Presumed Immanent: the Raëlians, UFO Religions, and the Postmodern Condition

Abstract

In 1974, Claude Vorilhon (later Rael), a French race-car driver, pop singer, and journalist, published Le Livre Qui Dit La Verite (sic) (The Book Which Tells the Truth), his first book describing his meeting with extraterrestrials and their revelations concerning humankind and the cosmos. Today, the Raelian religion is the largest “flying saucer religion” in the world, claiming a membership of 35,000 in eighty-five countries.1 It is millenarian and evangelistic in its goals, yet world-affirming in its orientation towards society. Raelians do not fit the anti-cult movement’s stereotype of a cult (which new religious movement does?), nor do they correspond neatly to Roy Wallis’s tripartite typology of “world rejecting/ affirming/accommodating” new religious movements (NRMs).2 Thus, Raelians present an enigma: they are fundamentalists but also modernists. Their actions are based on the belief in the literal and infallible truth embodied in their sacred texts, Rael’s accounts of his meetings and communications with his extraterrestrials, the Elohim, “those who come from the sky.” These texts bear at least a prima facie consistency with Robert S. Ellwood’s suggestion that the appeal of “UFO cults” might reside in their offering “classic religious eschatologies revamped to meet the fears and dramas of the modern world.”3 In this study, we will explore the Raelian eschatology within the context of the “fears and dramas of the modern world” and the historical horizon within which the modern world and Raelianism both find their context. Briefly, Raelianism replaces the supernatural with the extraterrestrial and technological in order to demystify and demythologize primarily the Abrahamic religions, simultaneously (if unconsciously) mythologizing and ideologizing science and technology. The Raelian hermeneutic and attendant worldview ground their unique—if somewhat extreme— solutions to some of the most troubling topics of the late twentieth century, such as ecology, sexuality, and globalization, concerns shared by many other UFO religions. Despite its explicit protestation that its members are not ufologists,4 the Raelian religion would not exist if it were not for the historical advent