This is What Sci-Fi Thinks of You

[00:00:00]Sci-fi has a very specific story it keeps telling about Christians, and I want to investigate exactly where that story comes from.

[00:00:09]So, here's the setup in case you haven't seen it.

[00:00:13]Christians encounter the confirmed reality of alien life, and suddenly, instantly, their faith collapses, and they often remove themselves.

[00:00:28]And every time I see it, my reaction's exactly the same.

[00:00:33]It's like, wait, what?

[00:00:36]It doesn't map onto anything I recognize.

[00:00:41]It feels foreign and forced.

[00:00:44]And I'm not saying this as someone on the outside of this genre.

[00:00:49]I've been a sci-fi guy my whole life. In fact, one of my earliest memories is holding my mom's hand, waiting in line at our small hometown theater.

[00:01:00]I remember the evening summer heat, and above us, a marquee sign.

[00:01:07]Tink, tink, tink, tink, tink.

[00:01:09]I can still hear those lights now. I was 5 years old. It was Star Wars, and when those doors opened, I walked into colors that I hadn't seen before.

[00:01:22]Worlds my little brain could barely fathom.

[00:01:25]My imagination caught fire in that theater, and it's never gone out since.

[00:01:31]So, my take here isn't defensiveness.

[00:01:35]I'm not someone who hates the genre and is taking shots at it.

[00:01:40]No, I love this genre. It's pretty much all I'll watch, which is exactly why this thing keeps catching my attention.

[00:01:50]So, last week, I was watching The Expanse, season 3, an episode called Dandelion Sky. The space fleet is approaching the ring, this massive alien structure, and they're about to transit through it into the unknown.

[00:02:07]And a man approaches a Methodist pastor named Anna.

[00:02:11]The man identifies himself as a fellow Methodist.

[00:02:14]First Methodist of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he says.

[00:02:18]And he looks openly freaked out.

[00:02:22]He asks her directly, "Do you think God wants us to be here?"

[00:02:29]Anna, she's unsettled herself.

[00:02:32]She's kind of fascinated, but she's also distracted, and she deflects and just fails to engage him really.

[00:02:39]Then, next scene, he goes back to his quarters, he pulls out his sidearm, and he shoots himself.

[00:02:47]And I just sat there stunned.

[00:02:50]I was like, "Where in the world did that even come from?"

[00:02:54]And it's not just the portrayal, it's the detail.

[00:03:00]I mean, the the writers didn't just write, you know, a generic religious person into the scene, they wrote a Methodist. They named his home church.

[00:03:09]They gave him a pastor to reach out to, and then showed the pastor equally lost and failing.

[00:03:16]So, does that seem like just lazy writing?

[00:03:21]Or more like evidence, something worth examining.

[00:03:26]What's going on here?

[00:03:29]And then, after I watched that, right on cue, a couple days later, this dropped.

[00:03:35]Steven Spielberg, one of the most celebrated filmmakers in Hollywood history, promoting his new film Disclosure Day, which just opened, by the way.

[00:03:47]In a CBS News interview, he says this, "Is God our God only on this planet?

[00:03:56]Or is God a God for every system where there's civilization and intelligent life, or even developing life?

[00:04:05]What does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have?

[00:04:09]And he suggested that Christians would experience, and this is his word, ontological shock from the revelation of alien life.

[00:04:22]The Christian internet responded almost in unison.

[00:04:26]Wait.

[00:04:28]What?

[00:04:30]Christian podcasters, theologians, ordinary believers, all essentially saying the same thing.

[00:04:39]That's not how this works. It's not how any of this works.

[00:04:44]One writer put it really plainly.

[00:04:47]They said, "The only people who think the existence of aliens would mess with Christianity are non-Christians who don't understand the first thing about Christianity."

[00:04:59]And that reaction, that's data.

[00:05:05]I mean, one reason it lights me up is that sci-fi is one of the only genres that gives you permission to actually ask questions, to push at the edges, to encounter something you've never encountered before.

[00:05:20]I have to remember that God said, "Behold, I make all things new."

[00:05:29]And I have personally come to believe that's not just a one-time statement. I think it's ongoing.

[00:05:36]A forever thing.

[00:05:38]And sci-fi gives me a small light into that.

[00:05:42]In fact, I'll just give you an example of what I mean.

[00:05:47]One of my favorite movies is Green Lantern.

[00:05:50]The Ryan Reynolds one.

[00:05:52]And And yes, I know it was a total flop. I'm aware.

[00:05:58]But here's why I absolutely love it.

[00:06:01]And it's not for any reason critics or fans ever evaluated.

[00:06:07]You see, the main character is a hardcore boundary pusher.

[00:06:12]Talented, reckless, someone who's maybe outlived the limits of his current world.

[00:06:19]Like he's just not challenged enough by what's in front of him anymore.

