I, in my own mind, have thought of America as a place in the divine scheme of things that was set aside as the promised land. . . . I believe that God in shedding his grace on this country has always in this divine scheme of things kept an eye on our land and guided it as a promised land.
—Reagan, “America the Beautiful”
Reagan’s ideas emerged from a Christian context. Like so much of Western thought, his political and ethical philosophies are intertwined with his religious cosmology. Religious influences permeate all Westerners because we have been shaped by our pasts, at both cultural and intellectual levels. Reagan’s branch of Christianity provided the foundation for his domestic and geopolitical philosophy. This will be described in more detail throughout this work.
Reagan’s childhood was materially poor but rich in spirit. His mother, Nelle, taught him her religious beliefs, which were a Protestant form of Christianity. She schooled him in Christian doctrine and lived a Christ-centered life. One of her friends recounts, “Many of us believed that Nelle Reagan had the gift to heal. She never laid on the hands or anything like that. It was the way she prayed, down on her knees, eyes raised up and speaking like she knew God personally, like she had lots of dealings with him before. If someone had real troubles or was sick, Nellie would come to their house and kneel and pray.”1 Nelle’s granddaughter Maureen said Nelle made you feel like you could change the world. Reagan’s father, Jack, was an alcoholic Irish Catholic, but Nelle’s Christian beliefs shaped her son. She imbued him with optimism too. He recalled, “While my father was a cynic and tended to suspect the worst of people, my mother was the opposite. She always expected to find the best in people and often did.”2 This optimism endured throughout Reagan’s life, infusing not just his personality but his political beliefs as well.
Nelle belonged to the Disciples of Christ, an evangelical brand of Protestantism, which can be traced to the Second Great Awakening that began in the United States in the early 1800s. Politically charged, this Great Awakening paralleled the rise of modern democratic politics. Its leaders insisted that Christian principles should be applied to political and social issues because religion provides us with answers to ethical questions and politicians create laws that foster ethical behavior. Politics and religion can never separate, just as modern-day ideologies can never be separated from politics. How can any ethical system be separate from the field that tries to create a just society? This Great Awakening contributed to the abolition movement in the nineteenth century and, later, women’s suffrage and temperance movements.
The Second Great Awakening was also a reaction against the Enlightenment notion that if God exists, He created the world and then left the scene, like an absentee landlord. This deism promotes the image of a distant God who has no concern for His creation, but evangelicals insist that God intervenes in the world and in our lives. God inspires people, evangelicals believe, and all of our success in the world is due to God’s divine will. For an athlete, this means that every victory is achieved with God’s help; for an author, it means that every book that author writes is shared with God; and for the president of the United States, it means that every bill signed into law contains God’s grace. For those unfamiliar with this religion, these may be notions that smack of messianic arrogance, but devout evangelicals believe that they achieve nothing on their own because God’s hand guides everything. We are merely His agents.
Besides relying on Scripture, evangelicals draw inspiration from Christianity’s greatest philosopher, St. Augustine. Augustine reconciled Platonic philosophy with the teachings of Jesus. Plato divided the world into two: the world of forms (ideas) and the world of appearances. The latter, he held, were cheap, meaningless representations of the true and perfect forms. All truth and goodness, according to Plato, could be found in the universal, permanent, immaterial forms. Augustine continued these ideas by arguing for the existence of two worlds: this earthly, material, temporary world, and the next world, the universal, permanent, immaterial world of God. One day the Kingdom of God will descend upon the entire world, engulfing all nations. God never distinguishes between nations, races, and cultures. As Nelle Reagan wrote, “Those who have turned against missions have turned against everything Christ taught—and the very last words he uttered, ‘Go ye into all of the world and preach the gospel to every creature.’”3 Like any good Christian, Reagan was taught the universal nature of his values and that he must spread them.
