If the left and the right could agree on one thing about Ronald Reagan in the wake of his presidency, it was that he was a religious pretender—a lightweight and maybe even a fake when it came to being a true Christian. The secular left, on the one hand, saw in his allusions to God-given liberty of “the city on a hill” the convenient sanctimony of selfish aggrandizement, as John Patrick Diggins makes clear in his biography of Reagan. The religious right, on the other, considered Reagan’s casual churchgoing and refusal to demonize non-believers and secular humanists alike to reveal a suspect level of Christian conviction. The irony, of course, was that Reagan, in fact, was deeply spiritual—the first (and maybe the last) fundamentalist to serve as president. But if that’s true, why did believers and non-believers alike get him wrong?
Part of the reason why relates to the peculiarities of his “Christian Church,” which is also (and somewhat confusingly) called the “Disciples of Christ.” Like that of many Disciples, Reagan’s faith was more emotional and experiential than creedal. He lived it and saw no reason, except on occasion, to declare it. Much of his faith was simple, based on a soaring but irenic optimism about the power of God among us, something he drew from the faith of his mother.
Nelle (pronounced Nellie) Wilson Reagan was twenty-six on the occasion of her baptism by full immersion in the icy water of the Hennepin Canal in northern Illinois on Easter morning, 1910. She was short and slim with auburn hair and bright blue eyes. If not a beauty, she was at least blessed with a beaming smile and quicksilver warmth. Baptized “Mrs. J. E. Reagan,” as Church records indicate, she was inducted into the “priesthood of all believers.” A little less than a year later, Nelle gave birth to her second child, Ronald Wilson Reagan, a son born not so much into a religion as into an awakening.
Like a slow-drifting ice floe, Reagan’s later offhand summary of his faith in his 1990 autobiography revealed a kind of serene simplicity that belied a deep berg of cold certainty:
I was raised to believe that God has a plan for everyone and that seemingly random twists of fate are all a part of His plan. My mother—a small woman with auburn hair and a sense of optimism that ran as deep as the cosmos—told me that everything in life happened for a purpose. She said all things were part of God’s Plan, even the most disheartening setbacks, and in the end, everything worked out for the best. If something went wrong, she said, you didn’t let it get you down. You stepped away from it, stepped over it, and moved on… From my mother, I learned the value of prayer, how to have dreams and believe I could make them come true.
Reagan would often make light about his passionate admiration of other people with a throwaway line, “I’m a sucker for hero worship,” but in fact it inhered in his faith. Everybody was good—“a child of God.” He would often admonish his aides in the heat of political battle, “Let’s just remember that we don’t have enemies, just opponents.” He was a Disciple through and through.
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Central to his Discipleship was the practice of free, personal choice. A good Christian life was a sort of voyage of open belief and personal discovery of God’s love as opposed to any institutionalized imposition of scriptural truth in which the promise of eternal salvation could be clerically trafficked. But once he entered politics, it’s worth asking: how could Reagan, raised to believe in free choice and inclusive tolerance, lead a Republican party for which those values were anathema? The answer has a lot to do with the votive features of his faith.
Unity. Liberty. Charity.
As both Christians and Protestants, the Disciples were, from their founding, a breed apart. They came together in the early 1800s as part of the “Second Great Awakening,” a Protestant revival movement that swept across the Kentucky and Tennessee frontier before spreading to other parts of the country. In the spring of 1801, a well-educated twenty-eight-year-old Presbyterian minister named Barton W. Stone (1772–1844) found himself, along with 20,000 others, at the edge of the prairie at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, witnessing an evangelical convulsion that went on for six days and nights:
It baffled description. Many, very many, fell down as men slain in battle, and continued for hours together in an apparently breathless and motionless state—sometimes for a few moments reviving, and exhibiting symptoms of life by a deep groan or piercing shriek, or by a prayer for mercy most fervently uttered. After lying thus for hours, they obtained deliverance.
Already nursing his own doubts about Calvinism’s dreary precepts regarding original sin, predestination, and biblical inerrancy, the inspired Stone began preaching about “God’s plan,” the same faith-based term Ronald Reagan would use throughout his life. The “plan” was that all people could come together and “experience” salvation with Jesus. It was notably—Garry Wills uses the word “dogmatically” in his 1987 appraisal of Reagan—democratic and inclusive. From the time of its populist founding, the Christian Church professed profound optimism about life, both earthly and eternal. Adopting the name “Christian” to include all believers and even non-believers, the Stoneites, as they were initially called, advocated an end to denominationalism in favor of congregational self-governance. From the get-go, this included women.
By 1804, Stone had parted ways with the Presbyterian church (which had accused him of Antinomianism), freed his slaves as a matter of Christian fraternity, and began ecumenically reaching out to build not so much an institutional religion as an open-ended socioreligious movement which had already lined up two “evils” in its reformist sights—slavery and alcohol.