[00:06:24]And then a whole other world just opens up to him.

[00:06:29]He's inducted into an elite culture that isn't even earthly.

[00:06:35]There's training.

[00:06:37]There's an enormous throng of beings he wasn't even aware existed. Creatures of shapes and sizes you need a sit down to actually take in.

[00:06:48]It's the closest thing to the rapture and to becoming part of the bride that I think I've ever seen in a film.

[00:06:58]And I don't think the writers knew they were ever doing that.

[00:07:03]But the truth always finds its way out, doesn't it?

[00:07:08]That's actually what this whole video is about.

[00:07:14]Because here's what I want to investigate with you today.

[00:07:19]Why does this keep showing up?

[00:07:22]Why do the writers keep writing this specific story?

[00:07:28]And why does it feel so foreign to the people it's supposedly about?

[00:07:34]We've got several explanations to walk through, and I'll be honest with you.

[00:07:38]When I started, I expected the answer to be one thing.

[00:07:42]and it turned out to be something else.

[00:07:46]Because I've started to wonder if every time they write this story, they're telling us something.

[00:07:53]Not so much about us, about themselves.

[00:07:59]And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

[00:08:03]Let's go.

[00:08:04]So, let's name the trope clearly first.

[00:08:07]This isn't one writer's quirk or just one studio's bias. It runs across decades of science fiction. Different showrunners, different networks, different countries, even.

[00:08:19]The portrayal is remarkably consistent.

[00:08:23]Christians encounter the confirmed reality of intelligent alien life, and something breaks.

[00:08:32]Faith collapses.

[00:08:34]Some characters spiral into existential crisis. And some, like that Methodist man I just described, Lieutenant Nemeroff, don't survive the revelation at all.

[00:08:46]And every time I see it, my same reaction rises up.

[00:08:51]Wait, what?

[00:08:54]Not offense, not defensiveness, just genuine puzzlement.

[00:09:01]Like watching someone describe a food as bitter when I know that food is sweet as honey.

[00:09:09]And don't miss this detail, okay? The reverse portrayal of this barely exists at all, anywhere.

[00:09:19]Just think about that. Where is the secular character, the committed atheist, the materialist, the person who's built their entire identity on the sufficiency of human reason, where is that character having the existential collapse.

[00:09:37]It's almost nowhere in all of mainstream sci-fi.

[00:09:43]The writers can imagine one scenario causing widespread crisis, science revealing something that supposedly disproves God, but the inverse, God proven undeniably real?

[00:09:58]Oh, no.

[00:09:59]They can only render that as a false god or as something that destroys the Christians who already believed.

[00:10:07]They almost never even attempt to write that other story. So, I had to ask myself, why not?

[00:10:17]What is it about that second story that no one can seem to put on the page?

[00:10:23]So, I started working through the possibilities, one at a time.

[00:10:28]And let's go through them the way that I actually went through them.

[00:10:32]Because where I ended up is definitely not where I started.

[00:10:38]The first one I reached for, predictive programming.

[00:10:43]The Bible doesn't leave us guessing about the end times.

[00:10:46]Jesus himself said, "Be careful. Don't be deceived."

[00:10:51]Matthew 24:24.

[00:10:54]For false Christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.

[00:11:05]Now, many serious students of prophecy believe the relentless cultural push into sci-fi and specifically the normalization of alien life is deliberate conditioning.

[00:11:18]Preparation for a coming deception, something staged, not discovered.

[00:11:24]And I don't think that should be dismissed at all.

[00:11:29]The The angels exist in the second heaven. And Apollyon the rises from within the earth with his own host.

[00:11:39]And those aren't mutually exclusive categories.

[00:11:42]The portrayal of believers losing their faith under alien revelation, that could be the scripting for the falling away.

[00:11:53]A sort of priming the audience for it, getting them to rehearse a response before the actual event.

[00:12:02]And notice, this explanation doesn't require the writers to be conscious participants. The architecture above them doesn't need their awareness.

[00:12:13]So, I couldn't dismiss it.

[00:12:16]I set it down to the side.

[00:12:18]Credible, but it wasn't the whole thing.

[00:12:21]I kept looking.

[00:12:22]Explanation two, personal grievance.

[00:12:27]Some percentage of the people writing these stories have a bone to pick.

[00:12:34]Anger with a parent, a church, a tradition they felt trapped by.

[00:12:39]And they have the power now. They're holding the pen.

[00:12:43]And they use it. I think this is probably true for some of them.

[00:12:47]You can kind of feel it in certain portrayals.

[00:12:50]There's like a heat to it that's personal.

[00:12:55]But here's where it runs out of road.

[00:12:57]Personal anger is too individual to produce a genre-wide pattern.

[00:13:03]It might explain the tone in some episodes, but it doesn't explain the theme repeating across writers who don't know each other, across decades, with that same exact and very specific shape.

