The President's Pulpit

A lot of theology is being proclaimed from the presidential pulpit these days. Ronald Reagan is stumping across the country in his drive for re-election. With increasing frequency, the president is invoking the name of God and using explicit religious language in his political campaign.

The New York Times reported back in March that the Reagan campaign was attempting "to make the religion issue the early cornerstone of his re-election drive." The president's 1984 State of the Union speech contained 10 references to God, and God was mentioned 24 times in his election-year address to the National Association of Religious Broadcasters.

Ronald Reagan is making a very direct appeal to the burgeoning constituency of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists. He has completely allied himself with the new Christian Right and its television preachers. It seems to be a very happy relationship on all sides, one that all parties seem to believe will be politically advantageous.

But an abundance of religious language does not a good theology make. Ronald Reagan, like all of us, has the right to voice his religious views. His public office does not take away that right. But, like all theology, presidential theology can and should be tested and held up to the light of biblical scrutiny.

What is his religion and who is the God being espoused by the most powerful political ruler in the world today? What is the character and quality of Ronald Reagan's theology? Such questions are hardly inappropriate. In fact the biblical tradition has historically cast a suspicious eye at the kind of religion and theology usually promulgated by places like the Oval Office.

Ronald Reagan's religious background is not particularly auspicious. He was raised in what many evangelicals call a "nominal" Christian family. His father has been described as an indifferent Roman Catholic. His mother belonged to the Disciples of Christ (Christian) Church. He was baptized in that church and attended Eureka College, a church member of that denomination during most of his adult life, but never attended church regularly or became an active member of any congregation. While he was governor of California, he frequently attended the affluent Bel Air Presbyterian Church but did not join the congregation.

The president's lack of regular church attendance has been a lifelong pattern that has continued down to the present day. Unlike most other presidents, Ronald Reagan does not usually go to church in Washington, D.C., nor does he hold special services in the White House as Richard Nixon did. His aides say his lack of church attendance is for security reasons.

During his governorship in California, Ronald Reagan began to speak in more overtly religious terms, and conservative political forces began to portray him as a man of faith. It wasn't long before Reagan became a presidential hopeful backed by both the conservative California businessmen who had launched his political career and his new-found friends among conservative evangelicals.

In its July 2, 1976 issue, Christianity Today published portions of an interview with Ronald Reagan titled "Reagan on God and Morality." It profiled Reagan's views on the need for the nation to turn back to God, on personal spirituality, pornography, sexual vice, drugs, abortion, prayer, and the divine inspiration of the Bible. The evangelical magazine ran a picture of Reagan with the caption "Reagan: Promising Candidate." In the interview, he declared himself "born again" and said that he did "seek God" before making the decision to run for the presidency. The message of the interview for American evangelicals was clear: Ronald Reagan is one of us.

In April of 1976, Sojourners had published an article called "The Plan to Save America." The article was the result of months of investigation into an extensive and highly political election-year initiative by the Christian Right. We uncovered a plan formulated by very wealthy and powerful evangelicals to put conservatives into public office around the country.

The leaders of the plan were conservative Republican Congressman John B. Conlan from Arizona, Bill Bright, the founder and president of Campus Crusade for Christ, and a number of very rich evangelical businessmen. The front organizations that were either created (Third Century Publishers) or revitalized (Christian Freedom Foundation) to carry out the plan spoke the language of spiritual reawakening in America, but they tied the call for revival to an extreme, right-wing political, economic, and military agenda. The real political purposes behind the effort had not been made public until the Sojourners article brought the secret plan out into the open.

With public exposure the right-wing initiative quickly floundered. John Conlan lost his Senate bid in Arizona, and Bill Bright spent much of his time protesting that he was not really involved in politics. It was, however, the first real organized political effort by the new Christian Right, which was rapidly gaining strength. The plan was a precursor of things to come, as we were to see in the 1980 presidential election.

