Why Joseph Fielding Smith Rejected Space Flight: Anti-modernism and the Problem of Civilization

Joseph Fielding Smith served as an apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for sixty years and its president for two. He published some three dozen books. He stands as perhaps its most influential twentieth-century intellectual. But despite that reputation, one of the more famous stories about his life has its roots in an April 1962 visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma, when he said that human beings would never land on the moon. The United Kingdom launched its first satellite that month; John Glenn had become the first American to orbit the earth only a few weeks earlier. And President John F. Kennedy had recently announced that putting a man on the moon was a national priority. Fielding Smith, then eighty-four years old, was in Oklahoma to handle ecclesiastical business, but given everything, a reporter asked the elderly apostle about Kennedy's idea.1Fielding Smith had already considered the question. Four years earlier, Orville Gunther, a Sunday school teacher in the church, had written to him to ask about reports that Fielding Smith believed that travel to the moon "was not the Lord's desire." Fielding Smith confirmed it. "When the Lord places man on earth he confines them to it," the apostle responded. He linked space flight to other notable forms of idolatry. "Remember the Tower of Babel," Fielding Smith wrote. "It is only fulfilling the prophets when men endeavor to rise to the heavens. They have already attempted to dethrone God and place in his stead an amoeba."2It might not have surprised the Oklahoma reporter, then, when Fielding Smith threw cold water on the idea. "Man does not belong on the moon," he said shortly, assuring the reporter that he "based his belief on his interpretation of the scriptures."3The statement caused a media tizzy, but it was not in Fielding Smith's nature to back down. On May 1, 1962, he responded to an inquiry about the story from a teacher in the church's education system named Robert Echols. "We were placed here on earth as prisoners, so to speak, at least confined to mortality for a reason, to be tried and proved to be worthy of an exaltation or some other condition in the life to come," he said.4What to do with this story? The first point to make is that Fielding Smith was not simply an anti-scientific crank. His reasons for rejecting the possibility of spaceflight were rooted in a particular and coherent vision of the nature of human history. To put it simply, Joseph Fielding Smith did not believe in progress.During his lifetime, this would have sounded even more radical than it does today. The first half of the twentieth century was obsessed with the idea of progress, but of a certain type. On the one hand, Americans linked national prosperity in both the economic and democratic senses to the refinement of moral virtue. "Progress there must and shall be," declared Theodore Roosevelt in 1910. "Our past century has been one of gigantic material prosperity . . . it is a great good chiefly as a means for the upbuilding upon it of a high and fine type of character." Lyman Abbott, the most prominent clergyman in the United States in the early twentieth century, enlisted Christianity in a national crusade for progress, saying that the Bible "from its opening to closing utterance . . . is the record of progress, a call to progress, an inspiration of progress" toward "a democracy of political power, founded on a democracy of religion and education."5 This way of describing progress had its roots in the democratic ethos of the American Revolution and the optimism of the Enlightenment, which spread faith in human competence and reason.By the nineteenth century, the rhetoric of progress took on the inflection of science, influenced by, more than anything else, the idea of evolution. Even before Charles Darwin, intellectuals discussed the idea of change over time and invoked the idea of natural laws. If species developed from lower forms to higher, so went the assumption, human societies might as well.6 Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson both spoke this way. Soon after Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, British writer Hebert Spencer argued that the naturalist's ideas applied to whole societies. Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest," and began to argue that "barbarian" or "primitive" societies were not as highly evolved as were more advanced, complex, and "civilized" nations.7 The French historian Francois Guizot formulated the notion of a "civilization"—a word only coined around the time of the French Revolution—as an advanced society that functioned as a coherent whole, whose economics, politics, and society were the product of social evolution. "The idea of progress, of development, appears to me the fundamental idea contained in the word civilization," he wrote. Guizot believed that only the nations of the North Atlantic achieved both metrics. China might possess a harmonious society, but it was stagnant. African societies changed, but in a chaotic and disharmonious way.8These people, then, spoke of the laws of history. They believed that American society was the product of the successful application of those laws, that its values were therefore harmonious and its civilization coherent. These were the assumptions that Abbott and Roosevelt and hundreds of others, including Latter-day Saints, took for granted, and applied to everything from politics to imperialism to their reading of Christian scripture. For instance, Brigham Henry Roberts, the church's most vehement apologist of the age, maintained that the Book of Mormon was an outstanding example of the laws of progress. Its peoples, the Nephites and Lamanites, were "the one civilized, the other barbarian." The designations signaled many things about their societies. Because they were civilized, Nephites, Roberts believed, were white, the Lamanites dark-skinned; the Nephites farmers, the Lamanites hunters; the Nephites righteous, the Lamanites idolaters; the Nephites democratic and the Lamanites monarchists.9 The Nephites were more advanced, and this was reflected in virtually everything about both civilizations. The book's coherent depiction of civilizations was, as far as Roberts was concerned, evidence of its truth. It also marked Roberts as a quintessentially modern thinker, a man of his time.The dominance of concepts like "progress" and "civilization" in early twentieth-century America is one useful way to conceive of what it meant then to be "modern." That is a term that means one thing to literary critics, another to cultural historians, another to sociologists. For my purposes, I follow scholars of American history like James Kloppenberg and Jackson Lears, who, influenced by theorists like Max Weber, describe modernity as a certain way of organizing, regulating, and imagining what society is, emphasizing the interests of efficiency and uniformity. Modernity was not a neutral or impersonal process; rather, it reflected the values and interests of a new white-collar educated elite: academics, businessmen, journalists, writers, politicians. Lears notes it might be succinctly summarized in the phrase "on time"—a colloquialism that dates to the 1870s. The phrase invests efficiency with moralism; the sense that being on time makes you a good person. And, of course, moderns celebrated advancement: the advance of civilization, the triumph of progress.Because modernity was a project, it attracted detractors. Antimodernists, as Lears and Benedict Anderson and Lynda Jessup note, took on a variety of forms—but all were skeptical of conventional narratives of progress, civilization, and efficiency. The deeply gloomy historian Henry Adams, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, saw only rapaciousness in industrial America and mourned the reduction of its politicians from the stately and patrician figures of his own ancestry to a figure like Ulysses Grant, to Adams an entirely mechanical thinker, a military tactician overwhelmed by the industrial forces at work in modern America. The social activist Vida Scudder found inspiration in the mystical world of medieval Catholicism, whose organic and metaphysical society felt to her alive in a way the increasingly standardized world of industrial America did not.10Of course, perhaps the best-known antimodernists are Protestant fundamentalists. The word "fundamentalist" is important to examine here, as even during his life some applied the term to Joseph Fielding Smith. Of course, in the broader context of the Mormon tradition "fundamentalists" are often practitioners of polygamy. Similarly, the original progenitors of the term "fundamentalist" were Baptists who used it to describe adherence to a certain set of doctrines. It might be more useful, however, to follow the Fundamentalisms Project of Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby, which interprets "fundamentalism" as a particularly modern religious reaction to modernity. That is, "fundamentalism" does not simply hold to traditional orthodoxies. Rather, it is a variety of antimodernism, particularly modern itself in its concerns and in the structure of its response. Like Adams, fundamentalists were pessimists; like Scudder, they were believers that religious communities were a viable alternative to capitalist individualism.Joseph Fielding Smith was a Mormon antimodernist. His fondness for the intellectual tropes of Protestant fundamentalism—like his young earth creationism, for instance—should be understood as derivative of a broader suspicion of modernity as he understood it: a standardizing force that prized the language of progress. Evaluating his conflicts with other members of his church indicates the extent to which the debate over progress and civilization shaped the Mormon tradition. In what remains, I will describe Fielding Smith's relationship with Susa Young Gates, with Heber Snell, and with