Seventh-day Adventism and Aliens
Recently, a former military-intelligence officer with a successful career in the US government’s space-based intelligence services has openly claimed that other officials prevented him from following-up reports of recovered non-human craft and pilots that he received as an investigator. David Grusch has filed a whistleblower complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) alleging concealment from Congress and retaliation. He has remained in the United States and the former ICIG has agreed to represent him as his attorney.
While skeptics point out that Grusch’s information is second-hand, the reporters who initially broke his story have a former high-ranking military officer on the record vouching for his character. It seems that we are entering a new era of openness to mainstreaming the notion that we are not alone and are being visited by beings from space or extra dimensions.
What might this mean for Seventh-day Adventist messaging and ministry?
1. This will likely change how people assess the plausibility of conspiracy theories because, as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat put it, “there's no [explanatory] story here that's entirely normal.” This means that those who are called to sober teaching in the church can no longer rely on the move of dismissing conspiracy theories per se. Rather, we will need structures for thinking through what we suspect versus what we know, by distinguishing what we can verify based on publicly documented records and testimony from varying degrees of speculation. And we should develop new models for the hermeneutics of life that can help us understand how we interpret incomplete information and how our decisions in these situations reveal and shape our deepest commitments.*
2. Our modern world was built on the (contested) notions that our consciousnesses and experiences are self-contained, our rationality is the key that unlocks nature’s secrets, and everything meaningful is limited to our life in this world. The ground of our current social order will disappear if those who sustain it once again generally imagine the world to be populated with beings who are more powerful and/or intelligent than humanity—only this time, not trolls and faeries, but aliens and AIs—phenomena that could alter our experiences, confound our rational expectations, and represent meanings that transcend, for better or worse, our lives in this world. Those who seek fuller meaning in life via quid-pro-quo relationships with such beings, attempting to bend their interests to our will, would likely garner a great following after this re-enchantment of our disenchanted world.
Traditional Christians may also welcome this new openness to transcendence, but life in the sway of “enchanted others” is hardly the liberation from the dominion of higher powers promised to the children of Almighty God. However, the freedom found in a loving relationship with God only comes via a willingness to renounce certain natural, human desires in order to live wholly for the good purposes of God, which go beyond the here-and-now. On the other hand, if Seventh-day Adventists fail to combine that higher purpose with a wholistic ministry of healing, our sacrifices will be seen as just another existential transaction and we will come across as salespeople offering little more than afterlife-insurance from God in exchange for worship.
3. Allegiance to God above all else may become increasingly contested if our governments claim to be in contact with non-human beings. For, as one former US intelligence official and ET researcher anticipates, this could catalyze a consciousness of universal human identity that subsumes all other identities. The demands of pan-human solidarity would radically alter the conditions of religious liberty and almost certainly change the way that we tell the story of redemption. In a future where most people conceive of cosmic conflicts in terms of humans and aliens, Ellen White’s visions of other worlds might prove helpful for addressing such questions ‘in-house.’ But research like Michael Heiser’s into the correlations between reports of alien encounters and biblical demonology may be more persuasive to a broader audience. Regardless of what the future holds, knowing who we are and in what story we have found ourselves means that we don’t have to cling to old explanations or jump at speculative proposals to come to terms with profound changes happening in the physical, social, and spiritual world around us.
*I discuss these points at some length with theological and ministerial colleagues here and here.