Ronald Reagan's Forgotten Speech to Evangelicals at Wheaton

I spent this past week at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, where I combed through several dozen boxes of material from the 1980 and 1984 campaign records and also attended the “Age of Reagan” conference. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience and another reminder of the reasons I enjoy archival research.

I came to the Reagan Library to look for more material on his campaign’s outreach to evangelicals and Catholics, but at this point, given the plethora of scholarship on the topic, I had some apprehensions about whether I would be able to find anything new. After all, Reagan’s outreach to the Christian Right is now a familiar story at this point. Every scholar in the field knows about his speech to evangelicals in Dallas at the Religious Roundtable’s National Affairs Briefing in August 1980, and most are probably also aware of his address to the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Lynchburg, Virginia, in October 1980 and his subsequent visit to Liberty University (which was then called Liberty Baptist College). I’ve written about all of those things myself in God’s Own Party – and so have several other historians of the Religious Right.

But on this archival research trip, I was excited to discover information about a Reagan campaign speech to evangelicals that most scholars in the field (including myself) have so far overlooked: Reagan’s speech at Wheaton College on October 8, 1980, a week after his visit to Lynchburg. When I discovered a folder of information on Reagan’s speech at Wheaton, I was intrigued, because I realized that this speech might change the way we perceive the Christian Right.

Previous accounts of Reagan’s outreach to evangelicals in 1980 have focused on his interactions with Jerry Falwell and other members of the Moral Majority, but I think that in doing so, scholars (myself included) have probably given too much emphasis to Reagan’s attempt to bolster a God-and-country sort of Christian Right that paved the way for 21^st-century Christian nationalism. We have overlooked another group of evangelicals – the moderately conservative intellectuals who were strongly opposed to what today we would call Christian nationalism and who wanted instead to help the poor and cultivate international alliances. As I discovered in my research this past week, it is that last group (the group of intellectually minded evangelicals associated with institutions like Wheaton College) that the Reagan campaign team especially wanted to reach – not the more conservative group associated with the Religious Right.

By October, several leading advisors on Reagan’s campaign team were worried about the possibility that Reagan’s speeches to “fundamentalists” (as Jerry Falwell and others on the right wing of evangelicalism were then called) were hurting his national image among moderates. Reagan’s appearance at the National Affairs Briefing was especially damaging, they thought, because more than a month after it occurred, people were still asking Reagan about what one pastor (Southern Baptist Bailey Smith) had said to the crowd right before Reagan spoke – that God “does not hear the prayer of a Jew.”

After August, the campaign team nixed several potential campaign appearances that religious advisor Bob Billings suggested, such as the Southwide Baptist Fellowship meeting on October 4. Elizabeth Dole, the chair of Voters for Reagan-Bush, was especially skeptical of the net value of reaching out to the Baptists.

She and others in the campaign team approved Reagan’s speech to the National Religious Broadcasters in Lynchburg only because the campaign staff on the religious outreach team insisted that it was an ecumenical event that would reach well beyond the “fundamentalists.” As Bill Chasey, the director of Reagan’s Christian voter outreach program, told Dole in a memo on September 15, “This group represents not only an isolated segment of our society, but also Representatives of many mainline denominations.”[1]

Campaign advisor Bill Timmons reiterated this message the next day. “I believe we should do the October 3^rd Religious Broadcaster event in Lynchburg, Virginia,” he wrote. “Earlier concern about identifying with one group or another is not valid in this case because all broadcasters (radio-TV) in the Christian community are a part of this, I understand.”[2] Plus, as Chasey told Dole, President Jimmy Carter had already accepted an invitation to speak a day before Reagan’s potential appearance. Reagan would be throwing away an opportunity to reach thousands of people – and possibly conceding some evangelical votes to Carter – if he didn’t accept the invitation to speak a day after the president.

