The Most Surprising Thing About Disclosure Day

On aliens, panentheism, and the unpredictable results of peak experience.

Steven Spielberg’s new film, Disclosure Day, is many things: a return to form, a popcorn movie about aliens, and an odd take on conspiracy theories.

But the most surprising thing about the film is that it’s also about God. Which, I have to say, I would not have anticipated from the trailers.

Mostly the film tracks what the trailers lead one to expect (this post has no significant spoilers): our heroes discover that aliens/UFOs are real and that the government has been hiding the truth about them, and they set out to disclose the truth to the world.

But one of the quintessentially Spielbergian aspects of the film is its pacing, interspersing delightfully executed action sequences — the protagonists are on the run most of the time — with conversations, characterization, and tempo drops that actually build tension since you know the storm is brewing. This is a technique Spielberg has used throughout his half-century-long oeuvre, from Jaws to Raiders to Disclosure Day’s most obvious precedents, Close Encounters and E.T. One moment, you’re racing away from the bad guys (or marine life); the next, you’re catching your breath while the heroes relax and have a drink (or Reece’s Pieces). And then back again.

To my surprise, several times in Disclosure Day, the subject of the conversation in these down-time scenes is, indeed, the Almighty.

It is revealed in the film’s first fifteen minutes that Jane, the love interest of one of the protagonists, had once been a nun. And when she learns that her boyfriend is in possession of proof of alien life, she worries that sharing the news might be a bad idea. People’s faith in God is already shaky, she tells him, and this revelation could throw the world into chaos. (To raise the stakes, the film is set during an unspecified escalation in global tensions.)

I admit, I was very confused by this perspective. How is one’s belief in God undermined by the existence of alien life?

Even odder, after seeing the film, I read New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s essay exploring the same question (entitled “Does U.F.O. Disclosure Threaten Faith?”) and, in part, agreeing with Jane.

For Jane, the existence of an advanced alien species (the aliens appear to have powers and technology we lack) challenges the Biblical teaching that Humankind is God’s greatest creation. She is comforted when a teacher of hers points out that the Bible calls us God’s greatest creation on Earth – a rather rabbinic solution for a Catholic, if you ask me. (I can hear my yeshiva teachers giving it over – well technically the text only refers to earthly creations, and soooo...) And her sense of moral order is restored when the bad guys turn out to, indeed, be bad guys.

Douthat’s objections are adjacent. First, he is concerned about “aliens stepping into the role that’s traditionally occupied by popes and prophets and mystics, angelic messengers or the Holy Spirit,” noting that the film depicts transformations – speaking in tongues, telepathy – that are traditionally the result not of a space alien but of divine or angelic possession.

This means, writes Douthat, that “if God exists in the movie’s universe, the alien race seemingly stands in a closer relationship to the deity than human beings, and they’re here to act as the divinity’s interpreters and agents. And that idea — again, a commonplace one in certain circles of U.F.O. discourse — is in pretty obvious tension with the belief that an existing scripture or teaching authority is the surest guide to faith and morals.”

It’s at moments like these that I remember my religious/spiritual views are more like the ‘spiritual but not religious’ than religious traditionalists (especially conservative Catholics) like Jane and Ross Douthat. I suppose, in more traditional theologies, the existence of life forms that are neither human nor mentioned in our sacred books (though of course, one can easily read Exodus, Ezekiel, and other Biblical books as recounting such encounters) could be problematic. But if we understand these books as important myths and teachings, rather than exhaustive scientific accounts of the world (which also omit dinosaurs, radiation, quantum mechanics, and evolution), this seems less central to the religious life.

Douthat is certainly correct that contemporary UFO encounter reports often read like “weird religious experiences interpreted through modern sci-fi-influenced cultural conditions.” There are range of opinions about this relationship. At the opposite end of the interpretive spectrum from Douthat are UFOlogists like Jacques Vallee (the inspiration for the chief scientist in Close Encounters) who propose that religious experiences, ancient and contemporary, are actually alien encounters or psychedelic experiences. This is the mirror image of Douthat’s view. Others, such as scholar of religion Jeffrey Kripal, have suggested that all of these experiences are similar and fundamentally mysterious in nature, with UFO reports being those conveyed in a technological idiom. In this view, it’s not that the experiences are ‘really’ religious or alien-related or psychedelic; it’s that all of these interpretations are of some similar but unknowable experience of what Kripal calls the ‘impossible.’

Merkavah or UFO? (Image from Disclosure Day advertisement)

Thus far, Douthat and I agree. We also would agree, I think, that Jane is persuaded too easily of the aliens’ benevolence; this is a Spielberg film after all, but were it Kubrick or Cixin Liu or any number of SF authors, I’d be more worried that the aliens might be malevolent (more 3 Body Problem than E.T.) or that their technology is too advanced for our unevolved human minds and bodies (cf., AI, nuclear weapons, bioweapons, etc). Or that the sheer ontological shock of the revelation would cause panic.

But these traditionalist theological worldviews are, honestly, hard for me to epistemically inhabit. Coincidentally, in the Forward this week, I’m writing about the conservative Christian view that God is male, a view at odds with most Christian and Jewish philosophy, scripture, and religious experiences in history. It is also, frankly, bizarre for me to even imagine God as being a fixed entity that has properties like gender, and one specific gender as well. (Does God also have a sex? A penis? Biceps?)