Reagan prayed to this providential Creator regularly. Prayer is central to Christians because it brings them closer to God and allows them to recognize His grace. It strengthens their relationship with God. Although prayer can be a laundry list of wants, it can be more than that. Reagan always prayed before taking off in an airplane, as many people do, but while a secularist might presume that Reagan prayed that he would survive each flight, he actually prayed that he would accept whatever God had in store for him. Reagan believed that God had a plan for him.
This deference to God does not mean that modern evangelicals believe human beings have no agency in this world. Providence should not be equated with fatalism. Nelle introduced a young Reagan to the book That Printer of Udell by Harold Bell Wright, a work that stresses human ability to change the world. Reagan cites this work as one of the most important influences on his life and thought. He writes:
[The book] had an impact I shall always remember. After reading it and thinking about it for a few days, I went to my mother and told her I wanted to declare my faith and be baptized . . . and I was baptized several days after finishing the book. The term “role model” was not a familiar term in that time and place. But I realize I found a role model in that traveling printer whom Harold Bell Wright had brought to life. He set me on a course I’ve tried to follow even unto this day. I shall always be grateful.4
Udell is a Christian story about a hardworking man named Dick who sees the world as a struggle between right and wrong. Seeking to apply Christian principles to his own corrupt world, Dick helps those in need. That Printer of Udell insists that some of our fate lies in our own hands. In modern times we take for granted the idea that individuals can influence important events, but this sentiment was less common in the Middle Ages, when God was seen to be the ultimate cause of most historical events. Human agency dominates our modern world, however; we control everything, our society tells us. Reagan, like other modern devout evangelicals, believed that God controls events, but human beings too can mold the world. This unifies Christian thinking and its belief in an omnipotent God with our modern feeling that individuals matter. The medieval Christian chanted, “Let the Kingdom of God come,” but the modern Christian chant, as uttered by the nineteenth-century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, is “May the Kingdom of God come, and our hands not remain idle.”5 We can help bring the Kingdom of the Lord to the earth. We are not helpless because we have free will.
Udell inspired a new religious faith in Reagan. As a young adult he joined a Christ-centered ministry called Christian Endeavor, a group that taught the Bible to young people and promoted spiritual strength among its members. Reagan even taught classes for the organization, and he seemed to have had a flare for making the Bible come alive.6 His activities as a young man were not merely spiritual, however. He also thrived in the secular world. In high school he played a variety of sports, participated in drama, worked on the yearbook, and was student body president. Despite what his detractors contend, these are the typical high school activities of a highly intelligent person. Still, Reagan’s religious beliefs were never far from his thoughts. His high school commencement speech cited John 10:10, where Jesus tells his followers, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”7 Christianity affirms eternal life. No other religion offers so much to believers; arguably, all a Christian needs to receive this eternal life is faith. It is very seductive.
Reagan’s evangelicalism must be contrasted with the “hellfire and brimstone” approach preached by those who insist humanity is (mostly) damned. The latter descends from Calvinism, but Reagan’s evangelicalism explicitly rejected many Calvinist doctrines, including the total depravity of man, the belief that all human beings are completely separate from God, and the theory that we have no free will. Reagan’s Christianity was optimistic, open, and hopeful. In a 1950 interview he said he didn’t believe in hell: “I can’t believe an all wise and loving father would condemn any of his children to eternal damnation.”8 It’s not that those who don’t believe in God will burn forever in the netherworld. Everyone will always be loved by God. Rather, they will be separate from God, a fate worse than any physical torment because they will be separate from all that is good and just. In his classic work, The Great Divorce (1945), which Reagan certainly read, C. S. Lewis asserts, “A damned soul is nearly nothing. . . . Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it.”9 The damned, those who reject God, don’t suffer; they just feel nothing. This is the opposite of life.
