Presidential church choice sends political, spiritual messages

WASHINGTON-George Washington did it to set an example for his young country. Bill Clinton did it most conspicuously when he got in trouble. Dwight Eisenhower stopped doing it until he reached the White House, and then blasted his pastor for blabbing about it. Like schoolboys on summer Sundays, presidents’ records of church attendance have been […]

(RNS3-JAN08) President Bill Clinton delivers the sermon at Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington on Jan. 7, 2001, just weeks before he left the White House. Clinton thanked the Foundry congregation for being a “church home” for his family during his presidency. For use with RNS-PRESIDENTS-CHURCH, transmitted Jan. 8, 2009. Religion News Service photo courtesy Dean Snyder/United Methodist News Service.

WASHINGTON-George Washington did it to set an example for his young country. Bill Clinton did it most conspicuously when he got in trouble. Dwight Eisenhower stopped doing it until he reached the White House, and then blasted his pastor for blabbing about it.

Like schoolboys on summer Sundays, presidents’ records of church attendance have been spotty, historians say. Some, like John Quincy Adams, who went twice on Sunday, were regular churchgoers. Others, like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, preferred to hold occasional services in the White House.


But most made an effort to get to the chapel on time-at least to keep up appearances.

As President-elect Barack Obama prepares to make his home in Washington, there has been no shortage of pastors and parishes angling to get the soon-to-be first family into their pews.

As Billy Graham told Eisenhower in 1952, Americans expect a bit of piety from their president. “Frankly, I don’t think the American people would be happy with a president who didn’t belong to any church or even attend one,” the famed evangelist recalls telling Ike in his autobiography ” Just As I Am.”

Much has changed since then, but according to opinion polls, most Americans still want a churchgoer in the Oval Office.

“Americans want their presidents to have solidly moral foundations,” said Gary Scott Smith, a historian at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, “and attending church is one barometer of their moral convictions.”

Obama’s church choice will be even more intensely scrutinized, given the role religion played in his campaign. Dogged by persistent and false rumors that he is a Muslim, Obama also dealt with fallout from the widespread dissemination of controversial comments by his former longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.


In sermon snippets broadcast on cable news and the Internet, Wright-who ministered to Obama for 20 years, married him and baptized his children-was heard cursing the U.S. government and accusing it of spreading AIDS among blacks.

Obama cut ties to Wright and Trinity during the campaign.

“In one sense, Obama is moving to Washington without an overt go-to guy,” said Gaston Espinosa, a professor of religion at Claremont McKenna College in California and editor of an upcoming book on religion and the presidency.

But Obama will not be the first president to deal with soul-searching reports about his Sunday morning excursions.

Franklin Roosevelt, an Episcopalian and senior warden of St. James Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, N.Y., would interrupt cabinet meetings to deal with church business. But he only attended church once a month in Washington, Smith said.

“I can do almost everything in the `Goldfish Bowl’ of the president’s life,” Roosevelt once said, “but I’ll be hanged if I can say my prayers in it.”

Abraham Lincoln was so besieged by office seekers when he attended New York Avenue Presbyterian Church near the White House that he often sat in the pastor’s office, where he could hear the service but not be seen.


Others, like Clinton, seemed to relish the attention. He regularly attended Foundry United Methodist Church, and asked its then-pastor, the Rev. J. Philip Wogaman, to be one of several spiritual counselors during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Wogaman recalls that the Clintons first showed up at Foundry without much advance warning, brushing snowflakes from their shoulders on a stormy March morning in 1993. Because of the weather, the church was nearly empty, except for the first family and security personnel.

Wogaman had planned to preach on the serenity prayer, which asks for the wisdom to discern between changing the things one can and accepting those that one cannot.

“When the president was there I emphasized a little bit more the courage to change the things you can,” Wogaman recalled with a laugh.

It’s unclear how much influence pastors have on presidents. Espinosa said he believes Foundry, which bills itself as welcoming to Christians regardless of sexual orientation, made Clinton more sensitive to gay and lesbian issues.

Most presidents arrive in Washington with their faith fully formed, said Daniel J. Mount, author of “The Faith of America’s Presidents.”


That’s certainly true of Jimmy Carter, who continued to teach Sunday school during his four years in Washington at First Baptist Church, and James Garfield, the only ordained minister ever elected president.

In some ways, Obama’s man-without-a-church situation most closely parallels Eisenhower, who was raised in a River Brethren home but fell away from the faith.

After two weeks in the White House, Eisenhower joined National Presbyterian Church. In his diary, the former president castigated the pastor, Edward Elson, for publicizing his membership.

“I feel like changing at once to another church of the same denomination,” Eisenhower wrote. ” I shall if he breaks out again.”

KRE/DEA END BURKE

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!