Whenever Mr. Reagan delivers a speech, he always mentions his religious feelings.
Soviet news analyst Anatoly Krasikov, November 22, 1986
My own prayer is that I can... perform the duties of this position so as to serve God.
Ronald Reagan, letter to Bernard Cardinal Law, Archbishop of Boston, March 11, 1987
M y rendezvous with the religious Ronald Reagan started with a close reading of his Evil Empire speech when I was an undergraduate. Those two words he used to describe the Soviet Union may have been critiqued by the media as strident political rhetoric, but within them I perceived something else, something more surprising: a striking and cohesive religious declaration.
A decade and a half later I had a deeper encounter with the same speech, this time as a professor sitting silently at a table in the Reagan Library. As I huddled in a remote research room perched high upon a hillside overlooking a balmy, picturesque landscape in Simi Valley, California, an archivist brought over a cart of materials from the Presidential Handwriting File, a large collection of Reagan Administration documents marked by Reagans personal handwriting. In Box 9, Folder 150, I met the real Evil Empire speechand the real Reagan.
That inked-up speech copy was an awakening. Reagans hand was all over itdeleting a word here, inserting whole new pages there. I read slowly and carefully. Here was the elusive, behind-the-scenes Reagan few had seen or known. And in that seventeen-page anti-communist manifesto, I had stumbled upon yet more evidence of Reagans intense religious thinking, which had already unexpectedly snowballed into an avalanche as I perused his public presidential papers.
Prior to that moment in the library, Id been engaged in writing a relatively straightforward book on Reagans personal role in his administrations effort to undermine the Soviet empire. Not long into that book, I realized that Id be including a unique chapter on his spiritual views and motivations. That chapter grew into three chapters. In the months to come, as I accumulated further evidence from other sources concerning Reagans religious beliefs, the story of the former presidents faith overtook the rest of the book.
It was odd: Reagan was said to be private about his faith, not sharing it with those around him. To a significant extent, that was true. Yet there it wasan endless trail of religious remarks that coursed unmistakably through his papers and letters. Almost everywhere I seemed to look, there he was: the religious Reagan, motivated in every aspect of his life and career by his spiritual convictions.
That moment was a turning point in the life of this book. My research on Reagans religious beliefs would give rise to a new work altogether.
THIS IS A SPIRITUAL BIOGRAPHY of Ronald Reagan. It begins where his religious life began, in his earliest childhood. At least at the outset, Reagans was a typical religious life for a man of his time and place; it began as he confronted the typical questions that believers in most historical ages have dealt with. Once Ronald Reagan left his hometown, however, his life became anything but typical. His religious sensibility was soon accompanied by a political sensibility, each complementing and informing the other. And by the time he was a young man, Reagan was aware of an international movement that ran in direct, violent opposition to everything he stood for: the atheistic strain of communism that precipitated the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Reagans life and political career coincided almost exactly with the rise and fall of communism in Russia. He was born on February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois; when the Bolsheviks launched their bloody coup in St. Petersburg in October 1917, he was an innocent six-year-old. Only days after that revolutionary fire broke out in Russiawith Vladimir Lenin emerging from the flamesthe Universalist church in Dixon, Illinois, burned to the ground. Five years later the First Christian Church emerged from the ashes on that same spot; that sanctuary, at 123 S. Hennepin Avenue, would shape young Ronald Reagan as surely as the coals of the Russian Revolution forged Lenin.
As Lenin was nearing death in the first month of 1924, Reagan was approaching his teen years. When Joseph Stalin at last seized absolute power, Reagan was heading to the friendly confines of Eureka College. As Stalin murdered tens of millions, Reagan was looking for a job. As the Soviet communists pursued the expansion of Marxism-Leninism and their brutal campaign against religion, the mature Reagan watched with pity, disgust, and a commitment not to be silent. By the time he became president in January 1981, he was not only ready to take action against Lenins empire, he was committed to doing so by every means necessary.
Only in that moment, perhaps, does it become clear how deep, and how atypical, the mans faith actually was. When faced with what he saw as a dark force of historySoviet communismReagan met it with not only his political but his spiritual beliefs. The Cold War is recognized by historians as the great ideological struggle of the twentieth century, but to manyincluding those jailed in the USSR for religious reasonsit also represented the great struggle for faith in the twentieth century. Reagan shared that view.
Thus, this spiritual biography, like Reagans own pilgrimage, will culminate in President Reagans personal crusadea word both he and Soviet commentators used to describe his actionsto undermine Soviet communism.
That is the journey explored by this book. Well trace Reagans journey from the baptismal tank of the First Christian Church on S. Hennepin in Dixon in 1922 to the podium at a tense, packed Moscow State University in 1988. And well examine Reagans vision of America as both a divinely ordained beacon of freedoma shining city upon a hilland a nation chosen, in his view, to place a stake in the future of communism.
While Reagans religious belief system was distinctively Christian, the goal of this exploration is not to prove his faith, to debate My concern is with Reagans spiritual beliefs: how they mattered, and how they strongly affected his thinking and actions. Most important, my intention is to underscore that its impossible to understand Ronald Reagan fullyand especially his Cold War actionswithout grasping the influence of religion on his thought.
Alzheimers disease felled Reagan only a few short years after the USSR fell onto that ash heap of history he foresaw. Mercifully, his mind lasted long enough to recognize what had happened. Soviet communism had met an end he had pursued for more than forty years.
This, then, is not simply a story of an influential man in a powerful position who came to believe that God had chosen him for a special purpose. Reagans religious faith was a critical factor in one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It had an immense impact on his thinking and action toward Soviet communism and the Cold War. As the Soviets themselves recognized in a formal statement from TASS, the official Soviet news agency, President Reagan uses religion with particular zeal to back his anti-Soviet policy.
Obviously, it would be too strong to claim that Ronald Reagans faith alone brought about the downfall of communism. But it was intricately tied to that event. For as with most individuals highly influenced by their religious beliefs, Reagans faith had a profound affect on how he lived, on what he did, and on those around him. It just so happened that what Reagan did involved one of the supreme contests of the twentieth century.