Reagan, like Lewis, believed in free will: “Nor do I believe that God can be blamed for all the tragedies in the world. The tragedy of war, for instance. If we each lived according to the rules of the Bible, if we loved our neighbor and did unto others as we would have others do unto us, how could war ever be? The responsibility is in our hands alone. And our lives are in our hands. I’m not a fatalist.”10 Evangelical, anti-Puritan ideas could not be better expressed. Reagan believed that a close relationship with God was, in fact, obtainable in this lifetime, for everyone, at any age. Reagan descended from this Christian faith, and although Scripture played a key role in his faith, Reagan, like other evangelicals, did not bow only to Scripture, as did the Puritans and Calvinists. Reagan’s brand of Christianity was a little more liberal. This does not make it any less Christian.
Some of Reagan’s biographers find his version of Christianity paradoxical. One writes, “The nature of Reagan’s religious beliefs is baffling. He seemed to offer Christianity without Christ and the crucifixion, a religion without reference to sin, evil, suffering or sacrifice.”11 This is true, but Reagan’s brand of Christianity represented the Protestant view that no specific acts (rituals) are necessary for the good life. This was at the heart of the Protestant Reformation. For Catholics, activities such as confession, attending mass, and receiving communion are required. Protestants may practice these activities in one form or another, or they may not. Just because Reagan didn’t express any outward or public manifestations of Christianity doesn’t mean he was less religious or Christian. Protestant Christianity is a relationship with Jesus Christ. For Protestants, all that is technically required is faith in Christ. The good life is built on that. A more solid foundation cannot exist.
As a committed Christian, Reagan did believe in God, Christ, the Resurrection, and, of course, salvation. Salvation played a dominant theme in his life, although the application of salvation often differed; some applications were personal, others were political. When analyzing the young Reagan almost all Reagan biographers refer to the following story he told of himself as an eleven-year-old boy: “I came home to find my father flat on his back on the front porch, and no one there to lend him a hand but me. He was drunk, dead to the world. I stood over him for a minute or two . . . seeing his arms spread out as if he were crucified, as indeed he was—his hair soaked with melting snow, snoring as he breathed.”12 Reagan saved his father by dragging him into the house but never told him about the event. Salvation can be a private phenomenon. Or it can be public. As a teenage lifeguard, he allegedly saved seventy-seven people from a river so turbulent, the city prohibits swimming there today. The local newspaper touted Reagan’s feats and made them front-page stories. Reagan called lifeguarding his favorite job.
Experiences like these, combined with his Christianity, led Reagan to view himself as a savior, although, as he writes in his memoirs, few recognize they need to be saved. “I would have been fine if you’d left me alone,” maintained most swimmers whom Reagan saved. Even during his movie career, with one exception, he played the good guy. The one exception, The Killers (1964), in which he slaps Angie Dickenson, bombed at the box office, suggesting that even years before his presidency, many Americans preferred Reagan as the good guy. This theme of Reagan as savior shaped him into the popular cold warrior he became when he attempted to save America from communism.
Secularists may scoff at Reagan’s notions about salvation, but salvation has been so fundamental to the Western intellectual and cultural heritage that modern Western ideologies remain steeped in the concept. Environmentalists, for example, seek to save the earth from the effects of sinful human activity. Animal rights activists view mankind as innately sinful, living with no regard to animals, whom they seek to save. These ideologies, too, seek to perfect a world writhing in sin. Environmentalists and animal rights activists seek a purity that is religious in nature. It involves abstinence (e.g., vegetarianism or minimizing one’s carbon footprint) in the name of salvation. This is not a coincidence. Salvation is a central part of the Western heritage, one that secularism hasn’t expunged.
Reagan was a mama’s boy, and he learned about salvation from her. Something he learned from his father was a tolerance for different ethnicities and races. Jack Reagan, born in 1883, was a second-generation Irish American whose parents arrived in the United States, like so many other Irish immigrants, around the time of the Civil War. Changing the family surname from O’Reagan to Reagan helped with assimilation. However, this didn’t limit the discrimination that they, along with several million other Irish immigrants, faced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because of this personal experience, Jack Reagan hated discrimination. He refused to let his children see Birth of a Nation for the way it portrayed the Ku Klux Klan. One night the Reagans stopped at a motel that did not allow Jewish guests. Instead of patronizing the business, the Reagan family slept in the car. Likewise, at the peak of his acting career, Ronald Reagan ended his membership with a popular country club in the Los Angeles area because they denied Jewish members. Reagan was particularly sensitive to America’s immigrant and ethnic history because his family epitomized it.
