Ronald Reagan on Religion

Ronald Reagan viewed faith and religion as playing a critical and positive role in the political and moral life of the nation, a belief he traced back to the nation's Founding Fathers who understood a divine order transcended the human one. He frequently argued that morality’s foundation is religion, meaning that religion and politics are necessarily related, and that a government needs the church because only those admitting sinfulness can bring the necessary tolerance to democracy. He expressed concern over the secularization trend that began in the 1960s, which he believed was removing religion from its honored place, leading to assaults on religious expression in public life, such as school prayer bans.

He saw the Christian Church, and religion broadly, as a source of national strength and virtue, contrasting this with the atheistic, state-supremacist ideology of the Soviet Union, which he famously labeled the "evil empire." Reagan maintained that while the government must not establish a religion or mandate worship, those who believe must remain free to apply their moral teachings to public questions, asserting that to remove religion’s theological underpinnings poisons society and courts corruption. His personal faith, rooted in the Disciples of Christ tradition of his mother, informed an optimistic view of human goodness but also a firm conviction regarding absolute good and evil in global conflicts, which he considered a spiritual crisis.