Steven Spielberg has tried to make aliens cool again. It hasn’t worked. Perhaps in Disclosure Day he intended to use extraterrestrials as a meditation on faith in a secular age. Perhaps he meant to challenge Christianity with demonstrations of science. But what’s he’s actually given us is a film about child abduction, bodily possession and psychological manipulation. Disclosure Day is the latest in the many media properties about visitors from beyond the stars.

The Trump administration’s attempt to recruit Christianity has had unintended consequences. It certainly hasn’t made the regime look more sacred; rather, it has made the regime look vulgar, incoherent and intellectually thin. It has emphasised to serious Christians, especially Catholics, that Christianity cannot be reduced to memes, theatrical props, and war propaganda. At the start of his administration, Trump instituted a “Faith Office” which, as I pointed out in a previous article, was not so much an acknowledgement of religious truth, as a cynical effort to hijack religious communities, and Christianity in particular, to the purposes of Trump’s state.