How has his presidency altered the political landscape?
At an age when most people contemplate retirement, Ronald Reagan was entering presidential primaries. It was 1976—the “year of the evangelical”—and he was 65. Jimmy Carter, a born-again Baptist, won the presidency that year by appealing to values that ran much deeper than political issues. Carter promised a government as good as the American people; he said he would restore confidence, competency, and honesty to government.
Four years later, Reagan tapped into a similar set of American voting instincts with a bolder appeal to specific religiosity. “I endorse you,” he told politically conservative Christians in Dallas, viewing them as a tailor-made constituency. He assured evangelical leaders that he would appoint Christians to office. Reagan offered conservative populism wedded, in the words of columnist William Safire, to traditional “momulism”—the profamily values that Christians have seen deteriorate. Now, with his first term nearly finished, it is time to ask what impact Reagan has had on the issues so important to evangelical Christians.
On specifics, Reagan is likely to come up short, since many campaign promises that put him in office remain unfulfilled, including school prayer and antiabortion legislation, while concern over his handling of welfare issues and national defense has deepened. But in ways that cannot be precisely measured, Reagan’s presence in the White House may produce some long-term benefits for the nation. His rhetoric, with its God-centered world view, helps counteract the rampant secularism that would shove religion to the margins of life. In Washington, D.C., Christians in government are making decisions based on their faith. That development alone promises to reestablish moral perspectives in Washington’s policy-shaping networks.
Reagan characterizes America as having been “set apart in a special way” to be discovered by people “who came not for gold but mainly in search of God.” He told a group of evangelicals: “I want you to know this administration is motivated by a political philosophy that sees the greatness of America in you, her people, and in your families, churches, neighborhoods, communities—the institutions that foster and nourish values like concern for others and respect for the rule of law under God.”
These are typical of the standard lines in every president’s script. Yet Reagan has heightened the visibility of Christianity in America by taking virtually every opportunity to convey a God-centered philosophy of life.
Lutheran theologian Richard John Neuhaus believes this has helped counteract a “values crisis” in society by restoring essential points of reference to public debate. These reference points, Neuhaus said, are primarily religious, yet in the public arena, people pretend they do not exist. Reagan does not so pretend. Neither have some other presidents. Neuhaus says, “The person who did it best was Lincoln. He didn’t attempt to generate new values or a civil religion, but clothed the public square with religious values most people believe in.”
Previous presidential expressions of religious sentiment include John F. Kennedy’s appearance at a Southern Baptist convention to signify he was not blindly bound to papal authority. Richard Nixon attended a Billy Graham rally and held Sunday services at the White House, and Jimmy Carter regularly taught an adult Sunday school class at a Washington Baptist church. Reagan also has been willing to express his personal faith in ways that are natural to him.
In his speech last March to the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) convention in Orlando, Florida, Reagan said, “While America’s military strength is important … I have always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root it is a test of moral will and faith.” He criticized America’s own “legacy of evil,” including racism and anti-Semitism. Condemning Soviet policies, he urged, “Let us pray for the salvation of all those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray that they will discover the joy of knowing God.”
What effect this has on people who do not identify with a Judeo-Christian outlook is questionable. Church historian Martin E. Marty believes the Orlando speech was Reagan’s low point—“an event which lost points for the evangelicals who cheered him so lustily but won him none.” When Reagan tries to make votes out of his religious convictions, Marty contends, “he is dismissed or scorned” by those outside the religious constituency. He also runs the risk of fusing in the minds of many the concepts of “Christian” and “conservative.”
Among Christians, there is some alarm over the dangers of embracing civil religion. Reagan’s reverence for an America that is “set apart,” for instance, expresses a general religious nationalism that is not explicitly Christian, according to historian George Marsden. He says this common-denominator appeal tends to favor any religion—a position the New Testament opposes in favor of an incarnate God. Civil religion has some social usefulness for unifying a pluralistic society, but it is no substitute for the real item, Marsden cautions. Theologian Ronald J. Sider points out that Reagan never mentions the displaced Indians when he identifies America as God’s gift to Western civilization.
