One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search For Salvation

Daniel Silliman (News Editor, Christianity Today), One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation (2024):

Impious and amoral, petty and vindictive, Richard Nixon is not the typical protagonist of a religious biography. But spiritual drama is at the heart of this former president’s tragic story.

The night before his resignation, Richard Nixon wept—and prayed. Though his demanding parents had raised him Quaker, he wasn’t a regular churchgoer, nor was he quick to express vulnerability. As Henry Kissinger witnessed Nixon’s loneliness and humiliation that night, he remarked, “Can you imagine what this man would have been had somebody loved him?”

In this provocative and riveting biography, Daniel Silliman cuts to the heart of Nixon’s tragedy: Nixon wanted to be loved by God but couldn’t figure out how. This profound theological struggle underlay his successes and scandals, his turbulent political career, his history-changing victories, and his ultimate disgrace. As Silliman narrates the arc of his subject’s life and career, he connects Nixon’s character to religious influences in twentieth-century America—from Cold War Christianity to Chick tracts.

Silliman paints a nuanced spiritual portrait of the thirty-seventh president, just as he offers fresh insight into US political and religious history. Readers who lived through Watergate will discover a new perspective on an infamous controversy. A historical page-turner, One Lost Soul will surprise and absorb students, scholars, and anyone who likes a good story.

Excerpt from the Introduction
Richard Nixon was a lost soul searching for the love of God. He wanted to be loved by God but couldn’t figure out how. He sought but could not find assurance from the universe and its creator that he was okay, his existence good, or at least worthwhile. Or at least tolerable. Then he sought that assurance from his parents, then political party leaders, the voting public, and even history itself. But when he got it he couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t accept it. And when he didn’t—or he did but then it went away, as is always the way with the ebb and flow of human approbation—he was left alone again with his need, this ache, his unshakable feeling that he could never do enough.

This is the fundamental drama underneath Nixon’s successes and scandals, his turbulent political career, history-changing victories, and ultimate disgrace. When he bugged himself in the White House, setting up the secret devices that would record him talking about obstruction of justice and bring about his downfall, he was trying to be loved by God. When he went to China to shift the geopolitical alignment of the Cold War and when he ordered the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam to punish it for not conceding more in negotiations, he was trying to be worthy and enough. When he ran for office and won, when he ran for office and lost, when he declared there would be no more Dick Nixon to kick around, even back when he first made a name for himself as a Communist fighter, pursuing a respected establishment figure he rightly suspected of being a spy, what he personally wanted was, in its essence, to feel accepted. To know he was okay.

It is probably not true that no one loved him. But a close reading of the evidence suggests that Nixon never felt it. From his wife and daughters, he felt respect and admiration, which he believed he had to earn. From his parents, he felt high expectations. From those who served him—some so loyally they would break the law and go to prison—he perceived fealty to a higher cause that he happened to embody. There were countless crowds who cheered for Nixon over the years, great masses of people giving him applause and adulation, waving placards saying “Nixon’s the One!,” and he was, still, just one lost soul. Deep down, he couldn’t believe he had value in the universe. He didn’t think he had secured it securely enough that he could trust it. This is the story of Richard Nixon.

***

Religious biographies typically tell the story of a great person who did great things and also prayed. Or they tell the story of spiritual leaders, charting the paths of their development. They generally focus on religious people, which is commonly understood to mean good people, moral people, or at least devout and pious ones.

But religion is also the name we give to great inner struggle. From Jacob wrestling with an angel to a gay pastor’s kid wrestling with identity, religion is what we call a fight with God.

A religious biography, then, can also be this kind of story. It can be an account of holy wrestling, a history of a life spent in inner struggle. A life spent losing. It can be a tragedy, the tale of one who gained the whole world and yet could not save his own soul.

Nixon’s story has never been told quite this way. But this is what happened.

He was a Quaker of a particular sort and a convert to a Cold War Christianity that taught that salvation came through toughness and fighting. He was close with two of the most famous ministers of his era, Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, and for a while he also worked side by side with Martin Luther King Jr. Nixon spent his childhood in a retrofitted church building, where his father looked down on him from the office in the stee- ple, and in the White House he spent more time planning church services than any other president in American history. He was very religious. Which is not to say he liked going to church. Or that he was especially pious. In fact, he was vulgar, petty, paranoid, and vindictive. He stewed in his resentments, feared judgment, and sought to control everything. He manipulated ministers for his political purposes. He embraced amorality and ends-justify-the-means ethics. He was always fixated on his own victories and how things would reflect back on him, personally. He couldn’t believe in grace and never accepted it for himself. Yet in this—exactly this—he was fighting a fight with God. The story of Nixon is, at bottom, a story of spiritual struggle. It’s political history, presidential history, psychological history and American, and it is also inextricably theological.

This religious biography puts that at the center, understanding Nixon’s life, his career, his impact on America and the world, all as the outworking of his attempt to achieve something that would allow him to receive the assurance of God’s love.

Editor's Note:  If you would like to receive a weekly email each Sunday with links to faith posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.