After graduating from high school, Reagan did something fewer than 10 percent of high school graduates did in the 1920s: he went to college. He was the first one in his family to do so. His parents never even finished high school. In 1928 the future president started at Eureka College, a private Christian school with roughly 250 students. Reagan later said these were the best times of his life. He played football, was on the swim team, joined a fraternity, was on the student senate, worked myriad jobs to make ends meet, and achieved average grades as an economics major. Like many college students, Reagan’s intellectual curiosity peaked later in life. The most telling event of Reagan’s college career had nothing to do with academics; it occurred his freshman year when he was chosen as a spokesman for his class regarding a dispute between administration and faculty. Reagan’s peers trusted that he could advance their cause. It was a harbinger of things to come.
The primary goal of Eureka College was to promote and instill biblical values. The Bible was the word of God for everyone at Eureka, and it was required reading for all students. Reagan believed that the Bible held the answers to all of the world’s problems. Though sometimes nameless, the authors of the Bible were great thinkers. Even those who disagree with the Bible’s tenets—those who deny its validity—have been influenced by its ideas. It remains fundamental to Western culture and civilization. The Bible’s most popular book, the Book of Revelation, contributed to Reagan’s cosmology, as well as that of many secular thinkers, by describing life as a great struggle between good and evil. It promises victory for the righteous, but only after titanic conflict. The book was composed around the time of the reign of the Roman emperor Nero, when Christianity was in its infancy and struggling against the Roman yoke, so the Book of Revelation gave Christians reason for hope, even in a time of deepest despair. Revelation promises the defeat of evil, followed by the utopian Reign of Saints, but only after a titanic conflict known as Armageddon. This religious paradigm can easily be applied to the cold war, as well as contemporary American struggles against Islamic extremists. For the secular, the Book of Revelation is fiction, but for many evangelicals, like Reagan, it explains both the present and the future.
This helps to explain Reagan’s optimism, one of his most enduring traits. After all, according to the Word of God, the righteous will be rewarded. “All in all, as I look back I realize that my reading left an abiding belief in the triumph of good over evil,” said Reagan.13 This became psychologically satisfying during times of despair, such as the Great Depression, which hit just as Reagan graduated college. Whereas the 1930s were trying times for many Americans, Reagan succeeded, finding work as a sports broadcaster in Iowa at one of the most powerful radio stations in the Midwest, WHO. This testifies to his rhetorical skills, since when he earned this job, the national unemployment rate was over 20 percent. All jobs were in demand. The Time magazine correspondent Hugh Sidey, who listened to Reagan as a young boy, recounts that during the Depression, Reagan “managed to give us the feeling that things wouldn’t always be that way, that they would get better.”14 Reagan conveyed his optimism to his listeners.
Reagan succeeded during the Great Depression because he was not deterred. Life is never easy, but the Bible maintains that the good will prosper. A Christian can believe in the imminence of a better age, even in times of crisis. Some interpret Christianity pessimistically for its belief in the sinful nature of man, but one can also use the Bible as a lens through which to optimistically view the future, extolling the age when heaven and earth are reconciled and when the righteous will join the Lord. One view is pessimistic, the other optimistic. These two types of Christians are sometimes contrasted as “Good Friday” and “Easter Sunday” Christians. Good Friday Christians are generally pessimistic, focusing on man’s sinful nature and emphasizing Christ’s suffering and persecution. Easter Sunday Christians celebrate the resurrection of Christ and look forward to the Second Coming, when the righteous live. Reagan epitomized Easter Sunday Christians. President Jimmy Carter, his opponent in the 1980 presidential election, was a Good Friday Christian. Carter was, in many respects, a better Christian than Reagan; he attended church more regularly, knew the Bible better, was open about his born-again experience, and even participated in overseas missions. Yet Reagan received more votes from southern evangelicals. How can this be? This can be attributed to Reagan’s optimism. Carter’s most famous speeches chastised the American people, describing their innately sinful nature, as exemplified by excessive oil consumption. His outlook for America was gloomy. Reagan, on the other hand, promised that something better awaited us. Which message would you vote for? The majority of Americans went with the positive.
