The sunlight of human freedom

Today marks the birthday of America’s 40th president, Ronald Reagan, and this year marks the 40th anniversary of his smashing landslide victory in 1984. What were the issues that allowed Reagan to carry 49 states and 525 electoral votes (to his opponent’s 13)?

Ronald Reagan took office during a time of national malaise. The previous decade was marked by Watergate, Vietnam, the oil shock, Jimmy Carter’s inadequacy at home and abroad, and out-of-control inflation. America’s moral consensus seemed to be weakening due to the sexual revolution, the legalization of abortion, the dramatic rise in divorce, and poor educational outcomes (see Reagan’s 1983 “A Nation at Risk” education report).

At the same time, the Soviet Union and global communism seemed ruthless, confident, and unstoppable. America’s allies, particularly in Europe, were even weaker economically and divided politically, meaning that it was unclear whether America had a viable Western alliance to lead.

But over the next four years Ronald Reagan’s policies led the country out of a recession and into a stronger economic and strategic position. Going into the 1984 election cycle one might think that Reagan would focus his campaign on the economic turnaround and a renaissance in America’s armed forces. Reagan did emphasize these, but he went well beyond the advice of some advisors to focus attention on the moral foundations of the republic and the threats to America’s ethical core.

In other words, Reagan took a bold stance on the “social issues.”

A case in point is his 1983 “evil empire speech” to the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), where he labeled the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and “the focus of evil in the modern world.” The “evil” he was talking about was the ideology of communism that rejects the religious nature of human beings, squashing the natural human impulse toward freedom.

The first several minutes of the speech focused on America’s moral ills at home, from school prayer to parental rights. As it was the 10th year since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling, Reagan specifically raised the moral issue of abortion and the provision of contraceptives to minors without parental involvement. He went on to rhetorically ask, “Is all of the Judeo-Christian tradition wrong?”

This theme of America’s Judeo-Christian foundations permeated Reagan’s campaign for the next 18 months. Reagan was no theonomist arguing for a state-imposed religion (indeed, as Mark David Hall has shown, there have been very few true “Christian nationalists” in that sense then or now). Instead, as he told the NAE audience, “The basis of those ideals and principles is … a commitment to freedom and personal liberty that itself is grounded in the much deeper realization that freedom prospers only where the blessings of God are avidly sought and humbly accepted.”

As Reagan campaigned for reelection in 1983-1984, he did not face an easy battle. The economy was just recovering from a recession; the European alliance remained problematic; and the Soviet Union continued to act aggressively, including support for hard-left insurgencies and governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Reagan faced an energetic slate of Democratic candidates, as the youthful Gary Hart and fiery Jesse Jackson took on the establishment candidate, Walter Mondale. The energy seemed to be on the side of the Democrats, particularly after Mondale selected the energizing Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate.

Reagan continued to govern, and campaign, on a unified message of strong national defense, smaller government, lower taxes, and a revival of moral and patriotic sentiment. Scholars call Reagan’s approach a “fusion,” bringing social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and national security conservatives into an unruly coalition. But Reagan did not see his approach as a bundle of somewhat disparate ideas and alliances. He saw human freedom, rooted in divinely created human nature and expressed as ordered liberty under law, as the foundation for national greatness. Voters overwhelmingly responded.

In his second inaugural address (on Jan. 21, 1985), Reagan looked down to our time, knowing that we would look back on the renewal that marked those years. It should provide hope for us today that such renewal is possible once again, but only when all the elements of national greatness are so rooted:

These will be years when Americans have restored their confidence and tradition of progress; when our values of faith, family, work, and neighborhood were restated for a modern age; when our economy was finally freed from government's grip; when we made sincere efforts at meaningful arms reduction, rebuilding our defenses, our economy, and developing new technologies, and helped preserve peace in a troubled world; when Americans courageously supported the struggle for liberty, self-government, and free enterprise throughout the world, and turned the tide of history away from totalitarian darkness and into the warm sunlight of human freedom.