After all, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wasn’t the only person to observe, following the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope last month, that the long-awaited feat had occurred on Christmas Day. Rather, Nelson’s comments raised eyebrows for their “spiritual tone”.
“It’s significant that we had the delays and it kept us all the way to today, Christmas Day,” Nelson said in a video released by NASA shortly after the launch. He went on to quote a passage from Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament shows his handiwork.”
To some viewers – especially those who believe religion and science are incompatible – the very mention of a religious text seemed to undercut the messaging of scientific achievement. The suggestion that the telescope served a Christian purpose, or that its use would reinforce a Christian worldview, also seemed to belie a commitment to inclusivity in science that NASA has claimed to value. (The agency is still reeling from the controversy over its decision to name the telescope after James Webb, a man alleged to have been complicit in the persecution of LGBTQ government workers.)
These are all valid concerns. But it’s also worth remembering that Nelson’s biblical references follow in a long tradition of religious rhetoric in the US space program. There’s a tendency to flatten this history – to imagine that religious language is and always has been inappropriate in the scientific discourse. But one needs only look back a few decades to find a time when comments like Nelson’s were not only acceptable in the American space culture – they were a central part of America’s science identity.
From the 1950s, the United States was embroiled in a decades-long rivalry with the USSR known as the Space Race – a competition that turned the technological and military practicalities of space exploration into a sort of proxy battle for cultural, political, and economic validation. Each nation’s scientific successes were interpreted as triumphs of one national ideology over the other. Among those warring ideologies were the nations’ sharply contrasting attitudes toward religion.
The USSR had officially embraced atheism (though some Soviet citizens were people of faith). In her recent history of Soviet atheism, Victoria Smolkin describes how Soviet leaders and cosmonauts used their victories in the Space Race as occasions to wave a banner of antipathy toward religion. During a 1962 visit to the US, Smolkin writes, Soviet cosmonaut German Titov, the second person in space, proclaimed his atheism, remarking “that he had not seen ‘God or angels’ during his 17 orbits of Earth.” Later Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev similarly joked to American reporters about God’s failure to show up in space. The brash rejection of God served to advance the Soviet effort to solidify state atheism and defuse religion’s threat to state authority.
But the Soviet Union’s dismissal of religion also stirred a backlash on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In fields ranging from evolutionary biology to cosmology, American scientists criticized the ideological dogmatism of Marxism, claiming that it impaired free scientific inquiry. Whereas the Soviet regime was totalitarian and oppressive, the American scientific establishment, by embracing religious tolerance, projected an image of openness. Opposed to the strict atheism of the Soviets but wary of the perceived anti-science attitude of fundamentalist Christians, the American scientific establishment staked out a middle ground of respectable, generic – but still Christian-leaning – religiosity.
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