Broadcasting not only allowed Reagan to express his optimism, it allowed him to use his greatest intellectual gift: his imagination. Sports broadcasting requires imagination because the broadcaster tells stories, trying to create something as real as possible for the listener. Reagan’s first audition in Iowa required him to broadcast a live imaginary football game, complete with the sights, the sounds, the players, and the action. Reagan had to create an entire football game, play by play, in his mind. That audition earned him his first job in broadcasting. Reagan eventually graduated to Major League Baseball, broadcasting Chicago Cubs games from Des Moines, Iowa. Sometimes the radio station lacked the funds to send him to Wrigley Field, so he verbalized accounts of the game, relying on telegraphic reports that came to the radio station. If a Cubs player hit a home run, Reagan described it in vivid detail, despite lacking visuals. Once, the telegraph wire went down, forcing Reagan to improvise. He recalls, “I knew of only one thing that wouldn’t get in the score column and betray me, a foul ball. So I had Augie [the batter] foul this pitch down the left field line. I looked expectantly at Curly [the producer]. He just shrugged helplessly, so I had Augie foul off another one, and still another; then he fouled one back into the box seats. I described in detail the redheaded kid who had scrambled and gotten the souvenir ball.”15 Foul ball after foul ball after foul ball. This went on for nearly seven minutes. One of his regular listeners was a teenager who became a Hall-of-Famer, Bob Feller. Feller contends that Reagan creatively tapped the mike with a pencil to signify a hit. A Sporting News poll ranked him as the fourth-most popular baseball announcer outside of a major league area.16
Reagan parlayed his radio success into a highly successful career in Hollywood. His first trip to California came during the Cubs’ spring training in 1937.17 By this point Reagan was already a minor celebrity. He met with a talent agent in California who arranged a screen test with Warner Brothers. Shortly thereafter, in the midst of the Great Depression, the twenty-six-year-old Reagan signed a contract for $200 a week. Goodbye Midwest, hello California. He was typecast in many of his earliest acting gigs as a radio announcer. And he continued to use his imagination since actors must create environments for themselves. They must leave everyday life and enter one created by their imagination. By the late 1930s, Reagan had moved to Los Angeles with his parents and become an active member of the Hollywood Beverly Church.