Sterling McMurrin to illustrate how ideas of progress and antimodernism structured twentieth-century Mormonism.In November 1922, Gates sent a letter to Joseph Fielding Smith. She had by that point been working for more than a decade with the Genealogical Society of Utah, a church-sponsored effort to promote genealogical research. Smith was secretary of that society, but he also had something of a personal relationship with Gates. A close friend of his father, Fielding Smith called Gates "Aunt" in his letters, and their correspondence reveals warm feelings. Perhaps because of this, she felt free to offer Fielding Smith advice.While working in Fielding Smith's office, she scanned the bookshelves. In her letter she told Fielding Smith, "I discovered that there are no reference books concerning the rise and development of the woman question." She explained that this was a grave omission because "women's work has come to be a very definite part of our present civilization." She offered to donate her own library on the topic.11Fielding Smith responded graciously—he took the donation—but confessed, "I have not given the attention to the subject of the emancipation of women that I might have done."12 This is not a surprise, for a significant reason beyond whatever Fielding Smith's own chauvinism might have been. The language Gates used was foreign to him. Gates, a believer in modernity and progress, was certain that women's activism was a signal of social evolution toward a better civilization. It signaled that her church participated in a bigger project of progress.The question was, in some sense, about race. As Miranda Wilcox has shown us, Gates used genealogy to weave Latter-day Saints into broader racist stories about the progress of the Anglo-Saxon race, a category popular among many modern Americans. Her Surname Book and Racial History is truly impressive: a six hundred-page long compilation of common names from the British Isles to China, sandwiched between the histories of the various "races" that inhabited these places. Following conventional nineteenth-century theory, Gates divided humanity into three basic races: "Ethiopian," "Mongolian," and "Caucasian," linking each to a child of Noah.13 For Gates, understanding the history of races was necessary to understanding what routes each might take toward civilizational progress.14Gates was close friends with many leading women reformers, including Susan B. Anthony (who told Gates that she might become president of the National Association of Women, if not for her religion) and, for our purposes most important, as Amanda Hendrix-Komoto has documented, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author and activist. The two met in Britain in 1898, at a reception for the International Women's Conference, and became fast friends. That year, Gilman published a book called Women and Economics, which Gates's journal, the Relief Society Magazine, praised as among "her best works." In 1904, Gilman wrote in her diary that this praise "cheered me much." Gilman visited Utah several times, reading a poem at Gates's birthday celebration in 1926, and serving as a lecturer at Brigham Young University.15As Gail Bederman has observed, in Women and Economics Gilman wholeheartedly embraced civilizational theory, in particular relying upon Herbert Spencer. "The inevitable trend of human life is toward higher civilization," she wrote. Gilman thought that this process was evolutionary, saying that every "child inherits . . . a certain increasing percentage of human development." As history continued onward, then, each generation would be more advanced than the previous, and their civilizations would grow increasingly complex, specialized, and accomplished. "To serve each other more and more widely; to live only by such service; to develop special functions . . . this is civilization, our human glory and race distinction."16Unfortunately, Gilman believed, patriarchy hobbled modern civilization. It prevented women from contributing to civilizational progress. She equated the state of life white Western women like herself were locked into to that of civilizations she believed more primitive. "Marry an Anglo-Saxon to an African or Oriental, and their child has a dual nature," Gilman warned. "Marry any man of a highly developed nation, full of the specialized activities of his race and their accompanying moral qualities to the carefully preserved, rudimentary female creature he has so religiously maintained by his side, and you have as a result that we all know so well."17 Western civilization was in danger of reversion to the primitive level of civilization. Americans claimed "a civilized, free, industrial, democratic age, but they are born and trained in the moral atmosphere of a primitive patriarchate."18Gilman's book shaped how Susa Young Gates understood the history of Latter-day Saint women. "How perfectly our Father understands the possibilities of growth and progress!" Gates wrote. "Activity, growth and motion beget