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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, APRIL 1, 1983
PAGE 8
concerning the East-West moral struggle as analyzed by syndicated columnist
Patrick Buchanan on March 16, 1983:
Last week in Orlando, President Reagan delivered to the National
Association of Evangelicals one of those ringing addresses he,
almost alone of modern presidents, could have given.... The
preachers who interrupted the president two dozen times with
cheers and applause loved it; the press loathed it. The "Darth
Vader speech," they said in mockery of Reagan's reference to the
captive nations herded together by Moscow as an "evil empire."
Even the lead on some stories contemptuously referred to Reagan's
"Cold War rhetoric."
With this address, Ronald Reagan, it seems to this writer, has
given the right answer to a dilemma faced by every modern
American president, a dilemma that may be described thus: How
does an American president deal with Moscow on the necessary
terms of political equality, while never allowing the American
people to forget the struggle between East and West--because it
is at bottom� moral and philosophical and religious struggle--is
irreconcilable?
Henry Kissinger's approach to this dilemma was to drain the East
West struggle of its ideological content••.to strip from presi
dential toasts references to our fundamental disagreement about
God and Man, to manage the struggle as an Old World balance-of
power contest from the 19th century with which he was so familiar
rather than a revolutionary, life-or-death struggle of the late
20th century to which it rightly belongs.
It is no easy dilemma to resolve.
Reagan recognizes and is
acting upon the notion, correct in my view, that the American
people will not long sustain, with economic sacrifice and surely
not with the blood of their sons, a struggle they do not recog
nize as between good and evil.
Invoking the shade of Whittaker Chambers, the president declared
that the "crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in
which the West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it
collaborates in communism's attempt to make man stand alone with
out God."
We must reject those "simple-minded" appeasers, the President
said, who declare themselves "above it all and label both sides
equally at fault," who "ignore the facts of history and the ag
gressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race
a giant misunderstanding" and thereby remove themselves from "the
struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."
No wonder The Lords Temporal of this Secular City [Washington,
D.C.] � so ticked off; he was talking about them!
The President, we know, is far from correct in describing America as any
longer being "good" in this good-versus-evil struggle, but he is right on
the mark in his analysis that the "crisis of the Western world exists to the
degree in which the West is indifferent to God." The President's liberal