“Rejuvenating” or “Out of Balance”?

Five religious leaders critique Reagan’s performance.

Carl F. H. Henry: “The President has reflected the conviction that moral absolutes are indispensable to the survival and well-being of the nation, notably on the issue of abortion. On balance, Reagan has helped the cause of Christianity, but the major battle remains ahead in the struggle against moral relativism. The notion that a democracy requires uncritical tolerance of all ethical deviations will, unless challenged, catapult America into chaos and undermine tolerance itself as a virtue.”

Martin E. Marty: “The Reagan policy that pays least notice to biblical and other Christian mandates to be stewards of the earth is most disturbing to me. For all his public relations and window-dressing, his Interior Department policies are very much directed to the short-range, not long-range, self-interest of the society and can lead to irreversible misuse of landscape, environment, and resource. Certainly the Bible mandates care of the earth, care of the body, care of the neighbor, care for justice and peace. No one doubts that President Reagan believes in these mandates, but millions have the freedom to believe that he does not carry them out properly.”

Richard John Neuhaus: “The Bible has an inordinate amount to say about the widow, the orphan, the stranger at the gate. It is outrageously preoccupied with the marginal. The Administration has seriously failed to communicate a different set of policies that can be equally as concerned for the poor and more effective than liberal New Deal proposals. To the extent that this Administration has lifted up the religiousness of the American people and particularly the increasing role of evangelicals, this Administration has helped. Reagan has unabashedly affirmed traditions of civic virtue that much of the elite in America had disdained.”

Os Guinness: “It is significant that both the Reagan administration and evangelicalism share a similar dilemma: they will last or fade according to their capacity to demonstrate some philosophic integrity and effectiveness. Both must break the long-held equation that to be intellectual is to be liberal (politically in one case; theologically in the other). Unless they succeed at this point, each will be a short-lived movement unable to go beyond the historical circumstances that brought them center stage.”

Eddie B. Lane (pastor of Bibleway Bible Church and assistant dean of students at Dallas Theological Seminary): “To some degree, Mr. Reagan has made Christianity a middle-class American tradition and in this context is reflecting to the world a Christ whose compassion and blessings are reserved for the middle class. The Christian gesture of proclaiming 1983 the Year of the Bible rings hollow in that, on the other hand, the President promotes injustice, inequality, and racism by supporting Bob (ones University’s tax-exempt status; seeks to have Affirmative Action repealed, fires most of the aggressive Civil Rights Commission members, and cuts social programs.”