In April 1962, Joseph Fielding Smith visited Tulsa,
Oklahoma. He was there in his capacity as president of the Quorum of the Twelve
Apostles, attending a local church conference and visiting with Oklahomans who
were not members of the Church but curious about it. He met with a reporter,
who, offhandedly, aside the eighty-five-year-old Church leader about travel to
the moon.
The moon was on people’s minds. President John F. Kennedy
had been in office for just over a year by that point. He had already made a
moon landing a priority. In April 1961, the Soviet Union had successfully sent
he first human being into space. The next month, Kennedy, hoping to regain the
US initiative, convened a joint session of Congress and told them he wanted the
United States to send a man to the moon and being him home again before the end
of the decade. Congress devoted vast resources to what came to be known as the
Apollo Program and, by 1962, the space race with the Soviet Union was regularly
making the news and thrilling US citizens.
It surprised the reporter, then, when Fielding Smith
threw cold water on the whole 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.” The story was picked up by press writes and reprinted all
over the country, bringing Fielding Smith a bit of grief. “I am flooded by
letters in relation to it,” he complained in his journal,” with some editorial
criticism. Why such a fuss?” (“Moon Shots Hit by Churchman,” Daily Oklahoman,
April 26, 1962, 24; “Mormon Leader Says Moon Not Meant for Man,” Arizona
Daily Star, April 25, 1962, 1. Fielding Smith’s diary entries are reprinted
in Joseph Fielding Smith Jr. and John J. Stewart, The Life of Joseph Fielding
Smith [Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1972], 322)
And yet it was not in Fielding Smith’s nature to back
down. On May 1, 1962, he sent a letter to Robert Echols, a teacher in the Church’s
education system. He told Echols that he was not responding to the vast number
of letters he had received about the moon but would make an exception for
Echols “because of the importance of the answer to you and the boys and girls
in the seminary system.”
Then he explained to Echols why he had made the point. “The
moon is of a higher order than the earth according to the reckoning of the
Lord,” he said. And he went on: “We were placed here as prisoners, so to speak,
at least confined to mortality for a reason, to be tried and proved to be worth
of an exaltation or some other condition in the life to come.” His concluding thoughts
did not give an inch. He wrote to Echols, “It is my judgment that Earth-men who
are mortal have no place on the moon or to have anything to do with the moon.” (Joseph
Fielding Smith to Robert Lee Echols, May 1, 1962)
Far from being simply an antiscientific crank, Fielding Smith
offered a coherent vision of the nature of human history, one that deviated starkly
from that of many other early-twentieth century Americans. To put it simply,
Joseph Fielding Smith did not believe in progress.
. . .
The belief arose from fundamental principles in Joseph Fielding
Smith’s conception of order in the universe. For him, the gestalt of the
universe was not linear, it was cyclical. From pieces as small as the individual
human life to as large as the very earth itself, Fielding Smith expected the
same pattern, and he thought it not merely foolish but impossible for human beings,
in their own lives or as a society, to attempt to defy it. That was why he did
not believe a man would ever land on the moon. (Matthew Bowman, Joseph Fielding Smith: A
Mormon Theological [Introduction to Mormon Thought; Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2024], 41-42, 43)
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