Three qualities of Ronald Reagan that shaped his political success

Former Reagan domestic policy assistant T. Kenneth Cribb writes about three characteristics of Ronald Reagan that helped guide his work as a politician and leader:  Ronald Reagan and the Moral Imagination.  As Cribb begins his discussion of Reagan's traits:

On the occasion of the centennial of his birth, I am going to make three assertions about Ronald Reagan that will be considered novel in some quarters. I’m going to argue:

• Ronald Reagan was an intellectual in the only important sense of that word.
• Ronald Reagan was a man of orthodox Christian faith.
• The victory over Soviet Communism was made possible by Ronald Reagan’s power of moral imagination.

Read the article for a fascinating glimpse into the personality of the man who was possibly the most successful conservative president of the last century.   I found Cribbs' discussion of Reagan's religious faith to be the most interesting -- his guiding belief in divine Providence is certainly echoed by other American presidents, including our two greatest, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  And Reagan had a firm grasp of the necessity of religious faith in preserving a culture of freedom here in the United States.  As Cribbs quotes Reagan saying:

Without God, there is no virtue, because there’s no prompting of the conscience. Without God, we’re mired in the material, that flat world that tells us only what the senses perceive. Without God, there is a coarsening of the society. And without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure. If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.