As a Southern Baptist preacher's kid who grew up in Texas in the 1970s, I had lots of reasons to reject Ronald Reagan. That may seem strange to some of you, since it is now assumed that Southern Baptists and the Republican Party that Reagan built are wedded at the hip. But people tend to forget that Jimmy Carter really is a Baptist. So are Bill Moyers, Al Gore and Britney Spears, while we're at it.
People also forget that Reagan was not a Southern Baptist or even what most people would call an evangelical. He grew up in the Church of Christ, in the heartland of American mainline Protestantism.
Nevertheless, I think it is safe to say that, for better or for worse, the current political divide in American life on moral issues is largely the result of three cultural earthquakes -- Woodstock, Roe vs. Wade and the Reagan revolution.
These events shaped modern Democrats as well as Republicans. They shaped religious conservatives and the emerging bloc some call the anti-evangelical voters. And these events helped create or deepened cracks in most religious sanctuaries that remain today and have, if anything, only deepened.
Take the Southern Baptists, for one example. That massive flock of 16-million-plus believers was split by Ronald Reagan just as much, if not more, than doctrinal debates about "biblical inerrancy."
Millions of Southern Baptists saw Reagan as a near Messiah.
For conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention, the rise of Reagan offered hope that the cultural revolution of the Woodstock-Roe era might in some way be overturned. They were wrong, of course.
Nevertheless, the Reagan-loving Baptists lost their fear of politics and jumped back into the public square. But while the conservative grown-ups helped create the Religious Right, their children were alone in their bedrooms watching HBO and MTV. The parents thought they could vote in the kingdom. It didn't work out that way. What they got was "I Love the '80s."
And there were some Southern Baptists who saw Reagan as the Antichrist.
I saw this close up. I had a dear friend in graduate school who literally lost his moderate Southern Baptist faith because of the election of Ronald Reagan. How could he believe in a loving God, if Reagan could be elected president?
The people who voted for Reagan hated the really cool movies then liked the really bad movies. They didn't read the right books and magazines or laugh at the edgy comics. And Reagan was embraced by all of those fundamentalists who wanted to ruin their Southern Baptist Convention, which was on its way to entering the mainline Protestant world.
Most of all, my friend believed that Reagan was dumb. And if Reagan was dumb, that meant that hating Reagan was smart. Everyone who was smart agreed. If you didn't agree, then, well, you must be dumb.
So defeating Reagan was the way to vote in a radically different Kingdom.
What these anti-Reagan Baptists and new evangelicals really needed was a smart, progressive, hip Southern Baptist in the White House -- someone like Bill Clinton. That would be perfect. Then things didn't work out precisely as they imagined, either. They ended up with "Sex & the City."
Lots of them liked it. A few didn't, but the alternative was worse. The alternative was being a religious conservative. The kind of person who yearned for the past and liked Reagan.
Was there another option?
But perhaps Reagan wasn't a Messiah or an Antichrist.
Maybe he was just a normal mainline Protestant guy from the 1950s. Maybe he had good intentions and he did his best and he accomplished a lot of things on the global level and didn't do so much on the national level. Maybe his beliefs were sincere, but not very specific. Maybe he made some people feel good and others feel bad.
Maybe his most important legacy in American religious culture is the Religious Right AND the Religious Left.
But questions remain. Was Ronald Reagan really a cultural and moral conservative? How about George W. Bush? He's another fairly normal mainline Protestant guy with traces of evangelical style who is being called a Messiah on one side and the Antichrist on the other.
Did Ronald Reagan cause America's deep divisions on moral and cultural issues? Did he cause the "Pew Gap" in all the election polls? I doubt it. Could he, if he had actually tried, overturn the culture of Woodstock and Roe? I doubt that, too.
There are things that politicians cannot do. It's a culture thing. It's a moral thing. It's a faith thing.
UPDATE: The webworkers at Christianity Today Inc. have put together a major resource for reporters and other readers, collecting the various statements issued from the evangelical world about Reagan. I assume this will grow in the days ahead, so journalists might want to bookmark it.