God and Ronald Reagan

A Spiritual Life

Paul Kengor

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780060571429
• eBook ISBN:
  9780061744310
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ronald Reagan is hailed today for a presidency that restored optimism to America, engendered years of economic prosperity, and helped bring about the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet until now little attention has been paid to the role Reagan's personal spirituality played in his political career, shaping his ideas, bolstering his resolve, and ultimately compelling him to confront the brutal -- and, not coincidentally, atheistic -- Soviet empire.

In this groundbreaking book, political historian Paul Kengor draws upon Reagan's legacy of speeches and correspondence, and the memories of those who knew him well, to reveal a man whose Christian faith remained deep and consistent throughout his more than six decades in public life. Raised in the Disciples of Christ Church by a devout mother with a passionate missionary streak, Reagan embraced the church after reading a Christian novel at the age of eleven. A devoted Sunday-school teacher, he absorbed the church's model of "practical Christianity" and strived to achieve it in every stage of his life.

But it was in his lifelong battle against communism -- first in Hollywood, then on the political stage -- that Reagan's Christian beliefs had their most profound effect. Appalled by the religious repression and state-mandated atheism of Bolshevik Marxism, Reagan felt called by a sense of personal mission to confront the USSR. Inspired by influences as diverse as C.S. Lewis, Whittaker Chambers, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he waged an openly spiritual campaign against communism, insisting that religious freedom was the bedrock of personal liberty. "The source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual," he said in his Evil Empire address. "And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man."

From a church classroom in 1920s Dixon, Illinois, to his triumphant mission to Moscow in 1988, Ronald Reagan was both political leader and spiritual crusader. God and Ronald Reagan deepens immeasurably our understanding of how these twin missions shaped his presidency -- and changed the world.

1.

Jack and Nelle

“You can be too big for God to use, but you cannot be too small.”

—an annotation in Nelle Reagan’s Bible¹

January 20, 1924, was a blustery cold, wind-swept Sunday across the plains of Illinois. According to the Dixon Evening Telegraph, tiny Alton, Illinois, had been hit the night before with “the heaviest and most spectacular” snowstorm of the winter. Rail, streetcar, and automobile traffic was plunging valiantly through the storm, but by ten o’clock all were losing the fight. The weather was so cold near Chicago, where the temperature dipped to eighteen degrees below zero, that many of the entries in the International Tournament of the Norge Ski Club failed to jump. And if that weren’t enough, the Associated Press was reporting that “a new cold wave” was on its way from Alaska, threatening to exceed already-record lows.

Suffering through the freeze, in the northwest corner of the state, was idyllic little Dixon, home to Jack and Nelle Reagan and their two sons. Dixon sits some one hundred miles west of Chicago, and less than an hour’s drive to the Mississippi River and the Iowa border. The town is geographically unusual by Illinois standards: the terrain of Illinois is largely flat, but Dixon is nestled among woods and rolling hills. Most of the state was dusted by a fine snow blowing across naked fields, the kind of cutting snow that hurts when it assaults uncovered faces. Dixon, however, enjoyed some protection on that frigid day.

Long before Ronald Reagan, the town already had its run-ins with presidential history. On May 12, 1832, Captain Abraham Lincoln and his company of mounted volunteers arrived at Fort Dixon on the Rock River to serve in the Blackhawk War. Lt. Col. Zachary Taylor was in command, and Lt. Jefferson Davis swore in recruits. At that moment, three future presidents saluted together in obscure Dixon: Taylor became U.S. president in 1848, Lincoln in 1860, and Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederacy shortly thereafter. (A colorful painting of the encounter by local artist Fran Swarbrick resides today in the building where Ronald Reagan attended school.)