The clear presidential favorite of the conservative evangelicals involved in the 1976 initiative was Ronald Reagan; their efforts served as a vanguard for Reagan's future support among evangelicals. Reagan's presidential bid was unsuccessful in 1976 and an even more clearly "born again" candidate captured the White House. But this Christian president was a Democrat.

Ironically, it was the presidency of a Southern Baptist moderate named Jimmy Carter that caused the media and the nation to "discover" America's evangelicals. But Jimmy Carter, despite his impeccable Christian credentials and piety, was never politically acceptable to the Christian Right. They were against him from the start. Their choice had now been established—his name was Ronald Reagan.

By the 1980 presidential election, the forces of the New Right were ready to move. A new alliance between the secular political right and a new breed of evangelical television preachers had now been successfully forged. Through massive banks of computers and over the Christian airwaves, political power was being gathered.

New religious-political organizations like the Moral Majority, Christian Voice, and the Religious Roundtable joined hands with the National Conservative Political Action Council and other established right-wing groups. New names like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, and other TV preachers found new friends in conservative political operatives like Richard Viguerie, Terry Dolan, and Paul Weyrich.

The combined energies of these revitalized conservative forces all coalesced around the candidacy of Ronald Reagan. In what still has to be regarded as an amazing phenomenon, the most conservative and vocal segment of the evangelical and fundamentalist churches rejected an active Southern Baptist layman who, while president, taught a regular Sunday School class and was well known for his personal faith. In his stead, they selected a divorced Hollywood movie actor who seldom attended church to be their standard bearer.

Ronald Reagan was their choice, not because of his Christian faith but because of his conservative politics. This is, of course, not necessarily wrong. But let us all recognize that the agenda of the Christian Right has a lot more to do with the criteria of political ideology than the measures of Christian spirituality.

Though substantial debate exists even in conservative political circles about the importance of Christian Right influence in the 1980 election, two things are clear. First, the Christian Right has claimed credit for the Reagan victory and has strongly identified with his presidency and his political agenda. Second, Ronald Reagan has welcomed the Christian Right with an embrace of his own. He has thoroughly identified himself with their political agenda.

What has been the Reagan theology in the White House? The religion that Ronald Reagan promulgates, like that of many of his presidential predecessors, is an American civil religion. Volumes have been written on the subject of civil religion, and I won't attempt here a thorough discussion of the topic.

Suffice it to say that American civil religion is an amalgam of the Judeo-Christian heritage and the national experience. It often casts national aspirations and ambitions in religious metaphors, speaks of transcendent moral values, mixes piety with patriotism, invokes God's name when speaking of the national destiny, and generally blurs the distinction between biblical faith and cultural religion.

But as many scholars have pointed out, there are two kinds of civil religion: the prophetic and the priestly. Both appeal to transcendent faith and moral values but for very different purposes.

The prophetic religious tradition invokes the values, ideals, and even the faith that stands above the behavior of the people and the practices of the nation. On the basis of transcendent faith and moral values, it calls the people and the nation to accountability. This, of course, is the role of the prophetic biblical tradition.

Martin Luther King Jr. stood firmly on that tradition as he spoke to the nation about living up to the challenge of both biblical faith and the best ideals and aspirations of America. Dorothy Day, by stubbornly espousing and living out true gospel values, exposed the hypocrisy of a self-proclaimed Christian nation that exploited the poor while finding its identity in possessions and its security in weapons.

Even a president, Abraham Lincoln, called for national penitence for slavery and civil war. He reminded a divided nation that both sides in the war read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, whom each believed to be on their side. The prophetic stream of American religion has been faithfully persistent but never dominant. The function of prophetic religion is to bring the nation under judgment and call the people to repentance.

The more common form of American civil religion has been its priestly variety. Here religion is used to comfort the people, to assure them of their basic goodness and the soundness of their institutions, to assert the righteousness of the national purpose and destiny. The appeal here is to pride and to the glory of the nation's past, present, and future.

