annashay 
By Joshua Tyler
| Published
Science fiction is often viewed as an exercise in atheism, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The genre has often been successfully used to explore Christian ideas in a way that favors belief.
Whether you’re a believer or a former believer like me, these Christian-coded movies will give you something to think about. These are the eight best Christian sci-fi movies.
8. The Book of Eli
I’m not sure if The Book of Eli is a good movie, but it’s about a guy protecting the Bible, so I couldn’t leave it off. Don’t worry; the other movies on this list are a lot better.
For most of the story, Denzel Washington’s Eli is a drifter in a ruined America, violent when he has to be and relentless always. Only later do we understand his endurance isn’t luck; it’s conviction. The Word he carries gives him direction, shields him, and makes every step west feel like a pilgrimage.
That’s why the villains want it. Carnegie doesn’t crave Eli’s book for nostalgia; he sees it as control, a way to bend people through scripture’s authority. By the time Eli completes his journey, dictating the entire Bible from memory, the movie makes clear it wasn’t survival at stake; it was preservation of Christianity itself.
7. The Seventh Sign
Released in 1988, The Seventh Sign is a doomsday ride that takes the Book of Revelation and plays it out in modern Los Angeles. Demi Moore’s Abby is a young woman whose pregnancy collides with a series of worldwide disasters: seas dying, rivers turning to blood, the moon dimming. Each event is presented like a countdown, the world inching closer to a final breaking point.
The hook isn’t subtle; this is straight-up biblical prophecy turned into speculative drama. Scientists try to explain it, governments panic, priests warn of what’s coming, but the story stays rooted in Abby, whose unborn child may be the key to humanity’s survival.
What makes the film work is that it doesn’t ask whether the prophecies are real, it assumes they are, and imagines what it would feel like if scripture started unfolding outside your window. It’s pulp cinema, but unmistakably Christian apocalypse dressed as Hollywood thriller.
6. Noah
Darren Aronofsky’s Noah isn’t a Sunday school retelling; it’s Genesis reimagined as a speculative apocalypse. The movie takes the familiar flood story and pushes it into sci-fi territory.
The Earth is ruined, stripped bare by human greed, and what’s left looks like a dying planet more than a biblical landscape. Fallen angels appear as hulking rock giants, alien in scale and design, blurring myth and cosmic science fiction. Even the ark feels less like a sacred relic and more like engineered survival tech, a massive lifeboat for a doomed world.
Noah treats scripture like speculative fiction, asking the same questions sci-fi always does: what happens when humanity destroys its environment, and who’s left to pick up the pieces? The answer is Noah, not as a pious saint but a reluctant survivor, forced to wrestle with extinction, morality, and faith. It’s the Bible told with world-building strange enough to feel futuristic.
5. The Adjustment Bureau
George Nolfi’s The Adjustment Bureau (2011) hides a theological argument inside a slick sci-fi romance. On the surface, it’s about Matt Damon’s David Norris, a politician who falls for Emily Blunt’s Elise, a dancer. But what drives the story isn’t politics or dance, it’s the Bureau, a team of mysterious men in suits and hats who rewrite reality. Their job? To keep humanity on “the plan.”
The Christian subtext isn’t buried. The Bureau is an angel in all but name, enforcing divine order while struggling with free will. Norris wants love; they insist fate says otherwise. That tension, control versus choice, is the film’s engine. By the end, the Bureau relents, admitting that maybe free will has a place in the plan.
4. Star Trek V
Released in 1989, The Final Frontier was William Shatner’s chance to direct, and he chose to send the Enterprise on a road trip to meet God. The film follows Sybok, Spock’s exiled half-brother, who commandeers the ship with promises of reaching “Sha Ka Ree,” the mythical source of creation. Kirk and crew cross the galaxy’s Great Barrier only to discover the truth: the deity waiting at the center isn’t benevolent but a dangerous prisoner demanding worship.
The movie is clumsy, its effects dated even on release, but the core question is bold. “What does God need with a starship?” isn’t a punchline; it’s the story distilled. Shatner crafted a film about faith, manipulation, and the danger of confusing power with divinity. That’s why it belongs on a Christian sci-fi list: it’s not about proving God exists, but about exposing false gods, and reminding us belief should never silence doubt.
3. Knowing
Released in 2009, Alex Proyas’s Knowing plays like a mash-up of biblical prophecy and disaster spectacle. Nicolas Cage is John Koestler, an MIT professor who discovers a sheet of numbers sealed in a time capsule, each predicting disasters with pinpoint accuracy. It starts with plane crashes and subway wrecks, but the numbers lead to something bigger: the end of everything.
The Christian threads run deep. The film frames its countdown not as random but as design, with mysterious beings, part angels, part aliens, guiding children away from the doomed Earth. They carry them off in radiant ships that look less like UFOs than chariots of fire, straight out of Ezekiel. John stays behind, embracing family as the world burns, while the children find themselves in an Eden-like field beneath a luminous tree.
That’s why Knowing fits. It doesn’t hide its hand; it’s Revelation reimagined as sci-fi, complete with judgment, salvation, and a new beginning.
2. Contact
At its core, Contact is a story about faith without proof. Jodie Foster’s Ellie, the scientist who spends her life demanding evidence, ends up with an experience she cannot verify.
Forced to believe in something unseen, she mirrors the Gospel line, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” Matthew McConaughey’s Palmer Joss counters her empiricism with the argument that love, and by extension God, cannot be measured, only trusted.
The film’s director, Robert Zemeckis, never claimed he was making Christian cinema. In his commentary, he said the film was designed to explore how science and religion could coexist rather than clash.
Contact threads the needle between telescope and pulpit, letting the tension itself be the point. The film resonates with Christian themes of doubt and trust, but it’s framed in universal terms: faith as an essential human condition, whether found in scripture, starlight, or both.
1. Signs
M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs isn’t really about aliens. It’s about belief, loss, and the terrifying silence of a God who might not be there.
Mel Gibson’s Graham Hess, once a minister, has abandoned his faith after the tragic death of his wife. The alien invasion is the crucible; it drives his family into corners, tests their survival, and eventually forces him to confront whether life is chaos or design. The crop circles and extraterrestrial threats are a spectacle, but the real plot is Graham looking at his pain and deciding if it means nothing… or everything.
Signs is one of the most openly Christian-coded sci-fi films of its era. It doesn’t end with humanity defeating aliens; it ends with one man putting his collar back on, embracing faith not because he got proof, but because he chose to trust again.
