From a half-century’s distance, the question startles. “I was wondering,” asked Sen. Alexander Wiley, “whether you felt that God was up there as well as down here, and that in Him, you lived and moved and had your being?” “Absolutely,” answered John Glenn.
Fresh from NASA’s first manned orbit of the Earth, Glenn was the star of a Senate committee meeting that The New York Times likened to a tent revival. His comments on his February 1962 flight were for cold-war-era Americans a counter to Khrushchev’s declaration that his Soviet cosmonauts had found no God, angels, or paradise in the heavens. Yet Glenn’s piety was not an epiphany of space travel. For the Mercury astronaut, a devout Presbyterian, God was “up there” because God was everywhere.
His was a “steady state faith for a steady state universe,” writes Kendrick Oliver in his new book, To Touch the Face of God: The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957-1975 (Johns Hopkins University Press). Glenn’s grounded faith contrasts with other astronauts’ spiritual transformations. It contrasts too with those who professed faith more in the machine age and the job.
The author, a reader in American history at England’s University of Southampton, is intent on avoiding two extremes he’s noted in previous histories of NASA. The first, vastly more common, defaults to a “secular tale of secular men striving to attain a shared secular goal.” The second, at its most extreme, sees the space program as stuffed with believers and imbued with religious—read millenarian—purpose.
Oliver finds, instead, that very few of NASA’s leaders saw their work as a “commission from God.” Thomas Paine, the space agency’s administrator at the time of the first moon landings, might call the program a triumph of “the squares—meaning the guys with crewcuts and slide rules who read the Bible and get things done.” But that was the extent, the scholar says, to which Paine and most other NASA higher-ups were likely to go in making common cause of spaceflight and religion.
Oliver, a Briton born two years after the moon landing, recalls no youthful fascination with space or science fiction. “I brought very little of that sort of hinterland to the project,” he says in a phone interview. Instead he finds a “subtle continuity” with his first book, on the My Lai massacre. While that infamous episode of the Vietnam War happened in March 1968, the revelations did not surface until November 1969, at the time of the second moon landing. In his studies of media from that era, especially year-end pictorials, the historian was struck by recurrent imagery. “You often got this juxtaposition of the images of My Lai with Neil Armstrong’s famous photograph of Buzz Aldrin on the moon in which Armstrong is reflected back in Aldrin’s visor. So there was an interesting question of, What do Americans see when they look in the mirror?” Essentially, “are they seeing someone like Armstrong, or are they seeing someone like William Calley,” the U.S. Army officer most identified with the massacre? Eventually, Oliver says, such questions provoked an interest in the symbolic politics of the space program.
The book explores links between religion and the space program in such disparate realms as astronauts’ experiences, theologians’ pronouncements, and even the churches in the space-enclave communities of Houston, Tex., Huntsville, Ala., and the racier environs of Cape Canaveral, Fla., where pastors were forced to compete with the fleshpots of Cocoa Beach.
Oliver also details a little-known episode of mass religious lobbying of NASA.
That chain of events began on Christmas Eve 1968, when the Apollo 8 astronauts, in moon orbit, took turns reading the first 10 verses of Genesis and then lapsed into silence after a blessing for “all of you on the good Earth.” It was the “emotional high point,” said the Times, of the crew’s “fantastic odyssey.” One person, however, was less than entranced. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, America’s most famous atheist, pledged to begin a mail campaign that would enlist some thousands of supporters against NASA for “slandering other religions” and for “slandering those persons who do not accept religion.”
There was little evidence, Oliver says, that O’Hair pursued such a campaign. Only a handful of letters were ever received. But the threat was enough for America’s faithful, who were still smarting from O’Hair’s role in removing prayer from schools. Between 1969 and 1975, more than eight million believers demonstrated their support for religious expression in space in a flood of letters and petitions sent to NASA.
At the heart of the book is Oliver’s take on astronauts’ space experiences, cast against the lyricism and spirituality of earlier aviation. His title, To Touch the Face of God, will be familiar to many from the speech Peggy Noonan wrote for President Reagan after the Challenger disaster. But Noonan borrowed the phrase, along with “slipped the surly bonds of Earth,” from the 1941 poem “High Flight,” by the pilot and poet John Gillespie Magee, dead at 19 in a collision over Britain.
The author also mines the writings of Charles Lindbergh, who told eerily of the phantoms he encountered 20 hours into his flight across the Atlantic, “The feeling of flesh is gone. ... ... I’m almost one with these vaporlike forms behind me, less tangible than air, universal as aether.” The phenomenon of “breaking off” is echoed in the recollections of U.S. astronauts. “The feeling of detachment I experienced was strange,” Charlie Duke wrote, remembering his venture into “the empty blackness of space” during the mission of Apollo 16. “It was almost euphoric, and I wondered what it would be like to float off into this blackness.”
As some astronauts courted epiphany (and its dangers), what were religion’s professionals thinking about the space program? The vast majority of believers still embraced a “medieval cosmography” in which heaven is a place and God an interventionist. But space exploration and the possibility of a plurality of worlds with intelligent beings brought new questions. What did such a possibility say about the uniqueness of humanity? What did it say about the Incarnation?
If, as Christians believe, God so loved the world, our Earth, that he gave his only begotten son, what did that mean for other worlds with intelligent beings? Was their salvation somehow grandfathered in, or was it only Earth that was so depraved as to need saving? In light of such debates, C.S. Lewis sounded a cautionary note. “We are trying to cross a bridge not only before we come to it, but even before we know there is a river that needs bridging.”
