Richard Nixon isn’t known for being particularly religious.
He’s thought of as calculating. Conniving. Someone who kept a list of enemies — and updated it regularly.
But a new book argues that you can’t really understand the former president, who resigned 50 years ago this month, without understanding the spiritual struggles that occupied him throughout his life.
“One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation” doesn’t claim Nixon was pious or particularly concerned with being a good person.
Instead, author Daniel Silliman highlights how much time he spent thinking about religion, including when he carefully planned church services in the White House, and how he wrestled with the concept of God’s grace.
“One Lost Soul” is not the first to explore Nixon’s religion, but it’s the first to present religion as central to his life and who he was.
By focusing on Nixon’s spiritual struggles, it makes the former president seem less like a one-of-a-kind villain, and more like you or me.
Last week, I spoke with Silliman, who is the news editor at Christianity Today, about his new book, including what Nixon’s religious journey can teach us about our political world today.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Kelsey Dallas: What drew you to Nixon?
Daniel Silliman: There’s a historian reason, and then there’s a personal reason.
As a historian, Nixon’s fascinating because he’s kind of at the center of the 20th century. Whatever it is you’re interested in — Vietnam, civil rights, the Cold War — at some point you’re going to be reading about Nixon.
And then there has always been something about Nixon’s character ... I just saw myself in him.
People ask, “Do you just really like Nixon?” and no, I don’t. But I don’t like Nixon for the exact same reasons I don’t like myself.
There’s something about his resentments and the way he got hurt and offended that is recognizable. It’s something I am trying to work on in myself.
I thought maybe I could work on myself by working on Nixon and trying to understand him.
KD: How would you describe Nixon’s religious reputation?
DS: Most people think he was not religious at all — or worse, that he just manipulated religion, adopting it for political purposes through his connections to folks like Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale and even Martin Luther King Jr.
I agree that he wasn’t pious. That he wasn’t good.
A lot of times in our culture when we say “religious,” what we really mean is “good.” But that’s not what I mean when I say Nixon was religious.
He wasn’t an orthodox believer. He wasn’t a happy churchgoer. He didn’t love Jesus.
But he was very religious in the sense that there’s a spiritual struggle that’s kind of at the heart of everything he did.
In my book, I’m making two arguments at once: 1) that there’s a spiritual struggle at the center of Richard Nixon, and 2) that Nixon is at the center of contemporary American history.
So that would mean Nixon tells us something about the spiritual struggle at the center of America. I think that’s worth attending to, even if it means thinking about religion in a more complicated way than being a good person, praying and reading the Bible.
KD: So ... did Nixon pray and read the Bible?
DS: There’s at least a couple points in his life where he seems to like going to church. But for the most part he was not devout. He wasn’t pious.
In the book, I explore the church services he planned in the White House. He would organize church in the White House instead of going out to churches in Washington, D.C., and he actually spent more time doing that than any other president in American history.
It takes a lot more time to find a preacher and a choir, to decide on how many seats and who you’re going to invite than to show up somewhere else for church.
When you dig into it, what was happening is that Nixon was kind of afraid of being judged. He said he was afraid of people watching him to see if he knew the hymn, to see if he closed his eyes when he prayed.
He was worried about pastors switching up their sermons to preach to him directly. That had happened to presidents before, including Lyndon Johnson.
KD: What was Nixon’s relationship like with the pastors in his orbit?
DS: He was pretty close friends with Billy Graham, but also lots of other ministers who were part of his political life. He would get to know ministers by organizing those church services at the White House.
I found comments from the various ministers about their experience preaching at the White House, and they would say things like, “Man, I really thought I was going to bring it. But I second guessed myself and toned it down.”
It happened with Watergate, and it happened with Vietnam and other controversies. Ministers would think, “I should have something relevant to say on this issue,” but then think, “I’m preaching to the president, to cabinet members and other VIPs” and they’d start to feel cautious.
I found one sermon example where a guy preached on the Bible being relevant to everyday life but his only concrete example was a soldier in Vietnam who was saved when the Bible in his coat stopped a bullet.
