Phil Brennan and NewsMax Staff
Tuesday, June 8, 2004

Part one: Forewarned of Shooting Part two follows:

Ronald Reagan’s family and early childhood were unique and difficult. For starters, he and brother Neil never referred to his parents as Mom and Dad. They were simply Nelle and Jack, as they preferred to be called.

Reagan was born in 1911 in Tampico, Ill., during an era when America was more homogeneous. People of different races, ethnicities and religious backgrounds rarely intermarried. Catholicism and Protestantism were considered different religions.

But the Reagans’ marriage was unusual. Jack, a Roman Catholic, was married to Nelle, a stalwart Protestant who belonged to a small denomination known as Disciples of Christ.

The dichotomy, as Kengor notes, would serve the Protestant Reagan well. His sensitivity to the split between Christians would enable him to unite the Christian West and allow America, largely a Protestant nation, to ally with the Catholic Church in a stealth plan to bring down the Iron Curtain.

Other childhood circumstances would also mold him. His personality seems to have been formed by two major factors.

The first was that Jack moved from job to job as a salesman, and his family moved with him. Reagan’s family lived in dozens of homes during his childhood. By Kengor’s count, Reagan had lived in no fewer than 37 residences by the time he went to the White House.

Because of the constant moves, Reagan became a loner. He later admitted that the frequent moves made him “a little slow in making friends. … [T]his reluctance to get close to people never left me entirely.” Withdrawn into himself, he would develop a spiritual relationship with God. The other factor was Reagan’s parents.

Jack was an unsuccessful salesman and an alcoholic. Reagan recalled seeing his father so drunk he had collapsed outside their home and he had to drag his father inside.

Though his father was troubled, Reagan’s mother was his role model. She stood loyally by her husband and explained to her son that people’s shortcomings deserved a response of compassion.

Nelle was more than just a loyal housewife. As Kengor explains, she was probably the most influential person in Reagan’s life, and her story is key to understanding him and his presidency.

Reagan’s mother was an active church member who devoted her life to the poor and helpless.

She was a regular visitor to local hospitals, mental asylums and the sanatorium for tuberculosis sufferers. Every week she would visit the jail, “where she came equipped with apples, cookies, and her Bible.”

Kengor notes that there are many stories of those in jail being converted.

She opened her home to strangers. Young Ron and Neil shared their home with destitute transients and others in need. On one occasion two black basketball players were visiting town and young Ronald discovered they had no place to stay. He brought them home, and Nelle gave them a hearty welcome and accommodation for the night.

She was fearless in her Christianity. For example, she regularly picked up hitchhikers. When others worried about her activities, she dismissed them. She said that if she did God’s work, He would protect her no matter what.

Despite being poor and with her husband frequently unemployed, Nelle believed in tithing, an Old Testament injunction that believers should give 10 percent of their income to charity.

She did so scrupulously. She also believed the words of Leviticus that she would receive a tremendous spiritual and earthly blessing in return. Nelle would later credit her son’s ascent in Hollywood and his financial success in the middle of the Great Depression to her tithing.

Reagan remembered his mother saying, “The Lord [will] make your 90 percent twice as big if you [make] sure He [gets] his tenth.”

The apple did not fall far from the tree. Reagan, Kengor writes, absorbed his mother’s Christianity and practiced tithing as well. He also became an active member of the church and, like his older brother, taught Sunday school. He developed a flair for drama by public readings of the Bible.

For more details on this report and Paul Kengor's book, "God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life," Click Here.

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