Daniel Silliman is a journalist, historian, and news editor for the evangelical magazine Christianity Today. Courtesy | Lily Fellows Program

Alumnus Daniel Silliman ’06 released his second book, a religious biography of Richard Nixon, in August.

“One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation” examines the ex-president’s life, political career, and public fall from grace as a spiritual struggle, according to the book’s introduction. 

The book released on Aug. 8, the day before the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation amid the Watergate scandal.

“Very few religious biographies are about ‘bad people,’ and very few religious biographies are sort of explaining someone’s failures in terms of theology, in terms of faith,” Silliman said. “That’s what I tried to do. That’s what makes it a little different.”

Silliman, a journalist, historian, and news editor for the evangelical magazine Christianity Today, said the more he read about Nixon’s life from political and historical perspectives, the more he perceived a deeper, religious story to be told.

“Nixon did have this deep, spiritual turmoil and this sort of theological fight in his life and in his heart,” Silliman said. “There’s a lot of his successes — which there were a lot of successes — and a lot of failures, which were quite well-known, that really make more sense if you understand that struggle going on in his heart.”

While at Hillsdale, Silliman studied philosophy and wrote for The Collegian. After graduating, he worked as a crime reporter for a local community newspaper outside of Atlanta, Georgia, where he reported on 100 murders. 

Silliman earned master’s and doctoral degrees in American Studies from Heidelberg University in Germany and taught at various universities before becoming the news editor for Christianity Today, an evangelical magazine founded by Billy Graham, a longtime friend of Richard Nixon. 

Executive director of media outreach and public relations Emily Davis ’05, who shared philosophy classes with Silliman and also wrote for the Collegian, said he chose well to become a reporter after college. 

“Daniel was a talented writer, was engaged on subjects that interested him, and had a doggedness in his questioning that has served him well as a journalist,” Davis said in an email to the Collegian.

Professor of philosophy and culture Peter Blum said he enjoyed having Silliman in his classes.

“He was always the person I could trust had looked at the stuff we were supposed to have looked at for any particular day,” Blum said. “He was able to think deeply about it, and he raised a lot of really good questions.”

Silliman credited his Hillsdale professors with encouraging him not to take shortcuts in order to reach the right conclusions.

“You needed to do all the work,” Silliman said. “You needed to be humble in the face of history, in the face of other people who have different experiences, different thoughts than you, and you have to work through it all.”

By reading biographies and political histories of Nixon, Silliman said he would come across hints of religious issues, which he found to be lacking from other biographies.

“As I kept reading about Nixon, I kept thinking there’s a religious story that needs to be told here that would really deepen our understanding of what was happening with Richard Nixon,” Silliman said.

Silliman said another factor that drew him to write about Nixon was that he recognized himself in Nixon.

“He’s kind of a weird person and has some bad and self-destructive instincts,” Silliman said. “As much as I didn’t like it, I just sort of would read it and think, ‘OK, I do that. I get how that feels. I understand that kind of wounded way of walking through the world.’”

Silliman said he hopes first to give readers a fuller understanding of Nixon through his biography, but that he also hopes to convey the importance of empathy towards people who are easy to judge like the ex-president.

“If you see Richard Nixon as a failure, as a tragedy, as a bad person, you’re not wrong, but also thinking about his struggles and his inner turmoil will actually help you more and give you more insight than that kind of judgment gives you,” Silliman said.

Blum said what interests him in reading the book is Silliman’s sensitivity to writing about complicated figures by neither idealizing nor vilifying them.

“I think Daniel knew from the beginning if you’re tempted to do one or the other of those things, you’re gonna cover over probably a lot that’s more complicated,” Blum said. “And I think that’s exactly what he’s doing with Nixon.”

Silliman said that approaching Nixon as a human, with deep spiritual needs and acute spiritual struggles, is good history that we can use to better understand his story and ourselves in the context of his lifelong struggle.

“People are shaped by their spiritual longings,” Silliman said. “They are shaped by their interactions with God and interactions with scriptures and interactions with the church, and those things make people who they are. Everyone who wants to understand a little bit about history would do well to pay attention to some of those things.”