IT WAS AN OCCASION imagined for decades. Now, in 1987, shortly before Christmas, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had given the world the gift of nuclear disarmament. On December 8, the two leaders signed the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty whereby the United States and the Soviet Union pledged to eliminate their stockpiles of intermediate-range nuclear arms. It was the first time the superpowers had agreed not only to limit their nuclear arsenals but to begin reducing them. It was a significant moment, and, after Gorbachev had returned to Moscow, Reagan reflected on its significance in an address to the nation. The INF Treaty symbolized his conviction that “the postwar policy of containment is no longer enough.” But instead of the hard-line rhetoric of rollback with which people had associated Reagan, he offered a policy of “world peace and world freedom.” He hoped that all Americans could now work together, with the Soviets, “for a day when all of God’s children will enjoy the human dignity that their creator intended.” It was not backroom negotiators who had scored the breakthrough, but the prayers of ordinary Americans; and “in the prayers of simple people,” Reagan explained, “there is more power and might than that possessed by all the great statesmen or armies of the Earth.” And then he said his own prayer of thanksgiving: “Let us then thank God for all His blessings to this nation, and ask Him for His help and guidance so that we might continue the work of peace and foster the hope of a world where human freedom is enshrined.” The Cold War ended two years later—peacefully.1
How did such a miraculous turn of events come to pass, especially during one of the most bellicose anticommunist presidencies in history? In part, the answer lies in Reagan’s handling of religion, particularly the symbolic power of religion on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Ironically, Reagan’s greatest feat was to make his own idealistic synthesis by successfully blending the militant nationalism of religious conservatives with the peaceful aspirations of religious liberals. After strutting onto the world stage as a brash new crusader, a self-styled Ronald the Lionheart, he discarded the sword of the spirit for a shield of faith. Not long after, the Cold War—and Reagan’s crusade—came to an end, and he exited the stage an unlikely peacemaker.
IN 1976, FOLLOWING a tumultuous decade of war and resistance to war, religious liberals hoped for a new president who could successfully transcend the Cold War and set America on its rightful path as the world’s leader in the promotion of social justice. Instead, they got Jimmy Carter.
To be fair, Carter meant well. Having inherited a deindustrializing and globalizing economy and a foreign policy in crisis, he aimed to transcend the power politics of the Cold War, particularly the strictures of containment that bound America to a static and negative approach to the world. And for religious liberals, Carter offered something more: he was one of them, a pious progressive even if he was also an evangelical. A lifelong Southern Baptist, he had been a regular fixture at the First Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, throughout his early life: baptized at the age of eleven, Sunday school teacher as an adult, appointed deacon in 1958 at the age of thirty-four.2
After losing Georgia’s 1966 Democratic gubernatorial primary, Carter completely reevaluated his life. Religion had always mattered to him without necessarily being central. His faith was well-grounded, yet it offered him little solace in defeat. But with the help of his evangelical sister, he had a conversion experience, accepted Christ into his heart, and became a born-again Christian. He continued teaching Sunday school and Bible study classes, not only to children but to adults as well, and traveled to the Northeast as a Southern Baptist missionary. But evangelicalism was not Carter’s only religious influence. He invested a nearly sacred meaning into the Baptists’ traditionally firm separation of church and state. Curiously, he also discovered original sin through the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr and incorporated them into his evangelical outlook. The result was idiosyncratic and, except in Carter’s mind, paradoxical: a worldview based equally on evangelical optimism and conviction, Niebuhrian hostility to national pride and exceptionalism, and Baptist separationism. With his mind and self-confidence settled by his newfound faith, Carter resumed his political career. In 1970, four years after his third-place primary finish, he won the governorship of Georgia in a landslide. Six years later, benefitting from a post-Watergate, anti-Republican, anti-incumbent backlash, he narrowly defeated Gerald Ford in the presidential election. Once in the White House, this Niebuhrian evangelical tried to govern as both a moralist and a realist.3
On foreign policy, Carter should have been the ideal Social Gospel president. He was a Democrat of deep faith who had made progressive change one of his signature campaign themes. He condemned Nixon’s and Kissinger’s “Machiavellian tactics,” “secret diplomacy,” “excessive concern with power politics,” and “neglect of principles and morality.” And he sought to transcend the Cold War and recalibrate U.S. foreign policy for a new era. Foremost on his agenda was the cause of human rights. Carter came into office in 1977 claiming to have found the source of the “modern concept of human rights” in the “laws of the prophets of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” and vowed to make them his administration’s overriding concern. According to National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who admitted he did not share his president’s views on the subject, the administration’s “commitment to human rights reflected Carter’s own religious beliefs.” And indeed, Carter fulfilled many liberal dreams, such as turning sovereignty of the Canal Zone over to Panama, canceling the B-1 bomber, and granting legal amnesty to Vietnam-era draft avoiders. He also pledged to continue détente and work with the Soviets to reduce tensions that could lead to nuclear war. But while complementary in theory, little did he realize just how contradictory the twin goals of peace and justice were in practice. Emphasizing human rights, for example, was bound to upset the Soviets, thereby undermining détente. And criticizing key U.S. allies for their own human rights abuses, as Brzezinski frequently warned, was bound to complicate the pursuit of U.S. foreign policy. The result produced the occasional triumph—the Camp David Accords in 1978—with tragedy—the Iran hostage crisis. Détente, already in a fragile state, eventually collapsed under the burgeoning weight of Carter’s own contradictory impulses.4
Ironically for a man of such faith, part of Carter’s problem was that he did not comprehend the religious mood of the country. In particular, he erred in trying too stringently to separate religion from politics. The most successful presidents deftly appealed to the shared principles of the civil religion, especially in the execution of foreign policy. Carter refused to do so. He did not hide his religiosity, but neither did he promote it. Jody Powell, Carter’s press secretary, noted that his boss “probably quoted less Scripture … than any public official we’ve had in a long, long time”—indeed, probably since Thomas Jefferson. On the rare occasions when Carter did invoke scripture, it was often to chastise Americans. He set the tone at the outset, quoting from the Book of Micah (6:8) at his inaugural: “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” Most damagingly, Carter issued Niebuhrian jeremiads when the country looked instead for uplift and inspiration. As presidential historian Gary Scott Smith points out, Carter was more prophet than priest: he reminded Americans of their sins and warned them of the hellfire that awaited if they did not repent. “Christ admonishes us against self-pride, against the condemnation of others, since we too are sinful,” he declared on one occasion. On another, he told Americans that despite their “great natural resources and great wealth,” they had “no special claim to be God’s chosen people.”5
