There’s No Separation of Church and Space

Artemis II pilot Victor Glover joins a long tradition of astronauts whose study of the stars reaffirmed their faith.

The Artemis II crew captured this view as the Earth sets behind the Moon during a lunar flyby. Photo: NASA/Associated Press

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It has long been an inconvenient fact for angry atheists that some of America’s most intrepid space explorers are devout religious believers. Buzz Aldrin performed the first Holy Communion on the Moon, though at the time he was told to keep the moment private. The activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair had sued NASA a few months earlier over Apollo 8’s Christmas Eve broadcast of the Genesis creation narrative. Her case wasn’t taken seriously, but NASA wanted to avoid more controversy.

Atheist biologist P.Z. Meyers recently suffered a flashback to that moment as he contemplated the terrifying prospect of an Easter mini-sermon from Artemis II pilot Victor Glover. Watching the Apollo 8 broadcast as a child was “one of the nails in the coffin” of his religious upbringing. For an atheist, mixing space exploration and religion borders on sacrilege.

Mr. Glover, a member of the Church of Christ, has unselfconsciously melded his work with his Christian faith for years. In an old interview that made Mr. Meyers especially apoplectic, the astronaut says that just as there are no atheists in foxholes, “There aren’t any on top of rockets, either.” This comment from the Protestant Mr. Glover echoed a near-identical quotation from Catholic astronaut Mike Good. He’s aware that referring to the “beauty of creation” can be triggering for some people, but he sees no contradiction between faith and science.

While the biologist Mr. Meyers yells at the clouds, normal Americans have been inspired by the astronaut Mr. Glover’s faith-infused messages back to Earth, which have managed to mention God, Jesus and the Bible without sounding overbearingly preachy. On the eve of Easter, the pilot reflected that when he reads his Bible and considers “all the amazing things that were done for us,” he’s moved to look back at our planet and tell us, “You are special, in all of this emptiness.” In his last broadcast before the ship passed out of range for further communication, he recalled Christ’s summary of the law: to love God and love neighbor as yourself.

Mr. Glover is in good company not only with fellow devout astronauts, but also with devout astronomers. A Catholic priest, Fr. Georges Lemaître, proposed the Big Bang theory in 1927, causing a stir among scientists such as Fred Hoyle who feared that his hypothesis sounded too similar to the Bible’s opening verse, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

In the early 17th century, astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote about his revolutionary discoveries of the laws of planetary motion in rhapsodically reverent language that would give Richard Dawkins an aneurysm. Kepler said that he’d planned to become a theologian, “but now I see how God is, by my endeavors, also glorified in astronomy, for ‘the heavens declare the glory of God.’ ” He believed astronomers were “priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature,” so “it befits us to be thoughtful . . . above all else, of the glory of God.”

Carl Sagan christened Earth the “pale blue dot” of the cosmos, inspired by an iconic image from Voyager 1. He believed this snapshot of our fragile planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam” should challenge “the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe.” It should make man feel infinitely insignificant, with no hope of rescue from above as we look up to consider the heavens. Sagan’s question is as ancient as the Psalms: “What is man that you are mindful of him?” But the psalmist’s answer is the same as Victor Glover’s: Man isn’t a lonely cosmic accident, but beloved.

There’s a reason this message continues to ring more loudly than atheist manifestos and angry screeds. The contest between nihilism and a narrative that places the thinking, discovering, space-exploring man in conversation with the creator of the universe simply isn’t a fair fight. It never was.

Right after the Artemis II broke Apollo 13’s distance record, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen’s voice cracked as he announced that they’d decided to name a moon crater after mission commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll. The whole crew shared an embrace. It was a potent reminder that of all the mysteries of the cosmos, the greatest of these is still love.

Ms. McGrew is a freelance writer based in Michigan.