The skeptics on the campaign team consented – but only on condition that they would rein in Reagan and keep him from looking like a fundamentalist religious nut. Reagan had recently expressed doubts about evolution, which had reinforced doubts about his possible extremism, some of his campaign staff thought. If he went to Lynchburg, they had to keep him from doing something similar. “It is absolutely imperative that RR stay away from a discussion of his own spiritual life,” speechwriter Bill Gavin told senior campaign aides Martin Anderson, Jim Brady, and Lyn Nofziger in an October 2 memo, with the word “spiritual” underlined. If asked about school prayer, “the first words he says should be: ‘I am totally opposed’ to any state-mandated prayer. Prayer must be voluntary.” “The point is that RR emerges from this forum having strengthened his image as a man of spiritual values but also as one who respects religious diversity (avoiding the ‘qualified Christian’ remark by an aide),” Gavin said.

When Reagan came to Lynchburg on October 3, he mostly stuck to the script and played the part of an ecumenically minded moderate – while also signaling that he was perfectly happy to be among the “fundamentalists.” When a reporter asked him whether he thought God heard the prayers of Jews, he responded in the affirmative. At the same time, he endorsed prayer in the public schools, saying “I don’t think that we should ever have expelled God from the classroom.” Reagan, it seemed, was well positioned to win the “fundamentalist” vote – but what about centrist evangelicals who were moderate or liberal Republicans and who feared that Reagan’s strident hawkishness or opposition to the Department of Education made him too extreme to support?

That was the backdrop for Reagan’s visit to Wheaton the next week, on October 8.

As the Republican strategist and consultant Vince Breglio told Bill Gavin on October 6 – only four days after Gavin had made a concerted effort to ward off any possibility that Reagan might appear too “fundamentalist” in Lynchburg – Wheaton was not like Falwell’s Moral Majority. Reagan was going to Wheaton not primarily to talk about religion but to talk about education. Reagan needed to prove that his opposition to the Department of Education did not signal a lack of commitment to education per se; he had to show that he had a philosophy of education and cared deeply about educational excellence. His campaign selected Wheaton for this speech because Wheaton was an educational powerhouse. Evangelicals there cared about the life of the mind.

“The overriding objective of this speech theme is to provide the Governor with the opportunity to address a topic on which he has a strong record (educational aid to the disadvantage[d] who wish to continue their higher education) and reinforce his own commitment to educational values,” Breglio told Gavin. “This speech theme should be pointed toward the Anderson voter as well as the undecided voter group.”[3]

As Breglio’s memo indicated, the Reagan campaign was still worried in early October about losing votes to independent presidential candidate John Anderson, a liberal Republican congressional representative from Illinois who was also a born-again Christian and member of the Evangelical Free Church of America. Anderson might have enough appeal among moderate Republicans in the Chicago suburbs to throw the state of Illinois to Carter, the Reagan campaign feared. Reagan needed to appear as thoughtful and irenic, concerned about education and the common good, to win over Wheaton’s moderate Republicans, who might otherwise be tempted by Anderson’s campaign.

“In comparison to high-church Protestantism it is definitely conservative,” one unsigned internal Reagan campaign briefing from early October stated, when summarizing the political climate at Wheaton College. “On the other hand, it is much more liberal than the Moral Majority which is a dirty word on campus. The Wheaton College faculty is rather liberal, while the student body is basically conservative. The Wheaton students do not want to politicize religion. They are more interested in 3^rd World issues such as refugees and the needs of the poor. Some of this can be accounted because of the fact that many of the students go on to become missionaries and are interested in the underdeveloped nations of the world.”[4]

Because of Wheaton’s emphasis on missions, Breglio said, it was also the ideal location for Reagan to counteract the erroneous impression that his opposition to détente was a manifestation of isolationism or a lack of concern about other countries. “Those who believe that Ronald Reagan stands for neo-isolationism should have their perception strongly challenged by the Governor’s remarks,” Breglio wrote. “The remaining impression should be that a Reagan administration will tear down the fences that separate nations, not build them up, nor will he further isolate American interests from the interests of the world.”[5]

Reagan came to Wheaton with the belief that the evangelicals there believed that education and mission went hand-in-hand, so he gave a speech that made the case for education as a means of preparing the next generation to spread the American message of freedom throughout the world.

“I say it time for Americans to once again take to heart the command to ‘teach all nations,’” Reagan told the assembled crowd of more than 2,000 people, in a reference to the Great Commission that he was sure would resonate with evangelicals.