On the surface, it seems surprising that the nation’s first born-again president would be so tone deaf to broader cultural developments involving religion. Yet Carter’s traditional Baptist faith in the separation of church and state blinded him to the changes occurring around him. “I have never found any incompatibility between my religious convictions and my duties as a President,” he told a questioner at a town hall meeting in Pittsburgh during the 1980 campaign. “Every night I read a chapter in the Bible, with my wife when we’re together; we read the same chapter when we’re separated. It’s part of my existence. I’ve done it for years.” But, he continued, “I have never found anything in the Bible, in the Old or New Testament, that specifies whether or not we should have a Department of Education in the Federal Government or whether you should have a B-1 bomber or the air-launched cruise missiles or whether we should share with Panama … operation of the Panama Canal … Those kinds of measuring rods to define what is an acceptable Christian are contrary to my own beliefs.” Carter mentioned the biblical politics of Jerry Falwell, and by extension other leaders of the Religious Right, as embodying the antithesis of his own beliefs. But he had forgotten that the Protestant left, though smaller in number, and major institutions like the Catholic Church, also looked to religion for political guidance. To them as to the Religious Right, the Bible was in fact pretty clear on whether the United States should develop the B-1.6
This was not only politically unwise but also geopolitically disastrous, for the Carter administration was just as indifferent to the revolutionary changes then sweeping through world religion. Almost certainly in reaction against the overweening ambitions and central planning of the modernist secular state, conservative religion was surging not only in the United States but worldwide. Beginning in the 1960s, Shiite fundamentalists in Iran struggled against the Shah’s grand modernization projects. They aimed instead to return Iran to its fundamental values and morals just as Moral Majority hoped to return the United States to what they perceived as its roots. By January 1979, Shiites had gathered enough strength and support from other Iranians to overthrow the shah and evict the “Great Satan,” the United States. But the rise of Islamic fundamentalism caught the Carter administration completely off guard. From the White House to the CIA, foreign policymakers grossly underestimated the seemingly irrational religious forces fulminating in Iran. The Islamic radicals seemed too divorced from the realities of modern politics to pose much of a threat. As one U.S. official working on Iran blurted out, “Who ever took religion seriously anyway!” But if Jerry Falwell could not make Carter or the national security bureaucracy take notice of political religion, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini could. “We will teach you about God,” one of the Iranian revolutionaries told his American captives in the besieged U.S. Embassy in Tehran. It was a harsh lesson that should have been unnecessary. Thanks to the shock, the Carter administration learned it too well. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December of that same year, Brzezinski and other cold warriors in the administration began assembling a coalition of Muslim nations to resist the godless communists in the belief that this would also realign the Islamic world’s sympathies toward the United States.7
THE SOCIAL GOSPEL was still around, but its message was weighed down by an ineffectual liberal president stumbling through some of the worst international crises to hit America in two decades. But more important, religious liberals simply could not match the intensity of the surging Religious Right. In 1979 alone, Christian conservatives founded four major political action groups that aimed to coax conservative voters to the ballot box: Moral Majority, Religious Roundtable, Christian Voice, and National Christian Action Coalition; the next year saw the establishment of the Family Research Council. Abortion, school prayer, the autonomy of Christian academies, and gay rights remained their abiding concerns, but the Religious Right was immersed in foreign policy issues as well. The Soviets appeared to have retaken the offensive and were marauding all around the world. Carter was either incapable or incompetent to meet the communist threat, said Falwell and other leaders of the Religious Right, and had made it worse through his dithering, disarming, and negotiating.8
It did not matter that in the second half of his term, Carter embarked on a rearmament program that was unusually aggressive for peacetime. Nor did it matter that, as he re-launched the very same Cold War he had tried to suspend only two years earlier, Carter used religion to galvanize Americans for the struggle and demonize their enemies. “The Soviets represent a totalitarian nation; we are committed to peace and freedom and democracy,” he told a questioner at a news conference in October 1979. “The Soviets subjugate the rights of an individual human being to the rights of the state; we do just the opposite. The Soviets are an atheistic nation; we have deep and fundamental religious beliefs.” A month later, an emotional Carter charged that the new Islamic government of Iran’s part in the seizure of American hostages “violates not only the most fundamental precepts of international law but the common ethical and religious heritage of humanity. There is no recognized religious faith on Earth which condones kidnapping. There is no recognized religious faith on Earth which condones blackmail. There is certainly no religious faith on Earth which condones the sustained abuse of innocent people.” But to Christian conservatives in America, none of this mattered at all. The damage had already been done.9
To evangelicals, America’s national and international weaknesses were inextricably linked. Communists abroad and their allies at home were weakening the nation. “In the late seventies,” recalled a Moral Majority official,
the threat of communism was great, whether it was seen as a “hot” war or an undermining action to take over this country by giving away our freedoms and our rights, including the freedom to preach and the freedom to have a church and be separate and be different. Now whether that was real or not, it was perceived as real by fundamentalist people. We felt a threat. We really had a fortress mentality: “Let’s hang on. We are losing ground every day to society, to the world, to bureaucracy, to the federal government.” It was a very real threat, and Falwell had an easy time rallying people for a strong America.
Christian conservatives had had enough. It was time for America to be America again. Accordingly, in time for the 1980 election, groups like Moral Majority and Christian Voice came out with vigorous foreign policy platforms that criticized Carter’s continuation of Nixon and Ford’s détente, especially nuclear disarmament negotiations with the Soviet Union (the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, SALT II under Carter); the recognition of the People’s Republic of China (Nixon had never established official ties; it was Carter who normalized relations, in 1979); and the handing over of the Panama Canal.10
In 1979, after an unproductive fence-mending meeting with Carter, Tim LaHaye expressed the frustrations of many Christian conservatives. “We had a man in the White House who professed to be a Christian, but didn’t understand how un-Christian his administration was.” After the meeting, while waiting outside the White House for his car, a bewildered and angry LaHaye made a vow to defeat Carter in the next year’s election. “I stood there and I prayed this prayer,” he recalled: “God, we have got to get this man out of the White House and get someone in here who will be aggressive about bringing back traditional moral values.” That man, he believed, was Ronald Reagan.11
REAGAN’S FAITH WAS eclectic rather than systematic, lived rather than learned. He was a devout, Bible-believing Christian, but he also harbored a rather more unorthodox spiritualism, such as a belief in ghosts; his wife, Nancy, dabbled in astrology. In this sense, Reagan’s devout but unconventional beliefs had more in common with those of George Washington, John Quincy Adams, or Abraham Lincoln than they did with Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, or John Kennedy. Even Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were more mainstream than Reagan, at least in their religious practices. But Reagan’s enigmatic syncretism was a strength rather than a weakness for, in the hands of a politician of Reagan’s gifts, it afforded his stewardship of America’s civil religion an almost limitless flexibility.
