Would Christianity Survive ‘Disclosure Day’?

June 17, 2026

If indisputable footage of alien life were released to the public, would the Christian faith continue on, to use a biblical phrase, “with all boldness and without hindrance”? Or would the disclosure begin unraveling core Christian assumptions, such that Christian faith shrinks into something scant and increasingly embarrassing? Would the groundbreaking news eventually supplant the good news, as faith shifts from an invisible God to advanced, visible Guides?

Summer flick Disclosure Day, directed by alien-movie veteran Steven Spielberg, raises such questions. The movie’s central conflict is between those who have secretly known about (and experimented on) aliens for decades and those who, having discovered the files, are compelled to release all the data to everyone in the world all at once. (Spoilers ahead.)

Along the way, the disclosers bring up the question of religion. Will believers in God be able to handle it once they take in the news? Is there room in the Christian worldview for advanced alien life? This dilemma is voiced by Jane, former nun-in-training and now girlfriend to the scientist planning to release the files:

“I can no longer say with certainty that God is divine. I believe profoundly that he’s essential. He’s how we define ourselves. He’s what keeps the whole civilization together. We’ve been raised to believe in a supreme being, and now you want to show actual supreme beings? People can’t handle both.”

“Is there room in the Christian worldview for advanced alien life?”

Later in the movie, Jane’s religious mentor, a nun she looks up to, reassures Jane: the Bible never says there aren’t aliens. According to the Bible, humans are the special ones on this planet, but there could well be other intelligent life elsewhere. The nun’s advice seems to be Spielberg’s peacemaking gesture toward religious folks. At the same time, the story marches ahead with God on the sidelines at best—Jane’s crucifix offers her no protection against the bad guys, and by the end of the movie, it’s the alien Guides who take center stage as the ones worthy of global awe and as bringers of peace on earth.

The nun’s reassuring words duly noted, Jane’s original assumptions seem to mirror the movie’s assumptions regarding God. Let’s look at these assumptions since they likely find many believers in alien life nodding along.

Assumption: God may be more “essential” than real.

Atheist Friedrich Nietzsche predicted that when God “died”—when humanity stopped believing in him—madness and chaos would follow. This may be why a set of Bible-belt parents might send their kid to church even if the parents themselves don’t believe: believing in God has a stabilizing, civilizing effect. This is Jane saying that, even if she no longer believed, God was still essential for holding civilization together. The movie itself doesn’t seem to assume this (which is why “essential” in the above heading is in quotation marks), as God is treated more as the training wheels than the bike—a bike which flies when steered by an E.T.

The truth is, God’s realness is what’s essential. Even amid humanity’s crazy beliefs and godless behaviors, without God there’s no us to do the misbehaving and disbelieving, no earth to make our king-of-the-hill, no life-permitting universe to take for granted. Even if there are highly evolved extraterrestrials traveling the trillions of miles over thousands of years—only to crash into New Mexico—they’re still part of a universe that didn’t used to be here. Travel back far enough, and you hit a blunt beginning to space, matter, and time. Your options at that point are that either nothing created our life-permitting universe ordered according to mathematically elegant laws in which statistically impossible “simple” life emerged—or that something was already there unbound by space, matter, and time. As fascinating as extraterrestrials would be, they would still be bit actors on a stage that needed built. 

“As fascinating as extraterrestrials would be, they would still be bit actors on a stage that needed built.”

Spielberg might have needed Bible artifacts such as the ark of the covenant and the holy grail to get the Indiana Jones franchise off the ground, but by episode 4 God was back in the dirt while Indiana Jones was off finding extraterrestrials with crystal skulls and flying saucers. Yet shiny new explorations in this or that corner of the cosmos don’t answer why the cosmos came about in the first place.

Assumption: Aliens would be actual supreme beings.

The assumption seems to be that, if we can see it, that makes it actual. If it’s physical like us, that makes it legitimately real, something intelligent people can fully believe in.

Do you recall the scene in Jurassic World when Chris Pratt’s character—whose four trained raptors see him as the alpha—hunt the mysterious, monstrous mega-dinosaur who has escaped? When the four raptors begin to corner the towering lizard, they all pause and begin studying each other. Suddenly the four turn around and begin growling at Pratt. What’s happening? Why turn on their human trainer? Staring up at the mystery monster, Pratt mutters under his breath, “I know why they wouldn’t tell us what it’s made of. That thing’s part raptor.”

As physical bipeds, Spielberg’s extraterrestrials would be part us. It might be attractive for humans to switch allegiance from an invisible God to visible extraterrestrials more advanced than ourselves. In 1 Samuel, God’s own chosen people preferred to be led by a human named Saul over continuing to be led by a God, especially when they saw that the new king stood a head taller than everyone else. But to anyone who has considered the scope and sequence of the cosmos, being physical or even more “evolved” isn’t sufficiently impressive. Now, a God capable of creating the heavens and the earth? That’s really something.

“A God capable of creating the heavens and the earth? That’s really something.”

Assumption: Aliens would be actual supreme beings.

Now we come to a strange disconnect in the movie. I’m not speaking to whether it was a quality movie or not, for I’m no movie critic (obviously, for movie critics say crazy things, like that Raiders was better than The Last Crusade and that Hook wasn’t anything special). But it was strange to see, on the one hand, aliens presented as the awe-inspiring hope for humanity, and, on the other, to actually see them: short gray extras from the final scene of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, either sitting stunned beside their spacecraft wreckage or being led away by evil government personnel in hazmat suits. Even the grand, wise alien we meet in the end has to be wheeled out and the plastic wrap removed so it can talk through a translator to the gathered humans.

All that to ask: Why assume that extraterrestrials that make contact would necessarily be supreme beings? As if they could orchestrate the shalom that evades us? In this movie, Spielberg had to make them meek as lambs—War of the Worlds aliens wouldn’t make a good solution at all. We are told that these peace-loving aliens had learned to “regard empathy as an evolutionary advantage”; that’s why they hadn’t killed each other off like we’re in danger of doing. But whether extraterrestrials are violent invaders or even the sagely E.T. himself, why think they would be supreme beings?

Disclosure Day seems to portray God as not much more than a placeholder until something more plausible comes along. He’s benign but not all that believable. He’s a necessary construct until true extraterrestrial contact is made. But the real God is necessary, period. We and any other creature are the constructs.