Nelle (pronounced Nellie) Wilson Reagan was twenty-six on the occasion of her baptism by full immersion in the icy water of the Hennepin Canal in northern Illinois on Easter morning, 1910. She was short and slim with auburn hair and bright blue eyes. If not a beauty, she was at least blessed with a beaming smile and quicksilver warmth. Baptized “Mrs. J. E. Reagan,” as Church records indicate, she was inducted into the “priesthood of all believers.” A little less than a year later, Nelle gave birth to her second child, Ronald Wilson Reagan, a son born not so much into a religion as into an awakening.
Like a slow-drifting ice floe, Reagan’s later offhand summary of his faith in his 1990 autobiography revealed a kind of serene simplicity that belied a deep berg of cold certainty:
I was raised to believe that God has a plan for everyone and that seemingly random twists of fate are all a part of His plan. My mother—a small woman with auburn hair and a sense of optimism that ran as deep as the cosmos—told me that everything in life happened for a purpose. She said all things were part of God’s Plan, even the most disheartening setbacks, and in the end, everything worked out for the best. If something went wrong, she said, you didn’t let it get you down. You stepped away from it, stepped over it, and moved on… From my mother, I learned the value of prayer, how to have dreams and believe I could make them come true.
Reagan would often make light about his passionate admiration of other people with a throwaway line, “I’m a sucker for hero worship,” but in fact it inhered in his faith. Everybody was good—“a child of God.” He would often admonish his aides in the heat of political battle, “Let’s just remember that we don’t have enemies, just opponents.” He was a Disciple through and through.
Central to his Discipleship was the practice of free, personal choice. A good Christian life was a sort of voyage of open belief and personal discovery of God’s love as opposed to any institutionalized imposition of scriptural truth in which the promise of eternal salvation could be clerically trafficked. But once he entered politics, it’s worth asking: how could Reagan, raised to believe in free choice and inclusive tolerance, lead a Republican party for which those values were anathema? The answer has a lot to do with the votive features of his faith.