Reagan was raised in Dixon, Illinois, in a religiously divided household. His father was a lapsed Irish Catholic who expressed little outward sign of faith. But his mother, Nelle, who was to leave a strong imprint on her son, was a member of the evangelical Disciples of Christ, otherwise known simply as the Christian Church. Nelle’s faith, based on an unbridled, postmillennial optimism and a firm belief in the all-powerful goodness of God’s providence, was typical of the Disciples. It was a fervently evangelical denomination, often bordering theologically on fundamentalism, yet it was grounded in a doctrine of good works and liberal politics. Recall other members of the Christian Church—Kirby Page, the interwar pacifist; Charles Clayton Morrison, the founding editor of Christian Century; Lyndon Johnson, who converted to the Disciples as a teenager—and then recall their progressivism. Young Reagan had an active church life as a boy: he chose to be baptized in 1922, at the age of eleven, and taught Sunday school as an adolescent. The Social Gospel was important to the Reagan family, as it was to most Disciples, but they supported a more conservative interpretation of progress. They believed in moral uplift, but more by voluntarism and individual faith, much as Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon’s western interpretations of Quakerism had informed their conservative politics. Despite their later support for the New Deal, the Reagans were not John Dewey pragmatists but temperance progressives, evangelicals who sought moral and spiritual uplift through clean living and traditional values. They were progressives, then, but conservative progressives—an oxymoron, perhaps, but the Reagans did not see it that way, and young Ronald learned the invaluable political skill of living comfortably with contradictions at an early age. After high school Reagan attended nearby Eureka College, which had official ties to the Disciples of Christ and where daily Bible reading was part of the curriculum. In this religious atmosphere, he formed an intense hostility to communism, a steadfast belief in the Bible, especially the inerrancy of the New Testament, and a firm belief in the guiding hand of providence.12
After his happy if sheltered Midwestern upbringing, Reagan’s life in Hollywood could not have been more different. Initially, his faith receded, at least as part of his daily life. But it did not disappear. When his film career began to wane in the late 1950s, he turned to politics, and as he did, religion became important once again. Along the way, he traded his New Deal liberalism for staunch western conservatism and a suspicion of government, beliefs to which his Disciples faith could easily adapt. In 1964, no doubt with electoral strategy in mind but also out of genuine political and theological conviction, he began regularly attending services at the Bel Air Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles. Elected governor of California in 1966 and reelected in 1970, Reagan’s faith returned in full force. “I have spent more time in prayer these past months than in any previous period I can recall,” he confessed shortly after moving into the governor’s mansion. “I’ve always believed there is a certain divine scheme of things,” he said elsewhere. “Whatever I do has meaning, only if I ask that it serves His purpose.” As governor, Reagan vigorously courted and associated with religious conservatives and invited Billy Graham to speak to the legislature on two separate occasions. He also began claiming born-again status, as in this statement from his 1976 bid for the Republican presidential nomination: “In my own experience there came a time when there developed a new relationship with God … So yes, I have had an experience that could be described as ‘born again.’ ” But he also displayed a pragmatic streak, signing into law a relatively liberal abortion bill years before Roe v. Wade. His conservative supporters did not like it, but Reagan suffered no lasting damage as a result.13
That Reagan could bridge such a wide gap between rhetoric and reality was testament to his tremendous political skills. As Robert Dallek has pointed out, foremost among these skills was his mastery of “the politics of symbolism,” which served him particularly well in presidential politics. Reagan was especially adept at deploying religious imagery and appealing to the patriotism of civil religion that linked together God and country, mission and nation. In 1980, he recognized the latent power of the Religious Right and moved swiftly to take advantage of it in ways nobody else could. After winning the Republican nomination, Reagan attended the National Affairs Briefing in Dallas. Organized by Religious Roundtable’s Ed Robison, one of Christian conservatism’s most militant leaders, the National Affairs Briefing was designed as a forum where politicians and the Religious Right could exchange ideas about domestic politics and foreign policy. Carter and independent candidate John Anderson declined Robison’s invitation, but Reagan accepted. In speeches and study sessions on SALT II, Panama, and the Middle East, delegates propounded on the unilateralist Christian conservative worldview. In a speech delivered right before Reagan’s keynote, Robison issued a call to arms that was shrill even by the rhetorical standards of the Religious Right. With the forces of secularism on the march at home and the communists rampaging abroad, the stakes could not be higher. “We’ll either have a Hitler-type takeover, or Soviet domination, or God is going to take over this country,” he railed. The audience, including Reagan, loved it. Reagan then followed with his own speech praising traditional morals and condemning the Supreme Court for banning school prayer. The National Affairs Briefing was ostensibly apolitical, which is why Carter and Anderson had been invited in the first place, but it was clearly a showcase for the emerging alliance between Christian conservatives and the Republican Party. Reagan certainly knew it, and he said as much. “You can’t endorse me, but I endorse you,” he declared to his officially neutral but obviously supportive audience.14
Once elected president, Reagan made religious faith an important part of his political persona. This is not to say he was insincere: everything he did in the realm of political religion was consistent with what we know of his private beliefs. Unlike presidents before him, Reagan deployed religious rhetoric to rally his supporters rather than to bind the nation together as a whole behind a common cause. In a significant but little-noticed shift, Reagan reconfigured the Judeo-Christian civil religion from what it had been since the 1930s—a way to foster inclusiveness—into a rhetorical device to attack liberalism and secularism. “I know this may often be laughed and sneered at in some sophisticated circles, but ours is a Judeo-Christian heritage, and ours is a loving and living God, the fountain of truth and knowledge,” he told the annual convention of the National Parent-Teacher Association. “I can’t help but believe that He, who has so blessed this land and made us a good and caring people, should never have been expelled from our classrooms.” This subtle recasting of the Judeo-Christian concept spoke to the core concerns of religious conservatives, Protestant and Catholic alike, who feared that the First Amendment was being used as a weapon against faith itself. As he argued before an evangelical audience in Dallas, “We establish no religion in this country, nor will we ever. We command no worship. We mandate no belief. But we poison our society when we remove its theological underpinnings. We court corruption when we leave it bereft of belief. All are free to believe or not believe; all are free to practice a faith or not. But those who believe must be free to speak of and act on their belief, to apply moral teaching to public questions.”15
Throughout his presidency, Reagan promoted many of the causes of the Religious Right. In 1982, he submitted to Congress a constitutional amendment to legalize school prayer. In his 1983 State of the Union address, he urged passage of the school prayer amendment and defended the notorious Christian academies by urging “tuition tax credits for parents who want to send their children to private or religiously affiliated schools.” Elsewhere, he criticized liberal theologians for portraying Jesus as “merely human” rather than the son of God who was crucified and rose from the dead. He also took issue with Darwinian theories of evolution and believed biblical creationism should have an equal opportunity to be taught in science classes. His views on creationism were characteristically expressed in one of his favorite jokes. As he told the 1988 Annual National Prayer Breakfast, “I’ve had an unholy desire to invite some atheists to a dinner and then serve the most fabulous gourmet dinner that has ever been concocted and, after dinner, ask them if they believe there was a cook.” He even repeated the joke to a gathering of dissidents while visiting the Soviet Union for his final summit with Gorbachev in May 1988.16
Reagan was also friendly to Catholics, who comprised many of his top-level appointees. Both of his secretaries of state (Alexander Haig and George Shultz), three national security advisers (Richard Allen, William Clark, and Robert McFarlane), and one director of Central Intelligence (William Casey), in addition to many lower-level aides and speechwriters, were Roman Catholics. And in 1984, Reagan fulfilled Harry Truman’s goal and established normal diplomatic relations with the Holy See.17
Yet overall, when it came to actual policy Reagan delivered very little to religious conservatives. The school prayer amendment did not pass; Darwinism remained in the schools; abortion remained legal—in fact, Reagan appointed a known abortion-rights advocate, Sandra Day O’Connor, to the Supreme Court. The Religious Right grumbled, but it did not abandon him. Because the alternatives were far worse, there was simply nowhere else to turn. And at least Reagan promoted their causes, even if he was unsuccessful in doing so.18
REAGAN FULFILLED MUCH of the Religious Right’s political platform in only one area: a hard-line anticommunist foreign policy. But this was more correlation than cause, for Reagan was already committed to ending détente and reigniting the Cold War. He could not undo some of the things Carter had done—for instance, he could not retake the Panama Canal, at least not without triggering a war—but he could increase defense spending, escalate his anti-Soviet rhetoric, and look for ways to contain and perhaps even roll back communist rule. He issued the Reagan Doctrine, which pledged U.S. political support and military aid (but, with the Vietnam trauma fresh in the collective memory, not troops) to “freedom fighters” resisting communist governments anywhere in the world. Behind the theory of the Reagan Doctrine lay the reality of Central America, specifically Nicaragua and El Salvador, where leftist and communist parties had either come to power (the Sandinistas in Nicaragua) or were threatening to (a Cuban-backed coalition in El Salvador). Though conflicts elsewhere were also critical, Nicaragua became the focal point of both the Reagan Doctrine and its domestic critics, including a majority in Congress. The Reagan administration funded and trained the Contras, a right-wing insurgency that aimed to topple the Sandinistas. In 1983, he also authorized the invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada out of fear that communists were poised to take over the country.19
Religion did not cause or drive these events, or even shape U.S. policy toward them. But for many people in both North and Central America, religion helped frame their perceptions of, and political position on, the key issues. As we shall see, the Catholic Church was deeply involved in the Central American controversies. But religion played a broader role, as well. Symbolically, Reagan framed his reescalation of the Cold War in religious terms that bore striking resemblance to those once used by Truman, Eisenhower, and Dulles. Unlike Kennedy, Johnson, or Carter, Reagan was not squeamish about invoking God’s name in America’s crusade, and unlike Nixon, Reagan spoke as if he meant it.
