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That was no deterrent to a man convinced of the dangers of Soviet rule. Throughout his career, Reagan heeded well the Rev. Cleveland Kleihauer's advice. His passion to bring religious and political freedom to Communist countries, as well as his avowed determination to shrink the size and reach of the U.S. government, drove his political campaigns.

Even among his critics, there is the sense that Reagan's unwillingness to compromise his quest for religious freedom, and his constancy in voicing his convictions, contributed in part to the eventual demise of the Soviet Union and to the dawning of religious freedom in many parts of the old Communist world.

Reagan did not get consistently high marks from the right. Some Christians were deeply troubled by his decision not to attend church on a regular basis.

"This religious truancy was difficult for even many of Reagan's most diehard Christian conservative supporters to countenance," Kengor writes.

The author makes a solid case that Reagan, who attended church regularly when not residing in the White House, was concerned foremost with the security burden he might impose on a congregation he chose to visit.

Kengor's chapter on astrology raises some questions that he might have addressed head-on, including the hint that the President was overly credulous at times. After the 1981 assassination attempt on him, assertions that his wife, Nancy, and possibly the President himself consulted an astrologer when scheduling meetings or making decisions rocked Christian circles.

In defending the President (and laying most of the blame at Nancy's door), Kengor makes a revealing comment: "Reagan was a man of supreme confidence in his beliefs, who often flummoxed people with his candor: he was known to speak freely of flying saucers, aliens, ghosts, and spiritual visitations."

The President, as other writers have noted, was indeed known to occasionally mix up fact and fiction. If he allowed a tinge of non-Christian mysticism to creep into his worldview, that made him more like many other Americans, comfortable with scanning some New Age bestseller with one eye and the Left Behind series with the other.

Although Kengor succumbs often to the irresistible temptation to throw red meat to political conservatives by demonizing "cynical elites" and liberals, on the whole this is a fair and exhaustively researched tome.

Kengor rarely goes below the surface to ask about the psychological makeup of the man who served two terms as President. Did one encounter with a minister in a Hollywood church really motivate Reagan's lifelong hatred of Communist ideology? Why did a man who saw the world in stark terms of a battle between good and evil have an administration riddled with staffers accused of ethics violations?

One must conclude that in many ways Ronald Wilson Reagan continues to remain an enigma, even to a sympathetic biographer. The main achievement of Kengor's labor is to remind the Christian public that the former President was a humble but determined man of prayer, assured in his faith that God would never abandon him.

Kengor sums it up well near the end of his book. In the years that Alzheimer's stole from him, as he bravely faced the cruel disease with his devoted wife by his side, Reagan and his well-wishers could be assured of one thing: The man whose faith sustained him did not walk into the darkness alone.

The Rev. Elizabeth Eisenstadt-Evans, a priest associate at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Wayne, Pennsylvania, reviews books for various national publications.

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August 2004, Vol. 48, No. 8