This is the religion of the prayer breakfasts, where presidents and other political leaders gather with the nation's religious leaders, not to bring the nation under accountability to the Word of God, but to engage in mutual affirmation and outright political campaigning.

President Ronald Reagan felt so comfortable and so surrounded by friends at the 1983 National Prayer Breakfast that he began his remarks by turning to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and saying, "General Vessey, I'm terribly tempted to call for a vote right now on the defense budget." The laughter that filled the plush hotel ballroom indicated that everyone understood the president's meaning.

Ronald Reagan has become the new high priest of American civil religion. Others have gone before him, often in the White House, and others will go after him. But Reagan has become, quite self-consciously it appears, the chief spokesman for the religion of America.

The religious themes in his speeches are constant and recurrent: America is a nation set apart, specially blessed and favored by God over other nations. We, like ancient Israel, are in fact a chosen nation, destined to play a central role in the divine plan.

That, of course, is an often-repeated theme in the history of American civil religion and the rhetoric of presidents, and Ronald Reagan has revived it with his determination to make America again the powerful force he thinks it ought to be in the world. The theme of his 1984 State of the Union message made his meaning clear—"America is back standing tall again!" As the president-priest is always ready to proclaim, "America is still the last and best hope of mankind."

Nothing in all of this is biblical. In fact this self-understanding is quite dangerous for any nation to possess, as previous great powers have discovered too late.

Ronald Reagan continually uses the language of spiritual renewal and revival. He links such spiritual rebirth not only to the restoration of American power in the world, but also to American wealth and prosperity. He repeats the message of the television preachers who say America's wealth is a sign of America's righteousness and, by implication, the poor people and nations of the world are spiritually suspect.

The insensitivity of the Reagan administration toward the poor has often been both blatant and absurd. Presidential Counselor Edwin Meese, in a now-famous statement, said he didn't think there was authoritative evidence of the existence of hungry people in America. When questioned about the long lines at soup kitchens across the country, Meese replied that "people go to soup kitchens because the food is free and that's easier than paying for it."

Ronald Reagan seemed to agree with that and added himself that the homeless in America are really "homeless by choice." The hungry and the homeless are that way by choice or spiritual defect, and the system of free-enterprise capitalism is not only the best in the world but is God-ordained; that is the economic meaning of Ronald Reagan's theology.

Even more important than what the president says is what his administration has done. While no recent U.S. president has been a true friend to the poor, the Reagan administration has plunged to new depths by making the abandonment of the poor official policy. No presidential administration in recent memory has been such bad news for the poor and such good news for the rich. Reagan directly reverses the biblical priority.

The issue is far deeper than one of "fairness," as the Democrats put it. At stake are the fundamental questions of justice that fill the Bible from cover to cover. A society that rewards the rich and punishes the poor cannot be a spiritually vital society. According to the Bible, the moral health and holiness of a society is largely determined by how it treats its poor.

The Reagan theology also equates spiritual revival with an unprecedented American military buildup. The tremendous increase in military spending has come at the expense of social programs for the poor, and is thus founded upon a basic injustice. More than ever before, the nation, under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, has put its trust and faith in its weapons of war in direct opposition to the biblical warning not to trust in horses and chariots. Despite the nuclear danger, this administration does not talk to our adversaries but talks instead of fighting and winning "limited" nuclear wars.

Indeed, the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan told the cheering evangelicals assembled in Orlando, Florida, on March 8,1983, is "the focus of evil in the modern world." Our enemy is an "evil empire," but our nuclear weapons are for a righteous purpose. In a world poised on the edge of total destruction, no more frightening theology than this could be conceived of. It is not only bad theology, but dangerous heresy to suggest that evil in the world today is mostly located to the north of the Caspian Sea.

Upon hearing a report of the speech in Orlando, the words of Jesus rang in my ears: "Why do you see the speck in your brother's eye, and not the log in your own eye?" The president sees Soviet aggressions but not American ones. He cares about persecuted Russian dissidents but not about priests, lay workers, women religious, and archbishops murdered by the governments we support.

