A Pillar of Reagan's Legacy: Religion

From The Center for Vision and Values

By Paul Kengor

Retrospectives on Ronald Reagan as the nation marks the centennial of his birth will touch upon every imaginable aspect of the man. I suspect, however, that the thing most integral to the man, and most consistent throughout his life — that is, his religious faith — will not be as front and center as it should.

That was something I learned quite unintentionally. It began in the summer 2001, when I was at the Reagan library researching what I thought would be a fairly conventional biography. I scoured a fascinating cache of documents called the Handwriting File. There, I glimpsed Reagan's literal input, in speeches, proclamations, you name it. And it was there, in marked-up drafts of speeches such as the "Evil Empire" address, that I encountered an intensely religious Reagan, a man making constant, seamless references to God. I found eye-opening private letters, including one where Reagan employed C.S. Lewis' classic "liar, Lord, or lunatic" argument to, essentially, evangelize the Christian message.


As I dug deeper, I found a Christian faith inculcated carefully, winsomely, by figures from Reagan's youth, from his mother, Nelle, to his pastor, Ben Cleaver, impacting the entirety of his life and thinking, from his views on communism to the sanctity of human life.

Long-standing religious tolerance

But what also struck me was how ecumenical was Reagan's faith. Baptized in the Disciples of Christ denomination, Reagan would attend mainly Disciples and Presbyterian churches. That said, I define Reagan's faith as largely non-denominational, a Protestant with a healthy respect for non-Protestant faiths, especially Catholic and Jewish faiths. This was a religious tolerance nurtured at home, at the dinner table of a devout Protestant mother and not-so-devout but believing Catholic father.

Moreover, it's significant how this religious inclusiveness related to the core struggle of Reagan's presidency: his desire to undermine a militantly, murderously atheistic Soviet regime, one he truly believed was "evil." Indeed, Mikhail Gorbachev himself later lamented that his predecessors had pursued a "savage," "brutal" "war on religion."

There are many indicators of this, which have taken me entire books to flesh out, but a few examples are worth highlighting:

Ronald Reagan with Pope John Paul II

First, consider the Catholic side. Reagan counted many Catholics among his intimates, especially his chief foreign policy players: National Security Adviser Richard Allen, CIA Director William Casey, Ambassador to the United Nations Vernon Walters, Secretary of State Alexander Haig (whose brother was a Jesuit priest), to name a few.

Most vital was William Clark, who replaced Allen. Clark supervised and implemented the formal National Security Decision Directives crucial to confronting the Soviet empire. A student of Aquinas, Fulton Sheen and Thomas Merton, who as a young man attended an Augustinian novitiate in upstate New York, Clark was dubbed Reagan's "most impressive" and "most important and influential" adviser by official biographer Edmund Morris. Morris rightly discerned that no other person was as close to the president spiritually. Clark and Reagan prayed together, particularly the Prayer of St. Francis.

Also notable, given Reagan's moniker "the Great Communicator," was the contribution of Catholic speechwriters, such as Peter Robinson, who wrote the Brandenburg Gate speech, Peggy Noonan, author of the Challenger remarks, and chief speechwriter Tony Dolan, who penned Reagan's most memorable foreign policy addresses.

Then there were Reagan's poignant relationships with high-profile Catholics such as Terence Cardinal Cooke, Mother Teresa and, of course, Pope John Paul II. To all three, Reagan confided that he believed God had spared his life during the March 1981 assassination attempt for the purpose of taking down Soviet communism. He and John Paul II were jointly committed to that historic endeavor.

Consider, too, Reagan's respect for the Jewish faith. This was evident in his first presidential statement on Easter. Reagan devoted equal time to Easter and to Passover, exactly four sentences on each. Here likewise, it was the battle against communism where Reagan's concerns were especially salient. He noted that Jews suffered persecution under communism, citing cases as remote as Nicaragua and as blatant as the USSR. He carried in his jacket a list of Soviet Jews held in prison or denied the right to emigrate. Every time he met with a Soviet representative, or when an adviser planned to do so, the list was presented. Reagan lobbied Gorbachev so hard on Jewish emigration that it clearly annoyed the general secretary.

A dramatic example was Natan Sharansky. In 1977, Sharansky was abducted by the KGB outside his apartment and charged with treason. He spent nine years in Lefortovo Prison, where he symbolized Reagan's description of the "religious dissident trapped in that cold, cruel existence." Sharansky later said: "They wanted to use me to destroy Jews who hoped to leave for Israel."

'Reaganite' Bible readings

In prison, Sharansky befriended Volodia Poresh, a Christian. The two secretly started each day reading the Old and New Testaments. They called these Bible sessions "Reaganite readings." Why? Because Reagan had declared that year the "Year of the Bible," a designation dismissed by the Kremlin, and by some Western elites, but which inspired Sharansky and Poresh. They gained strength from that Bible, coping with the "evil" (Sharansky's word) they faced. When Sharansky was freed, he met Reagan in the White House. The president awarded him the Medal of Freedom.

There is much more that could be said. But isn't it fascinating to see only now, in retrospect, what we couldn't at the time? In the 1980s, President Reagan's faith ranged from non-issue to a negative, given his irregular church attendance (after and because of the assassination attempt) and his wife's consulting astrologers. In fact, it was a deep faith and commendably ecumenical one — fundamental to a presidency that, in Ronald Reagan's mind, was undergirded by something far more profound than mere politics.


Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, Pa. His books include God and Ronald Reagan and The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.