Religion of the Presidents – 43

George W. Bush (born in 1946)  (president: 2001-2009)

Religion: Methodist.  As a youngster, Bush attended Episcopal and Presbyterian churches, his father’s and mother’s preferences, respectively.  As he grew older, he, generally, attended Presbyterian services.  After he married, Bush attended the Methodist church, which is his wife’s preference.  When he was younger, Bush wasn’t particularly religious, although he was raised in a religious household and served as an altar boy.  But, when he matured, he developed a deep commitment to Christianity.  Two incidents in his life transformed him: one was meeting evangelist Billy Graham, the other was his friend Don Evans’s gift of a 365-day version of the Bible and convincing him to join his Bible-study group.  

As president, he continued to attend Methodist services.

From: The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush, Revised and Updated Through 2004 by William A. DeGregorio (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004), p. 759.

 

Religion of the Presidents – 42

Bill Clinton (born in 1946)  (president: 1993-2001)

Religion: Southern Baptist.  “My faith tells me that all of us are sinners, and each of us has gone in our own way and fallen short of the glory of God,” he declared in an interview on VISN, a religious cable network, as transcribed in the New York Times (October 8, 1992).  “Religious faith has permitted me to believe in my continuing possibility of becoming a better person every day.  If I didn’t believe in God, if I weren’t, in my view, a Christian, if I didn’t believe ultimately in the perfection of life after death, my life would have been that much more difficult.”  Joining the Baptist church at age nine, Clinton grew up with more religious devotion than either his mother or his stepfather.  From his student days at Georgetown in the late 1960s, however, until his defeat for reelection as governor of Arkansas in 1980, he attended Sunday services infrequently.  Since then, he has resumed the more regular practice of his religion.  He believes in an omniscient God who forgives sin and hold outs the promise of redemption.  He feels that one’s faith is a private communication with God and should not be subject to public scrutiny.  He is a member of Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock, where he often has sung in the choir.  He is occasionally joined at Sunday services by his wife and daughter, who belong to First United Methodist Church in Little Rock.  Among his favorite passages from the Bible is from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, which he included in his inaugural address: “And let us not be weary in well-doing for, in due season, we shall reap, if we faint not.”

I have a feeling that this entry on Clinton was carried over intact from previous editions of this book, without change, as it does not reflect…um…later events in his presidency.

From: The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush, Revised and Updated Through 2004 by William A. DeGregorio (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004), pp. 708-709.

 

Religion of the Presidents – 41

George H. W. Bush (born in 1924)  (president: 1989-1993)

Religion: Episcopalian.  “I am guided by certain traditions,” Bush declared in his acceptance speech at the 1988 Republican convention.  “One is that there’s a God and He is good, and His love, while free, has a self-imposed cost: we must be good to one another.”  He was raised in a family that regularly read aloud from the Bible at the breakfast table.  The president and Mrs. Bush attend Sunday services regularly, recite bedtime prayers aloud together nightly, and read the Bible daily.  He has publicly professed faith in an afterlife and in Jesus Christ as his personal savior.  He is a vestryman at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Kennebunkport, Maine, where the family occupies the first three right rows of pews at the 10 AM Sunday service, and is a longtime member of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Houston.

From: The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush, Revised and Updated Through 2004 by William A. DeGregorio (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004), pp. 668-669.

 

Religion of the Presidents – 40

Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)  (president: 1981-1989)

Religion: Disciples of Christ.  Presbyterian.  Reagan often expressed a deep faith in God but, as president, rarely attended Sunday services.  He believed in a divine plan in which everything happens for the best.  Yet, he also believed in free will.  “We are given a certain control of our destiny because we have a chance to choose,” he asserted.  “We are given a set of rules or guidelines in the Bible by which to live, and it is up to us to decide whether we will abide by them or not.”

From: The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush, Revised and Updated Through 2004 by William A. DeGregorio (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004), p. 637.

