The Headlines About a FEMA Official’s Waffle House Alien Experience Don’t Tell the Full Story
There’s no question: Gregg Phillips, a top Federal Emergency Management Agency official, believes he was teleported 50 miles to a Waffle House in Georgia.
Similarly, the following week, a clip circulated of Vice President J.D. Vance claiming that UFO sightings are actually glimpses of demons in the sky. That also was not a misrepresentation of Vance’s words: He appears to believe that aliens visit Earth, and that those aliens are actually demons.
These stories lent themselves to eye-catching headlines. Teleportation? Demon UFOs? Critics of the administration saw in them proof that the MAGA movement is led by kooks, rather than qualified, levelheaded professionals. But there’s something that the stories about these clips have missed, beyond the individual-level absurdity. Phillips and Vance may sound, to the scientifically minded, ridiculous. But the bigger story, if you look at the landscape of American belief systems today, is that they’re actually remarkably conventional.
This might seem surprising to anyone who has been, say, a lifelong United Methodist, for example, or to an atheist who has lost track of the trends in Christianity in general. But sociologists who study belief in America have found that there has been a kind of weirding of American faith in recent years. According to Joseph O. Baker, a professor of sociology and anthropology at East Tennessee State University, there’s been a growth in the belief in paranormal matters thanks to the decline in conventional religion. In the 1960s, for example, when most American Christians attended local churches that belonged to some kind of larger denomination, pastors or priests gave guidance for—and, often, curbed—what parishioners were supposed to believe when it came to the paranormal. Today, when so many Christians are nondenominational or don’t attend worship services at all, there’s a general lawlessness to popular Christian theology.
Phillips believes in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as faith healing, divine prophecy, and direct messages from God—miracles, in other words. People are most familiar with this in the form of Pentecostalism, but there are many flavors of charismatics out there. Generally, these charismatic Christians believe in an incredibly intense and often ecstatic personal experience with God, often conveyed through these Spirit gifts. And these charismatics are considered the fastest-growing religious group in the world.
Coming from that tradition, teleportation isn’t so outlandish. As Andre Gagne, a theological studies professor at Concordia University, noted, these charismatics perceive anything that is mentioned in the Bible as feasible today. God does not change, the thinking goes, so those same miracles mentioned in the Bible can and do occur now; this belief has extended, in one extreme case, to praying for the resurrection of a dead child. And, indeed, the Bible does have anecdotes of bodily transportation, something Phillips pointed out in social media posts. In those posts, Phillips said the experience was “part of my spiritual journey” as he was battling cancer, which he said was cured by a miracle. He also reposted others’ accounts of being physically transported. It may remain unclear why God would choose to transport this man to a Waffle House, but sometimes charismatics believe the point is often just that something marvelous occurred, proving the power of God, without there needing to be a legible purpose for it. Phillips wrote, in reference to the teleportation, that he believed “that God moves in ways we cannot fully explain.”
Vance’s faith tradition is quite different, but his viral moment is connected to this same trend. A Roman Catholic convert, Vance operates in the arcane and highly traditionalist world that tends to attract only hardcore Catholics—and, commonly, manosphere types who appreciate its patriarchal order and anti-modern spirit. Talk of supernatural evil is more common among this crowd than among cradle Catholics, experts said, in part because it’s more common among conservatives in general, and in part because it aims to tap into a more medieval version of the church.
In fact, many of the leaders of the independent charismatic network he is connected to believe in “spiritual warfare” for control of America. In this view, the fight is not between Democrats and Republicans but between divine good and satanic evil. There’s no room for nuance in this view or even for operating under political norms: If the only thing that really matters is defeating evil, you can and should use whatever tools you have.
And then, there’s the matter of conspiracy theories. We tend to think of conspiracy theories as an internet phenomenon, but if you spend any time immersed in conspiratorial spaces, you’ll often find religious language being bandied about. Conspiracy theories aren’t just fantasies about Democrats drinking the blood of children and Trump arresting his enemies; they’re also places where religious convictions about good and evil are interwoven with political narratives. There certainly are atheists among conspiracy theorists, but the embrace of the fantastical in the everyday, so common now among so many Christians, makes some conspiracy theories easier to swallow. “We find high correlations between people who believe in supernatural evil and accept conspiracy theories,” Baker said. “Conspiricism makes claims about hidden powers behind things that have malevolent intent. Ideologically it meshes really well with claims about supernatural evil.”
Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, for example, said that he saw a “demonic portal” appear above the Biden White House; if you can believe that, you can believe in QAnon-esque activity happening in that White House. Phillips, for his part, was granted his FEMA position as a reward for being a committed conspiracy theorist about the 2020 election. To Phillips, his campaign against the certification of the 2020 election amounted to a spiritual battle. He has spoken of it as a matter of personal faith.
https://slate.com/life/2026/04/aliens-wa...stian.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