In my panentheistic understanding, the concept of ‘God’ is a human conception of the ineffable, omnipresent mystery of the universe itself, surrounded by that which cannot be expressed at all. Sometimes this Divinity/Spirit/Mystery/Whatever appears to us as Consciousness, sometimes as Love, sometimes as God or Goddess, sometimes as the true nature of the Mind reading and writing these words right now. These are all human conceptions, albeit rarified ones, and so they are limited and various. And downstream from that variety, of course, are even more human conceptions, myths, morals, relationships, and the rest — hence the diversity of religions and the frequent animosity between them.

I understand this is weird, statistically speaking, but I’ve believed it for so many decades now that I’ve forgotten how strange it might seem to traditionalists.

It is also true that conservatives, including Douthat, often vocalize Jane’s concern about the collapse of religious faith: that without a solid religious foundation, morality is basically impossible and society will collapse. As I’ve written in this newsletter before, I share the concern that religious sources of meaning and ethics are hard to replace. But fundamentalist religion – what Douthat calls “the belief that an existing scripture or teaching authority is the surest guide to faith and morals” – often provides too much meaning, laminating its myths and teachings in primal emotional experiences, exclusivist narratives, and counterfactual claims. And religion’s track record on ethics is mixed at best. Even setting aside the Catholic church’s sex scandals, penchant for Crusades, and Inquisitorial zeal, several studies have shown that religion only increases pro-social behavior toward the in-group (the saved, the chosen people, whomever) and promotes tribalism, rather than altruism, regarding the out-group.

The conservative Catholic equation, especially when set forth by popularizers rather than theologians, is far too simplistic. Teach evolution, get crime, they say; teach sexual diversity, get sin, depravity, anomie, and STIs. Hence post-liberals insist that we need a quasi-theocratic government to legislate morality based on the “Judeo-Christian” heritage. And hence conservative Catholics like Peter Thiel and his disciple Anakin Skywalker JD Vance insist that the only secure mooring for ethical and spiritual teaching is a dogmatic religion.

This is why some young earth creationists insist that the world is only 6,000 years old and all the dinosaur bones were put there by God as a test: not because they have a stake in geology, but because they cannot conceive of a Biblical worldview (community, family, belonging, ethics, myth, meaning) without Biblical literalism. Anyway, this worldview isn’t adopted because of empirical evidence; it’s adopted because of powerful experiences of crisis (as in Vance’s case) or derived from childhood. Which is why debating with traditional religionists is often pointless. As they themselves will often admit, faith is a matter of the heart – even the spirit.

Which means that, in a sense, Jane and Ross Douthat are right. It’s not that the existence of aliens contravenes a scriptural verse, or disturbs a theological proposition. It’s that the experience of the sacred outside the specific channel of traditionalist religion shakes loose the bond between spiritual truth and religious dogma. I remember having such an experience myself twenty years ago, when I was emerging from ten years of Orthodox-style Jewish practice: the profound experiences of meaning, groundedness, ethics-generativity, and belonging that I had previously had in Jewish contexts were now increasingly available outside of them. And sure enough, my adherence to Jewish law did in fact diminish, though it was hard to let go of at first. The same thing can happen in experiences of the super-normal, whether mediated by psychedelics or alien encounters (real or perceived) or near-death experiences. Religious/mystical intensity increases, but fidelity to a single religious path as the sole way to access it decreases.

Sometimes, anyway, according to the data. Other times, religious forms provide, as Abraham Joshua Heschel proposed, an excellent container for integrating these destabilizing experiences into ordinary life.

I wonder what would happen after an actual Disclosure Day. Most likely, I think the results would be like the television show The Leftovers, which is about life after a quasi-rapture event: some double down on their existing faith (even becoming extremists), some lose their faith entirely, while some create new patterns of belief and practice. That’s what we see in religious people who have psychedelic experiences: the results vary. But it is true that at least some people loosen the knots that tie them to their religious dogmas, even as their core spiritual beliefs are often strengthened.

I tend to think that’s a good thing, though I admit there’s no way to know for sure.

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Thanks for reading. And now for the news of the weird:

• Obviously, the main story is the Knicks winning the NBA championship, which I wrote about last week. The Times did a great profile of the leadership and overall menschlichkeit of Jalen Brunson that is excellent feel-good reading. What an arc. What a man. This is what healthy masculinity looks like.

• In sharp contrast, I thought about writing about the UFC match on the White House lawn, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. Luckily, Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day did so — and he even went there in person. His is the only reporting you need to read about that thing. Though Robert Reich did a great essay on its relationship to Trump’s fascist-masculinist appeal.

• Relatedly, I loved Daniel Pinchbeck’s analysis of the Manosphere as a “Reactionary Counter-Initiation.”

• Surprise, surprise, Peter Thiel runs a secret society of creepy people plotting eugenic world domination.

• Finally, Walker Bragman has some very infuriating news about Trump’s DOJ settling with criminals, grifters, and other political allies. It’s excellent feel-bad reading.

See you next time.