Reagan’s personal religious convictions were shaped primarily by his mother’s influence. She is described by Reagan biographer Lou Cannon as a deeply religious woman, loyal to the Disciples of Christ denomination although her husband was Catholic. The President remains a member of a California Disciples of Christ church, but he has not attended any services regularly as President. When he does go to a church, it is usually Presbyterian, including Bel Air Presbyterian near Hollywood, and National Presbyterian in Washington, which he has visited about six times since his election. When he was released from the hospital after being shot in 1981, Reagan invited National Presbyterian’s pastor, Louis Evans, to the White House for a Communion service on Easter Sunday. Evans recalls that Reagan “sensed he was spared by the Lord for some purpose,” and said he knew God wanted him to forgive would-be assassin John Hinckley, Jr. Reagan “is a sound believer in Jesus Christ,” Evans said, and “is very conscious of wanting to know what God wants him to do.”
Reagan’s current absence from church is due to scrupulous Secret Service protection as well as personal preference. Once, when he planned to attend National Presbyterian, the visit was scrubbed on Friday because of a specific threat to Reagan’s life. Reagan called Evans on Saturday to apologize, expressing his concern for the safety of the whole congregation. He has recently lobbied his staff and guards to allow more frequent church attendance, and those visits are now made without any advance public announcement.
In one of his most visible expressions of identification with the religious community, Reagan proclaimed 1983 the “Year of the Bible.” The ACLU and a “freedom-from-religion” group filed suit challenging Reagan’s constitutional right to do this.
Sen. William L. Armstrong (R-Colo.) sponsored the legislation that created the Year of the Bible, and he sees it as an indication of more openness in Washington toward belief in God. “In the ’60s and ’70s, you just didn’t hear a lot of talk at the highest levels of government about Christian things. Instead, everyone was trying to prove how tough he was.” The change became palpable in 1976, Armstrong believes, because “something happened in our bicentennial year—a refocusing of national thought life on our spiritual roots.” Besides that, the election of a Southern Baptist as president that year, a man who spoke unapologetically about his faith, made it much easier for many in Washington to be forthright about their own Christian convictions.
Several issues in the ’70s served to galvanize fundamentalist Christians. The Equal Rights Amendment, the Supreme Court’s decision to overthrow all state antiabortion laws, and various efforts to position homosexuals as simply another oppressed minority, deeply offended their religious beliefs. Evangelical Christians, as opposed to fundamentalists, are much more diverse in theology, and that has prevented them from coalescing on these issues.
But the Religious Right’s call to action has helped to sensitize evangelicals to public issues, and it has done so across a broad range of concerns. In addition, leaders such as Francis Schaeffer and James Dobson are educating their constituents about national issues. Reagan is a product of this morally outspoken environment, rather than its cause.
Cabinet and subcabinet appointments in the Reagan administration reflect these realities and may constitute the most significant legacy of his administration. What is important is not the number of committed Christians in government, but their success at introducing morally motivated thinking into government policy making. This is especially true in areas where a God-centered world view makes a big difference—such as education, health care, and constitutional law.
Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, renowned pediatric surgeon and outspoken prolife evangelical, has had difficulty swimming against the bureaucratic tide. His efforts to advocate government protection for handicapped infants met solid resistance in the medical community and in court. Yet at lower echelons in the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), other appointees are quietly pursuing accomplishments without attracting many headlines. It is these midlevel appointees and the career civil servants who operate the controls of government.
Progress in the area of federal grants doled out by DHHS is especially noteworthy. Grants consist of tax dollars distributed to organizations and individuals to carry out research or to run programs. The Adolescent Family Life Program, headed by Marjory Mecklenburg, is replacing old family planning programs with a fresh emphasis on teenage abstinence from sex, and adoption rather than abortion. It will distribute $13.5 million in grants to groups such as Catholic Charities in Arlington, Virginia, which is conducting workshops to train parents to provide sex education at home.
Jerry Regier, also at DHHS, is a former Campus Crusade for Christ staff member who has been instrumental in bringing Christian points of view into play. He has encouraged evangelical family experts to help review grant applications in the areas of runaway youth, adoption and foster care, child abuse prevention, and employment strategies.
Working on these same issues is the newly formed Family Research Council, a group of professionals including James Dobson, who make themselves available for congressional hearings and other government forums. They hope to see “religious moral values be as much a part of decision-making considerations as secular humanistic values currently are,” according to council spokesman L. Michael Lynch.
