Election years are always full of surprises, and one of the biggest ones so far this year has been the ostentatiously "religious" nature of Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign. In the State of the Union address that served as the president's unofficial campaign kickoff, he referred to God 10 times and included a call for state-sanctioned prayer in the public schools.
But that was only the beginning. In the weeks since, while Lebanon burned and his aides contemplated intervention in the Persian Gulf, Reagan has been on the campaign trail making speeches that overflow with overt, and often specifically Christian, religious language. He has identified the three great accomplishments of his administration as the economic recovery, the military buildup, and what he calls a "spiritual awakening," symbolized by his commitment to the New Right's favorite moral issues: school prayer, anti-abortion legislation, and tuition tax credits. He has pledged that after the prayer in the schools debate is concluded, he will begin pushing with renewed fervor for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion.
Some of the religiosity of the Reagan re-election drive can be explained by the fact that during the last three years, he has actually done very little to further the New Right and the right-to-life social agenda. Reagan the candidate knows that, come November, he will need the free publicity, fund-raising capacity, and network of volunteers those forces can offer. In the absence of Republican primary opposition, these early months are a convenient time to secure that hard core of support.
But Reagan's early moral offensive also points to an important truth about his often startling popular success, both as candidate and president. Perhaps more than any other currently active politician, Ronald Reagan understands that in our technological, bureaucratic, and fragmented society, secular ideologies of the right and left are no longer meeting people's needs and yearning for a new sense of community and a social vision rooted in strong moral values.
One of the places where this often vague spiritual-political discontent has been most politically visible and organized has been the right-to-life movement. Reagan and allied New Right political operatives have stepped into the moral vacuum by making abortion a central issue of their campaigns.
By this astute feat of perception and manipulation, Reagan and the Right have successfully claimed the political high ground of vision and values for a very selective kind of morality. It is a morality that would protect the life of unborn children in the United States while funding the slaughter of children in Central America, escalating the risk of nuclear holocaust, and severely cutting back social service programs necessary for the survival and health of low-income children after they are born. Reagan and his cohorts have to a large extent tied the deep commitment millions of religious people feel to the sanctity of life to a broader ideological agenda that degrades human life in favor of private profit and military dominance.
All this didn't have to happen. The religious people who oppose abortion are not inherently reactionary. In fact most of them are working-class people who have been hurt by the Reagan economic program. And some of their sons are undoubtedly among the troops being sent to places like Lebanon, Grenada, and Honduras. But many of these deeply committed Christians have been driven into the arms of the Right by a combination of the doctrinaire secularism of liberal and left politics and the narrow social morality still too often taught in the churches.
The moral poverty of liberal politics has been demonstrated all too well this year on the Democratic side of the presidential campaign. Only the underfunded underdogs, George McGovern and Jesse Jackson, have seriously attempted to raise a voice of moral indignation against war and injustice and to articulate a vision of America rooted in respect for human dignity, equality, and cooperation. But the press and party establishment relegated McGovern to the impotent role of "conscience of the party," and Jackson has undercut his own moral appeal with his reckless and hurtful remarks about Jews.
Meanwhile the two leading Democratic contenders, Walter Mondale and Gary Hart, seem to think they can overcome Reagan's rhetoric of "the city on a hill" by promising, respectively, the bureaucracy of the 1950s or the brave, new technocracy of the 1990s. The Democratic campaign is evidence that most liberal politicians have been so educated into a cynical, value-free, balance-of-power approach to politics that they have lost the capacity to speak or act out of moral conviction.
The moral bankruptcy of the official Democratic opposition in the face of the Reagan crusade makes it even more important that Christians insist on raising the whole range of moral issues this year. We have to be the ones to say, "Yes, abortion is an important moral issue. But so is the threat of nuclear war, the suffering of the poor, the oppression of women, U.S. support for apartheid, the exile of the Palestinians ..."
One valuable way of raising the moral issues is found in the growing call in the churches for a more comprehensive and consistent pro-life stance. This call is especially being heard in the U.S. Catholic church. Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, chairperson of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' Pro-Life Committee, has recently stated his hope that opposition to abortion will come to be viewed as one part of an overall pro-life agenda that includes respect for the lives of potential victims of nuclear war, people in Central America, and prisoners on death row. Bernardin reflects the growing conviction of many in his church and elsewhere that respect for life is a "seamless garment" that includes a commitment to enhance the quality of life of the poor and powerless and to care for the physical and emotional health of the families into which children are born.
This consistent pro-life stance has created quite a stir in Catholic circles. And it is not hard to imagine such a vision finding great relevance and appeal in other church communions and even in the larger society. In fact it is the kind of thinking that, taken far enough and seriously enough, could even lead to a spiritual awakening.
Danny Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.
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