Regent University in Virginia Beach every year hosts a Ronald Reagan Symposium around Reagan’s February 6 birthday to examine his legacy. This year’s featured speakers like Calvin Coolidge biographer Amity Shlaes, Ryan Anderson of the Heritage Foundation, Joe Loconte of Kings College, and Margaret Thatcher biographer Claire Berlinski, among others. There was a film presentation of Reagan’s famous 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing,” which was Reagan’s national political debut. It persuaded my father at the last minute to cast his first presidential ballot for Barry Goldwater, to the vast disappointment of my mother, an avid Lyndon Johnson fan.
This year’s symposium didn’t address Reagan’s religious faith or his role in the mobilizing of the then nascent Religious Right. Regent founder Pat Robertson, who attended a lunch for the symposium’s speakers, was one of several key Evangelicals who had previously supported born again Christian Jimmy Carter in 1976 but shifted to Reagan in 1980. Strong support by Evangelicals, many of whom were formerly Democrats or politically unengaged, was key to Reagan’s two dramatic landslide victories.
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