Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision

USC journalism professor Winston (Religion in Los Angeles) argues in this illuminating history that Ronald Reagan’s ability to “set and dominate news media narratives” led to broad shifts in the country’s “religious, economic, and political beliefs.” Spotlighting Reagan’s remarkable turnaround in 1983, when he went from a 35% approval rating to establishing himself as America’s “white knight” and winning a landslide reelection in 1984, Winston asserts that Reagan’s practice of injecting “a religious or moral dimension” into his comments enabled him to impose his conservative Christian values on the country, unmake the New Deal consensus, entrench a Darwinian vision of capitalism, and enact a foreign policy “dominated by his loathing of communism and the Soviet Union.” Winston sheds valuable light on how American reporters covered the invasion of Grenada and the AIDS crisis, and on the rise of the evangelical movement in the U.S. and its entwinement with conservative politics, and she incisively analyzes the subtleties of Reagan’s messaging, noting, for example, that “Morning in America,” a key advertisement from his reelection campaign, utilized a church wedding scene to emphasize how religion and morality were essential to his vision of a “new patriotism.” Unfortunately, Winston paints the American press with a broad brush and somewhat underplays how a rebounding economy and other real-world circumstances helped Reagan’s message resonate with a broad swath of voters. Still, this is a valuable analysis of the intertwining of faith and politics in America. Photos. (July)