A Particularly American Dilemma?: Religion and Technology in the Space Age

To Touch the Face of God is an insightful study of the complex intersections of a shifting religious landscape and a national fascination with high technology in the United States during the Cold War era. Rich in source material, Kendrick Oliver offers his readers a rigorous analysis that highlights the relationship of religiosity and technological progress—two of the most powerful ideological forces that have shaped the United States since its inception, if not long before. Meanwhile, the author demonstrates a deep understanding of two subject areas, the history of religion and the history of technology, which few scholars combine so shrewdly. He provides us with fascinating insights about post–World War II U.S. culture and allows specialists of both areas to gain new appreciation for what the other has to offer. While some chapters seem a bit taxing for the non-experts, the introduction and summary sections for each are very helpful. The second part of the book is altogether a much easier read.

At the outset, Oliver states that he is responding to a chapter in David Noble’s The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (1997), in which Noble concludes that Americans conceived of spaceflight as a means to return to God. Oliver suggests that Noble did not cast his net for evidence wide enough to draw such a broad, and therefore misleading, conclusion about the impact of religion on the space program, and promises to fill this gap by complicating the story.

Oliver defines the “space age” roughly as the Mercury-Apollo years, although he acknowledges that it began with Sputnik in 1957 and, arguably, never really ended. He declares that “the space program was culturally significant because it involved participants and audience alike in a discourse of ultimacy that simultaneously revealed the influence of religion and raised the prospect of its negation” (p. 10). In other words, theologians and religious commentators were grappling with whether or not faith in the supernatural could sustain itself in the face of mankind’s efforts to naturalize the heavens. But the author’s ultimate goal is for his readers to consider whether the space age’s failure to deliver on religiously inspired hopes had a significant impact on its own demise (p. 9).

The book’s five chapters coincide more or less with four major themes that Oliver offers in the introduction:

1. (1). The role of religious faith and values, first in motivating pioneers of aviation and rocketry, then in the development of national space-exploration goals during the 1950s and ‘60s, in NASA’s institutional culture, and in the careers of the astronauts of the era;

2. (2). The implications of spaceflight for religious thought and belief in the space age;

3. (3). The hopes attached to the transforming effect of spaceflight on spiritual experiences for the watching public; and

4. (4). The massive grass-roots response to the deliberate secularization of national spaceflight programs and its implications for the future of public support for NASA.

Following the order of the themes, chapter one addresses the question of religious motivation behind the Mercury-Apollo space programs. Oliver begins by explaining that the question of secularization is still important for an examination of the role of religion in the American space programs, despite the fact that the secularization thesis applied in sociology studies during most of the twentieth century was largely debunked by 1970 due to a prominent evangelical revival across the country. More importantly, Oliver claims that, in order to evaluate the role of religion on the space programs, “It is not enough to assert, as some commentators have, that many NASA personnel—officials, engineers, and astronauts—were religious believers. It matters also whether their beliefs were actually relevant in their work” (p. 14). This chapter therefore demonstrates that, on the one hand, spaceflight evolved out of enterprises that progressively lost...