One of Reagan’s key reelection issues will be education. Charged with evaluating policy and developing new legislative packages is Doug Holladay, a midlevel appointee who is well known in Washington for his work with the “fellowship,” which arranges small-group meetings among Christians in government.
Another Education Department employee, Robert Billings, heads ten regional federal offices. A former executive director of the Moral Majority, Billings is one of the few Religious Right appointees serving in government. He caused a stir at the department by writing an editorial, which was swiftly squelched, urging college students to speak up publicly for God. Many Christians in the executive branch maintain an extremely low profile and draw fire from fundamentalists for not being “fighters.” But the more outspoken Christian employees rarely see much progress because they are effectively blocked by career bureaucrats who know more about how the system works.
Court appointments are of growing interest to Christians because so many critical issues of the day are being decided there rather than in the Congress. Abortion, tax credits and tax exemptions for church-related institutions, and the constitutionality of military chaplains have all come before the Supreme Court this year. Reagan’s only appointment to the Court thus far is Sandra Day O’Connor, who is proving to be an advocate of judicial restraint.
She led a strong dissent against the Court’s recent proabortion ruling. If Reagan serves a second term, it is likely he will have the chance to appoint several more justices since five of them are in their mid-seventies and are expected to retire. Of the nation’s 677 other federal judges, Reagan has appointed 101, and this figure also would escalate during a second term. The President’s authority to appoint judges in accord with his own philosophy is critical.
His administration has filed numerous friend-of-the-court briefs, many of which are researched by Carl Horn, a lawyer in the Justice Department’s civil rights division. He helped prepare a brief arguing that it is constitutional to display a nativity scene on municipal property at Christmas, pointing out that the First Amendment was never intended “to secularize our public life so rigidly that we cannot continue to mark our public holidays in a manner that includes traditional acknowledgment of their religious character.”
Before he joined the government early this year, Horn directed the prelaw program at Wheaton College and served as general counsel for the Christian Legal Society. Another former CLS lawyer, Stephen Galebach, works on domestic legal policy questions at the White House, including abortion, school prayer, and pornography.
Dee Jepsen, also at the White House, has promoted private sector voluntaryism and was the President’s liaison with women’s groups. Her avid prolife position drew sharp criticism from the leaders of many women’s groups, and although she made some overtures to them, communication remained frozen. Now, the task of shrinking the “gender gap” is back in the hands of White House aides closer to the President.
Among Reagan’s top aides, counselor Edwin Meese (a Missouri Synod Lutheran), along with numerous other Christians in government, attends informal, off-the-record fellowship meetings. There are as many as 20 of these small groups meeting throughout the city, usually on a weekly basis, for Bible study, prayer support, and discussion.
Conservative Christians outside government have found the Reagan White House very accessible, and meetings between the President and religious leaders are commonplace. Morton Blackwell, presidential liaison with religious groups, listed Bill Bright, Jimmy Draper, Adrian Rogers, Jerry Falwell, Cardinal John Krol, and Pat Robertson as having met frequently with Reagan. He said no one has greater influence with the President than the others. The National Association of Evangelicals carries a high profile at the White House, and Blackwell credited Washington Office director Robert P. Dugan with being “immensely helpful in explaining how the evangelical community feels on a variety of issues.”
Diversity among evangelicals tends to create confusion in Washington about who really represents the movement. An authority on Christians in public life said he believes this very diversity prevents evangelicals from making significant public policy strides: “Each prominent evangelical leader gets what he wants in the way of a special tie-in for his program, and they present no singly unified political front as do Catholics and Jews.” Better organized, perhaps, but little noticed by the White House are mainline religious leaders represented by the National Council of Churches. “We have gotten a stone wall from this Administration,” a spokesman said.
In his interactions with Congress—where political initiatives are hammered into laws—Reagan has a mixed record. Few big successes stand out among the campaign issues he highlighted in his 1980 appeal to religious conservatives. Legislation to end abortion bogged down in the face of a liberal-led filibuster last year, and Reagan was reluctant to endorse any particular initiative because prolife groups failed to patch up their intramural differences.
