The Source of Reagan’s Magic
Last week, The New York Times published an article titled “With Trump Flailing, Some Conservatives Are Having Second Thoughts About Trumpism,” featuring Stephanie Slade, a senior editor at Reason.[1]
In her new book Fusionism, she argues that Reagan-era conservatism joined liberty with virtue, bringing together the principles of the American founding and a Judeo-Christian culture rooted in the Bible.
Today’s conservative movement, she contends, has lost its grip on that union.
We would carry the argument further: America’s meteoric rise, from her colonial beginnings in the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century, cannot be understood apart from the Biblical beliefs and moral habits that shaped her people and sustained their liberty.
Ms. Slade may be onto something, but we would put it more plainly: what separates Ronald Reagan from Donald Trump is how they approach governing. Reagan’s magic sprang from his application of Biblical truth and a Biblical worldview to the moral challenges of his day.
As background, I moved to Washington, D.C., at the end of 1982. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see why Reagan’s admirers regard his presidency as the greatest of the last hundred years. One remarkable tribute came on February 6, 1998—nine years and seventeen days after he left office—when Washington National Airport was renamed Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
But Tuesday morning, December 8, 1987, gave conservatives pause. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had met the previous year in Reykjavík, Iceland. Now the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was in the District of Columbia for the Washington Summit during Gorbachev's December 7–10 visit.
My office was on 2nd Street NE. Each morning, I drove up Constitution Avenue, passed the Capitol on my right, and turned left toward my office. But that morning, Soviet flags—bearing the hammer and sickle—fluttered in the breeze from every lamppost up and down the avenue.
“Reagan has lost his mind,” I remember thinking.
I was not alone. That week, as Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty, some of the President’s most loyal conservative allies accused him of letting the Kremlin play him like a fiddle. Congressional Republican opposition had already scuttled plans for Gorbachev to address a joint session of Congress[2]
The very man who had called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” on March 8, 1983, at the National Association of Evangelicals’ annual convention in Orlando, Florida, was now welcoming the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union with full diplomatic honors and all the pomp of a state welcome in the capital of the free world.
Six months later, another chapter in the Reagan–Gorbachev story would reveal that President Reagan had been one step ahead all along. The Soviet flags up and down Constitution Avenue had been a matter of diplomatic protocol. What Reagan carried to the Moscow summit, held May 29–June 2, 1988, was spiritual conviction rooted in Christ—a dimension his critics had failed to grasp.
Historian Paul Kengor described the visit as “Ronald Reagan’s Mission Trip to Moscow.”[3]
At the arrival ceremony, with the Soviet leadership arrayed before him, Reagan concluded his formal remarks with a carefully considered benediction: “Thank you and God bless you.”
Consider whom Reagan was addressing—the rulers of a nation whose state promoted atheism, persecuted believers, and severely restricted evangelism and the religious instruction of children. That was gutsy.
Igor Korchilov, Gorbachev’s interpreter, recorded the moment this way: “The heretofore impregnable edifice of Communist atheism was being assaulted before their very eyes.”
In the aftermath of the Moscow summit, change came quickly. In 1988 and 1989, the Russian Orthodox Church opened some 2,000 parishes. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Two years later, the Soviet Union itself was gone—without a war between the superpowers.
Reagan did not accomplish these changes alone. But he understood that the struggle concerned more than weapons and competing economic systems. It concerned God, human dignity, and whether the state could claim authority over a man’s conscience.
The man we thought had lost his mind walked into the Kremlin carrying his faith in Jesus Christ—the Son of God the Kremlin denied.
Reagan's bold venture to the Soviet Union brings to mind this truth: “God will never have it forgotten that the Cross is the basis of all blessing.”
He could welcome Gorbachev beneath Soviet flags because he never confused courtesy with capitulation. Like Daniel in Babylon, Reagan stood in the halls of power without bowing to their gods.
The iconic photograph of Reagan sharing a beer with House Speaker Tip O’Neill at a St. Patrick’s Day luncheon on March 17, 1983, offers another clue to his political success.[4] Reagan understood the power of persuasion. Political opponents could sit at the same table without surrendering their convictions.
Reagan's 1981 tax cuts and the 1986 tax reform both passed Congress. The Senate ratified the INF Treaty 93 to 5, binding the nation to a commitment that outlasted his Administration. Beneath it all stood a Biblical worldview that did not shift with the polls. Principle was his foundation; politics was how he built on it.
Which brings us to governing by executive order to produce immediate results, and how those gains may likely prove to be short-lived. What one President’s pen writes, the next President’s pen can erase. Joe Biden moved within days of taking office to reverse major elements of Trump’s first-term agenda. Trump began reversing Biden’s on his first day back.
The lesson: persuasion and legislation lay a far stronger foundation than governing by executive order.
And over the long run, a pen can change policy, but it cannot form a nation's character. That work begins at the headwaters of culture—in homes, churches, and schools, where people learn what to believe, what to prize, and how to live.
Reagan’s convictions took root long before Washington, through his mother’s faith and a small-town church in Dixon, Illinois. The next generation of public leaders is sitting in America’s pews right now—unlikely Gideons and Rahabs being grounded in Scripture and equipped to answer God’s call as we pray for the next Great Awakening.
Our task is to prepare them to carry Biblical wisdom into the city gates of our day: school boards, city councils, county commissions, courtrooms, and legislatures.
Elijah’s servant saw only “a cloud as small as a man’s hand … rising from the sea” (1 Kings 18:44). Then came the rain.
David Lane
American Renewal Project
[2] U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian
[3] Paul Kengor, “Ronald Reagan’s Mission Trip to Moscow,” Christianity Today
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