Excerpts

God and Ronald Reagan A Spiritual Life Chapter One Jack and Nelle "You can be too big for God to use, but you cannot be too small." --an annotation in Nelle Reagan's Bible January 20, 1924, was a blustery cold, wind-swept Sunday across the plains of Illinois. According to the Dixon Evening Telegraph, tiny Alton, Illinois, had been hit the night before with "the heaviest and most spectacular "snowstorm of the winter. Rail, streetcar, and automobile traffic was plunging valiantly through the storm, but by ten o'clock all were losing the fight. The weather was so cold near Chicago, where the temperature dipped to eighteen degrees below zero, that many of the entries in the International Tournament of the Norge Ski Club failed to jump. And if that weren't enough, the Associated Press was reporting that "a new cold wave "was on its way from Alaska, threatening to exceed already-record lows. Suffering through the freeze, in the northwest corner of the state, was idyllic little Dixon, home to Jack and Nelle Reagan and their two sons. Dixon sits some one hundred miles west of Chicago, and less than an hour's drive to the Mississippi River and the Iowa border. The town is geographically unusual by Illinois standards: the terrain of Illinois is largely flat, but Dixon is nestled among woods and rolling hills. Most of the state was dusted by a fine snow blowing across naked fields, the kind of cutting snow that hurts when it assaults uncovered faces. Dixon, however, enjoyed some protection on that frigid day. Long before Ronald Reagan, the town already had its runins with presidential history. On May 12, 1832, Captain Abraham Lincoln and his company of mounted volunteers arrived at Fort Dixon on the Rock River to serve in the Blackhawk War. Lt. Col. Zachary Taylor was in command, and Lt. Jefferson Davis swore in recruits. At that moment, three future presidents saluted together in obscure Dixon: Taylor became U. S. president in 1848, Lincoln in 1860, and Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederacy shortly thereafter. (A colorful painting of the encounter by local artist Fran Swarbrick resides today in the building where Ronald Reagan attended school.) A continent away on that January day in 1924, fifty-three-year-old Vladimir Ilyich Lenin lay near death in an even colder -- in many ways -- Bolshevik Russia. He had few hours remaining. As Lenin clung to life, twelve-year-old Dutch Reagan clung to his hymnal in the comfort of a pew near the front of the First Christian Church in Dixon, beside his beaming mother, Nelle. Filled with the spirit, Nelle had just finished her closing prayer with her True Blue Sunday school class. Though no one in that contented congregation could know it, this was the start of a spiritual pilgrimage that would lead that boy in the front pew to a spot in front of a bust of a grim Lenin at Moscow State University sixty-four years later, inspired with a religious drive very much like what he and his mother had felt that Sunday in 1924.As Reagan would recognize, Lenin too had been moved by a kind of religious zeal, though very different from his own. It was the clash of their belief systems that would make possible their rendezvous on May 31, 1988. And it was Nelle Reagan who would inculcate her innocent boy with a set of beliefs that helped convince him of the need to defeat the Soviet Union. She and the faith she imparted were the central forces in his life. Without them it is dif ficult to imagine Ronald Reagan becoming president, let alone mounting a crusade against "godless Soviet communism." From all evidence, it appears that Ronald Reagan's faith peaked in intensity at the bookends of his life -- during his youth in Dixon, and again in his mature years as president and former president of the United States. The origins of Reagan's faith were forged in the 1910s, his first decade of life, and the ideas he formed there persisted in his belief system through the 1990s. They predated by far his key political beliefs, which weren't set in stone until the late 1940s -- and, by some measure, until his Republican conversion in the 1960s. The historical record demonstrates abundantly that Reagan was driven by those core political convictions. What has gone overlooked is how deeply, and for how much longer, his core religious convictions moved him. How did he come by his spiritual beliefs? There were a number of key in fluences. Nelle and Jack Ronald Reagan's parents were John Edward and Nelle Clyde Wilson Reagan, called simply Jack and Nelle by their friends (and by their children, at their own request). Jack was a first-generation Irishman, Nelle from Irish-English-Scottish stock. Both hailed from the town of Fulton, in Whiteside County, Illinois, where they were born within eleven days of each other in July 1883. A couple of decades later they were married, on a crisp fall day in November 1904 at the Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception in Fulton. Though Nelle grew up as the youngest of seven, she and Jack had only two children: Ronald and his older brother Neil, who was given the nickname "Moon" by his parents. The young couple seemed carefree in their early years. Each was good-looking, with an attractive personality; they were a fun pair. But that began to change, slowly at first, with the arrival of the boys. Though theirs seemed largely a happy home, with normal problems, there was a split in the Reagan household over religion. It was not a major rift that created bickering, but a difference nonetheless: Jack was Catholic; Nelle a Protestant. One overriding concern both parents shared was that their boys should believe in God and go to church. Nelle, however, was much more earnest in her faith than Jack, who was apparently more apathetic ... God and Ronald Reagan A Spiritual Life . Copyright © by Paul Kengor. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life by Paul Kengor All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.