change, evolution, and development—all these are the attributes of the work of God."19 Gates's History of the Young Ladies' Mutual Improvement Association, one of the most significant works of history produced in the first century of the LDS church, explores in detail her theory of progress. Gates argued that throughout human history, women had rarely achieved equality. "In the temple at Jerusalem, women were not permitted," she observed. "During the dark ages . . . women felt keenly but perhaps unconsciously the heavy hand of superstition and oppression."20 This was consistent with the state of affairs Gilman saw all around her: the great paradox of a seemingly progressive, modern society.Gates agreed. Whenever women gained "superior opportunities . . . it is looked upon as evidence of a high degree of intellectual and moral development," she said.21Then Gates made her key argument. For Gates, it was women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who were answering Gilman's call in their self-directed, industrious, exceedingly modern organizations. "The women of the Church have been magnificently disciplined by their various organizations," Gates wrote. "It would be a much easier thing for a great reform movement to sweep through our midst today than it was thirty-five years ago. There is much to encourage the sociologist in the steady improvement and progress of the women of the Church."22And they could do this, Gates claimed, because Mormon women were largely "Anglo-Saxons," a then-popular designation for northern Europeans. "The Latter-day Saints have been taken from every civilized nation, but mostly from the solid, firm, Teutonic peoples," Gates wrote. The strong Anglo-Saxon population in the church had led it to the vanguard of civilization because they possessed the gift for democracy and organization that she saw in organizations like the church's Young Ladies' organization and its Relief Society. "The principle of representation," she said, was "familiar to the Germanic races."23 Moreover, "It is these two principles, social equality and a strong religious sense which have imparted and will continue to impart a vital strength to the . . . organized movement among Mormon women," Gates said.24Thus, for Gates, ideas of evolutionary progress, race, and civilization were deeply intertwined with the image of what she understood her faith to be. These were the stories that she hoped would be told in the library of the women's movement she donated to the office of Joseph Fielding Smith.But Fielding Smith was instinctively resistant to stories of evolution and progress. Like Gates, he believed in the reality of race. For him, racial differences were ordained by God. "Our place among the tribes and nations evidently was assigned to us by the Lord," he wrote.25 In his 1931 treatise, The Way to Perfection, Fielding Smith explained that all human spirits were "graded" in pre-mortal life. "Certain spirits were chosen to come through the lineage of Abraham," a selection Fielding Smith deemed a great honor. Similarly, he said, it was "reasonable to believe that less worthy spirits would come through less favored lineage."26But while he shared Gates's racism, Fielding Smith rejected her—and Gilman's, and many other Americans'—belief that the races might progress. He concluded, "The Lord is doing the best that can be done" with "the various grades of color and degrees of intelligence we find in the earth." He denied the idea that some races were capable of progress and others not; instead, for him, all races were equipped with strengths, but also weaknesses they could not overcome, regardless of their cultivation or organization.27 God "knew not only what each of us could do, but also what each of us would do when put to the test and when responsibility was given us," he wrote. People were assigned to differing races accordingly.28 As he explained to his son, Black people "were not entitled to take white bodies. This is because they exercised their agency in the spirit world."29 Similarly, his son should be grateful that he had "a white body and are preaching the Gospel, because you merited this blessing before you were born, having been faithful in the spirit existence."30For Fielding Smith, then, the story of human history was not the story of development and progress; rather, it was the story of various races enacting those fates God already expected. At the beginning of his book The Progress of Man, Fielding Smith scoffed at the conventional story that "after many millenniums of progress . . . gradually man progressed, increasing in knowledge and power, until he reached the wonderful state of intelligence which he possessed today. This is a very pretty story with just one defect—it is not true!" Instead, he insisted, "human nature has not changed in the past six thousand years of the earth's temporal existence." Therefore, "culture and ignorance have run in parallel directions at the same time."31 The belief that seemed second nature to so many