Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  Whether Kennedy was shaping opinion or simply being a bellwether of an emerging trend, there had been a sea change in how liberals perceived the role of religion in society in a remarkably short period of time. With the exception of civil rights, which will be discussed in the following chapter, the Democratic Party, the party that had produced moralists such as William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson, was now reluctant to use religious tenets to help justify public policies.

  For example, a 1949 Supreme Court decision that had banned public schools from providing a religious education—a practice common in all but four states at the time—had been harshly and almost uniformly criticized by leading liberals, including Eleanor Roosevelt. But in 1962 a majority of liberal opinion supported Kennedy’s position that the court was correct—mandatory prayer or Bible reading infringed upon the First Amendment.

  The consensus among liberals that any state support of organized religion violated civil liberties had been gradually growing during the 1950s, but Kennedy’s particular circumstance as a Catholic who believed he had to abide by a strict separation of church and state to win the trust of Protestants and the eloquence with which he explained his position certainly accelerated the trend. Even liberal presidential candidates who had studied for the ministry, such as George McGovern, Gary Hart, and Al Gore, hesitated to invoke religious teachings as a motivation for public action. Coming from the civil rights movement, the only Democratic politician to break the mold was an ordained minister, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who comfortably invoked God in his 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns.

  One of the most notable instances in which a leading Democrat mimicked Kennedy’s secular approach came in 1984 when New York governor Mario Cuomo spoke at the University of Notre Dame to explain why he could be personally opposed to abortion but could not support laws that would limit access to abortion. Cuomo did not specifically refer to Kennedy in his speech, but he relied on Kennedy’s basic argument that “it is not wise for prelates and politicians to be tied too closely together.” Cuomo’s remarks evoked Kennedy’s speech to the Houston Ministerial Alliance and Kennedy’s response to the Supreme Court decision on school prayer when he said, “there are many moral issues better left to private discretion than public policy.” Secularization is now a bedrock principle of the Democratic Party.

  The sharp lines Kennedy and Cuomo drew between private religious belief and public policy reflected the growing division among the religiously observant. Christians, particularly, have become less divided along denominational lines than they are along ideological lines. The crucial distinction among churches is less about doctrine but “rather, revolve[s] around the question of whether the church is ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative,’” said religious historian Ferenc Szasz.

  This distinction began in the late nineteenth century with the rise and spread of the so-called higher criticism of the Bible, in which scholars argued that breakthroughs in such fields as geology and archaeology could demonstrate which biblical stories were literally true and which were simply allegories. The notion that the Bible was not inerrant rattled traditionalists, but even more upsetting to them was the theory that only scholarly experts could accurately interpret scripture.

  Protestant tradition had long held that scriptural interpretation was open to any discerning believer, and to suggest otherwise generated a strong backlash against an educated elite perceived to be undermining traditional values. The debate over the authority of experts in religious study paralleled a similar secular debate over public policy that began in the 1920s and which accelerated during the 1950s, with liberals urging that trained experts were best qualified to make public policy, while conservatives continued to attack an academic elite as being out of touch with the concerns of average voters.

  So-called traditional values, particularly those involving sexual mores, seemed under constant assault in the period after World War II, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, but also before. “People think the boomers discovered sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll,” said commentator Peggy Noonan, “but it was their parents, really—children of immigrants, home from Anzio and the South Pacific, beginning to leave the safety and social embarrassments of their parents’ religion, informed by what they had been taught as children about World War I and what happened at Versailles, influenced by Scott and Ernest and the lost generation.”

  Conservative Christians and their allies in other faiths were particularly stunned by the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that made abortion legal nationwide. A variety of events, including the re-establishment of the state of Israel and the rise of the officially atheistic Soviet Union as the competing superpower with the United States, also convinced conservative believers that they were living in a time when biblical prophecies were being fulfilled before their eyes.

  Many religiously conservative Americans began to search for ways to ally themselves into a distinct political movement. Among the groups that were formed was the Moral Majority, led by Southern Baptist minister the Reverend Jerry Falwell, which began in 1979. What became known as the religious right was an extraordinary amalgam of Protestants representing denominations that had feuded for generations over doctrine, not to mention Catholics, Jews, and conservatives of other faiths. This ecumenical conservative moment that saw political ideology trump doctrinal differences was one of the most extraordinary religious developments in America in the twentieth century.

  This new alliance initially struggled to find a political champion. Given that incumbent Republican president Gerald Ford supported legalized abortion, once Ford defeated Reagan in the 1976 Republican primary, evangelical Christians—even conservative ones—initially supported Democrat Jimmy Carter, thinking he was one of their own. Carter, the former governor of Georgia, was a born-again Southern Baptist who was regarded by evangelicals in much the same way as Catholics had viewed Kennedy.* Carter even won the outright endorsement of televangelist and future Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson. But evangelical Christians quickly felt betrayed by Carter, who appointed no evangelicals to high administration posts and made no effort to address the issues evangelicals cared about, such as school prayer and abortion.

