The dozen or so pastors and podcasters who arrived at the Airbnb in Nashville one night in February weren\u2019t sure exactly what they were in for. An organizer asked them to turn their phones on airplane mode. Snacks were served. Then, for at least two hours, two mysterious men presented a slide show laying out the evidence, as they saw it, for some kind of extraterrestrial life and the spiritual confusion that coming revelations could sow among Christians.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the weirdest meeting I\u2019ve ever been a part of,\u201d said Alan DiDio, a pastor in North Carolina who attended. \u201cYou\u2019ve never seen that many Pentecostals in a room that quiet.\u201d<\/p>\n
For many of the pastors in the room, and some other Christians, there\u2019s only one possible explanation for extraterrestrial beings: They are not neutral visitors from other planets or dimensions, but demonic entities.<\/p>\n
As the pastors left the meeting and turned on their phones, they began receiving news alerts that confirmed for many of them that something significant was happening. That very day, President Trump had directed his administration<\/a> to begin releasing files related to extraterrestrial life.<\/p>\n The disclosure began<\/a> this month, with the Pentagon\u2019s release of murky \u201cnew, never-before-seen\u201d images whose significance is so far unclear.<\/p>\n But for some conservative Christians, who are among Mr. Trump\u2019s most loyal supporters, the prospect of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe has some unsettling theological implications. Some worry that it undercuts the Bible\u2019s account of the Earth and humanity as the centerpiece of God\u2019s plan for the universe, for example.<\/p>\n Christians in the United States are significantly less likely than the general public to say intelligent life exists on other planets, according to a 2021 survey<\/a> by the Pew Research Center. Among atheists and agnostics, 85 percent say their best guess is that intelligent life exists outside Earth. Among white evangelicals, only 40 percent say the same.<\/p>\n \u201cThe U.F.O. topic in particular is a big challenge to any religious worldview,\u201d said Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice University, where he has compiled an archive on paranormal subjects, including accounts from U.F.O. \u201cexperiencers.\u201d<\/p>\n In Dr. Kripal\u2019s view, the origin stories of many earth-based religions can be read as descriptions of encounters with unexplained entities of unknown provenance.<\/p>\n \u201cThe gods have always come from the sky, and we call that religion,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a lot of words in the Western canon for these entities of the middle realm, so my own feeling is that when religious people look out and they see entities that don\u2019t fit into their religious world, they call them demons.\u201d<\/p>\n The possibility that extraterrestrial beings might be better understood as demonic entities is not a new theory among some conservative Christians. But it has lately burst from the fringes of speculative religious cosmology into more prominent view, including from elected officials at the highest levels of government.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think they\u2019re aliens, I think they\u2019re demons,\u201d Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, said on a conservative podcast this spring.<\/p>\n The Catholic church has no formal teaching on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, though it has intrigued<\/a> some Catholic theologians. A Vatican scientist made headlines in 2010 when he suggested<\/a> aliens might have souls, and said he would baptize an alien \u201cif they asked.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEvery great world religion, including Christianity, the one that I believe in, has understood that there are weird things out there, and there are things that are very difficult to explain,\u201d Mr. Vance added.<\/p>\n Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado made a similar point recently on another podcast, this one hosted by the conservative Christian musician and activist Sean Feucht.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is more spiritual and, if you really want to go there, demonic,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t think that they are aliens as we have thought for most of our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n Spiritual conjecture about aliens and demons is not a topic in the vast majority of Christian pulpits, said Russell Moore, an editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today magazine.<\/p>\n Mr. Moore touched on the topic himself this spring in an adult Sunday school class at his evangelical church in Nashville. Teaching from the New Testament book of Hebrews, he discussed a passage in which the writer ponders humanity\u2019s relationship to angels, and our lack of control over the universe around us. Mr. Moore opened the class by asking what it would mean to have some kind of direct contact with nonhuman creatures like angels \u2014 or extraterrestrials, lately in the news.<\/p>\n Afterward, \u201cthe conversations were less about aliens than they were about \u2018What does it mean to be human?\u2019\u201d he recalled, adding that unidentified anomalous phenomena, colloquially known as unidentified flying objects, \u201cweren\u2019t the point for them, they wanted to talk about A.I.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Moore said proof of extraterrestrial life should pose no threat to Christianity and need not be received with hostility. \u201cIf we assume the possibility that there\u2019s something outside of Earth, our basic default should be the way we treat strangers generally,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Speculation about alien life fits more comfortably into other theological and cultural streams. For charismatic Christians, who emphasize the active movement of the Holy Spirit in contemporary events, \u201cthere\u2019s a thinner line between the natural and supernatural worlds,\u201d said Paul Gutjahr, an English professor at Indiana University and the author of the coming book \u201cFaith in Space: American Religious Belief in Extraterrestrial Life.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. DiDio, like most of the dozen or so charismatic Christian leaders in attendance at the meeting in February, has an established interest in the borders between the spiritual and the paranormal. So he was primed to appreciate the presentation by the men, who told attendees that they couldn\u2019t share their names or exact professional backgrounds.<\/p>\n Tony Merkel, a podcaster who invited many of the attendees, declined to share the organizers\u2019 names but said they were \u201cintelligence operators\u201d unaffiliated with the U.S. government. They assembled the meeting, he said, because thousands of conservative Christian leaders and media figures were already in Nashville for the annual National Religious Broadcasters convention, a major gathering where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered the keynote address this year.<\/p>\n \u201cThe purpose was to be able to say, \u2018This is what is coming, it seems like the government is gearing up for a disclosure and you need to be able to prepare and warn your people not to be deceived,\u2019\u201d said Ben Hughes, a pastor in Texas who attended the meeting.<\/p>\n At a similar meeting of Christian leaders, Representative Eric Burlison, Republican of Missouri, called in to share his views about the ways that proof of extraterrestrial life might be misunderstood.<\/p>\n Some of the attendees have since shared their accounts of the meeting \u2014 and their guidance about how to interpret any future revelations \u2014 with their congregations and podcast audiences, striking a tone that balances warning, conjecture and reassurance.<\/p>\n But many of them also see a certain validation in increasingly mainstream speculation around extraterrestrial or interdimensional beings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The dozen or so pastors and podcasters who arrived at the Airbnb in Nashville one night in February…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249837,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[80649,15019,1452,87610,76296,9,11,10,97515,83540,1069,87611,11753],"class_list":["post-249836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-christians-and-christianity","tag-defense-department","tag-donald-j","tag-extraterrestrial-life","tag-j-d","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-occult-sciences","tag-religion-and-belief","tag-trump","tag-unidentified-flying-objects-ufo","tag-vance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249836\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}