On prayer in schools, the President revealed a stubborn streak that has pitted his proposed constitutional amendment against more supportable efforts in the Senate. Reagan stuck to his guns, tolerating no alterations to his proposal, even when Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Strom Thurmond said it would never pass, and Christian groups supported it half-heartedly, if at all, because of some serious reservations. At the same time, Reagan is perceived to have expended very little political capital on the prayer issue. Dean M. Kelley of the National Council of Churches testified against the amendment in Congress. He said, “I was impressed by the lack of enthusiasm even among sponsoring senators. It was a big ho-hum.” There was no evidence of congressional jawboning by the President that often accompanies priority legislation. A new Reagan version of the amendment, stating that no state officials may compose school prayers, mollified some critics.
In less well-publicized areas, small victories of special concern to Christians have been won. These include charitable-contributions legislation giving taxpayers the right to deduct all their charitable contributions whether or not they itemize other deductions. Also, an adjustment in the overseas earned income act will exempt missionaries from paying federal income tax if they already pay taxes in the country where they serve.
Two issues loom especially large in the reelection campaign—nuclear policy and welfare. Reagan wants evangelicals to oppose a nuclear freeze, yet they are being pulled in the opposite direction by some well-respected Christian leaders. A Gallup Poll indicated mixed evangelical support for Reagan’s current nuclear policies, and further sifting of the issue is likely.
On poverty issues. Democratic contenders for the White House already are focusing on “fairness”—a political buzz word for policies that are said to hurt the poor and help the rich. Evangelicals differ on the specifics of Reagan’s program, which includes cuts in food stamps and welfare, coupled with a call for voluntaryism by the private sector. Reagan has spotlighted the role churches can play in helping out. This elicits energetic efforts from some, but stunned disbelief from others.
Black evangelicals ministering to the poor are often least able to shoulder an added burden, as Reagan wishes, yet their communities are hardest hit. C. J. Jones, director of development for Mendenhall Ministries in Mississippi, sees growing discouragement among the 400 to 500 people the ministry regularly reaches through job training and counseling programs as well as a health center, school, and law office. “Their idea is … that there is nothing they can do for themselves that will work,” Jones said. He explains, “Racism is a fact of life in this country. It is so institutionalized it takes new laws to change the old system and make the changes felt. The church can’t do that.”
Richard C. Halverson, U.S. Senate chaplain and an experienced Presbyterian pastor in Washington, D.C., defends Reagan’s “supply-side” economics as having a basis in justice. “The tendency has been to see justice only in terms of distribution—our responsibility to share,” Halverson said. “That’s true, but justice also has to do with using our talents to create wealth. Reagan’s policies encourage that aspect.”
Like his religious faith, Reagan’s tenacious belief in neighbor helping neighbor is a product of his boyhood experiences during the Depression and the silent lessons modeled by his mother who delivered packages of food to destitute families. Reagan sincerely believes America is a country where anyone can get rich and gain influence, because he has seen it happen—to himself.
His vision of an ideal America no doubt resembles very closely the image cherished by most of the rest of the nation. In articulating that vision, the President draws on a complex set of experiences and convictions that are not easily dismissed as throwbacks to the past or the by-products of an irrelevant belief in the supernatural. Neither, however, are they based purely on an evangelical faith. Reagan is preeminently a political leader and a patriot. He is less prophet or priest than either his most ardent critics or admirers claim.
He appeals to the American in evangelicals, more so than to any exclusive allegiance befitting citizens of the kingdom of God. Reagan provides direction, momentum, and goals that mesh with evangelical beliefs, but that is neither a calculated political move by Reagan nor evidence that evangelicals are becoming particularly successful at political power brokering.
They are, however, making inroads into networks of public debate and decision making. Evangelical professionals in the Reagan administration do not always advertise their faith, but they find they have the freedom to speak up about it when appropriate, and to involve more Christians outside the government in formulating policy. So far, many of their efforts have ended in defeat, but they are largely undeterred. They view their stint in government as a valuable source of experience and bridge building for the future.
They have grasped an important truth: for better or worse, any effect Reagan has on Christianity in America will be shaped more by Christians who get involved in politics than by anything the President does directly. The legislative scorecard keepers are likely to remain disgruntled, but—win or lose on specifics—people with a Judeo-Christian outlook are involved for the long haul, and the environment in Washington is fertile soil in which to cultivate their growth.