Picking up from the Helsinki groups, Reagan attacked the Soviet Union for its systematic violations of religious freedom in the Soviet republics, such as Ukraine, and in Eastern Europe. “Two visions of the world remain locked in dispute,” he proclaimed during Captive Nations Week in 1983. “The first believes all men are created equal by a loving God who has blessed us with freedom”; Abraham Lincoln was its most eloquent spokesman. The second vision, following the dictates of Lenin, “believes that religion is opium for the masses. It believes that eternal principles like truth, liberty, and democracy have no meaning beyond the whim of the state.” In a speech before the Irish parliament, Reagan framed the Cold War in religious terms that would have been instantly familiar to Harry Truman; the only difference was that Reagan also aimed his message at the liberal and secular doubters in the United States and throughout Western Europe. “The struggle between freedom and totalitarianism today is not ultimately a test of arms or missiles, but a test of faith and spirit. And in this spiritual struggle, the Western mind and will is the crucial battleground,” he told the Irish legislators. “We must not hesitate to express our dream of freedom; we must not be reluctant to enunciate the crucial distinctions between right and wrong—between political systems based on freedom and those based on a dreadful denial of the human spirit.”20
Reagan’s bellicose stance was controversial—three members of the Irish parliament stormed out in protest—but at least he had an ally. The United States and the Catholic Church had often shared a visceral anticommunist outlook, but they just as often differed about other priorities. But it was no coincidence that, forty-five years after FDR had first sent Myron Taylor to Rome, it was Reagan who normalized relations between the two leading voices of Christian anticommunism, the White House and the Vatican. In 1978, the College of Cardinals elected Karol Wojtyla, a Polish cardinal, as Pope John Paul II. Unlike John XXIII and Paul VI, this new pope—the first non-Italian in centuries—was committed to applying traditional solutions to modern problems. Coming from Poland, anticommunism was part of his political birthright. Such was the strength of the Catholic Church in Poland that the communist authorities had never been able to suppress it. Tacitly allowed to remain, the Polish Church became a quiet symbol of defiance, outwardly apolitical but representing a living, lasting blemish on the supposed purity of communist orthodoxy. “Imbued with a hatred of communism and a love of God,” writes the Cold War historian Melvyn Leffler, John Paul II “was an omen of the times.” In an increasingly interdependent world governed by standards set in Helsinki, Washington and the Vatican pressured communism from opposite ends, almost as if in tandem. In the end, Moscow could do little to resist.21
Reagan’s most famous (or infamous, depending on the audience) use of religious anticommunism—branding the Soviet Union an “evil empire”—came in a widely reported speech to the 1983 annual meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). While many Americans and Europeans were calling for a return to détente, Reagan called instead for eternal vigilance. In doing so, he held little back: “There is sin and evil in the world, and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.” It was rare for a president to use as bracing and unequivocal a word as “evil,” but Reagan knew his audience. “Evil” was not simply a concept to the pastors and evangelists gathered at the NAE convention, but a reality. Satan was real, not figurative, and he wrought mischief upon the world through his acolytes, the godless communists of the Soviet Union. Evil also had eschatological significance, especially for the premillennial dispensationalists who thought the end of the world was approaching. With all this in mind, Reagan’s script returned to the theme of evil repeatedly. At times, he even sounded like a preacher himself: “Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.”
Reagan then quoted the Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, a hero revered by evangelicals, to warn Americans not to be lulled into a false sense of security by the “quiet men,” the outwardly bland but ruthless communist functionaries—supported by unwitting allies in America—who spoke of peace while waging war against freedom. Especially galling was the “nuclear freeze,” a disarmament protest movement then gaining ground in the United States and Europe, especially in the Catholic Church. Because these quiet men “sometimes speak in soothing tones of brotherhood and peace,” Reagan warned in an unmistakable reference to the liberal apostles of progress at home, “some would have us accept them at their word and accommodate ourselves to their aggressive impulses.” Americans had learned this lesson once already, in the 1940s; they must not forget it now. If “history teaches anything,” Reagan continued, “it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.” This was a pretty stern message, one that was already bound to be controversial, but Reagan did not stop there:
So, I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority. You know, I’ve always believed that old Screwtape reserved his best efforts for those of you in the church. So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.
To his audience, the links between today’s evil empire and tomorrow’s Armageddon would have been obvious.22
Reagan’s other major foray into religious geopolitics had even greater consequences. Following Brzezinski’s lead, the Reagan administration, guided mostly by the enthusiasm of CIA director William Casey, significantly expanded U.S. support for the mujahedin resisting Soviet rule in Afghanistan. This meant working even more closely with conservative Islamists not only in Afghanistan, but Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as well. It required Casey convincing skeptical career CIA officers that arming Islamic radicals was a good idea. And it also involved the importation of fanatical Islamic warriors from elsewhere in the Muslim world, principally the Arab states of the Middle East.
Critics abounded, mostly within the State Department and CIA. But to its adherents on both sides, the alliance between the Reagan administration and the Muslim fighters made perfect sense: both hated the Soviet Union for its aggression, its communism—and its atheism. Casey, who often traveled secretly to Islamabad and Riyadh to solicit funds not only for the mujahedin in Afghanistan but the Contras in Nicaragua, found it easy to speak to devout, anticommunist Muslims on a gut level of basic faith and morality. Reagan’s intelligence czar was a veteran of the wartime OSS as well as the Cold War CIA, and so brought to the task a formidable talent in the dark arts of intelligence. But he was also a fervent Catholic who rarely missed Sunday mass—even when traveling in Saudi Arabia, where Christian worship was officially illegal—and filled his house, which he named Maryknoll after the Catholic order, with religious relics and icons. He had thoroughly enjoyed his Jesuit education from elementary school right up through his undergraduate years at Fordham, the spiritual home of serious, intellectual, conservative Catholicism. During the Spanish Civil War, he was an outspoken supporter of Franco and the Nationalists who fought the fight of faith against communism. Like Reagan, then, Casey was a Christian anticommunist, a true believer who hesitated at nothing to beat back the Soviet menace. Through his contacts in the worldwide Catholic Church, he funneled funds and supplies to the Solidarity movement in Poland as well as the Contras and the right-wing government of El Salvador. But Afghanistan was his largest feat. In 1984, supported in public by the rowdy Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson, Casey transformed low-level U.S. support for the mujahedin into a massive and increasingly sophisticated military juggernaut. He did not worry that the United States was allying with Islamic fundamentalists. To Casey, it made perfect sense for the faithful, of whatever faith, to wage war together against godless communism.23
NOT EVERYONE SHARED Casey’s commitment. Religious liberals did not recede with the coming of the age of Reagan but instead regrouped and maintained their own pressure on U.S. foreign policymakers. They continued to push for the adoption of a global Social Gospel and resisted Reagan’s policies whenever they deviated from this vision (as they almost always did). Thus continued the great schism between religious liberals and conservatives that had emerged with the postwar world. The Social Gospelers had strong views on many topics, but the two aspects of Reagan’s foreign policy that generated the most religious controversy were Central America and nuclear weapons. Both were essentially the continuation of struggles from earlier periods.