A continent away on that January day in 1924, fifty-three-year-old Vladimir Ilyich Lenin lay near death in an even colder—in many ways—Bolshevik Russia. He had few hours remaining. As Lenin clung to life, twelve-year-old Dutch Reagan clung to his hymnal in the comfort of a pew near the front of the First Christian Church in Dixon, beside his beaming mother, Nelle. Filled with the spirit, Nelle had just finished her closing prayer with her True Blue Sunday school class.

Though no one in that contented congregation could know it, this was the start of a spiritual pilgrimage that would lead that boy in the front pew to a spot in front of a bust of a grim Lenin at Moscow State University sixty-four years later, inspired with a religious drive very much like what he and his mother had felt that Sunday in 1924. As Reagan would recognize, Lenin too had been moved by a kind of religious zeal, though very different from his own. It was the clash of their belief systems that would make possible their rendezvous on May 31, 1988.

And it was Nelle Reagan who would inculcate her innocent boy with a set of beliefs that helped convince him of the need to defeat the Soviet Union. She and the faith she imparted were the central forces in his life. Without them it is difficult to imagine Ronald Reagan becoming president, let alone mounting a crusade against “godless Soviet communism.”

FROM ALL EVIDENCE, IT APPEARS that Ronald Reagan’s faith peaked in intensity at the bookends of his life—during his youth in Dixon, and again in his mature years as president and former president of the United States.

The origins of Reagan’s faith were forged in the 1910s, his first decade of life, and the ideas he formed there persisted in his belief system through the 1990s. They predated by far his key political beliefs, which weren’t set in stone until the late 1940s—and, by some measure, until his Republican conversion in the 1960s. The historical record demonstrates abundantly that Reagan was driven by those core political convictions. What has gone overlooked is how deeply, and for how much longer, his core religious convictions moved him.

How did he come by his spiritual beliefs? There were a number of key influences.

NELLE AND JACK

Ronald Reagan’s parents were John Edward and Nelle Clyde Wilson Reagan, called simply Jack and Nelle by their friends (and by their children, at their own request). Jack was a first-generation Irishman, Nelle from Irish-English-Scottish stock. Both hailed from the town of Fulton, in Whiteside County, Illinois, where they were born within eleven days of each other in July 1883. A couple of decades later they were married, on a crisp fall day in November 1904 at the Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception in Fulton.²

Though Nelle grew up as the youngest of seven, she and Jack had only two children: Ronald and his older brother Neil, who was given the nickname “Moon” by his parents. The young couple seemed carefree in their early years. Each was good-looking, with an attractive personality; they were a fun pair. But that began to change, slowly at first, with the arrival of the boys. Though theirs seemed largely a happy home, with normal problems, there was a split in the Reagan household over religion. It was not a major rift that created bickering, but a difference nonetheless: Jack was Catholic; Nelle a Protestant.

One overriding concern both parents shared was that their boys should believe in God and go to church. Nelle, however, was much more earnest in her faith than Jack, who was apparently more apathetic. (Certainly he was no Bible thumper.)³ By Dutch’s own account, his father left the boys’ religious rearing to Nelle.⁴

Nelle’s stronger commitment drew Dutch toward her faith. She made her life a model of Christian virtue, and her example begged emulation. At ease with herself and in helping others, Nelle Reagan proved herself a woman of genuine faith, warmly expressed.⁵

Jack’s influence did make its mark on Dutch’s faith—though in other, less flattering ways. Whereas Nelle apparently thought about God not just daily but constantly, her husband was consumed with something else: making a living. Money dominated his thoughts. The Reagans had little or no savings, and Jack’s obsession with money seemed less a matter of greed than of survival. He scraped and scrapped so that he and his family could get by. And before long, drinking—a lot of drinking—was helping him cope with his ever-present financial struggles.

“They were awful poor,” said the Reagans’ neighbor Cenie Straw. Another neighbor, Helen Lawton, recalled that her family frequently sent plates of food to the Reagan house. Lawton’s father even built a hinge onto the Reagan kitchen window, so food could be easily set inside. “It wasn’t that we had so much,” said Lawton, “but we had a garden. And they only had an electric plate to cook on.”⁶

Jack was a shoe salesman with a habit of chasing rainbows. He uprooted the family at every turn. Throughout young Dutch Reagan’s childhood, his family never owned a home; they were always on the hunt for an affordable rental.

