Almost a decade ago, NASA spent a million dollars for 23 theologians to contemplate the potential impact that the discovery of life on other planets would have on world religions. But in his new book, Faith in Space: American Religious Belief in Extraterrestrial Life (Princeton Univ., Sept.), Indiana University English professor Paul C. Gutjahr argues that their study overlooked American religious traditions that have long posited that aliens are out there—and they want to help us.
PW talks with Gutjahr, an expert on religious texts such as the Bible and the Book of Mormon about extraterrestrials and us.
You traced three centuries of religious traditions' views on this. What did the NASA miss?
By not paying attention to the traditions that have already given it a lot of thought, NASA was missing a giant resource. If they really are interested in how people would respond to alien life religiously, they should have consulted the past. For example, in the 1950s, the main newsletter that the Presbyterian denomination sent to its members had a column on UFOs.
You write that there are people who believe that spirits who live on other planets are talking with them here on earth. Isn't that spiritualism?
People think spiritualism is almost entirely about speaking with the dead. But really important spiritualists believed that there are people on Venus, and Jupiter, and Mars, and Mercury who are talking to us. Theosophy developed from spiritualism and maintained that great teachers such as Muhammad and Jesus have ancient alien origins.
How do texts followed by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints connect to the idea that the faithful will become gods in their next life?
Although the Book of Mormon doesn't detail this belief, those teachings are found in other Mormon sacred scriptures such as the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham. Mormons believe in a kind of spiritual progression. If you're faithful in this life, you're gonna be given more things to do in your next life, and the really faithful will get their own planet to be a god over.
How is the Seventh-Day Adventist faith relevant?
Its first leader, Ellen White, believed that the Earth is the only fallen world, the only world that Jesus needed to die on. But the whole universe watches the Earth, like in a giant amphitheater. Every other sentient being in the universe is aware of what's happening on Earth because Earth is the place that God most strikingly demonstrates his mercy. White wrote about life on other planets in key Adventist texts such as her monumental five-volume work, Conflict Of The Ages, published between 1888 and 1917. Life elsewhere in the universe is not foregrounded today as a teaching, but it is still there.
Are there religions that view aliens as figures who want to help us?
UFO religions such as the Ministry of Universal Wisdom and Ashtar Command embrace that view most fully. They have a very dedicated way of thinking that aliens can help us on Earth overcome some of our worst technological advances, such as the atomic bomb. By the 1940s, there was this growing fear that our technology has outstripped our morality, that we have weapons now that we just don't have the moral compass to control. Those UFO religions posit that there's alien life that can come and help us to not destroy ourselves with a bomb.
These groups view artificial intelligence as the latest threat to the survival of our species, joining nuclear weapons and catastrophic climate change. AI is the kind of thing that the Ministry of Universal Wisdom and the Ashtar Command believe aliens will help us with, so that we don’t do ourselves in as we navigate these tricky waters.
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