For many Americans, Nicaragua and El Salvador bore all the hallmarks of Vietnam. Though the situations in the two countries were fundamentally different—in Nicaragua, Reagan supported the insurgents, while in El Salvador he backed the government—they both seemed to share with Vietnam a dynamic in which the United States supported brutal right-wing thugs against the will of the majority of the people, all in the name of a reactionary anticommunism. The conflicts in Central America, liberals charged, committed American support for dictators who systematically violated the most basic human rights of their own people. They also pitted an all-powerful United States against some of the poorest people in the world. And both conflicts raised the possibility of gradual U.S. military escalation leading to a full-scale war in the jungles of Central America, something even Reagan wanted to avoid.
Religious Americans, particularly Christians, were in the vanguard of opposition to Reagan’s policies partly because of their personal experiences or personal contacts in Central America. Though she tried to be balanced, Lisa Fitzgerald, a thirty-nine-year-old Nicaragua-based Catholic nun from Troy, New York, could not help but wonder why her country had picked a fight with a people mired in abject poverty. Should Reagan not instead help these people with humanitarian and economic aid rather than stocking right-wing militias with weapons to destabilize the Sandinista government? In 1983, Fitzgerald returned north to testify about her Nicaraguan experiences before Congress. She did not want to choose sides, she said, but circumstances were forcing her to. “It is harder and harder for people to express my views without being branded as a leftist, like the red-baiting of the 1950s,” she complained to a reporter. Communism was an abstraction, she argued, a political luxury for a people struggling against poverty and hunger. What was important was sustainable, equitable development, not warmongering. “When I hear the Reagan people talk about this in terms of Communism, I get really mad.” To see the conflict through “cold war eyes,” she concluded, “is to distort it.” That same year, Nicaragua-based missionaries from nineteen different American Catholic orders, supported by the ecumenical Inter-Religious Task Force on Central America, sent a letter of protest to Congress alleging that Reagan’s policy was based on distortions of the true situation on the ground. Still, opposition to the Reagan administration’s aid to the Contras was not widely shared within the Catholic hierarchy; after all, the Sandinistas were backed by the Soviets and Cubans and had clamped down on the Catholic Church. And the Church hierarchy in Nicaragua was firmly opposed to the Sandinista government, as was the Vatican.24
Liberal Protestants were a different story. Their critique of the oppressive nature of U.S. foreign policy had changed little since it had begun in earnest in the 1950s and escalated dramatically during the Vietnam War; Nicaragua was but the latest episode in a long sordid tale of global injustice. Taking advantage of a hemispheric network of Christian churches and missions, thousands of Americans headed to Nicaragua to witness the conflict for themselves. What they saw appalled them. Two members of the North Carolina–based Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South, a mainline Protestant organization, spent two weeks in Nicaragua in the summer of 1985. They returned with horror stories of Contra brutality and U.S. support for it. The situation, they wrote to supporters in the United States, “inspires both hope and fear”: hope from the perseverance of ordinary people, fear from the tyranny of the right-wing militias. Contrary to Reagan administration propaganda, the people supported the Sandinistas because “reforms are happening” that would bring about “impressive change in a poor country where most people still work with a hoe and machete to survive.” The Nicaraguan government was certainly a threat, argued the women, but only to American corporations that wanted to keep Nicaraguans in a state of dependent destitution and virtual slavery. To religious liberals, freedom meant economic and social progress, not freedom from communism. “To stop these evil deeds being done in Nicaragua, we will need to persuade our fellow Americans that the threat of the Left is not automatically a threat to our economic or political security,” explained Reverend William Sloane Coffin, a veteran of crusades against Vietnam and nuclear weapons. “Most of all we need to recognize that the real source of insurgency in all of Central America is not Moscow or Havana, but decades of economic inequality and political dictatorships.”25
Opposition from mainline feminist peace activists and William Sloane Coffin were to be expected. More worrying for Reagan was the spread of opposition to normally supportive conservatives. Most Christian conservatives, Protestant and Catholic, firmly backed Reagan’s policies. But not everyone did, especially those churches and denominations that had missionary contacts in Central America who could eyewitness events and relay information back home. In 1985, Bishop August E. Wenzel of the Texas-based Southern District of the American Lutheran Church wrote Reagan to convey the moral misgivings of his denomination. At its annual convention, the Southern District passed three resolutions declaring its opposition to U.S. policy in Central America. “You should know also that the Southern District … would, by most standards, be considered conservative theologically and politically but that these resolutions passed with a sizeable majority vote,” Wenzel explained. “The experience of many of our people in these countries and our contact with refugees do not coincide with the kind of information that many of us believe is shaping our nation’s policy.”26
Actually, what concerned the Lutheran Church’s Southern District even more than the Contras was U.S. support for the authoritarian regime in El Salvador, and especially the Reagan administration’s obstructionist policy toward the refugees generated by the conflict there; two of the convention’s three resolutions dealt with El Salvador. While religious opponents thought Reagan’s Salvadoran policy of supporting right-wing dictators was grotesque, they were even more disturbed by the U.S. government’s refusal to grant asylum to the thousands of refugees who fled the conflict and headed north. People fleeing communist countries were automatically granted asylum and residency in the United States; Cuban exiles and Vietnamese boat people were two recent examples. But refugees from El Salvador were instead turned away at the border and shipped back to their country, usually to face certain imprisonment, torture, and even death at the hands of a regime they had sought to escape. Reviving a tactic pioneered during the anti–Vietnam War movement, churches across the United States offered sanctuary to refugees and refused entry to immigration authorities seeking to deport them. The rhetoric of the sanctuary movement was emotional, and it cast the U.S. government not as a protector of human rights but as their worst violator. To do so, the sanctuary movement used the language of revolutionary patriotism normally confined to the extremist, anti-statist right. “When the laws of a nation underwrite genocide, and compassion becomes a subversive activity, it is time to change the laws of that nation,” Reverend Lee Taylor of the Pilgrim Congregational Church in Anacortes, Washington, explained to the members of his church. “When a democratic nation no longer represents the interests of democracy, but chooses instead the interests of corporate greed and violence, it is time for the people of that democracy to take that government back into their own hands.”27
Quakers, Unitarians, and mainline Presbyterians and Congregationalists were among the most common denominations to offer sanctuary, but in fact nobody had more sanctuary churches than Roman Catholics—by 1985, Catholic churches and organizations such as Catholic Worker accounted for nearly 10 percent of the four hundred sanctuary churches. The difference between El Salvador and Nicaragua was that the Salvadoran Catholic Church backed leftist revolution while the Nicaraguan Church opposed it. From their contacts in El Salvador, Catholic priests, nuns, and laypeople fed secular human rights groups with detailed and fairly precise information about the number of government death squads, right-wing militias, murders, and “disappearances” that occurred with American backing. In homage to those fighting for freedom and justice in Central America, more radical Catholics (and Protestants, especially feminists and Black Power advocates) turned to liberation theology, a fusion of Christianity and Marxism that explained the conflicts as struggles against the neocolonial ambitions of American corporations and the U.S. government.28
