This Saturday, the United States will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing, a magical time when people of different beliefs and backgrounds united in a cause greater than themselves.
When Neil Armstrong planted an American flag on the moon on July 20, 1969, it signaled victory over the Soviet Union in a space race with religious and cultural overtones.
Deana Weibel, an anthropologist who studies religion and space travel, wrote in The Space Review that “one of the strongest cultural contrasts between Americans and Soviets – one that was emphasized frequently in the U.S. – was that Americans were God-loving Christian people while the Soviets were ‘godless commies.’
This meant that space exploration became a competition between those who loved and feared God, and those who sought to defy God’s existence. Seen from within this framework, Americans were bound to win.”
Weibel told a story about a Soviet cosmonaut being asked if he saw God in outer space. He said no. But American astronaut John Glenn responded, “My God is not so small that I would expect to see him in outer space.”
‘In the name of national greatness’
The moon landing came in the midst of a tumultuous time: the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the riots of the Civil Rights era. Buzz Aldrin, who accompanied Armstrong on the Apollo 11 mission, said, “We needed this first moon landing to be a success . . . to reaffirm that the American dream was still possible in the midst of turmoil.”
President John F. Kennedy brought the country together in the early 1960s by appealing to its national pride and pioneering spirit.
In his book, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, Douglas Brinkley argues that astronauts such as Alan Shepard, the first American to venture into space, would be seen as…
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