Project 2025 and the Religious Right: Ronald Reagan
A Hollywood Actor With a Hell of a Script
This essay seeks to explain the rise of the Religious Right during the Reagan-era. Please subscribe below to receive the next posts about the Religious Right and post-Reagan, and our current Trump administration. You can view my sources at the end of the post. This is Part 2 in the series, you can view Part 1 here.
During the Nixon administration, someone on Nixon’s staff suggested a conservative ideological handbook so that the team could hit the ground running during the first 100 days of a Republican presidency. Nixon was buddies with Jerry Falwell. Nixon nominated conservative judges to the Supreme Court, and held religious services in the White House. Falwell defended Nixon during Watergate, but Nixon’s credibility was diminished within the religious community, and it played a role in Carter’s rise to presidency.
Falwell & Friends were more than happy to craft that conservative handbook. The Mandate for Leadership of 1981 was delivered to Ronald Reagan, who pulled 60% of his policies from this book. I don’t think a handbook is inherently a bad thing, in fact, there are many liberal/progressive think tanks that do exactly this for Democrat administrations. It helps to be organized and all on the same page.
The 3,000-page book was primarily focused on fiscal policy: banning trade with the Soviet Union, privatizing the US Post Office, obliterating union power, and tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations in the name of ‘trickle-down economics’. It said very little about social policy, but the Heritage Foundation didn’t need to — Reagan had plenty to say on social issues.
Prior to Reagan’s gubernatorial leadership, he was a Hollywood actor and union leader of the actor’s strike in the 1970s. While he was governor, he oversaw one of the most liberal abortion policies passed in the country. He was charismatic and charming. Yet he was a Republican with eyes on the White House, and sought to connect and align with the rising Moral Majority/Religious Right. Falwell & Friends were eager to work with Reagan.
Reagan had been vocally opposed to the Civil Rights movement during the 1970s, and drew up that language during his presidential campaign. He started his campaign in Mississippi, in the same county as three KKK members killed civil rights activists a few years before. Following his announcement, the KKK endorsed Reagan.
The pivotal moment came during his speech in Dallas to a convention of evangelical leaders, when he opened his speech with ‘you cannot endorse me, but I can endorse you’. At a press conference before the convention, Reagan told the press that Creationism should be taught in public schools as prominently as the theory of evolution. Remember in the last post how upset the Moral Majority was about Carter not allowing prayer in schools and forcing Christian schools to integrate? Reagan was the anti-thesis of Carter.
He proudly weaved racist and pro-Christian values while promising America’s greatness as a ‘shining city on a hill’ and standing on states’ rights.
He made good on a lot of those promises in office. While he didn’t get prayer in schools, he did nominate anti-Civil Rights proponents to destroy and decommission the Civil Rights Commission from the inside. He openly supported the apartheid in South Africa, called HIV/AIDS a ‘gay plague’, reduced funding for mental health, launched a ‘war on drugs’ which disproportionately affected marginalized communities, all while obliterating union power, cutting taxes for the rich, and moving jobs overseas. Oil, gas, mining, and other wealthy conservative industries and elites supported his economic policies, even though they ran counter to helping Americans. And just like Trump’s Elon Musk DOGE leader, Reagan went after air traffic controllers.
While Reagan was working the politics, the rise of cable TV brought Pat Robertson and the 700 club’s prosperity gospel into everyone’s home. Jesus loves you, but give Pat your money. The televangelism industry made about $1billion that year, adjusted for inflation. The influence of the Religious Right was everywhere, and yet, a twice-divorced, former union leader, pro-abortion governor was right there to say all the right things. He took their script, their Mandate for Leadership, and ran with it.
So long as you fuse God and country, people will look away while they’re robbed of their economic power.
Reagan walked so Trump could run.
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Bibliography:
https://iatse.net/timeline/organized-labor-in-north-america-under-siege-during-reagan-administration/
https://academic.oup.com/book/25660/chapter-abstract/193101621?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://millercenter.org/rivalry-and-reform/building-movement-party
https://jsr.fsu.edu/issues/vol14/swartz.html
https://www.npr.org/2012/04/26/151444474/party-of-reagan-no-party-of-falwell-writer-says