From February to May 1911, the family lived in a second-floor apartment above the bank in Tampico, where Dutch was born. Baby Ronald lived in his first home only four months before the family moved to 104 W. Glassman Street, a house opposite the rail depot outside of town; they stayed there until December 1914. The family’s next Christmas was spent in the big city, near the University of Chicago, where the Reagans rented two apartments. Jack sized up patrons in the shoe section of Marshall Field’s department store. It was not an easy stay for young Dutch, who almost died from a bout with bronchial pneumonia.⁷

The Reagans left Chicago for Jack’s job selling shoes at O.T. Johnson in Galesburg, Illinois, where they lived in a pair of houses a block apart on N. Kellogg. It was as a five-year-old in Galesburg that Reagan had a kind of epiphany.⁸ Wrestling with the loneliness of a little boy who had just moved to a third new town in five years, young Dutch ventured alone to the attic of his latest home. There he found a large collection of bird’s eggs and butterflies enclosed in glass, left behind by the previous tenant. In the weeks to follow, the curious first-grader escaped into the attic for hours at a time, “marveling at the rich colors of the eggs and the intricate and fragile wings of the butterflies.” To him these collected wonderments were like “gateways.” “The experience,” Reagan remembered, “left me with a reverence for the handiwork of God that never left me.”⁹ The notion of a Creator was etched into the boy’s consciousness.

This event took place several years before he was baptized. He later thanked that previous tenant as “an anonymous benefactor to whom I owe much.”¹⁰ Jack’s never-ending moves may have brought his family desolation, yet in retrospect his son Ronald might have reflected (as he generally did) that even his family’s trials seemed to be part of God’s plan.¹¹

From Galesburg, the Reagans hit the road again. As American doughboys fought the Kaiser in Europe, the Reagan family occupied no less than three different residences in Monmouth between early 1917 and August 1919. The stay in Monmouth was hardly uneventful. The family moved there when Dutch was in second grade. Shortly after, the jubilant Illinois town celebrated the end of WWI; that was followed by the influenza epidemic of 1918–19. Dutch was alarmed by the sight of townspeople donning masks, of the wreaths with black ribbons that adorned local doorways. Affected areas were quarantined, and schools, libraries, dance halls, even churches closed, though ministers were busier than ever tending to the dying. The mounting toll was chronicled in a death column in the daily paper.¹²

The flu hit Nelle as well. Though it wiped her out, and she nearly perished, ultimately Reagan’s mother escaped the early death that came to millions of young mothers around the world. Nelle had been a healthy middle-aged Midwestern woman before the epidemic, but at her worst Dutch, Moon, and Jack thought she was a goner. The experience brought the idea of mortality close to home for all of them.

The Reagans were back in Tampico through December 1920, in an apartment on Main Street above Pitney’s Shoestore, where Jack was shop manager. Though his return to Tampico was brief, Reagan, ever the optimist, would have nothing but fond memories of his second stay, which he called his “Huck Finn years.”¹³ But happiness was halted again shortly thereafter, as the Reagans reloaded the Model T.