He says, in fact, that America has never committed any aggression or fought a war for selfish reasons. To that, the many victims of American violence surely raise their voices with those of the many victims of Soviet atrocities and cry out to heaven for redress.

Aeschylus, a Greek dramatist, said it well. "In war, truth is the first casualty." Today the president of the United States calls the government in El Salvador, whose security forces and death squads have killed 40,000 of its own people in the last five years, a "democracy." He praises CIA-paid contra terrorists as "freedom fighters" and labels Nicaragua, a country finally free from decades of U.S.-backed dictatorship, a "totalitarian dungeon." Not telling the truth is always bad theology.

Apparently, too, the fundamentalist theology of some of the president's best friends seems to have rubbed off on him in some quite disconcerting ways. On at least five occasions in the last four years, President Ronald Reagan has referred to his belief that Armageddon (the final battle between the forces of good and evil at the end of the world) may be fast approaching.

Jerry Falwell and the other fundamentalist preachers who apparently have the president's ear link the "end times" with a final confrontation with godless communism, perhaps involving nuclear weapons. Though Falwell and others are quick to point out that the true Christians would all be safely raptured before any nuclear holocaust, their predictions, if taken seriously, could prove to be more than a little dangerous.

What are the possible consequences of having a commander-in-chief who is sympathetic to a fundamentalist view that, by a perverse and twisted logic, sees nuclear war as part of God's will for the way the world will end?

William Martin, a sociology professor from Rice University and frequent writer on religious topics, puts the question well in the June 1982 issue of Atlantic magazine:

If a president were to appoint one or more premillennialists to key foreign policy posts (who at the confirmation hearings would think to probe for beliefs about the Second Coming?), what incentive would they have to work for a lasting peace in the Middle East, since they would regard a Russian-led attack on Israel as a necessary precursor of the Millennium ...?

And if the nuclear destruction of Russia is foreordained, in some premillennial schemes, might not a fundamentalist politician or general regard his finger on the button as an instrument of God's eternal purpose?

And what are the potential consequences for the nation of a president who takes his religious advice almost exclusively from fundamentalist Christians instead of from church and religious leaders from across the spectrum of American religious life? Falwell's role in particular is worthy of note. He seems to have replaced Billy Graham in this administration as the evangelical preacher who most frequently visits the White House. Falwell boasts of his friendship and influence with the president. In fact, the two appeared together in an election-year "revival meeting" held last May in Washington, D.C.

The president has rejected the witness and wisdom of the U.S. Catholic bishops in their pastoral letter on the nuclear arms race, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response. At the same time, he has consistently welcomed the advice and support of the fundamentalist preachers on the same subject.

In an extraordinary recounting, Haynes Johnson in the April 3, 1983 Washington Post tells at length the story of the Reagan-Falwell partnership on the question of nuclear weapons:

On March 15, Falwell met with Ronald Reagan for an hour and 10 minutes in the White House. A key Falwell aide tells me they discussed the nuclear freeze movement and the politics of the situation facing the president.

Reagan, according to this account, remarked that Falwell was the only major conservative minister speaking out in opposition to the nuclear freeze. He mused aloud about why it was so difficult for him to get his peace-through-strength message across to the country.

Falwell replied that one of the problems was the extremely complicated nature of the subject; the president's case hadn't been boiled down into language the average citizen, the farmers and laborers of America, could understand. If the president could supply him with such language, and the official facts and figures to back them up, he, Falwell, would be proud to carry that case to the public.

The president then called in an aide and instructed that such material be prepared for Falwell.

Several days later, Falwell returned to Washington. He was given a briefing by National Security Council aides, accompanied by charts and graphs, and written material making the president's case "in laymen's language" about the Soviet military strength.