“Our educational system has produced men and women whose mastery of science and technology has enabled them to help the poor, the needy, the starving and the destitute, all over the world. We must continue this great tradition.

“The revival of the great tradition demands a new spirit of cooperation between citizens and teachers and private institutions and all levels of government.

“American education must become, once again, not only a means by which we teach our children the best our civilization has to offer, but a means by which our children help the needy and the poor in our nation and all over the world.”[6]

This mission was grounded in a theistic worldview – a belief that humans were not merely material beings, Reagan argued. “Materialists see this world as kind of God and try to get all they can out of it,” Reagan said. “But our philosophy has been different. We have tried to get all the good we can from this world because material goods serve the needs of millions of families who are thereby freed from hunger and poverty, freed to develop their own spiritual and intellectual gifts. That’s not materialism. That’s Americanism. All we have, all we have ever built, all the hopes and dreams we want to come to pass, all of this is dependent on education in freedom. . . . No nation of materialists or hedonists could ever believe that.”[7]

Education as a means to appreciate the blessings of freedom and to share those blessings with the poor and needy at home and with others throughout the world – that was the essence of Reagan’s message to Wheaton.

The message worked. On Election Day, Reagan carried DuPage County, Illinois (where Wheaton is located) with 64 percent of the vote; Anderson won only 10 percent. And Reagan won Illinois’s electoral votes, with 49.65 percent of the popular vote.

Perhaps even more importantly, he entered office with the support not only of the Moral Majority but also of centrist evangelicals who did not want an America-First candidate but who instead wanted a president who wanted to cultivate America’s relationship with the rest of the world and who saw education as a vital means of preparing the next generation to help others and spread the message of freedom. This alliance lasted not only through Reagan’s presidency, but into the beginning of the 21^st century and beyond.

Today, of course, that alliance has been broken. After decades of Republican voting, Wheaton students in 2020 supported Joe Biden over Donald Trump by an 8-point margin, according to the Wheaton Record’s poll. Though a 2024 Wheaton Record poll showed Trump winning a narrow plurality of the Wheaton student vote, he still fell short of a majority. If Reagan’s appeal to Wheaton-style evangelicals was based on a message of support for education and international mission, perhaps it shouldn’t be too surprising that a Republican president who does not share those values finds it difficult to win the votes of Wheaton students. And the same is true of DuPage County, which cast 55 percent of its votes for Harris in 2024 and 57 percent for Biden in 2020.

If we want to understand what has happened to Wheaton’s politics in recent years, we need to understand where they were politically in 1980 – and what Reagan told Wheaton evangelicals to win their trust. Reagan’s message to Wheaton was based on the premise that education mattered and that Americans had a duty to share their blessings with the rest of the world. I think that some evangelicals still believe those things today – even if Reagan’s party no longer does.

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[1] William C. Chasey, Memo to Elizabeth Dole and Max Hugel, September 15, 1980, Folder: “Political Ops – Voter Groups – Christians / Evangelicals (2/4),” box 255, 1980 Reagan Campaign Files, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (RRPL).

[2] Bill Timmons to Chuck Tyson, September 16, 1980, Folder: “Political Ops – Voter Groups – Christians / Evangelicals (2/4),” box 255, 1980 Reagan Campaign Files, RRPL.

[3] Vince Breglio to Bill Gavin, October 6, 1980, Folder: “Speech Files – Drafts & Back-up Documents – Wheaton College, 10/8/80 (2/2),” box 441, 1980 Reagan Campaign Files, RRPL.

[4] “Event Briefing – Wheaton, Illinois,” October 7, 1980, Folder: “Speech Files – Drafts & Back-up Documents – Wheaton College, 10/8/80 (2/2),” box 441, 1980 Reagan Campaign Files, RRPL.

[5] Breglio to Gavin, October 6, 1980.

[6] Ronald Reagan, Speech delivered at Wheaton College (IL), October 8, 1980, Folder: “Speech Files – Drafts & Back-up Documents – Wheaton College, 10/8/80 (1/2),” box 441, 1980 Reagan Campaign Files, RRPL.

[7] Reagan, Speech at Wheaton College, October 8, 1980.