Domestic opposition to U.S. policy in Central America was passionate, broad-based, and continual, and as such it applied uncomfortable pressure on the Reagan administration. But so long as it was confined to the religious left, Reagan and his advisers were confident they could withstand it. More difficult was the issue of nuclear weapons, which provoked a much wider protest movement that voiced anger at Reagan’s expensive military buildup and nuclear rearmament program at a time when he had also pushed through deep tax and spending cuts. “As military spending continues to grow, the ability to meet social needs declines,” and the gap between rich and poor within America and between nations continued to grow, the Women’s Missionary Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church pointed out in 1984. In rare harmony, American Muslims and Jews joined Protestants and Catholics in the World Conference on Religion and Peace to urge Reagan to disarm America’s nuclear arsenal, preferably under UN supervision. In a broadside typical of the religious left, the ecumenical Sacramento Religious Community for Peace linked “the problems of the arms race … with concerns about justice, hunger, poverty, war in Central America and our responsibility to our children.” Such protests were part of the nuclear freeze movement Reagan had singled out for special condemnation in his “evil empire” speech. As with the anti–Vietnam War protests, religion was a significant but by no means sole influence within the nuclear freeze movement. But as during the Vietnam era, protest by otherwise respectable churches and clergy gave the movement a moral and political credibility it might otherwise have lacked.29
This was never more evident than during the deliberations of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB). Normally one of the strongest bodies of support for U.S. foreign policy, particularly when it was directed against communism, the NCCB was having serious second thoughts about the nuclear basis of the Cold War. Crucially, the NCCB was no longer dominated by Cardinal Spellman’s generation. By the 1980s, the formative experiences for most bishops were Vatican II, civil rights, Vietnam, and Watergate, not the anticommunist crusades of Pius XII and Bishop Fulton Sheen. From time to time, the bishops issued pastoral letters instructing the laity on the proper Catholic approach toward a wide variety of subjects. But in November 1980, alarmed by the breakdown of détente and the rise of international tensions, the bishops began drafting a pastoral letter on nuclear strategy. Judging the issue to be the most important facing humanity, they deliberately wrote their letter to be accessible to all Americans, not just Catholics. A handful of bishops, such as Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, were committed pacifists and were thus opposed to nuclear weapons on any grounds. Another group, led by Archbishop John O’Connor of New York, supported traditional deterrence theory. The majority of bishops stood between these two extremes but, guided by just war doctrine, found it difficult to imagine a circumstance in which the use of nuclear missiles would be proportionate, and therefore just. Father J. Bryan Hehir, the main author of the letter’s final version, had to balance all these viewpoints, but in the end he followed the will of the clerical majority. This did not bode well for Reagan.30
In May 1983, following two years of wide-ranging consultation, including with Reagan administration officials, the NCCB published Hehir’s conclusions in The Challenge of Peace. Because it involved the deliberate targeting of civilians, deterrence was immoral; obviously so was any recourse to actually waging nuclear war. Hehir and the bishops did not totally repudiate American nuclear strategy, but they came very close. “The nuclear age is an era of moral as well as physical danger,” they concluded. “We are the first generation since Genesis with the power to virtually destroy God’s creation. We cannot remain silent in the face of such danger.” By every consideration, the bishops had determined that “good ends,” such as national self-defense and protecting freedom, “cannot justify immoral means.” In an unsubtle reference to Reagan’s foreign policy stewardship, they expressed “fear that our world and our nation are headed in the wrong direction.” The whole premise of U.S. foreign policy, indeed of the Cold War itself, was predicated upon deterrence and the threat of war. But the bishops had decided it was now time to end that system. “Peacemaking is not an optional commitment. It is a requirement of our faith. We are called to be peacemakers, not by some movement of the moment, but by our Lord Jesus.”31
This was, of course, the very same Lord Jesus who had called Reagan to resist communism wherever it reared its satanic head. Thus it was no surprise that the White House could call upon a number of conservative Catholics to resist Hehir and the bishops. To combat the “leftward drift” in the Church, New York–area Catholics established the American Catholic Committee as a rival voice to the NCCB. William F. Buckley Jr., one of the leading lay Catholic writers in the country, warned the Church against being tempted by the sin of appeasement. In a similar spirit Michael Novak, the Catholic neoconservative and an editor at Buckley’s National Review, founded his own journal to promote a more realistic application of Catholicism to world politics; in a nod to Niebuhr, he called it Catholicism in Crisis. With a foreword by Billy Graham and an introduction by Buckley, Novak then followed with Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age, a book-length response to what he saw as the dangerous moral relativism found in the bishops’ pastoral letter. (And after that, he published a scathing critique of liberation theology and anti-Contra protests.) In the usually more liberal pages of the New Republic, Patrick Glynn penned a critique of the NCCB’s position that Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams recommended to National Security Adviser William Clark, himself a Catholic, as “the best analysis I have ever seen of the recent political activism of the Church.” Characteristically, Catholic traditionalists simply condemned the bishops’ peace drive as the work of the Antichrist.32
But the most extraordinary response of all was a joint letter to Archbishop Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, sent under Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde’s name and signed by twenty-three other Catholic members of Congress, that carefully attacked the bishops’ terms point by point. As elected representatives, it was their job to ensure the security of the American people; if nuclear weapons served this purpose, argued the lawmakers, then so be it. Nuclear weapons kept in check “the very real threat of Soviet communism” and its “aggressive intentions.” Arms control efforts had been sabotaged by Soviet recalcitrance and dishonesty. In any event, arms control would not itself lead to peace because nuclear weapons were a symptom of international tension, not a cause of it. The Catholic congressmen also rejected the bishops’ implication that the nation’s only Catholic president “was less than moral in defending our freedom during the Cuban missile crisis.” And anyway, conventional weapons killed millions more people than nuclear arms, so surely the bishops should focus on a very real problem instead of a largely theoretical one. Rarely had the gap between clergy and laity been so wide.33
Even though they had not been able to bring an end to deterrence, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops had inflicted severe damage on the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. If the nation’s Catholic bishops, once the final defense of anticommunist forces in America, a body of clerics who did not come out against Vietnam until 1971 and tepidly at that, could condemn a staple of Cold War national security policy, then something had to be seriously wrong with U.S. foreign policy. And of course, the Catholic bishops were not isolated: just as Billy Graham and William F. Buckley had teamed up in a conservative alignment, mainline Protestants praised the NCCB pastoral letter and crusaded with liberal Catholics against the nuclear threat. Thus while Reagan found he could drastically escalate the Cold War, he also discovered that the Soviets were not his only opposition. With the evil empire speech, in Central America, and with rearmament, Reagan had taken the initiative. But he had also provoked an equally strong reaction, mostly at home. And by the time of his reelection, it was unclear how much longer he could keep waging this battle on two fronts.34
TO BREAK THE deadlock between East and West, peace and war, Reagan began to reach out, quietly at first, to Soviet leaders. Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to become general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 provided a partner who was willing and able to do business with the West, but Reagan had already been moving toward a modification of his hard-line stance two years before. On two of the Cold War’s most divisive issues, individual liberty and nuclear weapons, he eased off the extreme positions he had taken in order to create space for a new dialogue with Moscow. Central to both these issues, and thus at the very heart of the end of the process that led to the end of the Cold War, stood religion.
