To Touch the Face of God: The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957–1975

Chapter 5. Evil Triumphs When Good Men Do Nothing: Religious Americans and NASA in the Autumn of the Space Age

chapter five Evil Triumphs When Good Men Do Nothing Religious Americans and NASA in the Autumn of the Space Age I n February 1969 the newly inaugurated President Richard Nixon ordered the establishment of a Space Task Group to develop recommendations for the future direction of the American space program.1 Six months later, at a meeting in August, Vice President Spiro Agnew, chair of the group, finally came up with an answer to the question that had haunted many of its deliberations: now that man had landed on the moon and achieved the principal objective of the Apollo program, how could the American people be persuaded to maintain their support for space exploration? What was needed, Agnew declared, was a new, “grander overarching goal”: “what I propose is a national priority to search the heavens and, before the year 2000, to find God where He lives. We can call the program—‘Go for God.’” Some members of the task group were skeptical, with Dr. Lee A. DuBridge, Nixon’s science adviser, noting that many theologians considered God to be spirit without body: “We may not be able to find Him, no matter how hard we try.” Herbert Klein, White House communications director, was much more enthusiastic : “I think this has PR potential; we can really sell this program. President Nixon, Norman Vincent Peale, and Billy Graham will fall all over each other to back this proposal, and they’ll bring every God-fearing American along with them.” Such was the scenario drolly conceived by journalist Bryce Nelson in a short article for the November issue of the Washingtonian Magazine.2 Consistent with comic convention, the article charted the transformation of a plausible situation into something incongruous and absurd. Forwarding the piece to Agnew, NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine commented, “The 138 To Touch the Face of God Space Task Group has been outdone”;3 but he would have recognized that Nelson was tapping, albeit lightheartedly, on a genuinely sensitive nerve. By the late autumn of 1969 the Space Task Group had not succeeded in generating majority popular support for a bold post-Apollo program based on secular scientific and technological objectives. Furthermore, only one constituency of significant size seemed to be actively engaged with the space program at this time, and it was made up of Americans who wished to defend its religious content. Between December 1968 and the summer of 1975, NASA received more than eight million letters and petition signatures supporting the right of American astronauts to free religious expression during their missions in space (see table 1). Of all the topics on which NASA received correspondence in the course of these years, religion in space generated the largest volume of mail, more than four times as much as any other issue.4 That mobilization, as well as its implications for the standard historical accounts both of American religion in the long 1960s and of the late- and post-Apollo space programs, is the subject of this chapter. Religious Mobilization in the Space Age Against the measure of interest and activity offered by the cascade of letters and petitions into NASA offices, all other examples of religious mobilization in the decade and a half between the election of John F. Kennedy and Table 1 Correspondence received by NASA on the subject of religion in space Year NASA Figures Other Reported Figures 1969 185,876 2,500,000—Project Astronaut 646,000—Gabrielse campaign 500,000—Fry campaign 300,000—Texas Jaycees campaign 35,000—Lynn campaign 1970 901,810 1971 372,356 1972 386,169 1973 1,643,157 1974 1975 1,000,000 Total 3,489,368 4,981,000 Evil Triumphs When Good Men Do Nothing 139 the mid-1970s appear rather modest in scale and force—even the campaigns against the 1962 and 1963 Supreme Court decisions to ban organized prayer and Bible reading from the public schools. Yet the magnitude, the duration, and even the existence of the correspondence campaign in defense of free religious expression in space has generally evaded the attention of historians , even those with a specific interest in rockets or churches. Part of the reason may be that the campaign left few readily visible clues that it had ever occurred. NASA offered little public encouragement to the petitioners, and in most instances the letters and petitions it received were transferred swiftly to a warehouse and thereafter destroyed...