In March 1983, US president Ronald Reagan delivered an address to evangelical Christians in Orlando, Florida, referring to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”:

“I intend to do everything I can to persuade [the Soviet Union] of our peaceful intent, to remind them that it was the West that refused to use its nuclear monopoly in the forties and fifties for territorial gain and which now proposes 50 percent cut in strategic ballistic missiles and the elimination of an entire class of land-based, intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

At the same time, however, they must be made to understand we will never compromise our principles and standards. We will never give away our freedom. We will never abandon our belief in God. And we will never stop searching for a genuine peace. But we can assure none of these things America stands for through the so-called nuclear freeze solutions proposed by some…

A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the cold war, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. And suddenly, though, I heard him saying, ‘I love my little girls more than anything’. And I said to myself, ‘Oh, no, don’t. You can’t—don’t say that’. But I had underestimated him. He went on: ‘I would rather see my little girls die now, still believing in God, than have them grow up under communism and one day die no longer believing in God’.

There were thousands of young people in that audience. They came to their feet with shouts of joy. They had instantly recognised the profound truth in what he had said, with regard to the physical and the soul and what was truly important.

Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.

It was C. S. Lewis who, in his unforgettable Screwtape Letters, wrote: ‘The greatest evil is not done now in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps and labour camps. In those, we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.’

Well, because these ‘quiet men’ do not ‘raise their voices’, because they sometimes speak in soothing tones of brotherhood and peace, because, like other dictators before them, they’re always making ‘their final territorial demand’, some would have us accept them at their word and accommodate ourselves to their aggressive impulses. But if history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.

So, I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority… I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.

I ask you to resist the attempts of those who would have you withhold your support for our efforts, this administration’s efforts, to keep America strong and free, while we negotiate real and verifiable reductions in the world’s nuclear arsenals and one day, with God’s help, their total elimination…

I believe we shall rise to the challenge. I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written. I believe this because the source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man. For in the words of Isaiah: ‘He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might He increased strength…. But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary…’

Yes, change your world. One of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine, said, ‘We have it within our power to begin the world over again.’ We can do it, doing together what no one church could do by itself. God bless you, and thank you very much.”