The family finally “settled” in Dixon shortly thereafter, though they would live in five different rented houses—portions of which they subleased to pay their own rent—before Dutch left for his first job at WOC radio in Davenport, Iowa, in 1932.¹⁴

Moving, of course, is never easy for children, and young Ronald lived in five different towns and twelve rented apartments before he reached his teen years. At any given spot, he could have easily forgotten his address. This took a toll on the boy, making him lonely and introverted. Dutch Reagan walked by himself to each new school, day after day. The perpetual new kid, he was regularly exposed to the mean-spirited, uncaring glares, taunts, and whispers of other kids. At the end of the school day, he strolled “home” alone to the latest residence, often with a handful of bullies dogging his step. As an adult, he frequently remembered the day they chased him all the way to his front door. A stern Nelle barred the entrance, forcing her son to fend for his dignity, which he did with flailing fists and some success.¹⁵

Dutch spent many of his days without playmates in these years, entertaining himself in the yard, on the porch, in the parlor, in the attic. Then, just as he was finally settling in and beginning to make friends—his natural good looks always helped—Jack packed the bags and the whole miserable process would repeat itself. As a young man, then, Ronald Reagan came to see a danger in making friends—the risk that any new friend would sooner or later disappear from his life forever. Decades later, he acknowledged that his nomadic life as a child had probably made him “a little slow in making friends. In some ways I think this reluctance to get close to people never left me entirely.”¹⁶

This created a void in the young Reagan—a hole that religion came to fill. In need of a rock of reliability, he looked to where his mother, his heart, and his desolation pointed him—upward. And in God he found what he perceived as a permanent friend. No matter how often Jack Reagan should relocate his family, his son saw that he could get close to God without any fear of abandonment. God the Father was always in his place, constant, always with the boy, and always in his perfect heaven. Dutch Reagan may have been a stranger to all those peering kids, but he was never foreign to God, who knew him wherever he went.

God also provided a reliable paternal figure for young Reagan, whose own father was less than a steadying force in the family. Reagan loved his father and knew he had the family’s best interests at heart, but Jack Reagan didn’t offer the unwavering stability his son needed. “He couldn’t really rely on his father,” his daughter Patti has said.¹⁷

Years later, in remarking on Reagan’s apparent aloofness, his good friend Paul Laxalt said that the president was a “loner” even in his relationship with God.¹⁸ Perhaps this is no surprise, considering that he first sought and connected to God as a lonely boy.

This is not to suggest that Ronald Reagan’s spirituality was purely emotional—a “crutch,” as skeptics often characterize religious faith. At a relatively young age Reagan’s became an intellectual Christianity, and it would remain so. But his religious beliefs were always marked by a degree of emotionality, and there’s no doubt that the emotional appeal of religion was a key factor in his boyhood.

Intriguingly, another failing of Jack’s may have contributed further to Dutch’s turn to God. It came to a head on a brisk February evening in Dixon in 1922, shortly after young Reagan’s eleventh birthday. He had just strolled up the 800 block of South Hennepin, returning from a basketball game at the YMCA. He knew that Nelle was out on a sewing job, trying to scare up a few dollars, and he was expecting to come home to an empty house. Instead, he was shaken by the sight of Jack sprawled out in the snow on the front porch, passed out, flat on his back, freezing, too inebriated to make it to the door. “He was drunk,” his son later remembered. “Dead to the world.” The boy leaned over and smelled the whiskey escaping through his dad’s long snores. His hair was soaked with melted snow, matted unevenly against the side of his reddened face.¹⁹

Jack’s arms were stretched out, recalled his son, “as if he were crucified—as indeed he was.” He had been taken by the “dark demon in the bottle.” Dutch stood over his father for a minute or two, not sure how to react. He wanted to simply let himself in the door, go to bed, and pretend his dad wasn’t there.

Dutch grabbed a fistful of the old man’s overcoat and heaved him toward the door. He dragged him into the house and to the bedroom, out of the way of the weather’s harm and the neighbors’ fixed attention. It was a sad moment for father and son. Dutch felt no anger, no resentment, just grief. This was the man who until that point had always carried him. Surely, to see his father so out of control must have frightened him. His world was in chaos—again, just when it seemed to have stopped spinning, when Dixon appeared to be the last stop on the Reagan family train.

The event occurred at a crucial time in young Reagan’s spiritual development. Four months later he would be baptized, starting life over as a child of God; the though...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Praise
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher