President Reagan told a group of broadcast evangelists yesterday in Washington that Americans had no need to fear the future because “we have a promise from Jesus to soothe our sorrows, heal our hearts and drive away our fears.”
In a speech to 4,000 people attending the National Religious Broadcasters convention, Reagan made 24 references to God and Jesus and strongly attacked the Supreme Court’s ban on prayer in public schools.
“God, source of all knowledge, should never have been expelled from our children’s classrooms,” he declared to the thunderous approval of the audience which included the Rev. Jerry Fahvell, the Christian Evangelist who heods the Moral Majority.
Joseph Berger, the religion editor of Newsday, a Long Island daily, said Reagan’s speech contained all “the markings of a church sermon,” He quoted Jeffrey Hodden, a Virginia sociologist who has written a book on broadcast evangelists, as saying he could not recall a more “explicitly Christian” speech by Reagan.
Reagan’s address to the evangelists, considered an important potential political constituency for Reagan, was the President’s first speech since his announcement Sunday that he would seek re-election.
SIMILAR TO SPEECH LAST MARCH
Reagan’ s speech yesterday was similar in tone to one he made last March in Orlando to the National Association of Evangelicals, an organization of conservative churches and agencies, which came under stinging denunciation from leaders of the three branches of Judaism.
The President told the Orlando gathering that “there is sin and evil in the world and we are enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.” He said Soviet Communism “is the focus of evil in the modern world” and that those favoring a mutual freeze on nuclear weapons were ignoring “the aggressive instincts of the evil empire.”
Jewish religious leaders said the use by the President of moral absolutes “in the name of Jesus” was morally offensive and possibly a violation of his constitutional obligations; that castigation of the Soviet Union as the “focus of evil” might unwittingly bring about the “catastrophe” of a nuclear holocaust; that it implied an attempt to silence opposition to the President’s policies, including support of prayer in public schools; and threatened the nation’s religious pluralism.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
