God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life

by Paul Kengor Ph.D. Narrated by Bob Souer

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Judge William P. Clark

Paul Kengor now reveals the inner heart and soul of this great man.

Gary L. Gregg

The conservative Christian who rarely went to church. That is the conundrum most pundits used to refer to Ronald Reagan when discussing his reltionship to religion. God and Ronald Reagan helps us finally come to grips wiht the man and the presidency taht was Ronald Reagan. From childhood to the Cold War, Paul Kengor has unearthed the Ropnald Reagan most of knew was there but which few of us had the chance to see. Enjoyable and enlightening.

Lee Edwards

Illuminates the role of faith in the life and worldview of one of the 20th century’s most important figures.

Rich Lowry

Illuminates the role of faith in the life and worldview of one of the 20th century’s most important figures.

Matthew Dallek

God and Ronald Reagan deepens our understanding of Reagan’s life and the times in which he governed.

Steven F. Hayward

Paul Kengor has performed a masterful service by shining a light on this underappreciated but central aspect of Reagan’s life.

Edwin Meese III

Paul Kengor has written an excellent book which explores a previously neglected aspect of Reagan’s life—his religious faith.

Stephen Knott

[A] superb book—no interpretation of Ronald Reagan will be complete without reference to this vital work.

Donald M. Goldstein

God and Ronald Reagan fundamentally transforms the historical view of Ronald Reagan and his place in the 20th century.

Andrew E. Busch

In this meticulously researched and insightful book, Paul Kengor finds the ultimate source of Ronald Reagan’s resolve against communism.

Peter Robinson

"A profound character study, an engrossing work of history...a heartbreakingly beautiful love story about one man and his Maker."

David A. Noebel

For anyone who believes Christianity and politics don’t mix needs to read this work on an American president.

Marvin Olasky

Paul Kengor offers not only a thorough history of Reagan’s religious development but a good and sardonic eye for detail.

Peter Schweizer

Paul Kengor takes the reader to depths where no other writer has yet been—Ronald Reagan’s very soul.

Shirley Anne Warshaw

Paul Kengor has addressed a critical issue in today’s study of the American Presidency: how religious background influences presidential decisions. This is a book particularly important to presidential scholars who are assessing President George W. Bush and how he too has interwoven his political and religious beliefs in presidential decisions.

Robert P. George

In the vast body of Reagan scholarship, what’s been missing is a spiritual biography. Kengor has admirably supplied our need.

Judge - William P. Clark

"Paul Kengor now reveals the inner heart and soul of this great man."

Ryan J. Barilleaux

God and Ronald Reagan makes an important contribution to our understanding of the last major president of the 20th century.

Hugh Heclo

Paul Kengor’s book offers a deeper understanding than can be found in any of the conventional academic literature.

Kenneth W. Thompson

A penetrating history of the President’s evolving religious faith and its articulation in different settings during his career.

In the vast body of Reagan scholarship, what’s been missing is a spiritual biography. Kengor has admirably supplied our need.” %COMM_CONTRIB%Robert P. George

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177532691
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	02/25/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

God and Ronald Reagan
A Spiritual Life

Chapter One

Jack and Nelle

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

--an annotation in Nelle Reagan's Bible

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 runins 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 dif ficult 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 in fluences.

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.

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 ...

God and Ronald Reagan
A Spiritual Life. Copyright © by Paul Kengor. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Videos