[00:13:18]So, explanation three.

[00:13:21]And this one deserves close attention because it's the most sobering.

[00:13:27]Demonic seeding.

[00:13:30]The mechanism is real and it's documented in a completely secular context.

[00:13:36]Suicide contagion research.

[00:13:39]Peer-reviewed with decades of data shows that media portrayal of method and outcome demonstrably increases attempts in vulnerable populations.

[00:13:53]So, get this. The fictional portrayal does not have a net neutral effect on the viewer.

[00:13:59]Instead, it actually preloads an internal script.

[00:14:04]So, someone who's spiritually unmoored, who has seen a faith collapse under death portrayed dozens of times, may reach for that scripted response when genuine disruption hits.

[00:14:18]And it's not because they reasoned their way to it.

[00:14:21]It was already there waiting.

[00:14:24]It had been programmed in.

[00:14:27]Now, from a spiritual warfare perspective, planting that seed in millions of minds simultaneously through entertainment without triggering anyone's defenses against it, that's a scarily efficient operation.

[00:14:44]And sadly, I think that one's very true, too.

[00:14:48]So, that's all pretty heavy.

[00:14:51]But if you're a believer, there's something to remember.

[00:14:55]None of this is happening over the shepherd's head.

[00:14:59]Not one single frame of it.

[00:15:03]The same God who said, "Behold, I make all things new."

[00:15:08]He's not nervous about any of this.

[00:15:12]Okay.

[00:15:13]So, that's three.

[00:15:14]And each one of them tells us why this portrayal exists.

[00:15:19]But not one of them tells us why it takes this exact shape.

[00:15:24]Why Christians specifically.

[00:15:26]Why collapse followed by death.

[00:15:30]And why can no one write the reverse?

[00:15:34]So, let me show you the thing that I wasn't looking for.

[00:15:39]The thing that not instead of the other three, but underneath them all, actually explains the precise shape of what we're seeing.

[00:15:51]And I want to say something carefully here because it really matters.

[00:15:56]What we're about to discover doesn't let the writers off the hook.

[00:16:02]And it doesn't make them villains, either.

[00:16:06]Because a seeding operation doesn't need villains.

[00:16:11]In fact, it needs sincere people.

[00:16:15]That's not a contradiction.

[00:16:18]That's the mechanism.

[00:16:22]Something I've noticed increasingly, especially since 2020, is that people reveal their own inner state through what they judge.

[00:16:32]Almost without exception, the truth always finds its way out.

[00:16:40]And here's why that happens.

[00:16:42]Here's the mechanism.

[00:16:44]When you think entirely from inside your own box, when it genuinely doesn't occur to you that other boxes exist, frames larger or stranger than your own, then your frame isn't a frame anymore. It's just reality.

[00:17:00]There's nothing outside it to measure it against.

[00:17:04]So, when you try to imagine how someone else would respond to something terrifying, what do you actually have to work with?

[00:17:14]Only yourself.

[00:17:17]Now, hold that and come with me into their frame.

[00:17:25]What would it mean for the unbeliever, the committed materialist, the person whose entire identity rests on human sovereignty and the sufficiency of self, what would it mean for them to encounter a being vastly greater than humanity?

[00:17:44]It would mean they were never alone.

[00:17:47]Never sovereign.

[00:17:49]Never actually in control.

[00:17:53]Even though they were so sure that they were.

[00:17:58]The self-made narrative, "I am the author of my own existence. I answer to no one above me."

[00:18:06]That doesn't survive that encounter.

[00:18:09]And if that narrative is your identity, if there's nothing at all underneath it, then what collapses isn't just a worldview.

[00:18:24]So, here's the question I couldn't put down.

[00:18:28]When they write a Christian collapsing at the revelation of something greater than humanity, whose terror are they actually drawing from?

[00:18:42]Whose existential crisis is actually on that screen?

[00:18:51]All right. Let's bring this home.

[00:18:54]The other three explanations tell us why the portrayal exists.

[00:18:59]And this last one tells us why it has the face that it has.

[00:19:04]They can imagine science revealing aliens because that's a world where human reason is still the interpreter, still the authority, unsettling, but survivable on their own terms.

[00:19:19]But, a being greater than humanity who is also personal, who knows you, who has a prior claim on you?

[00:19:28]>> [laughter] >> That is not a discovery their framework absorbs.

[00:19:33]That's annihilation.

[00:19:36]So, they write Christians collapsing.

[00:19:40]Because that's the only honest ending they can imagine for that story.

[00:19:45]Using themselves as the template.

[00:19:52]And what they can't see, what they genuinely cannot see from inside that frame, is that the people they're writing about already answered that question a long time ago.

[00:20:09]So, what does that actually look like to have already answered that question?

[00:20:16]Let me try to describe it from the inside.

