He’s patriotic, nonpartisan, and seeks a “middle course” on issues of science and religion. The sympathetic Palmer Joss (played by Matthew McConaughey in the film) is a kind of young Billy Graham figure. Rise of the Christian Rightīut while the film portrays Arroway as journeying into the heavens to meet the dead, it actually leaves out the novel’s most remarkable religious details.įor one thing, the novel has two “fundamentalist” characters instead of one. The film captures the novel’s religious sensibility that Arroway is asking people to accept “on faith” her testimony of wonder. And the novel, in turn, offers an even more startling sympathy for the epistemological premise of revealed religions.

But the film gives us a very different picture, an affirmation of the religious experience of wonder. Sagan has a reputation as a hardened, somewhat combative atheist. The film, like the 1985 novel by Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan which it adapted, recognized the essentially religious implications of the question of whether we are alone in the universe.Īmid the political resurgence of the Christian Right in the United States, which has culminated in the rise of so-called “ alternative facts” and a Donald Trump presidency in which 81 per cent of white evangelicals voted for him, the anniversary of Contact provides us with the opportunity to revisit the politics of science and religion that Sagan took up. It’s the 20th anniversary of Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 science fiction film Contact, and we’re in the middle of remembering its story of aliens purposefully communicating with our planet.

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