Ronald Reagan: an American Christian.

For Ronald Reagan religion and patriotism coincided. He took the words of the Declaration of Independence at their face value. His America was a promised land, flowing with democracy and freedom, under, of course, the rule of God. For Reagan, acceptance of divine authority was the key to social order. "If we will not be governed by God," he warned an audience of Evangelicals in March, 1983, quoting William Penn, "we must be governed by tyrants'. Like the Israelites of old, in ignoring God's laws, Americans brooked disaster. But Reagan was American enough never to lose faith in their essential goodness. Corrupt government had led them astray, as had King Joram his subjects when "he made the inhabitants of Jerusalem to commit fornication and Juda to transgress." It took another century and half, but didn't Ezechias finally manage to undo the evil Joram had caused?

Reagan expected the same sort of reformation in his own kingdom of Judah . Restore prayer to public schools; keep parents informed of what was really happening to their teenage children in birth control clinics; fight child pornography, but above all put an end to the massacre of innocent children that had resulted from the Roe v. Wade decision of 1972, and, as Reagan confidently assumed, Americans would be brought back to their senses. Some day, he promised his evangelical audience, Congress would indeed enact human life legislation to end the tragedy of abortion on demand; meanwhile, they must never rest until that happened. Their task was no less than that of helping to enforce the Declaration of Independence. Since science dictates that preborn children are indeed living persons, their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness required protecting.

And the same American-born spirit of militant hopefulness animated Reagan's foreign policy. He fought the Cold War not to placate the Soviets, but to defeat them. Hence he refused to countenance a nuclear freeze. Pursuing peace by leaving your enemy permanently in possession of superior military force to him seemed suicidal. The thing to do was end the arms race by winning it. Reagan believed that the United States was founded on moral principles.

And, since in the end good must prevail over evil, the Soviet Union, as he told members of the British House of Commons in 1982, was indeed destined for the ash heap of history. Thus perish all evil empires. Nevertheless, like American abortion advocates in high places, Soviet freedom-usurpers in the Kremlin were not about to quit without a fight. So in 1983, his ears plugged against the massed choirs of anti-war protesters, Reagan advanced U.S. pershing and cruise missiles to within range of Eastern European targets. Soviet negotiators stormed out of arms limitation talks. Pundits around the world rose as one man in protest. Reagan responded by announcing that U.S. scientists had started work on a missile shield in space.

This was the so-called Strategic Defence Initiative, parodied by opponents of Reagan's foreign policy as "Star Wars." Peaceniks mocked S.D.I., but ruling circles in Moscow treated it with deadly seriousness. They knew that, should Washington ever develop an effective defence against on-coming missiles, Mass Assured Destruction would for their country become Mass Assured Defeat. S.D.I. persuaded the Kremlin to resume arms limitation talks, as Reagan predicted it would.

The crunch came at the Reykjavik summit meeting in October of 1986, where, against the advice of his aides, Reagan refused to barter away S.D.I. in return for further arms cuts. Now he had his enemy over a barrel. Moscow lacked the economic resources to build its own anti-missile defence. This left then-Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev with nothing more to bargain with. He could, of course, have pulled the nuclear trigger, but any of his missiles stopped in space would have left the U.S. with sufficient capacity for counterattacking to ensure victory. So, Gorbachev flew home from Reykjavik, having failed either to achieve an arms limitation agreement or put an end to S.D.I.

Such a resounding diplomatic defeat put heart into opponents of his regime and ultimately led to its demise. Pharaoh-like, Gorbachev let his peoples go, although it must be said in his defence that, unlike his Egyptian predecessor, he never once authorized the use of force to prevent their departure. As for Reagan, the fall of Soviet communism did not surprise him. It was God's will that it should give way to democracy, and Reagan felt proud to have had the privilege of helping to make that ideological change happen.

The question is: why wasn't he equally successful in overthrowing Roe v. Wade? The legal slaughter of unborn children must surely be every bit as heinous in God's eyes as the imprisonment of innocent adults in Gulag. Yet in authoritarian-minded Russia, Gulag is no more, while in democracy-obsessed United States, government-approved abortion facilities continue to flourish. Lou Canon, the biographer who has followed Reagan's career most closely, explains this anomaly by asserting that Reagan in his dealings with Congress gave only scant attention to the human life file. William P. Clark, a key member of Reagan's staff both when he was governor of California and after he became President, however, takes exactly the opposite view. According to Clark, Reagan's record shows that "no issue was of greater importance to him than the dignity and sanctity of all human life." And Clark backs this statement up by quoting the last sentence of "Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation," an article Reagan wrote for the Human Life Review in 1983, and Nelson published a year later in book form:

"My administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land, and there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other right has any meaning."

And, as Clark shows, Reagan was as good as his word. Every congressional initiative designed to curb the abortion holocaust received his blessing. During his watch, no foreign aid was to be used for promoting or performing abortions, and he enthusiastically supported the Hyde Amendment, which calls for an anti-abortion rider on all federal spending measures. But perhaps most significantly given current developments, he managed to stop the public funding of embryo research throughout his presidency.

Yet the evil empire of abortion shows no signs of cracking. Roe v. Wade is as firmly as ever entrenched in U.S. constitutional law. Some sociologists are even praising it for having made possible the killing off of potential criminals, thus lowering contemporary crime rates. Meanwhile, Reagan has hardly had time to turn in his grave before his name is being invoked to promote the butchering of unimplanted, unborn babies to serve the dubious ends of lab-coated utilitarians. What are we to say? Is Peter Kreeft right, and we really are in the run-up to Armageddon? Or is this just another of those dark ages so familiar to Old Testament history when the Children of Israel, having reverted to the worship of Baal in high places, find themselves once again at the mercy of the Assyrians? One thing is certain. If there is to be another dawn, we can expect that Americans will remember Ronald Reagan with the same respect and admiration that the Children of Israel must have bestowed on Ezikias.

John Muggeridge is a retired historian. He lives in Toronto.