That’s not what we mean when we say the Bible is relevant to everyday life.
KD: Was Nixon aware of his power to make pastors tone down their sermons?
DS: I think it’s very clear in the archival records that he did it knowingly.
He was implying, “This is my home, my turf. Don’t come in here and judge me.”
You may think that sounds horrifying, but I’m kind of that way, too.
I don’t love it when pastors preach sermons that make me feel uncomfortable.
And also like Nixon, there have been times in my life where I wished I could control who I worshipped with. I have sat in church and thought, “Where are the cool people? Where are the smart people?”
I hope other people can have a response like that, too, and think, “How could Nixon be that way?” at the same time they’re thinking, “I’m a little bit like that.”
KD: Is that one of the goals of your book — helping people see themselves in Nixon?
DS: I don’t do that overtly. It’s a pretty straight history book.
But that’s a thought in the back of my head: Many of us are more Nixon-y than we’d care to admit.
His essential religious struggle was wrestling with the idea of grace. He thought you had to earn it, that you had to work for God’s love. That, to me, feels like a pretty normal human condition.
Many of us don’t feel confident that we’re affirmed by the universe and loved by the creator of the universe, so we try to prove ourselves worthy and good enough. That’s an issue that’s deep in Nixon’s heart.
KD: Where did Nixon end up in terms of his relationship with God and religion in the final years of his life?
DS: I spent the whole last part of the book, which is about the post-resignation period, hoping he would somehow find grace. Partly it was about resolving the narrative and partly it was because I was so invested in this person.
His life after the White House is kind of fascinating. A Catholic archbishop shows up and tries to connect with him. A rabbi shows up and tries to connect with him. A Methodist preacher’s son shows up and tries to connect with him. That’s all in the period of a couple years.
It was like the setup for a preacher joke. What’s going on here?
Nixon says that at one point he considered converting Catholicism but he turns away the Catholic archbishop. I think the idea of receiving a religious pardon after receiving the presidential pardon was unbearable.
At the end of his life, he reasserts that he thinks religion is about being good. He thinks the Bible is an interesting, inspiring book, but says that Jesus wasn’t really divine and that he wasn’t really raised from the dead.
Nixon said religion was mostly about morality and pursuing upright living.
KD: What does Nixon’s story have to teach us about our current political moment?
DS: The advantage of looking back in time is that you can rethink some things.
People really struggled to see Nixon as a human being. But we have enough distance from his history now that even if you hate everything Nixon did and think he was a monster in the White House, you can see that he was also someone who had a bad relationship with his parents and someone who didn’t feel loved. A someone who struggled with God.
That can give you some empathy.
It’s hard to step back and think about current political figures in the same way. But it’s useful to be reminded that, even if you can’t see it right now, the people in our political landscape right now are human beings with spiritual struggles and life issues that you don’t have access to.
KD: Do you wish you could have interviewed Nixon?
DS: No, not really. I think even if he’d been alive I would have skipped interviewing him.
I found in my research that he lies a lot. And over time, people’s stories get set in their minds and they stop being capable of reexamining their thinking. I think that was true of him.
And I had so much material to work with: speeches, memos, letters, tapes. He documented every minute of his time in the White House. You can actually find out how many minutes he talked to his wife each day during his time as president.
KD: At the beginning of our conversation, you talked about working on yourself by working on Nixon. When you finished the book, did you feel like you understood yourself better?
DS: One of the things that I took to heart was that if you follow Nixon’s trajectory, he’s always focused on how people have hurt him and on keeping track of his enemies.
But in the end, he’s his own worst enemy, and he defeats himself.
I took a kind of life-changing lesson from that: You have to let other people go and attend to your own heart and your own soul. It’s just so easy to become really obsessed with the ways other people might get you and totally miss the ways you are totally destroying yourself.
It’s kind of wild when you think about it. This is a man whose great crime was covering up the fact that men in his campaign bugged the Democratic Party headquarters. And the way we know he did that is that he bugged himself.