Prayers from on high: Religious expression in outer space during the Apollo era, 1968–76

Abstract

In the wake of the Apollo 8 mission on 21–27 December 1968, infamous atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair threatened a lawsuit against the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). O’Hair, who had successfully fought against mandatory Bible reading and prayer in the public schools earlier in the decade, argued that NASA’s administrators knowingly violated the separation of church and state by allowing astronauts Frank Borman, William Anders and James Lovell to read from Genesis during their Christmas Eve broadcast from the moon’s orbit. The threat instantly garnered public attention due to O’Hair’s notoriety, particularly among evangelical Christians. Although the lawsuit was quietly dismissed a year later, letter-writing campaigns defending religious expression in outer space continued unabated, even after the last Apollo astronaut set foot on the moon’s surface in 1972. This article examines defences of prayer and Bible reading in outer space during the later Apollo missions from 1968 to 1976. It argues that these efforts reveal a favourable shift in evangelical attitudes towards the space programme – attitudes that were divided sharply prior to Apollo 8 were subsequently more unified as evangelicals combined the fight for prayer in outer space with other major battles over religious freedom. O’Hair’s lawsuit linked Apollo with evangelicals’ earthly concerns, prompting them to interpret American outer space exploration as an endeavour inextricably endowed with religious purpose. The emotional letters-of-thanks they penned and the strongly worded petitions protesting O’Hair they signed in the years following the Apollo 8 mission make a compelling case for incorporating the space programme more prominently into the broader historical discussion of evangelicalism in twentieth-century America.