Ronald Reagan: “Evil Empire” Speech

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

As president, Reagan earned a reputation as “the Great Communicator,” conveying ideas and connecting with listeners in original, striking, and memorable ways. In speaking to the NAE, which was founded in 1942 and four decades later had 3.5 million members with strong religious views, Reagan began by establishing a connection with the audience. In the first few paragraphs of the speech, Reagan explains that he, too, often prayed and was grateful for all the prayers for his success. He then uses humor, as he often did in his talks, to win over his audience; in this case the humor is partly at his own expense, as the joke is about the first politician who ever reached heaven. After the laughter ended, Reagan asserted that many political leaders, himself included, based their political thinking on religious conviction. At the end of this opening section, in paragraphs 8 and 9, Reagan introduces the speech's major idea, explaining that American democracy thrived because of widespread belief in God. He mentions the colonial leader William Penn; two of the founders of the American nation, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington; and the French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, who traveled to the United States in the 1830s and wrote a remarkable account of American life entitled Democracy in America. Each of these historical figures confirms the president's central point: religious faith was the foundation of individual liberty and democratic rule in the United States.

In the next section of the address, Reagan warns that the traditional values that he and the members of the NAE cherish are facing formidable challenges. The president concentrates on three controversies to make his point. The first involves the provision of contraceptives to young women at federally funded clinics. Reagan presents this issue as one of federal “bureaucrats and social engineers” depriving parents of control of their children and, in so doing, turning sexual activity into a “purely physical” matter rather than a moral choice. As the president explains, Congress had started funding family planning clinics years ago, specifically, in 1970. Eight years later, additional legislation required that these clinics serve adolescents, since many members of Congress wanted to lower the high rate of unwanted teen pregnancy. The legislation encouraged parental involvement in young people's choices about birth control; however, it also emphasized the need to maintain confidentiality about any services provided to patients, since teens might not be willing to use such birth control services if clinics were to notify parents. In January 1983, the Department of Health and Human Services announced new regulations for these clinics reflecting the president's preference for parental notification. Only two weeks later, a federal court prevented these new rules from taking effect, holding that they were at odds with the main purpose of the legislation: to prevent unwanted teen pregnancy. In his “Evil Empire” Speech, Reagan challenges that court's reasoning. He even equates being “sexually active,” which could mean having a relationship with only one partner, with promiscuity, which includes casual sex with a number of partners. Reagan's most important point here, though, is to connect this dispute to his larger concern about threats to moral values that are, in his view, the foundation of American society.

The president next discusses the controversy over the exclusion of prayer from public schools. The Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that mandatory school prayer was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, President Reagan and many evangelical Christians who supported him, including members of the NAE, wanted students to have the opportunity to participate in voluntary prayer during the school day. On May 17, 1982, the president submitted to Congress a constitutional amendment that would have allowed “individual or group prayer in public schools or other public institutions” while stipulating that “no person shall be required … to participate in prayer.” Congress took no action, so Reagan sent the proposed legislation to Capitol Hill once more on the same day as his speech to the NAE. Over a year later, on March 20, 1984, the Senate voted on the amendment, which did not secure the necessary two-thirds majority. In this speech, Reagan insists that the courts had gone far beyond protecting the division between church and state. He refers to the schools in Lubbock, Texas, that had allowed student religious groups to use school facilities for their meetings. A federal appeals court invalidated that policy, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in January 1983. The president states here that such rulings erected “a wall of hostility between government and the concept of religious belief itself.”

Reagan's third example of declining morality concerns the volatile issue of abortion. On January 22, 1973, in the case of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court had ruled that a woman had a right to abortion during her first three months of pregnancy, while states could restrict access to abortion in later stages of pregnancy. For millions of Americans, abortion was a moral issue. Many insisted that abortion was a private choice for a woman, her family, and her physician that involved her health and well-being and control of her body. Many others, including the president and the NAE, maintained that abortion involved the taking of human life. Reagan asserts here that the availability of abortion is corrupting moral values and leading to infanticide, such as with the failure to keep alive infants with severe birth defects. He hopes that federal legislation will end such practices and overturn the decision in Roe v. Wade. For the time being, the issues of birth control for young women, school prayer, and abortion can be discouraging, Reagan observes, because they suggest a decline in the nation's morality.

Still, Reagan sees reason for hope. In the next section of his address (paragraphs 28–34), the president cites evidence of “a spiritual awakening.” He concedes that racism and bigotry have been deplorable parts of American life, past and present, yet he believes that an American strength is “transcending the moral evils of our past.” As he closes this part of his talk, Reagan declares that American history is a “story of hopes fulfilled and dreams made into reality.” This idea was central to Reagan's understanding of the American nation and what it represented. He thought that the United States was a unique experiment in freedom, a beacon of hope to people around the world, and a society that allowed people to achieve their potential. As usual, when Reagan looked to the future, he was an optimist.

