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To Touch the Face of God: The Sacred, the Profane, and American Space Program, 1957-1975. By Kendrick Oliver. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Pp. xiii + 229. $39.95 hardcover.
This is an ambitious book. Kendrick Oliver uses the 1957-1975 American space program as a window through which to view religion, cultural optimism, church-state relations, NASA's institutional ethos, and especially the relation between American religion and the space program. Oliver persuasively shows how the nation's 19571969 romance with space travel reflected those years' soaring optimism. Likewise, the sudden disinterest in NASA that began even in 1969 closely corresponded to the public's pessimism and cynicism.
Chapter one discusses religion's surprisingly large influence on the birth and founding vision of America's space program. Many NASA policymakers, aerospace engineers, and astronauts were openly religious and explicitly linked the space program with religious ideals. "What you watch is a biblical scene," intoned Eric Sevareid as he described the Apollo 11 liftoff to his CBS Evening News viewers. "There's a gratitude, a thanksgiving, really a reverential sensation as you watch this" (123). This was still an era when "it mattered that the way a man earned his living was broadly compatible with Christian doctrine and conscience" (42). The space program explicitly made a case for that compatibility. Secularization and professionalization, however, meant that religion's role was that of validation and not inspiration.
Chapter two deftly explains how space exploration affected theological discourse in America. It caused lay Americans first to understand and then to reject Paul Tillich's and John Robinson's liberal immanence theology. Tillich/Robinson presumably would not have choked on Nikita Khrushchev's gleeful report that...