A chat with Paul Kengor

A few years ago, I met Paul Kengor at the Rivers Club in Pittsburgh at a speaking event delayed two years due to COVID. Kengor, a political science professor at Grove City College, wrote our Jimmy Carter retrospective in this issue. He’s a busy guy—a husband, author, visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and director of Grove City’s Institute for Faith and Freedom. Oh—and the father of eight. I asked Kengor a few questions in connection with his essay:

What drew you to the topic of faith and the American presidency? The shortest answer is the Reagan years. I came of age in the 1980s. That said, I vividly remember the late 1970s and how bad things had gotten in America. I remember my dad getting home late from work after dark in the very cold winter of 1978-79, cursing about waiting in line for over an hour to pump a mere 5 gallons of rationed gasoline into his giant gas-guzzling Plymouth. That was an everyday occurrence.

By the late 1980s, I was a pre-med major and was actually apolitical. However, I was quickly engrossed by extraordinary world events taking place at the time, namely, the collapse of communism. I became the campus conservative and went to graduate school to study subjects like the end of the Cold War, and especially individuals like Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher.

According to your research, how would you say a president’s faith trickles down into the everyday lives of American citizens? Bringing it back to Jimmy Carter, his willingness to speak openly about being “born again” really inspired a lot of Americans. Unfortunately, when a Republican like President George W. Bush later tried to talk about his faith, even when prompted by reporters, liberals vilified him and told him to “keep his faith out of the public square.” It’s an outrageous double standard.

You are a practicing Roman Catholic but were an evangelical prior to that. Tell us about your faith journey. I went from being an agnostic and near ­atheist in college to becoming an evangelical and then Roman Catholic. One thing that has always drawn me to the Roman Catholic faith is the strong intellectual tradition and impressive theological consistency. For 2,000 years, there’s nothing that matches it. Jesus Christ founded a Church, initially through Peter. The fact that this one lasted into the Middle Ages and through Martin Luther and into today suggests an undeniable supernatural element to me.

Your book The Crusader was the inspiration for the presidential biopic Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid. I understand you visited the film set in Guthrie, Okla. What was that like? It was fun, a cool thing to be a part of. Of course, I met everyone, from the lead actors and actresses to the camera guys and the folks building the sets. Dennis Quaid is a good guy, as is David Henrie, who plays the young Reagan.

Your most recent book, The Devil and Karl Marx, traces the spiritual roots of communism. How does Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine relate to the country’s suffering at the hands of the Soviet Union in the 1930s? Putin is a throwback. He’s actually not a Marxist-Leninist, even though he was trained in the KGB in the 1980s and said in an April 2005 speech to the Russian Duma that the collapse of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century. Putin is an old Russian nationalist, a throwback to the Russian and even Soviet strongmen of times past. He’s a thug, for sure. I’ve long feared that we’ve yet to see the worst of Putin in Ukraine.