  * “Evangelical Christian” is not a precise term. It is not synonymous with “fundamentalist,” though there is overlap. It is, however, the preferred self-identification for politically conservative Protestants who generally subscribe to the inerrancy of the Bible, and that is how the term is used here.

  With some misgivings, conservative Christians rallied around Reagan in the 1980 election, even though Reagan would be the first divorced man elected president, and even though, while governor of California, Reagan had signed legislation that greatly expanded access to legal abortions in the state (a law critics said opened the door for more than a million abortions performed in the state). Nor did Reagan regularly attend church, though that was primarily because he did not want to disturb his fellow worshipers with his security detail. Whatever religious counsel he needed, his biographer Edmund Morris said, could apparently be received “from silent colloquies, usually at an open window with ‘the Man Upstairs’—that being his usually coy substitute for the Holy Name.”

  But Reagan spoke the language of evangelical Christianity. He was “a student of the Protestant sects” that believed in phenomenal events, including “the end times.” Upon learning that Israel had bombed a nuclear reactor in Iraq in June 1981, Reagan wrote in his diary, “I swear I believe Armageddon is near.”

  Reagan shared the evangelical belief in a God who directly and actively intervenes in human affairs and in personal lives. While he referred to them as “hunches” in his autobiography, rather than messages from God, Reagan believed that there were times “when I have known, or at least had a positive feeling, that something would happen.” While this belief would leave Reagan open to the influence of astrology, as was revealed late in his presidency, it also made
him comfortable with the Christian tradition of prophecy. While governor of California, Reagan met with a number of evangelical leaders at the home of entertainer Pat Boone. They closed the meeting with a prayer circle, and one of the ministers holding Reagan’s hand, Reverend George Otis, said that he began to feel a “pulsing,” and believing it was the power of the Holy Spirit, prophesied aloud that Reagan would become president “if you walk uprightly before Me.”

  Reagan further believed that God had spared his life during the 1981 assassination attempt for a reason and pledged in his diary, “Whatever else happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve Him in every way I can.” As Reagan prayed that his own life be saved he said, “I realized I couldn’t ask for God’s help while at the same time I felt hatred for the mixed-up angry young man who had shot me. Isn’t that the meaning of the lost sheep? We are all God’s children and therefore equally loved by him. I began to pray for his soul and that he would find his way back into the fold.”

  Evangelicals, as well as conservative Catholics and Jews, were especially elated by how Reagan spoke of the Soviet Union. In a 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world” and an “evil empire.” At the end of his speech, the crowd rose and cheered on and on while a band played “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Most analysts focused only upon how those provocative remarks impacted relations with the Soviet Union, but what thrilled conservative Christians was that America had a president who believed that satanically inspired evil was a real, tangible force in the world and he was willing to state that belief publicly.

  Reagan said a good many things that cheered conservative Christians and Jews—on sexual promiscuity, abortion, drugs, and secularization. The question among his supporters was why he did not actually do more about each of these things.

  Abortion was a particular sticking point. Reagan advocated for a constitutional ban on all abortions, except those necessary to save the life of the mother, but “he invested few political resources toward obtaining this goal and it was not a high priority of those close to him.” When anti-abortion activists held rallies in Washington, DC, even if Reagan was at the White House, he still addressed the gathering by telephone rather in person because, it was believed, he did not want to be photographed with leaders of the pro-life movement. Several key advisors, such as Lyn Nofziger and likely Nancy Reagan, “who avoided any comment on the issue,” believed in the right of a woman to choose to have an abortion. Even Ed Meese, who led a campaign against pornography while attorney general, was considered “middle of the road” on the abortion issue.

  In addition, Reagan inadvertently ensured abortion rights were protected for several decades with his first Supreme Court appointment. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan had pledged he would appoint a woman to the first court vacancy that occurred during his administration. When Justice Potter Stewart retired in 1981, Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor, a former Arizona state legislator and judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals, to the High Court. As a state senator, O’Connor had cast several votes that suggested she supported the right of women to have an abortion. Antiabortion activists were appalled and began lobbying Reagan to withdraw the appointment. When Falwell was misquoted as saying that good Christians should be wary of O’Connor’s nomination, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater retorted, “Every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.” Reagan asked Falwell to trust his judgment, and Falwell played a key role in reducing right-wing opposition to O’Connor, who was confirmed by a 99 to 0 vote in the Senate. O’Connor, however, did prove to be an important swing vote in ensuring that Roe v. Wade was not overturned, and that the right to an abortion remained widely available for women who sought one.