[00:20:19]Believers, real ones with real relationship, understand something about the difference between a sheep and a shepherd.

[00:20:29]The sheep is not offended by the existence of the shepherd.

[00:20:34]The sheep is not threatened by the shepherd's size or authority or the fact that the shepherd knows things the sheep doesn't know.

[00:20:46]Because the sheep has learned something that changes everything.

[00:20:55]The shepherd is good.

[00:21:03]Walking with him yields a better outcome in all circumstances except perhaps instant gratification and even that restriction when you've walked with him long enough, you start to understand that one comes from goodness, too.

[00:21:21]So, the surrender the unbeliever fears most, the surrender of self-sovereignty, of being the final authority over your own existence, the believer has already walked through that door.

[00:21:37]Not theoretically, actually.

[00:21:42]Not an exercise of the mind where games can be played, but an actual leaving, a movement from one place to another.

[00:21:52]And what they found on the other side wasn't obliteration.

[00:21:59]It was the widest frame they'd ever inhabited.

[00:22:07]So, when sci-fi writers imagine that encounter, an entity or civilization so far beyond humanity that it reorders everything, and they place a Christian in that scene and write the collapse, they are doing their honest best.

[00:22:25]They're drawing on the only emotional architecture available to them.

[00:22:31]And that architecture says, "Sovereignty lost equals self-destroyed."

[00:22:39]But the sheep already knows that's not how it goes.

[00:22:44]The sheep walked through the very door they're so afraid of and found a shepherd, not a void.

[00:22:56]For those of us who've chosen to follow, we share something, a deep bond.

[00:23:04]A kind of quiet courage.

[00:23:06]Because we walk a path far beyond the boundaries most people won't cross.

[00:23:13]Entrusting our lives to the care of the benevolent one.

[00:23:19]And that's also what I do with you, my fellow sheep. My life is entrusted to your care. I do this work and you make sure my wife and I eat.

[00:23:29]It's a simple action and a bond of love.

[00:23:33]And their names are in the description below and you can join them through the links down there.

[00:23:40]And the believer's frame is uniquely built for exactly this. For stepping into the unknown.

[00:23:48]Think about what scripture asks us to hold.

[00:23:53]Revelation 4:6-8.

[00:23:55]And before the throne there was something like a sea of glass, like crystal. And around the throne on each side of the throne are four living creatures full of eyes in front and behind. The first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with the face of a man, and the fourth living creature like an eagle in flight. And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and within.

[00:24:29]And remember the locust creatures of Revelation 9?

[00:24:33]Beings with human faces and lions' teeth and scorpions' tails.

[00:24:38]Creatures so strange they resist any single frame of reference.

[00:24:42]Well, the believer's been sitting with these creatures for years without collapse.

[00:24:49]Shocker.

[00:24:51]Embracing the wonder.

[00:24:53]Not just treating it as made-up stories.

[00:24:58]And a sci-fi imagination really helps here, giving permission to inhabit the strangeness scripture describes.

[00:25:06]Without needing to domesticate it, without needing to make it smaller than actually is.

[00:25:12]God said, "Behold, I make all things new."

[00:25:18]That's a forever promise.

[00:25:20]And a frame wide enough to hold that is wide enough to hold quite a lot.

[00:25:28]So, if you're a believer watching this, that gut reaction you had to this trope that we're talking about, it was already the right reaction.

[00:25:40]The wait, what?

[00:25:43]That feeling is not naivety.

[00:25:45]It's not wishful thinking or intellectual laziness. It's information.

[00:25:50]It's your internal compass telling you the portrayal doesn't match your reality because it wasn't drawn from your reality.

[00:26:01]It was drawn from theirs.

[00:26:04]So, trust that.

[00:26:07]And if you're watching this, and you're not a believer, or maybe you're somewhere in between, just trying to figure out what you actually think, I want to ask you something.

[00:26:19]The thing you're most afraid of losing, the sense that you are the final authority on your own life, have you ever really sat with what it would cost you to find out that someone else holds that role?

[00:26:33]Not a government, not an institution, or a cold impersonal force, but a shepherd.

[00:26:42]One who is good.

[00:26:47]The believers you're watching in sci-fi, the the who are supposedly breaking they already walked through that question and they're still here.

[00:26:59]Not despite the surrender but because of it.

[00:27:05]Spielberg asked what does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have?

[00:27:13]It's a good question.

[00:27:15]Honestly, the right instinct.

[00:27:18]He just aimed it at the wrong group.

[00:27:23]The truth always finds its way out.

[00:27:28]And with careful observation it can always be ferreted.

[00:27:34]They're showing you exactly what they're afraid of every single time they write this story.

[00:27:46]So the question was never whether you would collapse at the revelation of something greater than yourself.

[00:27:54]You already answered that the day you met the shepherd.

[00:28:03]And you're still here.