Among the Disciple maxims that Nelle Reagan would repeat thousands of times during her lifetime was this: “In essentials, Unity; in non-essentials, Liberty; and in all things, Charity.” The principle of “Unity” (which the Disciples liked to capitalize) meant bringing all people together as one and encouraging them to freely interpret the scripture. As early as the 1830s, the Disciples welcomed African Americans and Native Americans into the faithful and placed women at the forefront of their ministries.
Purposefully defying rigid doctrinal authority as practiced by the rest of religious America, the Disciples took to publishing their discussions and debates, which often included contesting views, in journals, newspapers, and broadsheets. “[W]e object not to publishing, for information, what we believe,” wrote Isaac Errett, founder of the Christian Standard Magazine and a fellow Disciple, “but we stoutly refuse to accept of any such statement as authoritative, or as a test of fellowship, since Jesus Christ alone is Lord of the conscience.”
From the start, the Disciples were communicators and educators. The teenage Mark Twain, then working as a printer’s apprentice in Hannibal, Missouri, sardonically summarized the high-minded literary habits of the ever-busy Christians: “They fortify every weak place in their land with a school, a college, a library, a newspaper.” In 1840, the church opened the first of an eventual fifteen liberal arts colleges, all free-thinking, abolitionist, and dedicated to educating men and women on an equal basis. As Wills writes, by 1860, Disciple membership had risen to nearly 200,000. By 1900, the Disciples were the fastest growing religious group in the country with their faithful numbering more than 1.2 million. Such was the prairie fire of conversion in the first years of the twentieth century that by 1910, the year Nelle was baptized, the Disciples had established no fewer than 682 churches in the state of Illinois alone.
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In a country shackled and scarred by race, religion, gender, and class, much of that rationalized and reified by mainline American churches, the Disciples were genial revolutionists offering inclusion, education, and empowerment for those at the margins. They believed in the work ethic, progress (though they might argue against the supposed virtue of wealth), free will, education, the family, America as central to God’s plan, and were generally doubtful or hostile to socialism. Little wonder that a bright and questing twenty-something-year-old like Nelle Reagan, with little education, no profession, and trying to get through a troubled marriage, should seek to be born again into their midst. Her conversion coincided with the discovery that she was pregnant again.
Dutch the Disciple
As she threw herself into a whirlwind of Disciple activity—prayer meetings, choir practices, home visits to the sick and dying, and acting roles in staged church dramas—the pregnant Nelle at some point decided that her next-born wouldn’t be baptized Catholic (as her marriage bond to her husband, Jack Reagan, required) but Christian. It was a decision of singular consequence to the life of Ronald Reagan. In the midst of a wild winter storm, after a long and arduous labor in the bleak flat the Reagans rented on Main Street in Tampico, Illinois, Nelle gave birth on February 6, 1911, to a ten-pound boy soon to be nicknamed “Dutch.”
From Dutch Reagan’s birth until he reached the age of ten, the Reagan family moved a total of ten times, ostensibly in search of economic betterment but often to leave behind debts and job disasters. If father Jack was a handsome, smooth-talking shoe salesman who boasted a sort of makeshift degree as a “practipedist,” he was also an alcoholic who, in the middle of a drinking binge, could walk through a screen door, as older son Neil (nicknamed “Moon”) later recounted.
After a succession of dismissals for drinking on the job, Jack finally moved the family to Dixon, Illinois, when Dutch was eight or nine. Here Dutch found some semblance of a normal childhood, later describing his years in Dixon as “one of those rare Tom Sawyer-Huck Finn idylls.” Moon remembered it very differently—and probably more accurately. Money was so short in the Reagan household that they ate “bone soup” several nights a week because they couldn’t afford anything else. But Dutch, always Momma’s boy, would add that they also dined on “oatmeal meat”—a dash of real beef mixed with oatmeal and topped off with gravy. “It was moist and meaty, the most wonderful thing I’d ever eaten. Of course, I didn’t realize oatmeal meat was born of poverty.”
It was in Dixon, an agricultural entrepot roughly a hundred miles west of Chicago with a population of some 8,000 in 1919, that Nelle would come into her own as practically the co-pastor of the local Disciple church. Moon remembered how “she sandbagged merchants for clothes and food” to help Dixon’s poorest families and often visited the county jail to feed and commune with the prisoners as well. Upon their release, the convicts would often stop by the Reagan home for a hot meal, a bath, and some used clothes.