 

Religion of the Presidents – 39

Jimmy Carter (born in 1924)  (president: 1977-1981)

Religion: Baptist.  Baptized at age 11, Carter was what he called a superficial Christian until early 1967 when, in despair over his gubernatorial defeat, he communed with his sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, an evangelist, and became a born-again Christian.  “I formed a very close, intimate personal relationship with God through Christ,” he said of the experience, “that has given me a great deal of peace, equanimity, and the ability to accept difficulty without unnecessarily being disturbed.”  Subsequently, he volunteered for Baptist missionary work among the poor in New York and elsewhere.  He became a deacon and taught Sunday School at Plains (Georgia) Baptist Church.  President Carter taught a Bible class at First Baptist Church in Washington.  He and the First Lady nightly took turns reading the Bible to each other in bed.  He does not adhere to a completely literal interpretation of the Bible.

From: The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush, Revised and Updated Through 2004 by William A. DeGregorio (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004), p. 620.

 

Religion of the Presidents – 38

Gerald R. Ford (1913-2006)  (president: 1974-1977)

Religion: Episcopalian.  President Ford attended St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington.  As president, he prayed for guidance in making particularly difficult decisions, notably the pardon of his predecessor, Richard Nixon.

From: The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush, Revised and Updated Through 2004 by William A. DeGregorio (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004), p. 606.

 

Religion of the Presidents – 37

Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)  (president: 1969-1974)

Religion: Quaker.  Nixon belonged to the Friends Meeting of East Whittier, California but, as president, attended services of various denominations.  He rejected the Quaker tenet of pacifism, enlisting in the Navy during World War II.  He also ignored the Quaker ban on swearing oaths on taking office as vice president and president.  (Under the Constitution, he could have substituted the word affirm for swear, as Quaker Herbert Hoover had done in 1928.)  Nixon cited religious and moral grounds in opposing abortion.

From: The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush, Revised and Updated Through 2004 by William A. DeGregorio (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004), p. 584.

 

Religion of the Presidents – 36

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973)  (president: 1963-1969)

Religion: Disciples of Christ.  At 18, Johnson joined the Christian Church, or Disciples of Christ, in Texas.  As president, he worshipped at churches of various denominations.  After the assassination of President Kennedy, he regularly said grace before dinner and prayed often in the White House.  Late one night, in June, 1966, Johnson, worried that bombing raids over Hanoi and Haiphong might bring the Soviets into the Vietnam War, sneaked out, with daughter Luci, to pray at St. Dominic’s Chapel.  Also in 1966, Johnson conferred with Pope Paul VI.  He was the first incumbent president to meet a Pontiff.

From: The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush, Revised and Updated Through 2004 by William A. DeGregorio (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004), p. 566.

 

Religion of the Presidents – 35

John F. Kennedy, Sr. (1917-1963)  (president: 1961-1963)

Religion: Roman Catholic.  Kennedy, the only Roman Catholic president [and the first president to be born in the 20th century - RZ], rarely spoke of his religious beliefs.  He did not completely accept the teachings of the Catholic Church.  He supported, for example, the use of birth control devices and opposed federal aid to parochial schools.  To many, the religious issue seemed an insuperable barrier to the Kennedy candidacy in 1960.  Kennedy confronted the issue in a speech before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association during the campaign.  “I believe,” he said, “in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.”  He went on to say that he was prepared to accept defeat on the basis of the issues.  “But,” he added on behalf of his co-religionists, “if this election is decided on the basis that 40,000,000 Americans lost their chance of being president on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history and in the eyes of our own people.”  As president, Kennedy declined to raise relations with the Vatican to the ambassadorial level and attended Protestant services from time to time.

From: The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush, Revised and Updated Through 2004 by William A. DeGregorio (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004), p. 548.

 

Religion of the Presidents – 34

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)  (president: 1953-1961)

Religion: Presbyterian.  Eisenhower was raised in the strict religious environment of the River Brethren faith and joined in family Bible-reading daily, but did not formally join a church until he became president.  He was baptized at National Presbyterian Church in Washington in 1953.  “I am the most intensely religious man I know,” Eisenhower asserted in 1948.  “Nobody goes through six years of war without faith.”  He believed in the power of prayer and divine guidance.  He once said that all free government boils down to an attempt to translate religious faith into the political world.  He composed a prayer that he recited before delivering his inaugural address, asking God for the power to discern clearly right from wrong.  As president, he instituted the interdenominational White House Prayer Breakfast and the practice of opening cabinet meetings with prayer.

From: The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush, Revised and Updated Through 2004 by William A. DeGregorio (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004), p. 530.