Reagan next shifts from domestic to international affairs, concentrating on the cold war struggle with the Soviet Union. He reminds his audience that he condemned the Soviets in his first presidential press conference, in January 1981, for rejecting religious morality and for insisting that whatever served their political and international goals was moral. This point was crucial, because Reagan believed that the U.S.-Soviet struggle was not merely a conflict over power or security or a competition between different economic or social systems. Here, he portrays this struggle as primarily a moral contest between two nations with fundamentally different values. Reagan remarks that the United States sought cooperation with the Soviets but not at the cost of “our principles and standards” or “our freedom.” Reagan was replying to critics who complained that his strong condemnations of Communism had worsened Soviet-American relations and that his proposals for deep cuts in nuclear arsenals were unrealistic, as they required the Soviets, who had more land-based missiles, to make greater reductions. Reagan implies that those who disagree with his Soviet policies are like the appeasers of the 1930s who did not understand that Nazi Germany was a totalitarian nation with unlimited ambitions for aggressive expansion.

The proposal for a freeze of U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals jeopardized national security, according to the president. The nuclear freeze movement gathered momentum in the early 1980s, drawing support from members of Congress, concerned citizens, scientists, clergy, antinuclear activists, and security experts. On June 12, 1982, more than five hundred thousand people attended a nuclear freeze rally in Central Park in New York City. They thought that the United States and the Soviets should stop adding to their nuclear arsenals as a first step toward controlling the arms race. In this speech, Reagan asserts that the freeze proposal, while simple and appealing, is deceptive and dangerous. In the president's view, a freeze would allow the Soviets to retain superiority in some categories of nuclear weapons, advantages they had gained through the expansion of strategic forces over the previous fifteen years. In addition, a freeze could only lead to an illusory peace, since it would not change Soviet values, ideology, or ambitions. Reagan told his audience in Orlando something that he repeated often during his presidency: Peace would come only through strength.

Reagan next shifts back to a comparison of U.S. and Soviet morality. He uses the story about the young father, his daughters, and their future to assert that the spiritual matters more than the physical—that it was better, according to a famous cold war phrase, to be dead than Red. Reagan then uses language more reminiscent of a sermon than of a typical presidential speech as he calls for prayers for those living in “totalitarian darkness” in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European nations that it dominated. Those who enforced this totalitarian dominance, denying individual rights such as the freedom to worship, are described as “the focus of evil in the modern world.”

Reagan continues this discussion of evil (paragraphs 45–47) until it culminates in the famous phrase that gave the address its popular title. Drawing on the writer C. S. Lewis, the president maintains that evil is usually the work not of brutish figures in sordid places but of seemingly ordinary people in comfortable offices. Their ideas and rhetoric, at least on the surface, can be appealing, even reassuring; but beneath this veneer can be found aggressive impulses and repugnant values. Reagan proceeds to call his immediate audience, as people of the church, to a moral crusade. Just as they fought evils at home—such as the exclusion of prayer from public schools and the corrupting effects of abortion—so they should rally against international evil by supporting administration efforts to defeat a nuclear freeze proposal that could benefit only the Soviet Union and the totalitarianism it sought to extend. He urges his listeners to place the debate about a nuclear freeze in the context of the cold war “struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.” The United States and the Soviet Union are not morally equivalent or equally responsible for international tensions or the arms race. One nation, as Reagan previously explained, was an inspiration for freedom-loving people the world over. The other was “an evil empire.”

Reagan ends his address on a hopeful note. He reiterates that the real battle in the United States and around the world is a moral conflict. The victor will not be the side with superior military strength but the one with greater spiritual resolve. Vanquishing Communism will require maintaining religious faith. Reagan uses the example of Whittaker Chambers, a controversial figure who had been a Soviet agent during the 1930s but later repudiated Communism and testified in a famous trial that a former State Department official, Alger Hiss, had provided government secrets to the Soviets. Hiss maintained that he was innocent, but he was eventually convicted of perjury. During the 1950s, Chambers became increasingly gloomy about Communist threats and the strength of Western nations to resist them. Many conservatives endorsed his perspective, and Reagan thought that the connection Chambers saw between faith in God and resistance to Communism was as important in the 1980s as it had been thirty years earlier. Nevertheless, Reagan maintains that however vital and resilient it might seem, Communism is dying. He repeats an idea that he had included in a speech in June 1982 to the British Parliament, when he said that the eventual destination of Marxism-Leninism, the philosophical basis of Soviet Communism, would be “the ashheap of history” (Cannon, p. 272). Ultimately, religious conviction, cooperation, and common purpose, in the words of Thomas Paine, the famous writer from the era of the American Revolution, would enable Americans “to begin the world over again.”