Success again followed Reagan: by the end of the decade he had appeared in nineteen films. He had a reputation as a responsible, serious actor who usually got along with his fellow performers. In 1942 he starred in quite possibly his best film, Kings Row. His most memorable line comes when, after noticing his legs are gone, he shrieks in disbelief, “Where’s the rest of me?!” This line would be the title of his first autobiography. Shortly after the movie was released, he departed for military service, but he never saw any combat due to his poor vision.18 Upon returning home, he became more active in Hollywood politics, even rising to the position of president of the Screen Actors Guild (1947–1951, 1959). Political issues seemed to have been Reagan’s passion, even at the peak of his Hollywood popularity. Jane Wyman, Reagan’s first wife, recalls that Reagan was always more passionate when discussing political and current affairs than when talking about his current script.19
From the late 1930s through the mid-1940s Nazism, not communism, was America’s worst enemy. America and the Soviet Union cooperated in the fight against the Nazi threat during World War II, so, at least temporarily, the Soviets were our brothers in arms. The United States even funded its future adversary. (A similar event occurred four decades later, when the United States funded Iraq in its war against Iran. In each instance, the country America funded seemed to be the lesser of two evils.) Anticommunist sentiment in America waned at this time. For his part, Reagan spoke far more critically of fascism than of communism during this era, because fascism seemed like a greater threat to the world. This era of good feeling was fleeting, however, and so was Reagan’s naïveté about communism. The overt origins of the cold war lie sometime between 1945 and Stalin’s blockading of Berlin in 1948. In between, Stalin consolidated his control of Eastern Europe, reneged on his promise to President Franklin D. Roosevelt of democratic elections, and kidnapped and sent to labor camps almost anyone who seemed to disagree with him. So within a span of three years the Soviet Union transformed from our brothers in arms against the Nazis to our new world enemy. This new enemy, like the old one, was inherently expansionist, because the paranoid Stalin equated territory with security; the more of Europe he controlled, the safer he felt. For its part, the United States helped economically to rebuild Western Europe and joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the first peacetime alliance the country had ever joined, and stationed troops in West Berlin and West Germany. If Western Europe was to remain free and democratic, it would need America to act as a buffer. Reagan learned this lesson in the late 1940s, and he never forgot it.
It was during this time that Reagan first encountered communists in Hollywood. Reagan was part of a host of Hollywood organizations, such as the Americans Veterans Committee, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and the Hollywood Independent Citizens of Arts, Sciences, and Professions. Communists infiltrated these organizations and managed to make their influence far stronger than their numbers suggested. Reagan resisted communism, not just for political and religious reasons but for its disingenuous tactics. Communists routinely claimed to be representing the majority even when they were clearly a minority, a method that did not begin in 1940s Hollywood. Consequently when Reagan became SAG president in 1947 (he was nominated by Gene Kelly) and refused to participate in some communist-supported strikes, he became one of their biggest enemies. In the late 1940s no issue was more important to Reagan than limiting communist influence in Hollywood. He supported a resolution that denied any self-identifying communist the position of officer in SAG, for example.
Like Reagan, communists sought to promote freedom, but the two sides’ ways of achieving freedom differed. For one side, freedom could exist only in relation to God; for the other, freedom was achieved by eliminating religion. In the West, freedom and Christianity have developed a complex relationship. Enlightenment philosophers, some of the architects of the modern secular Western mind, viewed religion and freedom as antagonistic. Eighteenth-century thinkers like Voltaire, David Hume, and Condorcet saw organized religion as a threat to freedom, stifling critical inquiry and limiting personal freedom. Hume, for example, writes, “As to ecclesiastical parties; we may observe that in all the ages of the world, priests have been the enemies of liberty.”20 The atheist Holbach wrote, “True toleration and freedom of thought are the most proper instruments for the destruction of religious fanaticism.”21 Holbach reasoned that Christianity denied people their freedom by enslaving them to the clergy. People couldn’t live freely, he believed, in a religious society where morality came from an elite who claimed justification from an immaterial God. For modern secularists who embrace these Enlightenment sentiments, religion and freedom clash: where religion flourishes, freedom suffers, and the more religious a society, the more starved for liberty that society becomes.
Marx augmented these arguments by contending that capitalists (the ruling class) promoted the falsehood of religion in order to maintain control of the masses and dupe them into ignoring the harsh realities of their lives. Those living in capitalist countries, he proclaimed, were deceived by the bourgeoisie, the false prophets of freedom. Subsequently communists in the Soviet Union confiscated church land; desecrated church property and relics; rigidly secularized education; banned religious weddings, funerals, and baptisms; and executed many religious leaders. At roughly the same time a young Reagan was first learning Christian principles, Soviet children (including Ayn Rand) were encouraged to turn in anyone, even adults, who preached about God. The Soviet Union practiced what some secularists still preach: that eradicating religion improves humanity. According to this belief, progress correlates with secularism. The aim of the Soviet government was to ensure that the material needs of its people were met in preparation for the glorious age of communism, a classless final stage of history, devoid of religion, when man would return to his pristine state. They too tried to bring their own version of heaven to earth, where freedom would reign supreme.
