Besides Presidential Candidate Ron Paul, it was conservative columnist George Will who pointed out that "Reaganism" is not conservatism.
He quoted from one of the 40th President's recent biographers:
"Diggins' thesis is that the 1980s were America's "Emersonian moment" because Reagan, a "political romantic" from the Midwest and West, echoed New England's Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Emerson was right," Reagan said several times of the man who wrote, "No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature." Hence Reagan's unique, and perhaps oxymoronic, doctrine -- conservatism without anxieties. Reagan's preternatural serenity derived from his conception of the supernatural."
Just like the offensive assertion on the Gipper's Simi Valley tombstone, "Man is basically good", the notion that one should listen to the "sacred" law of one's nature is laughable.
Man unredeemed is man reprobate, full of fallen nature, rebellious to the extreme:
"Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:" (Romans 5:12)
We have a sin nature, inherited from Adam, the first father who sinned against God, eating the forbidden fruit, seeking the knowledge of good and evil part from the gentle leading of God the Father.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is the last person anyone should be listening to for advice. A bitter Unitarian minister whose happiness was forever shattered by the untimely death of His son, the preacher from Harvard disdain all spiritual realities, trusting to his fallen mind and nature, yet still forever unable to reconcile his homespun humanistic optimism with a world ever-still dominated by death and despair.
George Will's assertion that "Reagan's preternatural serenity derived from his conception of the supernatural" is incorrect. Ronald Reagan's adherence to Unitarianism denies all things spiritual.
More on this followed later in Will's article:
"Diggins says Reagan imbibed his mother's form of Christianity, a strand of 19th-century Unitarianism from which Reagan took a foundational belief that he expressed in a 1951 letter: "God couldn't create evil so the desires he planted in us are good." This logic -- God is good, therefore so are God-given desires -- leads to the Emersonian faith that we please God by pleasing ourselves. Therefore there is no need for the people to discipline their desires. So, no leader needs to suggest that the public has shortcomings and should engage in critical self-examination."
Unitarianism is not Christianity, a reprehensible confusion which Will must remedy for himself. Unitarianism denies the divinity and the Finished Work of Jesus Christ.
Another president-Unitarian was William Howard Taft, a frightened man who ate himself into sickness and death, so consumed was he with fear.
Without Christ, there is no salvation, there is not freedom from the fear of torment, for:
"There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love." (1 John 4:18)
What is the Perfect Love, according to the apostle John?:
"Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God.
"And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.
"Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world." (I John 4:15-17)
Christ Himself, and His death on the Cross -- that is Perfect Love. Unitarians reject Him and His Finished Work. Taft lived in chronic fear. Reagan lived in fantasized optimism, as Will later commented:
"Diggins thinks that Reagan's religion "enables us to forget religion" because it banishes the idea of "a God of judgment and punishment."
Yet without Christ, there is nothing but judgment:
"He that believeth on him [Jesus Christ] is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God." (John 3:18)
So, what is the proper response to the notion that "God is good, therefore so are God-given desires -- leads to the Emersonian faith that we please God by pleasing ourselves", which Will soundly derides?
Consider the prophet Jeremiah:
"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9)
Even Solomon roundly asserts the folly of leaning on one's own understanding:
"Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.
"In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths." (Proverbs 3:5-6)
We are called to "trust in the Lord", not in our own nature.
Yet the Finished Work causes the Lord Jesus Christ to live in us through the Holy Spirit, so that He indeed can lead us to will and to do for His good pleasure! In this sense only, following rebirth through the power of the Holy Spirit, can one indirectly argue that"we please God by pleasing ourselves":
How is this possible? Let's start with the prophecy in Ezekiel:
"And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh:
"That they may walk in my statutes, and keep mine ordinances, and do them: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God." (Ezekiel 11:19-20)
Here, the "stony heart" represents a law-minded, a condemnation-laden heart, full of guilt and sin, for everyone of us has inherited this sin nature from Adam.
The "heart of flesh" represents not a human heart, or even a heart given over to sin, but rather a "soft heart", or "a heart of good tidings", a heart full of the Good News -- the Gospel of Grace through Jesus Christ, who frees us from the bondage of sin and makes us one with the Father!
Because of the redemption and sanctification through Christ for every one who believes on Him (cf 1 Corinthians 1:30), we are then able to obey the law, through the power of the Holy Spirit within us!
"For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace." (Romans 6:14)
then
"Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness." (Romans 6:18)
And finally
"There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." (Romans 8:1)
We are made the righteousness of God, and we are thus bound to this righteousness, which in transforms us (cf Romans 12:2; 2 Corinthians 3:18) that our fleshly mind and body accord with the new man that now lives in us!
Therefore, we can indeed have "conservatism without anxieties", but only through Jesus Christ, for:
"If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." (John 8: 36)
Free to sin? Of course not!
"What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?
"God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?
"Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?
"Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.
"For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection:
"Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.
"For he that is dead is freed from sin." (Romans 6:1-7)
We have God's own nature in us -- we are servants of righteousness; we cannot break away from this blessed bondage. We will still fall, we will still fail in our flesh, but our spirit is eternal and forever righteous. And as the "wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), why would we go back to such a hateful, despairing, doomed dungeon? In fact, because of the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, we cannot, nor do we want to.
So, when we reject the old nature of Adam and receive the nature of God Himself in us through the Finished Work of Jesus Christ and the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, we then can live in accordance with the peace of God in us. Now:
"Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
"For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure." (Philippians 2:12-13)
He, God Himself, works within us both to will and to do. So, as a born-again believer, the desires within you are prompted by God. Everything is now by grace, not longer by works, no longer through weak and beggarly striving.
Ronald Reagan's assertion that "God couldn't create evil so the desires he planted in us are good" has merit, if we have received the grace of God through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2: 8-10). No, God did not create evil, but His goodness must be received through repentance, a "changing of the mind" from doing things our way in our strength, and receiving the Holy Spirit, so that we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us (cf Philippians 4:13)
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