Thanks to his mother, Nelle, and the comforting evangelical faith of the Disciples of Christ, Reagan grew up believing in the literal truth of the word of God as laid down in the Bible. He held fast to this biblically inerrant outlook even as his faith began to wander off, amiably if aimlessly, in various spiritual directions. One book of the Bible particularly seized hold of his fertile imagination: the end times foretold in the Book of Revelation. And within Revelation, one episode in particular fascinated him: the battle of Armageddon. Christ’s prophecy of the future, revealed after his death to the disciple John, describes a climactic battle with the Antichrist on the plains of Armageddon. Victory against Satan would eventually presage Christ’s return to earth and give rise to a new heaven and a new earth. Reagan referred to Armageddon on several occasions before his reelection in 1984—in other words, during the most dangerous phase of his presidency, when Cold War tensions reached levels unseen for decades—and clearly cast the Soviets in the role of the Antichrist. Unsurprisingly, many observers worried that their Bible-thumping commander-in-chief cited Revelation as a precursor to unleashing nuclear hell on the Soviet Union. An interfaith group of liberal clergy called upon Reagan not only to stop mentioning Armageddon but to repudiate its relevance to the modern world. “The president had fairly strong views about the parable of Armageddon,” National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane later told an interviewer. “He believed that a nuclear exchange would be the fulfillment of that prophecy [and that] the world would end through a nuclear catastrophe.” And soon, too. As Reagan revealed on televangelist Jim Bakker’s program, The PTL Club, in 1980, “We may be the generation that sees Armageddon.”35
Yet it was a different reading of the end times, largely unnoticed at the time, that was really guiding Reagan’s thoughts. For Reagan was not only fascinated by the Book of Revelation, he was terrified of it. And though he did not doubt that the world would one day end, he wanted no part of it. We now know what Reagan knew then: that the year 1983 brought the superpowers closer to an exchange of nuclear weapons than they had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Tensions were already high thanks to Reagan’s evil empire speech and the Soviet downing of a Korean passenger jet earlier in the year that killed all 269 people on board; 61 U.S. citizens died, including a member of Congress. Then in November, during NATO military exercises code-named Able Archer, the Soviets believed they were about to be attacked and mobilized their military, including their strategic nuclear arsenal, for a preemptive launch against the United States. Shaken by events that seemed to lead straight to Armageddon, Reagan began to step back from the brink. Already convinced that nuclear weapons were a menace to humanity, he became something of a nuclear abolitionist—thanks in part to his literal belief in the Bible’s eternal truth.36
In fact, courtesy of the Vashchenkos, a family of Pentecostals from Siberia, Reagan had already been looking for a way out of the Cold War. On July 3, 1978, five members of the Vashchenko family and two others from their hometown of Chernogorsk, near the Mongolian border, barged their way past startled Soviet police officers guarding the U.S. Embassy entrance. They had tried the same tactic in January 1963, only to be turned away at the embassy doors. They made it through this time, though the U.S. foreign service officers in the embassy wished they had not. Despite the reluctance of U.S. officials to prolong an obvious irritant to the Soviets, and despite the lack of proper living quarters in the embassy, the Vashchenkos settled for an indefinite stay, all seven of them living together in a single twelve-by-fifteen-foot room. Embassy staff collected whatever blankets and bedding they could and made sure these religious refugees were well fed. But soon, some of the family went on a hunger strike; two had to be hospitalized. Their demand: exit visas so they could emigrate to America, where they could freely practice their faith.37
The Carter administration paid them little heed, but the “Siberian Seven” attracted widespread sympathy in the United States. Church groups called attention to their plight; so did a contingent of congressional representatives visiting the Soviet Union in 1979. The pace of protest quickened after Reagan’s election as president, probably on the assumption that he would be more attentive to the Pentecostals’ ordeal. Indeed he was, but there was little he felt he could do about it for now, especially with a reluctant State Department. Still, Americans kept up the pressure. The National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry informed Reagan it was “most anxious about the safety of the Pentecostal Seven.” New York Representative Benjamin Gilman consulted with Ray Hughes, the general overseer of the Church of God, the nation’s oldest Pentecostal denomination and one of its largest, to find a home for the Vashchenko family. A freshman lawmaker from Massachusetts, Barney Frank, was particularly indefatigable on behalf of the Siberian Seven. As the successor to Father Drinan in Massachusetts’ Fourth District, Frank may have felt compelled to maintain pressure on the Soviet Union’s appalling human rights record, especially on religious liberty. Perhaps, as a Jew, he empathized with people suffering communist tyranny for their religion. Whatever the reason, he urged Reagan to help. “The struggle of the Pentecostalists is a compelling human drama highlighting their fight to practice religious beliefs without harassment and intimidation,” Frank wrote Reagan in May 1981, only a few months after being inaugurated into Congress. A year later, he and Tom Harkin of Iowa led the signatures of nearly eighty other congressmen and -women in a petition to Reagan to come up with a solution that would allow the Pentecostals to emigrate “so that they may be allowed to practice their religious beliefs in freedom.”38
Reagan was not a policy wonk and was notorious for drifting off during detailed briefings, especially on technical matters of diplomacy or strategy. But as Barney Frank had guessed, the old actor was instinctively drawn to a “compelling human drama,” and he followed the Pentecostals’ story with great interest. Indeed, he had already done so before 1980 in radio broadcasts and his nationally syndicated newspaper column. After coming into office, he sent the hunger strikers a personal note expressing concern for their health, recommending that they begin to eat again, and urging them “to continue your courageous course, a struggle that is an inspiration to all who value religious freedom and individual human rights.” In November 1981, Reagan summoned diplomat Jack Matlock to the Oval Office to discuss Soviet affairs. Matlock had just returned from a stint in the Moscow embassy, and he had been there in 1978 when the Vashchenkos stormed through the embassy doors. Once it was clear the religious refugees would not leave, Matlock and his wife, Rebecca, made sure they were as well fed and decently housed as possible under the circumstances. Now, back home in 1981, Matlock expected Reagan to quiz him about the war in Afghanistan, unrest in Poland, or economic conditions in the Soviet Union. But Reagan only wanted to talk about the Pentecostals. “Why don’t the Soviets let them go?” he asked, almost plaintively.39
Eventually, Reagan thought he might as well ask them himself. Just over a year after his meeting with Matlock, Secretary of State George Shultz discreetly escorted Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin through the White House basement garage and into the president’s private living quarters. Incredibly, two full years into the Reagan presidency, it was the first time the president had met the Soviet ambassador outside of crowded White House functions. Reagan wanted to begin a dialogue with the Kremlin, and he wanted to keep it quiet. Above all, he wanted to probe their sincerity, to see if they too wanted a new and more productive relationship. “Probably,” Reagan said to Dobrynin, “people in the Soviet Union regard me as a crazy warmonger. But I don’t want a war between us, because I know it would bring countless disasters. We should make a fresh start.” He then suggested the place he would most like a fresh start: the Siberian Seven. Shultz noted the president’s “sincere intensity” when he spoke about the Vashchenkos. For his part, Dobrynin was only just coming to realize that the Pentecostals were “Reagan’s favorite subject.” It was a bewildering turn of events—as Dobrynin put it, two full years in office “and at his first meeting with the Soviet ambassador, the president actually raised only one concrete issue … as if it were the most important issue between us.”40