Christians like Reagan view things differently. In the Gospels, freedom is achieved when one finds God, as in Luke 4:18: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free.” When Paul employs this concept in Scripture, he usually juxtaposes it against or compares it with Jewish law, which early Christians like Paul believed enslaved Jews, as opposed to Christ, who sets us free. Paul declares in Galatians 5:1, “So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the Law.” Christianity is a liberating philosophy because Christ frees us from our sinful state and past religious traditions. According to this philosophy, freedom is achieved when humankind is liberated from the extensive laws detailed in the Mosaic Code (Torah) and is fulfilled through Christ. In other words, Leviticus tells us what we cannot do, but Christ frees us from these restraints. Christ frees us because through Him we find God and the good life. Christ frees us from our sins.
For Reagan, freedom couldn’t be separated from God because it was a gift from God, so any nation that lacked knowledge of God also lacked freedom. This is based on 2 Corinthians 3:17: “Now the Lord is that Spirit; and where the spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty.” Reagan asserted, “All men and women yearn for the freedom that God gave us when he gave us free will.”22 Furthermore, he said, “God meant America to be free because God intended each man to have dignity and freedom.”23 For Reagan it all boiled down to the fact that “where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”24 The French president François Mitterrand claimed, “[Reagan] has two religions: free enterprise and God.”25 In no way did Reagan replace the Christian emphasis on the spiritual with the American emphasis on freedom; he merely combined the two ideas. For Reagan, the two concepts were actually just one, because he believed that God and freedom are inexorably bound.
This is an important part of the American cultural tradition. Believing the relationship between freedom and religion is a zero-sum game ignores the fact that a puritanical zeal coupled with a love of liberty produced the young American republic. America’s Founding Fathers loved liberty, but they were not completely secular. They were indebted to America’s religious heritage. Two months before signing the Declaration of Independence, the minister and founding father John Witherspoon preached,
A good form of government may hold the rotten materials together for some time, but beyond a certain pitch even the best constitution will be ineffectual, and slavery must ensue. On the other hand, when the manners of a nation are pure, when true religion and internal principles maintain their vigour, the attempts of the most powerful enemies to oppress them are commonly baffled and disappointed. . . . He [God] is the best friend to American liberty, who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion, and who sets himself with the greatest firmness to bear down prophanity and immorality of every kind.26
Alexis de Tocqueville remarked, “In France I had always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.”27 Democracy in America is different from democracy in Europe. The uniqueness of American civilization—what separates it from its European heritage—is the enduring link between freedom and religion. Christianity was the backbone of European civilization for one thousand years and was brought to America by its first overseas immigrants, who sought religious liberty. This began the time-honored connection between American religion and American freedom. America has no history of religious wars and oppression, so to Americans there seems to be no conflict between religion and freedom.
Reagan’s ideas conformed to the American heritage. He spoke the American cultural language most fluently. America has always been the most religious nation in the West (defined as Europe and the United States) and the primary defender of freedom. During the 1920s and 1930s, when European nations were experimenting with more secular and totalitarian systems like communism, socialism, fascism, and Nazism, America stubbornly maintained its liberal-democratic political system. Even today socialist, communist, and proto-fascist ideas gain more traction in Europe than in the United States. But for Reagan, as for most Americans, these political systems were exercises in futility because they meant more government control, at the expense of liberty.
