JD Vance’s demon-haunted world

One of the curiosities of our modern world is that beliefs that sound like severely paranoid ideation are considered pretty much A-OK for extraordinarily important people to hold, as long as these beliefs are considered “religious.” For example:

Vice President JD Vance just shared his thoughts on whether or not aliens exist, telling conservative podcaster Benny Johnson he had a more spiritual take on what’s going on when it comes to UFOs.

During an interview posted Saturday, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author said he was “more curious than anybody” about government research into the possibility of life on other planets, but added, “I don’t think they’re aliens. I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion.”

Johnson couldn’t let Vance leave it at that.

After being pressed to share more, the vice president said, “Well, look, I think that celestial beings who fly around, who do weird things to people. I think that the desire to describe everything celestial, everything is otherworldly, to describe it as aliens.”

“I mean, every great world religion, including Christianity, the one that I believe in, has understood that there are weird things out there and there are things that are very difficult to explain,” said Vance, who grew up an atheist and converted to Catholicism as an adult.

The former Ohio senator told Johnson he thinks his faith offers an answer for what’s going on when it comes to the supernatural.

“I naturally go ― when I hear about, sort of, extra natural phenomenon, that’s where I go to ― to the Christian understanding that there’s a lot of good out there, but there’s also some evil out there. And I think that one of the devil’s great tricks is to convince people he never existed.”

The world soon may have some answers.

Last month on Truth Social, President Donald Trump announced plans to release “government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).”

I’ve written before about why I believe the odds that UFOs/UAPs are actually visitors from worlds beyond our solar system are so vanishingly small that I think it’s difficult to imagine a less justifiable use of scarce resources for scientific research than dedicating such resources to such investigations.

But something quite a bit more disturbing than that is the belief that UAPs are supernatural representatives of evil, pure and simple from the 8th dimension.

I know that some of commenter Bathhawk’s views can verge or even tip all the way over into ethnic and religious generalizations that many LGMers, including me, would not endorse, but what I understand to be his basic point — that contemporary liberal democracy founded on either explicitly secular or what might be called “lightly religious” beliefs (an old colleague of mine told me 30 years ago that he was a Unitarian, which meant he believed in “one God at most;” I don’t know if this was his original formulation but I found and find it extremely charming) is fundamentally, so to speak, incompatible with old school fundamentalist religious belief, whether Christian, Jewish, or miscellaneous.

Things like Vance’s statements, which I’m going to treat as the sincere beliefs characteristic of the zealotry of adult converts, really put an exclamation point on that.