Jim Wallis’ Evangelical Left Sojourners has
helpfully reminded us, amid all the hagiography about Ronald Reagan
on the centennial of his birth, that the Religious Left despised
him. Some Religious Leftists doubtless still do.
Sojourners magazine editor Jim Rice
recently recalled Sojourners’ 2004 observations about
Reagan upon his death. “Reagan’s policies were disastrous and
destructive.” After all, “poverty worsened at home and abroad, he
spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the largest peacetime
military buildup in history, including $80 billion (and counting)
for the fantasy of Star Wars and tens of billions for
first-strike-capable nuclear
weapons.” Reagan also reputedly “ignored” the AIDS
epidemic. He instigated “U.S. wars in
Central America” that included right-wing “death
squads” and killed tens of thousands, including Jesuit
priests.
According to Sojourners lore, “Reagan’s policies
worked against the interests of the poor and marginalized and
further enriched the wealthy and powerful.” His “most destructive
legacy could very well be the mania for ‘deregulation’ that he
unleashed, starting with his declaration in his first Inaugural
address that ‘Government is not the solution to our
problem. Government is the problem.’” Of course, Reagan’s passion
for deregulation led in a straight line to the “tsunami that
swamped Wall
Street” in 2008. Reagan was personally “likeable,” Rice
admitted. “But don’t let the revisionists whitewash one of the most
damaging presidencies of the 20th century and the dangerous legacy
it left us.”
In the stroll down memory lane, it could also be recalled
that Jim Wallis’ Sojourners effusively praised various
Soviet surrogates around the world, including Nicaragua’s notorious
Sandinista regime. And Sojourners, then as now, wanted
U.S. unilateral disarmament. If the Religious Left view had
prevailed in the 1980s, hundreds of millions might still live under
a Communist police state. Of course, Rice instead suggests that
Reagan’s “militaristic approach helped bolster the hardliners in
the Soviet Union and forestalled rather than caused the inevitable
downfall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War.”
At least consistent, Rice essentially rehashed the
Religious Left warnings that issued forth almost immediately after
Reagan’s 1980 election. In 1981, a few months after his
inauguration, the National Council of Churches (NCC), then a far
more important organization than now, dispatched a “Message to the
Churches” ominously called, “The Remaking of America?” It warned
that the new administration threatened the “vision of America as
the model and embodiment of a just and humane society.” Reagan’s
agenda was “contrary to the best insights of both Christian faith
and the national creed.”
Allegedly, Reagan was “giving away the public inheritance
to private entrepreneurs,” capitulating to “sheer naked,
untrammeled greed.” He was also exchanging concern for “human
rights” for a “selective preoccupation with ‘terrorism,’” which the
NCC helpfully put into scare quotes, and which recalled the
“hysteria of the McCarthy era.” Reagan was reviving a “distorted
vision of the bipolar Cold War world,” and a dangerous obsession
with Communism. The NCC worried that Reagan proposed to “make
America ‘Number One,’” which it found truly frightening. In the
heartless Reagan vision, “compassion is a weakness,” and government
only a necessary evil to “protect privilege from assault.” Reagan
wanted our nation to be “principally” an “Empire” guided by
“Manifest Destiny,” with a “mission to extend its power and
commerce throughout the continent, the hemisphere, the
world.”
In 1986, the NCC’s chief celebrated that the Democratic
Party’s new majority in the U.S. Senate at least could “control the
damage the Reagan Administration has done to the fabric of our
country.” Of course, the Mainline Protestants who comprise most of
the NCC’s supposed constituency voted by 60 percent or more for
Reagan’s reelection in 1984. Evidently they were also lacking in
“compassion,” despite decades of attempted guidance from the
NCC.
United Methodist Bishop James Armstrong would become NCC
president in 1983. Only days after Reagan’s 1980 election he
bewailed: “People voted their self interest instead of the social
principles of the church. It looks like United Methodists with
everybody else forsook their Christian idealism at the ballot
box.”
Another panicked United Methodist bishop similarly
exclaimed after the 1980 election: “If we sincerely believe that
the American people are ready to regress into some style of
oppressiveness, some minuscule interpretation of religion, some
ultraconservative posture of belief, then we have absolutely lost
confidence in the whole process we have contributed to over the
years.” He further faulted the disastrous election on the “weakness
of the saints, who somehow in their faltering leadership could not
quite gain the confidence of the population.”
Still another United Methodist bishop in 1981 waited only
two months into Reagan’s first term before decrying the “alarming
turn towards violence, confirmed by a soaring arms race, by the
belligerent rhetoric of a revived cold war, a turning away from
human rights in the name of national expediency and support for a
variety of military governments abroad while neglecting the poor
and wretched at home.” Trying to be profound, one other United
Methodist bishop thoughtlessly commented after the failed
assassination attempt on Reagan: “It is puzzling that Americans are
highly and correctly offended by Mr. Hinckley’s violent outbreak
but the death of some 13,000 persons in El Salvador during the last
year doesn’t upset us much.”
Of course, in Religious Left mythology, the war in El
Salvador was not the fault of a Soviet-armed Communist insurgency
attempting to overthrow an elected government. It was Reagan’s
fault.
Then, as now, once prestigious groups like the National
Council of Churches and the United Methodist bishops, having sat in
the cockpit of American religion for so many decades, could not
understand how their post 1960s radicalism, and church membership
implosion, had made them increasingly irrelevant. They were
especially indignant over newly arisen conservative parachurch
groups that successfully organized as the “Religious Right,” and
which, unlike they, commanded loyalty from millions of church
goers.
The Religious Left then as now did not understand or
acknowledge the Reagan-era prosperity which helped both poor and
rich. Devout statists, these prelates and activists were not
interested in increasing wealth, only in seizing it and
redistributing it according to their own political considerations.
They had stopped criticizing Soviet bloc human rights abuses in the
1960s, and were largely indifferent to the Soviet empire’s
collapse. And they never understood how Reagan-era policies fueled
not only communism’s collapse but also facilitated the transition
of countless rightist regimes to democracy, from the Philippines,
to Chile, to South Korea to South Africa. No doubt, the Religious
Left preferred to claim credit for itself.
Ironically, Reagan was himself a lifelong Mainline
Protestant and, by extension, a constituent of the National Council
of Churches. He grew up in the Disciples of Christ and was a
practicing Presbyterian during his final decades. No doubt he was
indifferent when the elites of his own denomination caustically
condemned him. And he probably understood these politicized clerics
rarely spoke for most church members. Sojourners editor
Jim Rice, amid his recent blistering critique, opined that Reagan
was at least a “model of civility in contrast to the flame-throwing
rhetoric his successors wield today.” But the Religious Left, in
its countless jeremiads against Reagan’s rule, was itself far from
civil, or even sensible.
