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Righting the American Dream

How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision

Righting the American Dream

How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision

A provocative new history of how the news media facilitated the Reagan Revolution and the rise of the religious Right.

After two years in the White House, an aging and increasingly unpopular Ronald Reagan looked like a one-term president, but in 1983 something changed. Reagan spoke of his embattled agenda as a spiritual rather than a political project and cast his vision for limited government and market economics as the natural outworking of religious conviction. The news media broadcast this message with enthusiasm, and white evangelicals rallied to the president’s cause. With their support, Reagan won reelection and continued to dismantle the welfare state, unraveling a political consensus that stood for half a century.

In Righting the American Dream, Diane Winston reveals how support for Reagan emerged from a new religious vision of American identity circulating in the popular press. Through four key events—the “evil empire” speech, AIDS outbreak, invasion of Grenada, and rise in American poverty rates—Winston shows that many journalists uncritically adopted Reagan’s religious rhetoric and ultimately mainstreamed otherwise unpopular evangelical ideas about individual responsibility. The result is a provocative new account of how Reagan together with the press turned America to the right and initiated a social revolution that continues today.

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History: American History

Political Science: American Government and Politics

Religion: American Religions, Christianity

Reviews
Table of contents
Excerpt
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Awards
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Reviews

"Winston shows how the president harnessed the power of the news media to popularize a new ‘religious imaginary’ and thus to build support for his policies.”

Jacobin

"A valuable analysis of the intertwining of faith and politics in America."

Publishers Weekly

“Journalist Diane Winston examines the marriage of religious fervor and politics in the United States, tracing the mainstream version of this phenomenon back to President Ronald Reagan. When the then-struggling president began framing the country’s woes through a spiritual lens in 1983, he quickly garnered passionate support from white evangelicals. Winston offers a withering critique of the media and explains how journalists advanced Reagan’s black-and-white views on religion, economics, and society—perspectives that remain popular today.”

Alta Journal

"Far from a study of religion in the Reagan presidency, the book considers the way Reagan recast presidential images and sound bites to appeal to a perceived sense of moral rightness and particularly to the reemerging Right, creating a social structure beneath his neoliberalism. . . . Careful readers will see in the methods and values explored in this volume the underpinnings of a less religious, more exploitative, and more recent presidential use of media."

Choice

"Standard accounts of the Reagan era treat foreign policy, religious, and economic conservatism as separate spheres that rarely intersected, but Winston’s fascinating and well-argued account shows how the religious worldview championed by President Reagan reinforced the ideological transformation he sought in all three realms. Righting the American Dream will reshape studies of the media no less than our historical understanding of a pivotal era in the history of American religion.”

E. J. Dionne Jr., author of 'Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism–From Goldwater to Trump and Beyond'

“Above and beyond the study of [the religious right,] Righting the American Dream is also an excellent and concise history of journalism in the United States. . . . A fascinating account of the birth and growth and present status of newspapers and electronic media.”

Common Threads

"The familiar bond that connects conservative economic ideology, traditional Christian values, and Republican party politics in the United States continues to shape electoral outcomes and bear scholarly fruit. Diane Winston’s latest work . . . is rich in historical context, with relevant excursions into the evolution of the country’s media landscape, public opinion, and the relationship between the two."

Sociology of Religion

"[Winston] argues that the Regan Revolution was “as much a religious phenomenon as a political and economic one” and that the news media “normalized” this revolution by repeating and reporting Reagan’s worldview . . . [with] neither the means nor the capacity to present Reagan’s messaging with the deep, nuanced background information readers might have needed to understand or critique the president’s standpoint . . . Winston carries her argument about the lack of nuance into the present moment as well, using the epilogue to explore how Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency in 2016 hinged on the same relationship between media and messenger, even after the “deathblow” to consensus media."

American Journalism

"Winston offers a compelling take on how news and other media played a crucial role in establishing a racist, classist, and sexist religious imaginary that continues to shape America’s political, cultural, economic, and media landscapes."

Reading Religion

"In clear and accessible prose, [Winston] explores how during the second half of the twentieth century the US news media bolstered and publicized a heady combination of (evangelical) faith, free enterprise, biblically sanctioned patriarchy, a discourse of personal responsibility, American exceptionalism, support for segregation, advocacy for prayer in public schools, and opposition to abortion rights, the welfare state, and LGBTQ+ equality. . . . Among the strengths of the book is Winston’s convincing demonstration that broad societal trends in the United States often attributed exclusively to “evangelicals” in fact enjoy a much broader social and political base."

