Derb wrote:

The great 20th-century conservative presidents were Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan. Neither was an atheist, but neither was much of a church-goer either. Their expressions of religious belief did not venture far beyond the requirements of “ceremonial deism.”

I’ll leave Calvin Coolidge to someone else, but regarding the Gipper what we have here is a misleading half-truth and a straightforward error.

The error? Reagan’s expressions of religious belief ventured far beyond the requirements of ‘ceremonial deism.’ He spoke to religious groups often, and when he did so he discussed the importance of faith, including his own faith, in a way no deist would have countenanced. Google your way, for example, to Reagan’s 1983 address to the National Association of Evangelicals. The address concerned foreign policy—it’s remembered today as the “evil empire” speech—but take a look at just a couple of passages.

Reagan on his own faith (as I recall, incidentally, this was an ad-lib, not a passage in his prepared text):

The other day in the East Room of the White House at a meeting there, someone asked me whether I was aware of all the people out there who were praying for the President. And I had to say, “Yes, I am. I’ve felt it. I believe in intercessionary prayer.” But I couldn’t help but say to that questioner after he’d asked the question that–or at least say to them that if sometimes when he was praying he got a busy signal, it was just me in there ahead of him. I think I understand how Abraham Lincoln felt when he said, “I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.”

Reagan on the importance of faith to our well-being as a nation :

The basis of those ideals and principles is a commitment to freedom and personal liberty that, itself is grounded in the much deeper realization that freedom prospers only where the blessings of God are avidly sought and humbly accepted….
[T]hat shrewdest of all observers of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, put it eloquently after he had gone on a search for the secret of America’s greatness and genius–and he said: “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America. America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

The misleading half-truth? That Reagan wasn’t much of a church-goer.

As president, Reagan did indeed attend church only irregularly, explaining that he disliked the distraction that his presence and security detail always caused. Yet once he left office, he went straight back to attending Bel Air Presbyterian, the church he and Mrs. Reagan had attended before leaving California for Washington.

The more important point, though, is that church attendance was never an index of Reagan’s faith. His mother raised him in the Disciples of Christ, a denomination that stresses direct, unmediated relationships with the Almighty. Reagan often said he felt closest to God at his ranch, and if he sometimes spent a Sunday mornings on a trail ride among the live oak rather than sitting in a church pew, he was no less a man of faith for that. One of Reagan’s few true intimates, Judge William Clark, told me that Reagan called the ranch “a cathedral with oak trees for walls,” that when he and Reagan rode together they would often begin by reciting a prayer, and that in an beautiful place Reagan might rein in his horse and say simply, “Glory to God.”