You’ve doubtless read that the atheizers are in a snit again. They are kicking up dust and dashing into court. They don’t want “In God We Trust” to be engraved over the entrance to the new Capitol Visitor Center. These grinches are always trying to steal Christmas. Maybe the atheizers need to pay more attention to what happened on the Moon.

Forty years ago, Americans and most of the rest of the world were transfixed by the sight of men landing on the Moon. U.S. astronauts had bravely gone where no men had gone before. It took bravery, too. At the last minute, the supremely skilled Neil Armstrong had to adjust the landing site. He put the lunar lander down with just seconds of fuel to spare. As he descended the ladder and became the first man to set foot on an alien world, he memorably said: “That’s a small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.”

How grateful we can all be that political correctness had not yet risen up to demand that

he say “a small step for a person, a giant leap for personkind.” Or homo sapiens. Then, Armstrong and Aldrin planted an American flag and a plaque on the lunar surface. They are there still. The plaque reads:

Here Men from the Planet Earth
first set foot upon the Moon
July 1969 A.D.
We came in Peace for all Mankind.

Notice the date. Anno Domini. In the year of Our Lord. Buzz Aldrin was the Lunar Module pilot on that world-historic Apollo XI flight. Aldrin wanted to do something special to commemorate man’s first descent onto the Moon.

NASA’s nervous nellies were still smarting from atheist complaints of the previous December. Then, when Apollo 8 circled the Moon but did not land on it, the three astronauts—Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders– read from the Book of Genesis. On Christmas Eve, their strong and reassuring voices came across the hundreds of thousands of miles of inky void.

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