  But the O’Connor choice was an aberration. Most of Reagan’s court appointments thrilled conservatives—and he made many appointments. Reagan was able to appoint two other conservatives, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, to the Supreme Court and also elevated conservative Justice William Rehnquist to the position of chief justice. More importantly, Reagan appointed more judges to the federal judiciary than any president in history—368 federal district court and appellate court justices, or more than half of all the judgeships in the lower federal courts. This “rightward shift in the federal judiciary . . . would be one of Ronald Reagan’s chief political legacies.”

  For all his talk of God and personal morality, Reagan demonstrated a general lack of enthusiasm for the “culture wars.” His reticence led at least one reporter to question whether Reagan was a “closet tolerant,” befitting both his upper-class social status and his experience in Hollywood, which for all its supposed wholesomeness, as Reagan viewed it, still had a large gay population and a tolerant attitude toward sex generally. But in his lack of stridency, Reagan was also being true to his religious faith. The church into which Reagan was baptized, the Disciples of Christ, is a particularly ecumenical denomination that has no creed, so members have wide latitude in what they believe and how they worship. Influenced by the writings of Christian author Harold Bell Wright, Reagan always believed that doing good is more important for a Christian than dogma or organized religion. Reagan’s son Ron described his father’s religious faith as “a sincere but low-key nonexhibitionst approach . . . a quiet faith built around a basic do unto others philosophy.”

  The unique merger of religion and politics that had emerged in Southern California during the mid-twentieth century also influenced Reagan’s religious philosophy. As noted by political scientist James Q. Wilson in a widely studied article in the May 1967 edition of Commentary magazine titled “A Guide to Reagan Country,” a majority of Southern Californians were, like Reagan, immigrants from the Midwest who had imported a ”fundamentalist Protestant individualism” ideally suited to the region’s suburban lifestyle.

  In this particular form of Protestantism, the emphasis was less on community or service to the poor than on “the obligation of the individual to find and enter into a right relationship with God, with no sacraments, rituals, covenants, or grace to make it easy.” It was an optimistic, growth- and future-oriented faith, and since nearly all Southern California residents either owned their own home or intended to own their own home, there was a strong emphasis on property ownership as a key to prosperity, which was a key to happiness. Government’s primary purpose was to facilitate growth so the enterprising individual could create wealth that would ultimately benefit the broader community.

  Adherents of this form of capitalist Christianity despaired that the virtues they practiced, and which they credited for their success, were “conspicuously absent from society as a whole,” Wilson said, adding his own emphasis, and they knew who to blame for the moral “decay” they observed every night on television: “a self-conscious intelligentsia” located on the East Coast or in the Bay Area whom they believed was pushing the nation toward ruin.

  While these advocates of a prosperous Protestantism believed their faith was rooted in biblical teaching and the philosophies of America’s Founding Fathers, it represented something new in American religious life. Old-line Protestantism had emphasized humanity’s fall from grace and the need for repentance and humility. Reagan and his Southern California cohorts were at the forefront of a new type of faith that William James had earlier called “healthy-mindedness,” where sadness is as much an enemy as sin. Reagan’s much noted optimism, then, was rooted not only in his belief that all things went according to God’s plan, but also in his sense that optimism was not just an attitude but a tool to change society.

  A faith in faith itself also encouraged the idea that believers are favored by heaven and will prosper if they follow God’s will. Personal behavior, not wider societal conditions, dictated how well a person would do in life. In a wider sense, this became the controversial doctrine of the “prosperity gospel,” which viewed wealth as a blessing from God u
pon the righteous. While Reagan never articulated the prosperity gospel as such, it certainly fit well with his economic theories in which government policies should reward success, not burden it with high taxes.

  Kennedy received nearly four-fifths of the votes of Catholics in 1960. In 2004, which was the next time a Catholic, Massachusetts senator John Kerry, was nominated for president, Kerry lost the Catholic vote 52 to 46 percent. As of 2013, six of the nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court were Catholic, which drew nary a peep of protest from non-Catholics. In 2012, for the first time, a Mormon was nominated for president, and while Mitt Romney lost that election, there was no evidence that his religion played a significant role in his defeat.

  We might conclude that religious affiliation is no longer an issue in American politics, but that would not be completely correct. As Szasz noted, while a candidate’s denomination may no longer be an issue for most American voters, it does matter whether the candidate is religious and whether his religious beliefs fall under the heading of “liberal” or “conservative.” Indeed, in the early twenty-first century, there was said to be a “faith gap” in American politics. Those who considered themselves to be religiously observant, usually defined as attending worship service on a weekly basis, tend to support conservative, usually Republican, candidates. Those voters who seldom or never attend worship services tend to favor liberal, usually Democratic, candidates. Too much can be made of such generalizations, but clearly there has emerged, particularly since 1990, a division among Americans based on their religious belief and the role they believe religion should play in public policy.