Nathan Schneider in The Smart Set:
Since the 1970s, however, ancient astronauts have been relegated to the science fiction and spiritualism from whence they came. The few remaining systematic attempts to argue for them only rehash talking points from that fertile decade. “The biggest reason for the decline of the ancient astronaut theory,” thinks Jason Colavito, “was the boring sameness of it.” Today ancient astronauts have the marks of a fad whose 15 minutes have come and gone.
Meanwhile, traditional religions have been marching back onto the world stage. This “desecularization of the world,” as sociologists call it, brought about a new Religious Right in the United States and militant Islamists from London to Indonesia. Explicitly religious perspectives became more and more welcome in postmodern academia, not to mention on the campaign trail.
Ancient astronauts thrived on the period of secularization that followed World War II. Science and technology seemed to be eroding old beliefs, opening the door for new ones. Mainline liberal churches were taking less and less of the Bible literally in order to make room for modernity — aliens become most plausible when gods fail to be.
Read the full essay here.
Jonathan VanAntwerpen is program director for theology at the Henry Luce Foundation. Originally trained as a philosopher, he received his doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. He is co-editor of a series of books on secularism, religion, and public life, including Habermas and Religion (Polity, 2013), Rethinking Secularism (Oxford University Press, 2011), The Post-Secular in Question (NYU Press, 2012), The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia University Press, 2011), and Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2010). VanAntwerpen was the founding director of the SSRC's program on religion and the public sphere, and in 2007 he worked with others to launch The Immanent Frame, serving for several years as editor-in-chief.