Dobrynin had not survived Soviet politics and Washington’s bureaucratic battles for two decades for nothing, however, and he immediately recommended to the Politburo that they grant Reagan’s request. It was obviously personally important to the president and would therefore be a gesture of good faith that could go a long way. The Soviet leadership agreed and sent Shultz a message hinting that the Vashchenkos would be allowed to emigrate, but only if they first returned home to Chernogorsk and applied for exit visas like everyone else. Shultz considered the oblique, subtly worded message “a significant overture” that “could open other avenues for progress.” It was indeed significant, and not only for the concession on emigration, for it began a mutual exchange based solely on trust. The Soviets promised, if only implicitly, to allow the Pentecostals to leave the Soviet Union (via Israel, the same inconspicuous route that refusenik Jews had already traveled) while the Americans promised that they would, as Reagan later put it, “never mention it as an exchange or concession” and thus embarrass the Soviets. A few months later, both sides proved as good as their word, and the Vashchenkos left the Soviet Union forever. In fact, dozens more Siberian Pentecostals were allowed to leave with them. Reagan was delighted. “Quiet diplomacy is working,” he exulted in his diary. When Indiana Senator Dan Quayle, who had close ties to the Religious Right, asked that the Pentecostals be hosted at the White House when they moved to the United States, Reagan demurred. It would not be “appropriate,” said the official who replied to Quayle’s letter on Reagan’s behalf.41
Perhaps, Reagan surmised, the successful resolution of the Pentecostals’ case could mark a new beginning. To Dobrynin, Shultz, and Matlock, it demonstrated that the White House and the Kremlin could work together, quietly and constructively, to ease tensions. It did to Reagan as well, but it also meant much more. To him, the Pentecostals might become the symbol of a new Soviet Union that tolerated its religious people. If so, it would be an important first step on the long road to reform. “Ronald Reagan was intensely interested in the fate of individuals in trouble,” recalled Matlock. “He wanted to do everything in his power to help them. His harsh judgment of the Soviet leaders was based … on his perception of the way they treated their own people.” If the Soviet leaders were going to treat their people better, perhaps they themselves deserved better treatment. Reagan sensed that religion had provided him with an opening, and he was determined to seize it.42
At the same time, Reagan encouraged his friend Billy Graham—who had also become a convinced nuclear abolitionist in recent years—to ignore the opposition of the State Department and most Christian conservatives and accept Moscow’s invitation to take his crusade to the Soviet Union. “I believe God moves in mysterious ways,” he told Graham at the White House in 1982, when criticism of the evangelist’s Moscow trip was at its height. “I’ll be praying for you every mile of the way.” Billy Graham walking in the peacemaking footsteps of the National Council of Churches’ 1963 exchange? These were strange times indeed. Graham traveled twice to the country he had spent a lifetime demonizing, in 1982 and 1984, and on both occasions he spoke the rhetoric of freedom but also the language of peace. He called for increased religious freedom, but he also called for mutual respect and understanding between the two sides of the Cold War. During his 1982 visit, he met with the Pentecostals in the U.S. Embassy, but they simply berated the evangelist for even coming to the Soviet Union in the first place. Behind the scenes, Graham urged Soviet officials to let the Pentecostals emigrate, not only in the name of human rights but in the name of Soviet-American harmony. Reagan, Shultz, and Dobrynin would later make the decisive intervention that led to the Vashchenkos’ freedom, but Graham’s private efforts certainly helped. Like Reagan, and with the president’s support, he had come to the realization that the Cold War, especially the arms race, was futile, perhaps even meaningless.43
With understandable puzzlement, Dobrynin noted in his memoirs that it was “most difficult for us to fathom” why Reagan would keep delivering “vehement public attacks on the Soviet Union while he was secretly sending … quite different signals seeking more normal relations.” After all, only three weeks after his first, secret meeting with the Soviet ambassador, Reagan delivered his incendiary “evil empire” speech to the National Association of Evangelicals. But to Reagan, this strategy was not contradictory or confused but a deliberate blend of offense and defense. Reagan’s détente would not be a Nixonian or Kissingerian pact with the devil, in which human rights would be sacrificed upon the altar of Cold War stability. He wanted détente, but on terms that were conducive to American ideals that he assumed to be universal. Matlock noted that most people looking back at the 1980s and the end of the Cold War assumed there were two Reagans: the first, a bellicose cold warrior, gave way to the second, a congenial statesman, shortly after the 1984 election and the coming to power of Gorbachev. But Matlock found this a bit too facile, because “in Reagan’s mind his policy was consistent throughout.” Perhaps, then, he was not a crusader, but a missionary out to spread his values—America’s values—as widely as possible and by whatever means necessary. “Unlike many of his advisers,” Matlock concluded, Reagan “believed that, if given the chance, he could convince the Soviet leaders that these goals were in the Soviet Union’s interest—provided, and only provided, they came to understand that military competition with the United States was a losing strategy.”44
In the Vatican, Pope John Paul II shared Reagan’s vision. From personal experience and years of bitter struggle, the pontiff knew the Polish people had retained their ancient faith. From little more than an optimistic hunch, the unfortunate Pentecostals, and some carefully selected anecdotes, Reagan believed the same was true of the people of the Soviet Union. After John Paul’s remarkable homecoming to Poland in 1979, when he was greeted by millions of adoring Catholics and which the communist authorities were powerless to stop, Reagan had predicted that “religion might very well turn out to be the Soviets’ Achilles’ heel.” But more important, he believed that if the suppression of Russian religion were lifted, it might just provide the path to world peace. As had most of his predecessors, Reagan assumed that religion provided a baseline for democracy and that once a state allowed its people to worship it could do little to hold back the swell of other freedoms. “The truth is, politics and morality are inseparable,” he told an audience during the 1984 campaign. “And as morality’s foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related. We need religion as a guide. We need it because we are imperfect, and our government needs the church, because only those humble enough to admit they’re sinners can bring to democracy the tolerance it requires in order to survive.” Thus the easing of restrictions on religion in the Soviet Union would create the conditions for peaceful internal revolution—and perhaps even an end to the Cold War. “Like you,” he wrote to a friend while watching the funeral of Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov on television in February 1984, “I continue to believe that the hunger for religion may yet be a major factor in bringing about a change in the present situation.” He got his chance to convert Gorbachev during the 1988 summit in Moscow by making a case for the existence of God and urging the atheist leader to relax restrictions on the thousands of churches, synagogues, and mosques throughout the Soviet Union.45
“It’s been said that an icon is a window between heaven and Earth through which the believing eye can peer into the beyond,” Reagan told a gathering of religious leaders in Moscow in May 1988, when Gorbachev’s reformist policies of glasnost and perestroika were at their height. Here, in a church in the middle of the capital of world communism, an American president could now address a religious audience on the importance of religious liberty to political freedom. It was their task, Reagan told the assembled clerics, to foster the spiritual bases of peace and freedom. He confessed to being moved by “the deep faith that lives in the hearts of the people of this land,” a faith that had been “tested and tempered in the crucible of hardship. But in that suffering, it has grown strong, ready now to embrace with new hope the beginnings of a second Christian millennium.” Speaking on behalf of the American people, he revealed his dream that one day, hopefully soon, the people of the Soviet Union could reclaim their golden religious heritage:
We in our country share this hope for a new age of religious freedom in the Soviet Union. We share the hope that this monastery is not an end in itself but the symbol of a new policy of religious tolerance that will extend to all peoples of all faiths.
Our people feel it keenly when religious freedom is denied to anyone anywhere and hope with you that soon all the many Soviet religious communities that are now prevented from registering, or are banned altogether, including the Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox Churches, will soon be able to practice their religion freely and openly…
We may hope that perestroika will be accompanied by a deeper restructuring, a deeper conversion, a mentanoya, a change in heart, and that glasnost, which means giving voice, will also let loose a new chorus of belief, singing praise to the God that gave us life.
Only with faith could the political and economic freedom promised by glasnost and perestroika flourish. It was a moving message, but it was also an example of Reagan’s idealistic synthesis that deftly blended the promotion of ideals with the soothing, conciliatory tones of détente—albeit strictly on American terms. With this in mind, he closed with a message of America’s hope: “In our prayers we may keep that image in mind: the thought that the bells may ring again, sounding throughout Moscow and across the countryside, clamoring for joy in their new-found freedom.”46