Journal of Religious History

"An important corrective to the idea that the news media represent a liberal, secularizing counterpoint to conservative religiopolitical ambitions."

American Religion

“Perhaps no figure is more responsible for the interplay of American media, religion, and politics today than Ronald Reagan. Righting the American Dream masterfully weaves the story of how Reagan created a seemingly organic, but actually entirely constructed, religious imaginary that continues to fundamentally shape the terrain of our most pressing cultural and moral debates.”

Brie Loskota, Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago

“Winston shows how Ronald Reagan had his cake and ate it too, perceiving the mainstream media as liberal while also using the press to promote and normalize his conservative agenda and a lived religion of American hyper-individualism and exceptionalism. A masterful critique, Righting the American Dream is key for anyone who wants to understand the impact of the Reagan era today.”

Heather Hendershot, author of 'When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America'

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One. Context: Media, Politics, and Religion
1. Faith in the Media
2. 1973: The Body Politic and the Religious Body
3. An American Religious Imaginary

Part Two. Reporting Reagan’s Imaginary
4. Evil Empires: Communism and AIDS
5. The “New Patriotism”: The Mission in Grenada
6. Scrooged: Moralizing Welfare and Racializing Poverty

Epilogue

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

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Excerpt

In January 1983, President Ronald Reagan faced an unhappy electorate. By midmonth, his job approval rating would fall to 35 percent— an all- time low. His proposals to cut income taxes and social spending while tightening the money supply and increasing the military budget did not produce the positive results he had predicted. In 1982, the unemployment rate hovered at 10.4 percent and the real gross national product had fallen almost 2.5 percent, the largest drop- off of the postwar era. Housing starts were at their lowest since 1946, while mortgage rates rose to over 16 percent. In fact, the economy was so bad and Reagan’s image so tarnished that the president’s advisors were desperate for their boss to provide a compelling case for his continued leadership. Even conservative Christians, his strongest supporters, were disgruntled by a lack of concrete change: abortion remained legal while school prayer was against the law.

But if Reagan was worried, he didn’t let the public know. Rather than admit anything was wrong, he blamed the news media for erroneous reporting.

“I came in to point out to you accurately where the disarray lies,” the president said at a news conference in the White House press room. “It’s in those stories that seem to be going around, because they are not based in fact.”

Many of those stories were based on leaks from administration insiders, whom the president criticized too. But from a distance of decades, the important question is not who leaked the stories or how true they were. Rather, it’s how, in less than a year, a foundering leader turned into America’s white knight. By exploring the political, religious, and media history of the 1980s through news narratives that helped propagate and, in turn, shape the Reagan Revolution, this book provides an answer. It focuses on the pivotal year of 1983, when the economy rallied, America’s global standing rose, and Reagan convinced many conservatives and evangelicals that he was still their man.

Reagan’s ability to set and dominate news media narratives was crucial to his success. And whether discussing international relations, military decisions, or economic policy, he often included a religious or moral dimension in his comments. Critics dismissed his claims of divine justification for secular actions, but their complaints had little impact on the president or his policies. Nor did they stop the recasting of the nation’s culture and ideology. Americans’ understanding of themselves and their world was changing. The religious worldview that accompanied this shift encompassed more than a set of sacred beliefs. It also enfolded economic tenets, social values, and political practices that would shape the United States and its citizens. Reagan knew or intuited this transformation, which mirrored his own ideas about God and country, and made it central to his political platform.

I call that cluster of religious, economic, and political beliefs an American religious imaginary. A commonsense understanding of metaphysical truths, ethical norms, and civic virtues, a religious imaginary draws on traditional religious and/or cultural notions of the common good to provide mission, identity, and purpose for citizens as individuals and as national stakeholders. A national religious imaginary can encompass a belief in the supernatural; but most important, it offers a shared orientation to everyday life, especially political and economic convictions reflecting a higher purpose. Religious imaginaries shape individual identity and social relations, including what people expect of themselves and their world; how they expect others will behave and how they interpret their own daily interactions; and most significantly, what they know to be true, real, and good. In other words, a religious imaginary instills a collective sense of what’s normal— that is, the correct way (whether for religious or for ethical reasons) to live one’s life as both a private individual and a public person. It also provides a way for people to think about national destiny and their role in its fulfillment.