Space Aliens And Queering God

I want to make clear from the start that I'm subscribed to, and a daily watcher of, Fr Mke Schmitz's Catechism in a Year series from Ascension Presents on YouTube. In general, I'm a big Fr Mike Schmitz fan. Still, in the video above, which may not have been subject to the same editorial rigor as the Catechism in a Year series, I think he makes some remarks that open a door he may not have intended to open. At about 2:45, he says,

Could it be possible that God has made other beings? Well, yeah. He has made angels. Those aren't really, technically speaking, aliens. The same God who created human beings also created angels. He created human beings with an intellect and will and bodies, and he created angels, with an intellect and a will, with no body. Who is to say that God couldn't continue to create? . . . God is infinitely creative. . . . So -- would it make sense that He would create and then just stop?

The discussion in the comments, though, wandered off somewhat predictably. One commenter said,

One thing I've thought about at times, and speculated on: What if beings on other world's didn't fall like we did on Earth? Would they be so advanced as to be indistinguishable from angels? They may very well be. However, I don't know to what degree (if at all) God would allow them to interact with us at this point in time.

And this goes to the bigger question, can God create an alternate universe? Because that's something like what we'd have if there were a Planet Bltsfx with unfallen beings, sort of like the houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels, but Swift is actually hinting there about the difficulties that arise from that whole idea. An unfallen being like a houyhnhnm wouldn't be human and wouldn't be in God's image, unless God created an alternate universe in which the houyhnhnms would be in God's image. But this runs against the idea that God is one, and beyond that, that while God could contradict Himself, He doesn't.

So I'm just not sure about Fr Mike's idea of whether God can just keep creating, and in the process, by implication, create some new type of being, Being X, that has an intellect and a will but isn't human. But his language here isn't precise, and the forum in which he's talking won't let us interrogate his remarks with greater precision.

But this brought me to a homily I heard in my Episcopalian days, in which a curate addressed a hypothetical question from a hypothetical elderly Episcopalian lady: "What about the scriptural condemnations of gay sex, like the punishments of Sodom and Gomorrah or 1 Corinthians 6:9-10? How do we justify gay sex in light of those?"

To which the curate roared in his homily, "YOUR GOD IS TOO SMALL!!"

In other words, there must be a God who is bigger than that one, the one that gave us scripture. There must be a God who's bigger than that, like the one that can just keep on creating whatever new orders of beings he chooses -- but this runs up again against the problem that God is one. And it's interesting that the idea of a God who is bigger than God is actually common in queer theology. For instance,

The University of Chicago’s 2023-2024 course catalog includes a religious studies course on “Queering God,” applying LGBTQ+ ideology to different religions and examining the ways gender is being reimagined in theology.

“Can God be an ally in queer worldmaking? Is God queer? What does queerness have to do with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam? This course introduces students to foundational concepts in queer and trans studies by focusing on queer Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologies,” the course description reads.

This theme frequently occurs in queer theology, that there is effectively a different God or a better-understood God who sanctifies Queer:

There’s little to fear from a queered approach to talking about God, because it’s about nothing more or less than setting God free to be God. By implication, if we are to be bearers of the image of God, called into the likeness of Christ, it’s about setting us free, too. Queer theology offers a way of unearthing what is already present—the fact that God is, by any stretch of the imagination, queer—and helping humans to inhabit that reality. It is the best kind of skewed God-talk.

. . . Althaus-Reid talks about how so many traditional ways of talking about God “closet the divine.” The church wants to force God’s abundant and life-transforming outrageousness into hiding. As a Latinx Catholic growing up in Argentina, Althaus-Reid witnessed the garish campiness of festivals in which statues of the Blessed Virgin, the Queen of Heaven, were processed through streets. Yet for all her sense that this was something that held the possibility of queering our imaginations, she came to see that the authorized church version of the Mother of God was sanitized: Mary was presented as a rich white woman who never walked. The divine image was made bland, and the unruly facts of actual cis and trans women’s lives were erased.

As Galileo put it, there's a book of nature and a book of scripture, and as Fr Mike puts it, they don't contradict each other. But when he speaks to people asking him if aliens exist, I think his answer, "they could", is misleading. Lots of things "could" exist, starting with bigfoot and proceeding down through unicorns and phlogiston. The problem is that so far in the book of nature, we've neither seen them nor any remotely credible hints of them.

On top of that is the logical problem that given the size of the universe, even considering the billions of planets that might or might not be friendly to life, in most parts of the universe, an advanced society could rise and disappear without the remotest possibility that even if we somehow read a message from it, so many eons would have passed since it was sent at the speed of light, we couldn't send them an answer that would get back to them, much less travel there. Thus we have the logical difficulty that even if space aliens did exist, as a practical matter, they would be irrelevant.

So I think the idea of space aliens invites just about anyone to construct a sort of science-fiction religion that inevitably includes unfallen beings of a new order, of whom it follows implicitly that they will land on this planet and straighten us out. (Remember that Gulliver's Travels is just an early variant of Star Trek.) I think priests answering questions about this informally tend to feed this assumption when they say something like "maybe"or "it could" or "can't rule it out", or in the account of one commenter, "God is great!" But God doesn't contradict Himself.

In fact, I think the idea of enlightened/unfallen space aliens who'll one day land on earth isn't too far from the queer theologians' idea that one day we'll be able to free God to be queer, and LGBTQ+ will be created in queer God's image, a special sanctified class above the traditional Christian saints. This is basically fantasizing a whole new book of nature that will supersede the old book of scripture -- but the problem is that in this universe, the two books don't contradict each other. I think a better course for priests when asked about science fiction religion is to be more precise in speech and emphasize "probably not".