Steven Spielberg has spent half a century making movies about aliens. At 79, his latest — Disclosure Day, opening June 12 — may be the most theologically charged of them all. The film, starring Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor, follows a Kansas City weather personality who suddenly speaks foreign languages she has never learned and a rogue cybersecurity expert racing to release a massive trove of classified government UFO files. But the real story Spielberg wants to tell is about God.

“The movie also takes the position of the church,” Spielberg told CBS News. “What does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have? Is God our God only on this planet, or is God a God for every system where there’s civilization, intelligent life, and even developing life?” One character in the film, a former Roman Catholic nun, warns that people will see the aliens as deities and “stop believing in God.” The villain, played by Colin Firth, is a Pharaoh-like corporate tyrant devoted to keeping humanity ignorant — a figure drawn, consciously or not, from the pages of Exodus.

The film arrives at a culturally combustible moment. The U.S. government recently launched a UFO website and declassified UAP files, and the White House briefly teased a sci-fi-branded aliens.gov that turned out to be a site for tracking illegal immigrants. Politics and entertainment are blurrier than ever.

Spielberg is not hiding his personal convictions. In his CBS News interview, he said flatly: “I absolutely think that they have been here, and they are here.” He described Disclosure Day as “a summation of my life in science fiction,” rooted in what he calls a “foundation of truth” — not fiction, not speculation, but something he treats as settled. The 2017 New York Times tic-tac video, the 2023 House Oversight Committee testimonies under oath, decades of consistent eyewitness accounts — for Spielberg, the cumulative weight is overwhelming.

The reaction from religious communities was swift and, notably, far less panicked than Spielberg seems to have expected.

A clip of Spielberg’s remarks went viral on X, framed as a claim that extraterrestrial disclosure would shake Christian faith. Many users pushed back hard. “No, it won’t. Hollywood is obsessed with the idea that the discovery of aliens will rock Christian faith. It’s weird,” said Christian podcaster Josh Daws. “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,” said Eric Sammons, editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine.

CBN’s Billy Hallowell noted that what people identify as “aliens” may actually be phenomena rooted in the spiritual realm — angels and demons. He pointed out that the Bible focuses on the salvation of human beings: Jesus came to die and save people, not other creatures or entities.

Christian author and UFO researcher L.A. Marzulli called the film “very disturbing,” arguing that Spielberg is “filmically signaling” a coming global event. “Cling to Jesus,” Marzulli urged. “Understand that what was foretold is unfolding. Do not be deceived.”

One Christian reviewer who attended a press screening noted something unexpected: unlike films on similar themes from the 2000s and 2010s that would have placed Christians firmly on the side of bigotry and fear, in Disclosure Day Christians are without exception portrayed in a positive light. The theologically grounded nun character, Sister Maura, ultimately steers the more fearful ex-novitiate toward confidence rather than panic — a portrayal reviewers across the spectrum found surprisingly generous.

Jewish tradition, it turns out, had already grappled with this question long before Spielberg reached for his iPad to write the story. Jewish scholars have contemplated extraterrestrial life and concluded it poses no theological crisis. As one rabbi put it plainly: the discovery of extraterrestrial beings “would pose no more of a threat to Judaism than would the discovery of a new species of rabbit. It would be limiting God’s power to say that He could not have placed life on other planets.” Notably, the Talmud itself identifies a place called Meroz, referenced in Judges 5:23, as a star — and treats it as inhabited.

Kabbalistic and traditional Torah texts, including Rabbi Pinchas Eliyahu Horowitz’s Sefer HaBris, entertain the idea of advanced, “super-intelligent” beings dwelling on other planets.

Exotheology is a word that sends the etymological geek-meter spinning, and very few can claim to have even a passing knowledge of this esoteric field. Dr. David Weintraub, professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt University and the author of Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It?, is uniquely qualified to answer questions on the subject. His book presents a staggering array of opinions, ranging from Aristotle’s premise that extraterrestrials cannot possibly exist, to the more recent Enrico Fermi, who, over 600 years later, came to the same conclusion.

Dr Weintraub reassured Breaking Israel News that Judaism is spiritually prepared for little green men.

“Judaism accepts the possibility of extraterrestrial life. At this level, Judaism is similar to most, but not all other major religions. A few other religions clearly demand and embrace the idea that extraterrestrial life exists.  Except for a few extreme kabbalistic interpretations of a few passages in the Talmud, Judaism does not go that far,” he said.

The professor states that Jewish theology may actually require a belief in extraterrestrials since “there are no limits on the power of the creator. Thus, for Jews to say that no life beyond the Earth could possibly exist would be unacceptable, as such an idea would appear to place shackles on God’s creative power…the universe belongs to God (or is God) and God can do what God wishes to do with the universe.”

The film’s final word — spoken by an alien — is “listen.” Spielberg is drawing unmistakably from Shema Yisrael, the declaration that stands at the center of Jewish life: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4). The Shema is not a call to doubt. It is a call to attention. The God of Israel is not diminished by a large universe. He made it.

The deepest irony of Disclosure Day is that the question Spielberg poses — would the discovery of other intelligence unsettle everything we believe? — was answered definitively by the prophet Isaiah thousands of years ago. “I am God, and there is none else” (Isaiah 45:22). Not “none else on this planet.” None else. The scope of creation does not threaten the Creator.

Spielberg himself has attributed his fascination with aliens partly to his Jewish identity and his childhood experiences of being “othered” — a sense of solidarity with fantastic beings from elsewhere. That instinct is authentically Jewish. But the tradition he comes from already knew: a God vast enough to create the cosmos is not rattled by what the cosmos contains.

Disclosure Day is in theaters now.