Reagan believed America was the defender of good, “the shining city on the hill” that must lead the fight for freedom against atheist darkness. American cultural historians may cite John Winthrop’s sermon “A Model Christian City” as the progenitor of this idea, but the notion really goes back to Scripture. The prophet Isaiah, writing as Jerusalem was on the verge of destruction by the Babylonians, predicted that a resurgent Jewish Kingdom would rise from the ashes, becoming a beacon of light for all nations of the world. A New Age would dawn. Christ’s Sermon on the Mount preaches, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on the lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly father.” Reagan saw America as this light, a light that leads all other lights in the cold war. As the leading defender of freedom in the world, America bore a moral responsibility to confront and eliminate the forces of evil. Reagan insisted in 1952, “I, in my own mind, have thought of America as a place in the divine scheme of things that was set aside as the promised land. . . . I believe that God in shedding his grace on this country has always in this divine scheme of things kept an eye on our land and guided it as a promised land.”28 It was America’s anointed destiny to lead a crusade against the evil empire. These ideas help us understand Reagan’s seemingly aggressive cold war policies, even in light of the Vietnam debacle. He saw the cold war as a holy war, and he knew that God was on our side. With His help, Reagan believed, we could not lose.
This belief that America has a divinely appointed mission predates Reagan and exemplifies the cultural tradition that Reagan epitomized. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed, “The stage is set, the destiny is closed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God that led us this way. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was this that we dreamed of at our birth. America shall in truth show the way.”29 Reagan quoted from FDR’s fourth inaugural address when he declared, “The Almighty God has blessed our land in many ways, so we pray to Him now for the vision to see our way clearly.”30 And John F. Kennedy stated, “We are by destiny, rather than choice, the watchmen on the walls of world freedom.”31 It is thus not those who assert American providence that run counter to the nation’s cultural tradition but rather those who deny it.
America’s historic moral position is to defend liberty around the world because America was “born modern,” meaning that unlike older nations such as France and England, America has only one tradition, and that is a tradition of liberty, individual rights, and equality. Furthermore freedom is not just a tradition in America but its raison d’être. Less burdened by her past, America can look forward.
And it wasn’t just Reagan’s conservative ideology that emerged from the broader Western religious landscape. Political ideologies can never be separated from religion, even among people who fashion themselves as secular. Modern political ideologies evolved out of religions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That’s when new values, like freedom, justice, environmentalism, equality, education, health care, and human rights, emerged. These values and cosmologies attempt to replace Christianity as a way to interpret reality, and they prescribe how to live the good life. Nonbelievers get judged, damned, and even hated. Although these movements may seem void of religious concepts, they also are fundamentally ethical movements with their own conceptions of good and bad, saints and sinners, and sacred beliefs, which seem like truths to devout believers. They too seek to gain adherents through conversion. Each explains worldly misery and promises a better world if the proper values are adopted. Punishment and despair await those who resist.
Cultural anthropologists insist that certain patterns of thinking cannot be eliminated from society because the human mind needs some sort of structure to help it understand the world. Even radical ideologies like Nazism and Marxism are frameworks through which to understand the world, and they each provide solutions to problems that beset society. In fact, most ideologies, including Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, insist that although the world is sinful now, hope exists—as long as we act properly. But if we lose faith, we are doomed. In sum, in the West ideology cannot be separated from religion because religion provides the foundation for Western civilization and culture. Even when a snake sheds its skin, it still maintains the same vital organs. Our world may look very different now than it did during the Middle Ages, but closer inspection reveals that our minds are not all that different from those of our medieval ancestors. There are never any complete breaks in history, just evolutions. Some Christians may see themselves as distinct from the Greco-Roman era from which their faith emerged, yet deeper analysis of Christianity finds evidence of ancient Greece and Rome, as seen in the Catholic Church’s patriarchal and hierarchal nature. Just as Christian thought could never escape its Greco-Roman past, neither can modern culture, despite some secularization, escape its Christian past. It is therefore not a coincidence that the Age of Ideology eclipsed the Age of Faith; ideologies become new faiths, only cloaked in new nomenclature. In the United States today the ideals of our civil religion include liberty, equality, democracy, and freedom of speech. Christianity may have waned among some intellectuals as Western culture focused less on the next life, yet sacred values persist. Reagan’s freedom-centered philosophy, must be placed in this context.