Thanks to his mother, Dutch was soon acting in the church skits and plays (some on the subject of the dangers of alcohol) that his mother composed and directed. “She executed it [drama] with the zest of a frustrated actress,” Reagan would later write. “She recited classic speeches in tragic tones, wept as she flung herself into the more poignant, if less talented, passages of such melodramas as East Lynne and poured out poetry by the yard…Naturally I was pressed into protesting service— usually as the thing in a sheet at the Sunday School pageant.”
In a rapturous sonnet that Nelle penned in a family bible, now held in the archives of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, she promised that,
My life must prove the power of His grace,
By every action through my living days.
For a good eighteen years, Nelle ran the Disciples “True Blue” class, a devotional club that opened each of its meetings by singing, “Help Somebody Today!” Under her ministration, the club dedicated itself to good works—preparing food for the poor and homebound, taking up collections for the sick, and even interceding to stop evictions. But, when it came to Nelle’s fierce beliefs about racial justice, she found herself alone and often out on a limb.
Racial attitudes among Dixon’s Disciples in the 1920s varied widely between a paternal tolerance of blacks (in tune with the founding beliefs of the church) to Ku Klux Klan-like racist revulsion that was widespread in its day. But Nelle never wavered in her own convictions. In one of her Sunday school classes, she read an essay of her own composition about “Negro Disciples and Their Contribution.” She openly associated with Dixon’s Black families and organized the YMCA’s Kleen Kids Klub (KKK), a deliberate spoof of those busy burning crosses and targeting “uppity Negroes” and “Papists” (Roman Catholics).
“Communist”
Dutch was the first member of that parodic KKK—and twenty-five years later in September, 1946, he would use his celebrity as a leading actor in Hollywood to vilify the Klan on statewide radio in California. In the first of thirteen live, three-hour shows (with Nelle sitting in the studio audience), the thirty-five-year-old Reagan, accompanied by four Black actors, dramatically reenacted Klan cross-burnings, beatings and shootings, and the desecration of synagogues.
“Operation Terror,” as the episode was called, touched off a statewide uproar and stepped-up FBI surveillance of the actor on suspicion of being a “communist.” But among his liberally inclined fellow actors, Reagan’s sudden notoriety resulted in his election to a position he would come to value more than his presidency—third vice president of the Screen Actors’ Guild. Part of Reagan’s hidden history is his extraordinary mission as SAG president during the late 1940s and 1950s to, as the union’s resolution put it, use all its power to “oppose discrimination against Negroes in the motion picture industry” and to adopt a policy of “presenting Negro characters on the screen in the true relation they bear to American life.”
Even if Reagan made a hard right politically during those years (ultimately winning the California governorship in 1966), the votive features of his faith continued to shape his public service. On civil rights, he governed as a peacemaker. Although he slashed statewide welfare rolls as California’s chief executive, he simultaneously increased welfare stipends. When a therapeutic abortion bill reached his desk, he signed it not because he was pro-abortion but because he was pro-personal choice—the same justification he later made when he opposed a 1978 California ballot initiative to ban gays from teaching in public schools.
As president, however, he tended to accommodate the rising power of the Christian Right. As HIV/AIDS deaths surged into the thousands, Reagan, under pressure from Christian fundamentalist lobby, refused to acknowledge it as a public health emergency for no less than four years. His brave and brilliant mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s and died in 1962 of a cerebral hemorrhage, would have been shocked and ashamed.
“God’s Children”
For all of that, even if the political Reagan ultimately fell into line with the Christian Right, the spiritual Reagan seemed to retain his deep faith in the goodness of people as hundreds of his handwritten letters over a period of sixty years clearly attest. One such letter, written in 1973 during Reagan’s second term as California governor, was to the Reverend and Mrs. Ben Cleaver who had brought him into their family back in Dixon when he was eight years old and raised him as their son. As shared in the 2004 Reagan: A Life in Letters, where he wrote about a bitter decision he faced as governor, Reagan confessed he had had “an almost irresistible urge—really a physical urge—to look over my shoulder for someone I could pass the problem on to…. I realized I was looking in the wrong direction. I started looking up instead and have been doing so for quite awhile now. My faith is unshakeable, and because all of you were so much responsible, I thank you for a peace beyond description. Love, Dutch.”
Even as Reagan faced death from a would-be assassin’s gunshot to his chest in March 1981, an event documented in his posthumously published diary, he clung to his faith in God’s “covenant of love.” In shock and in excruciating pain, going in and out of consciousness with his pulse flatlining for a time as the team of emergency medical personnel at the George Washington University hospital desperately tried to save his life, he prayed for God to spare him but then stopped himself.
“I realized I couldn’t ask for God’s help while at the same time I felt hatred for the mixed up young man who had shot me,” he recalled. “We are all God’s children & therefore equally beloved by him. I began to pray for his soul and that he would find his way back to the fold.”
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