theorists that a democratic civilization would also be advanced in terms of morality or government was a confusion that masked the truth that all civilizations always stood upon the brink of moral failure.Just so, developments in technology or government were not due to progress, but to divine inspiration God granted to humanity in his own time for his own purposes. "Abraham, as he sat in his tent, could not receive the news of the world published in the daily press and have it delivered to him at his door; he could not push a button and turn on the electric light, but is that saying that Abraham was less intelligent than men are who dwell on the earth today?' Fielding Smith demanded. "The truth of the matter is that these things were not intended for Abraham's day, and they would not be known and utilized today if the Lord had not revealed them."32These arguments find expression in Fielding Smith's discussion of the European conquest of the Americas. He rejected the notion that this event was a triumph of progress and civilization over ignorance. That story, he believed, was precisely backward. "Europeans looked upon the Lamanites who possessed the American continent as being savages and as such not entitled to any rights of possession," he observed. But Europeans were ignorant of the fact that God had given that land to its indigenous peoples. Therefore, he wrote, "The Indians would have had as good a right had they sailed to the shores of Europe and planted their standard by right of force or supposed superior civilization. Force is not justice." For Fielding Smith, contemporary Western nations might be advanced technically, but they were nonetheless afflicted with "greed and selfish jealousy . . . the love of pleasure and the seeking of power that does not come from enlightenment or superior civilization." In fact, Fielding Smith wrote, the Book of Mormon taught that "there were in America civilizations even at the time of discovery just as far advanced in many particulars as the so-called Christian nations of Europe."33Fielding Smith's critique of the European conquest of the Americas reveals the source of his puzzlement, then, with Susa Young Gates's story about the "development" of Western women. Race might mark one's ability to comprehend and obey God's law, but it hardly meant that one civilization was morally superior to another. For Fielding Smith, Gates's idea of moral progress was an inappropriate celebration of the present world rooted in the problem of Darwinism.Of course, Joseph Fielding Smith had only disparaging things to say about Charles Darwin. However, his rejection of the theory of evolution also led him to reject various intellectual theories he saw rooted in Darwinian thought. That dynamic explains the link he drew between space flight and the theory of evolution. It also explains his collision with the biblical scholar and church educator Heber Snell, and Snell's friend and ally, University of Utah professor Sterling McMurrin.A lanky student of the Hebrew Bible, Snell received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, taught at the Utah State University Institute of Religion, and in 1948 published Ancient Israel: Its Story and Meaning, a book he understood to be a basic introduction to the Hebrew Bible for use in the church educational system. But that system's director guessed that Fielding Smith would stop the book's publication, and he was right. Snell had to find another press.34Fielding Smith disliked the book because it was a fairly conventional synthesis of early twentieth-century scholarship of the Bible. And early twentieth-century biblical scholarship was steeped in theories of civilization and progress. This fact is perhaps best illustrated in the work of Julius Wellhausen, the German scholar who stood in the first rank of the era's biblical critics. According to Wellhausen, the earliest Hebrew religion was naïve and primitive, based on feasts celebrating fertility. This version of religion transformed into a ritualistic, legalistic, priestly religion dominated by obscure laws and elaborate ceremonialism. But in turn, what Wellhausen believed to be the ritualistic decay of Hebrew religion sparked what he called "the progressive step of ethical monotheism in which the first step toward universalism had been accomplished."35 Wellhausen argued that the great prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel cared most for personal ethical behavior and spurned empty rites and priestly authority. For Wellhausen, therefore, Christianity, with its emphasis on ethics, was the true inheritor of the highest form of ancient Hebrew religion. Judaism was simply a ritualistic dead end.That these ideas were steeped in antisemitism and Protestant triumphalism seems obvious now. However, this way of reading the Hebrew Bible was immensely appealing to Protestant Christians in the United States. They were accustomed to believing that Judaism was a backward faith supplanted by Christianity, a belief called supersessionism. They were also prepared to understand human history in terms of progress toward their own Protestant, democratic civilization. As Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of the leading American liberal Protestants of the early twentieth century, said of Wellhausen's theory, it "restores to us the whole book seen as a unified development from early and simple beginnings to a great conclusion."36Many Latter-day Saints, particularly those who pursued higher education at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, were taught this theory. In the years from 1907 to 1909, two sets of brothers—Joseph and Henry Peterson and Ralph and William Chamberlin—taught a variety of courses in psychology, biology, and philosophy at Brigham Young University. These professors taught not simply the theory of evolution, but a Wellhausenian conception of religious development and Christian supersession of Judaism. "It is only when we perceive the constant growth, the constant evolution, in the Bible and recognize in it the progressive unfolding of the Divine Will in the Hebrew race that it has the highest meaning for and can teach and stimulate us," Ralph Chamberlin wrote in BYU's student newspaper.37Heber Snell studied under the Chamberlins at Brigham Young University and under prominent higher critics at Chicago. So, it is no surprise that his book echoed Wellhausen. "The Jews became engrossed in the means of religion rather than its ends—its theology, ritual and organization, rather than a full orality and depth of spiritual living," Snell's book said.38Fielding Smith could not abide this, but for a very particular reason. He utterly rejected an evolutionary, progressive approach to history. In 1937, after hearing Snell deliver a lecture, Fielding Smith sent a letter to the director of church education denouncing teachers in church schools who believed in "the development view of the Hebrew religion," the idea that "the high religion of the prophets traveled out of the dark land of primitive low religion."39 Later, in his masterwork Man: His Origin and Destiny, published in 1954, Fielding Smith spent many chapters assailing the theory of evolution. But he also gave a passable summary of Wellhausen's work. And then, he linked the two ideas together. It was important, he insisted, to recognize "the part that evolution has played in the twisting of the Bible accounts of things in the beginning."40 He believed that evolutionary theory corrupted humans' understanding of their own history, but also their understanding of scripture.Part and parcel of Fielding Smith's rejection of the theory of evolution was his own version of supersessionism, his belief that the sort of Christianity he himself practiced was eternal, existing from the time of Adam to the present day. Talk of "development" obscured this fact. "The same principles which are given to save us now through the mercy of Jesus Christ were taught to Adam," he claimed. "The Church was organized in the very beginning, and has always been on the earth when an authorized servant clothed in the priesthood could officiate."41In that claim, Fielding Smith placed himself within a wide and motley stream of mid-century scholars and writers who were skeptical of the idea that religion was marked by evolutionary development, each anti-modernist in their own way. The scholar of religion Mircea Eliade, for instance, argued that the human religious impulse was, in fact, a universal and coherent facet of the human experience rooted in the desire to return to a mythic origin, though he did not posit that it was identical to the manifestation of any particular tradition. That was the interpretation of LDS scholar Hugh Nibley, an associate of Fielding Smith, who argued that all human religions were fragmented reflections of the ancient religion God gifted to Adam. There were others. The German Catholic priest Wilhelm Schmidt was quite important to Fielding Smith. The two were the same age, and Schmidt spent many years in ethnographic study of indigenous peoples in Oceania and Africa. By the 1930s, he was publishing in English a series of books arguing that monotheism was the oldest belief in a divine creator. Polytheism, Schmidt argued, was a sign of civilizational decay, not progress. "Primitive belief in a Supreme Being," Schmidt wrote, "is an essential property . . . of the most ancient of human cultures."42 Fielding Smith cited Schmidt's work repeatedly.The arguments Schmidt advanced and Fielding Smith seized upon were not broadly accepted among academics in the early twentieth century, which led to confusion between Snell and Fielding Smith.After his book was published Snell asked to meet with Fielding Smith. Snell's friend, the LDS philosopher Sterling McMurrin, noted wryly that Snell was "the last of the Mormon liberals . . . a man who really believed in the rationality of the human race." By "liberal" McMurrin meant that Snell was a believer that all human beings were basically reasonable in the same wa