Since then, Falwell has been off and running. His organization has reproduced the president's written material in even more simplified language. It is being distributed to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans. His full-page ads running in papers nationally tell citizens: "We cannot afford to be number two in defense! But, sadly enough, that's where we are today. Number two. And fading!"

And he goes on to say, in language that directly impugns the loyalty of opponents, specifically duly elected representatives of the people: "We have a president who wants to build up our military strength. But he is catching it from all sides. The freeze-niks,' 'ultra-libs' and 'unilateral disarmers' are after him. He and the loyal members of Congress need to know that you are with them."

His electronic audiences hear him describe what the president "told me" and how the National Security Council "briefed me." He asks listeners if they are going to take the word of the president and the secretary of defense, as relayed through himself, or others? And he makes dark allusions to those advocating a nuclear freeze as having "links to the Kremlin."

Falwell's aides say they are being "overwhelmed" by the favorable public response to his appearances. They believe he is having "a very significant effect" in transforming public opinion from a pro-freeze stance into one backing the president's views.

If so, the Rev. Jerry Falwell will have become something more than a crucial factor in our great nuclear arms debate. He will have written a new, potentially fateful chapter in the story of church and state relationships in America.

Finally, we are brought to the most delicate and difficult issue: the president's "pro-life" stance. The deep concern of many Christians about the ethics and ethos of "abortion on demand" is, in my view, on solid ground. But the polemics around the issue of abortion reveal great moral inconsistencies on almost all sides of the fierce debate. The Reagan position on the issue, again aligning with the Right, has served to bring these theological and moral inconsistencies into sharp relief.

Life is woven into a single fabric. It must be defended everywhere and anywhere it is threatened. Whether the lives are yet unborn, or an enemy population under the shadow of our missiles, or children of poor families without enough to eat, or Central American peasants facing terror, torture, and murder, or prisoners on death row—all these lives are precious to God and must be protected and preserved by those who love God.

It is the knife of political ideology which separates these issues from one another. By linking the abortion question to a whole other agenda which is decidedly not pro-life, Ronald Reagan has cut the moral heart out of his concern for the sacredness of human life.

A much saner voice and a better theology on these matters can be heard these days from Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, speaking for the U.S. Catholic bishops. He speaks of "the need for an attitude or atmosphere in society which is the precondition for sustaining a consistent ethic of life." He continues:

We intend our opposition to abortion and our opposition to nuclear war to be seen as specific applications of this broader attitude. We have also opposed the death penalty because we do not think its use cultivates an attitude of respect for life in society. The purpose of proposing a consistent ethic of life is to argue that success on any one of these issues threatening life requires a concern for the broader attitude in society about respect for human life ... Our moral, political and economic responsibilities do not stop at the moment of birth. Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visible in the support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker.

It is the commitment to the right to life, the quality of life, and the search for a positive peace that has, says Bernardin, "led the U.S. Bishops not only to oppose the drive of the nuclear arms race, but to stand against the dynamic of a Central American policy which relies predominantly on the threat and use of force, which is increasingly distancing itself from a concern for human rights... and which fails to grasp the opportunity of a diplomatic solution to the Central American conflict." Here is the outline of a public theology which is genuinely pro-life across the spectrum of social issues and human concerns. Here, in fact, is a direction clearly in the prophetic tradition of American religion.

Ronald Reagan may be a new theologian, but unfortunately, his theology is not new. It is the old theology of American civil religion, which sees our nation as first, best, richest, most righteous, and, always, most powerful in the world.

It is a theology that favors the rich over the poor, the strong over the weak, and the nationalist over the dissenter. It is a theology that does not subject itself to the Word of God but claims to be on God's side. It does not call the people to participate in God's purpose but rather calls on God to join its purpose. God, in fact, becomes a narrow American tribal deity in this priestly civil religion, to be called upon and used to bless the ambitions and aspirations of the nation.

Ronald Reagan's religion is, in the end, the religion of the state. It is a religion whose constant companion is falsehood and whose greatest enemy is truth.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine.