Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. (Mark 9:23)
I am sought of them that asked not for me; I am found of them that sought me not. (Isaiah 65:1)
The X-Files was, for the millennials, the touchstone television program for ideas about extra-terrestrials, the supernatural, and conspiracy theories. While it - and the entirety of the sci-fi genre - has arguably been used undermine Creationism, and to disseminate and promote the idea of extra-terrestrial life and Scientism, Chris Carter wrote into The X-Files a remarkably rich commentary on the nature of belief.
Within the first few minutes of the show’s pilot and first episode, the viewer is confronted by FBI Agent Fox Mulder’s office - packed with cabinets, walls covered with pinned photographs, and a striking poster:
This theme, of what individuals ‘want to believe’, dominates the show’s core ET and UFO plotline episodes, as Fox Mulder’s new partner, Dana Scully, struggles to come to terms with Mulder’s beliefs during their investigations. Indeed, she witnesses many of these inexplicable phenomena herself (despite being often, frustratingly, out of sight), but she practically refuses to believe. In ‘Beyond the Sea’, wherein Scully is forced to acknowledge the psychic powers of a death row inmate named Luther Boggs, she plainly admits to Mulder, ‘I’m scared to believe’. 1 For her worldview to be shattered by experience is distressing.
Mulder’s desire to believe in ET and supernatural phenomena is also plainly stated. During the episode ‘Conduit’, which finds the pair investigating the abduction of a girl in Iowa, Mulder becomes emotionally invested in the case, and his childhood memories of his sister’s alien abduction are a prominent part of the episode. At the end of the episode, Scully has found audio recordings of Mulder recounting the childhood event while under hypnotic regression;
Hypnotist: Can you see your sister?
Mulder: No. But I can hear her.
H: What is she saying?
M: She's calling out my name. Over and over again. She's crying out for help, but I can't help her. I can't move.
H: Are you scared?
M: I know I should be but I'm not.
H: Do you know why?
M: Because the voice-
H: The voice?
M: The voice in my head.
H: What's it telling you?
M: Not to be afraid. It’s telling me that no harm will come to her, and that one day she’ll return.
H: Do you believe the voice?
M: I want to believe.2
While this plays, we are shown Mulder in a darkened church, weeping, beneath a depiction of Christ on the cross.
Mulder - I posit - does not just want to believe, but was made to believe. As the Christian, at some time in his life, encounters the pure grace of God (whether it be gradually or all at one powerful moment), Mulder had an ET encounter which gave him no other option but to believe. However, there is a part of faith where we need to continue ‘wanting’ or ‘trying’ to believe. While many Christians can say that they, for certain, know of and believe in God’s existence, the temptations of the Father of Lies, the antichrist-world we live in, and of our own fallen flesh blinds us to our own experience of the divine. As Paul says,
The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. (2 Corinthians 4:4)
We in a sense must want to believe continually, and put it into practice, if we are to be faithful Christians. (I am not making a soteriological point here.) Even the Christian who does not struggle with intellectual doubts, his actions continually betray a disconnect from his intellectual or spiritual position due to the sins of the flesh; Paul wrote to the Romans,
Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. (Romans 7:17-8)
There is something of a disconnect between our will, the will of the Holy Spirit, and our fallen state of ‘fleshliness’. As Jeremiah says,
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9)
The struggle to continue in belief and in virtue, to ‘be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master's use, and prepared unto every good work’ (2 Timothy 2:21), is therefore a vital part of the proper Christian life.
However, faith itself does have a kind of ‘blindness’. The Apostle Paul remarked to the Corinthians, when writing upon the struggles of earthly existence,
For we live by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7);
and to the Hebrews,
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. […] Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. (Hebrews 11:1, 4)
The X-Files frequently shows that things which are real are often unseen or out of sight, even hidden by evil forces (be it through the influence of ETs, or deep state cover-ups and psyops). Similarly, there is an element of our current, mortal, existence in which we cannot trust our senses alone. Not in some Gnostic sense of matter being inherently corrupt, but due to the fall, and before the prospect of completeness in the resurrection of the dead and the gift of the Spiritual Body, as Paul is discussing in 2 Corinthians 5. There is a fleetingness, an unreliability, and a “limpness” to the world.
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To Scully, the proof of the senses - of empirical observation - is the cornerstone of reality. In the show’s first dialogue between her and Mulder, she remarks that she does not believe in the supernatural because there is no apparent empirical evidence to justify it;
Mulder: Do you believe in the existence of extra-terrestrials?
Scully: Logically, I would have to say no- given the distances needed to travel from the far reaches of space, the energy requirements would exceed a spacecraft’s capabilities.
[. . .]
M: Now, when convention and science offer us no answers, might we not finally turn to the fantastic as a plausibility?
[. . .]
S: What I find “fantastic” is any notion that there are any answers beyond the realm of science. The answers are there, you just have to know where to look.3
However, Scully’s outlook is not that of scientific enquiry, it is ‘Scientism’. Theories, no matter how ridiculous, are not put forth in order to be tested by the evidence. Mulder reminds Scully in ‘Conduit’:
This is the essence of science: you ask an impertinent question and you’re on your way to a pertinent answer.4
She, instead, works strictly within the bounds of what is taught as truth by the establishment. Scully is a Scientism fundamentalist, and she will plainly deny the sense-data evidence of mutated corpses, physics-defying aircraft, an ammonia-based 2000 year old Arctic parasite, a 100- year old mutant who climbs through her air-vents, non-earthly material on human scar tissue, and inexplicably accurate psychic readings, just to name a few. While hyperbolic, Scully epitomises the worldview of the average intellectual in the modern west. Our society is not one of atheism, but of Scientism, made up of the scientist high priests in their clean, white, priestly robes, given the title of doctor by the infallible universities to deliver mystical empirical knowledge via the holy tomes of the peer-reviewed journals. Theories like the Big Bang and evolution, while perhaps an observable reality, are elevated to a divine height, as the two central doctrines of Scientism. The height of heresy is to propose that which the peer review gods, or St. Darwin, have not told us, or to believe what cannot be proven by ‘plain’ empirical data (as if it does not need to be interpreted). Scully sees the reality of what Mulder preaches - over and over again - but she willingly blinds herself to it. To look outside of high society’s “rationalistic” paradigm is frightening. For most Christian converts here has been a point in time like this; what we began seeing was simply unmanageable.
By the final episode of the season, however, Scully confesses what her worldview was all along - ‘I believed in the accepted facts of science’.5 It was the doctrines of the institution (or religion) of science, not the pursuit and virtues of scientific enquiry in and of itself.
The war against Christianity - or in Mulder’s case, ETs and the supernatural - is not of plain reality and logic versus superstition, it is theology v. theology, and worldview v. worldview. As Paul reminded Timothy, we must be wary:
O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science [or knowledge] falsely so called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace be with thee. Amen. (1 Timothy 6:20-1)
Mulder is treated by his peers at the Bureau how many Christians are in today’s world. He is seen as a kook; as disconnected from reality; and is the butt of jokes. For the modern conservative Christian, we are, to most, the Bible-bashers, the holier-than-thou-ers, the misogynists, the homphobes, and - most sacrilegious of all - the science deniers. As Mulder pursues the cases of the X-Files project with an unrelenting zeal, we must pursue the things of God - ‘righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness’ - and ‘Fight the good fight of the faith’ (1 Timothy 6:11-12). We should be prepared to stand firm before the denier, ‘always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you’ (1 Peter 3:15), and bring the Scullys of the world with us on the way.
Through God’s grace and His sacrifice, we have come to believe. Let us keep ‘wanting to believe’.
David Nutter dir. ‘Beyond the Sea’, The X-Files (1994)
Daniel Sackheim dir. ‘Conduit’, The X-Files (1994).
Robert Mandel dir. ‘Pilot’, The X-Files (1993).
Daniel Sackheim dir. ‘Conduit’, The X-Files (1994).
R. W. Goodwin dir. ‘The Erlenmeyer Flask’, The X-Files (1994).