The Faiths of the Postwar Presidents

From Truman to Obama

David Holmes, Mitchell Reddish

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780820346809, 9780820338620
• eBook ISBN: 9780820339634
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, an acclaimed look at the spiritual beliefs of such iconic Americans as Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson, established David L. Holmes as a measured voice in the heated debate over the new nation's religious underpinnings. With the same judicious approach, Holmes now looks at the role of faith in the lives of the twelve presidents who have served since the end of World War II.

Holmes examines not only the beliefs professed by each president but also the variety of possible influences on their religious faith, such as their upbringing, education, and the faith of their spouse. In each profile close observers such as clergy, family members, friends, and advisors recall churchgoing habits, notable displays of faith (or lack of it), and the influence of their faiths on policies concerning abortion, the death penalty, Israel, and other controversial issues.

Whether discussing John F. Kennedy's philandering and secularity or Richard Nixon's betrayal of Billy Graham's naïve trust during Watergate, Holmes includes telling and often colorful details not widely known or long forgotten. We are reminded, for instance, how Dwight Eisenhower tried to conceal the background of his parents in the Jehovah's Witnesses and how the Reverend Cotesworth Lewis's sermonizing to Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War was actually not a left- but a right-wing critique.

National interest in the faiths of our presidents is as strong as ever, as shown by the media frenzy engendered by George W. Bush's claim that Jesus was his favorite political philosopher or Barack Obama's parting with his minister, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Holmes's work adds depth, insight, and color to this important national topic.

The Faiths of the Postwar Presidents

George H. Shriver Lecture Series in Religion in American History No. 5

FROM TRUMAN TO OBAMA

David L. Holmes

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction by Martin E. Marty

Harry S. Truman

Dwight D. Eisenhower

John F. Kennedy

Lyndon Baines Johnson

Richard M. Nixon

Gerald R. Ford

James Earl Carter Jr.

Ronald Wilson Reagan

George Herbert Walker Bush

William Jefferson Clinton

George W. Bush

Barack Hussein Obama

Notes

Index

PREFACE

No president’s story is complete until his death—and even then, reevaluations frequently occur. In the case of a sitting or recent president, assessments are especially subject to change. In certain ways, a book or chapter on such a president resembles a first draft.

This book went to press in the summer of 2011. In the months since, more than a dozen works on the postwar presidents have appeared. None changes in any significant way the evaluation of any president’s religious faith given in these pages. In September 2011, for example, the Kennedy Library released tapes of interviews conducted with Jacqueline Kennedy several months after her husband’s assassination. Although her words would have provided color and detail, they support the revisionist interpretation of John F. Kennedy’s Roman Catholicism found in this book.

My thanks to the following alumni and students of the College of William and Mary who assisted in preparing this publication during the half-dozen years of its research and writing: Katelyn R. Browne, Jack E. Cohen, Leah R. Giles, Ann E. Glennie, Andrew E. Jungclaus, Jarrett W. Knight, Anna L. Krause, Susan M. Metallo, Wistar W. Murray, Hannah R. Perry, and Maggie E. Southwell. Additional thanks go to the staffs of the Swem Library at the College of William and Mary, the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, and the nation’s presidential libraries.

INTRODUCTION

The founders of the United States, both its leaders and ordinary citizens, had a problem: what to do about religion in the new republic. Those who had immigrated from Europe, remembering everything from corruption to holy wars, knew that in the hands of civil authorities religion could by force of law be used, and that rulers had used it. Heads of state might employ preferred faiths to endorse their own selfish policies, show favoritism in the public, or penalize those who dissented from officially approved creeds. The American colonists, now republicans, had just “killed [off] the king” in the Revolutionary War, so monarchs and governors could play no legally legitimated role in determining the civil place of religion. The thirteen former colonies differed among themselves in polities and policies. Some retained the establishment of religion with all the legal perquisites that went with it, while others fought for disestablishment and thus attempted to give a place for dissent against the favored faith. What should the citizens of 1787 and 1789 do?

It has been well said that the founders solved the problem of religion by not solving it. They drafted and approved the First Amendment to the Constitution with its classic clause barring Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise. Earlier, in Article VI of the Constitution itself they had assured that “no religious test” should have any part in qualifying or disqualifying anyone from public office. But they did not go so far as to spell out the details, and they did not include anything about the religious role of the executive branch in the person or through the agency of the chief executive. That left a vacuum to be filled in a society of whose citizens President Dwight Eisenhower was to say, “We are a religious people.” He overshot in a second phrase, claiming on slight grounds that the nation’s laws presupposed belief in a supreme being.

This people—“religious” and “nonreligious”—has shown through the decades that the majority favors religious expression from the president. Willy-nilly, the president serves a kind of priestly role. When a spaceship explodes, when terrorists attack or enemies bomb, when publics need to employ someone with a voice to prod or to console, it falls on the president to resort to both rhetoric and example that sound and look religious by most definitions of that term.

David Holmes, who is so familiar with the sources that he sounds as if he is on speaking terms with the post–World War II presidents, serves us well by showing how each of them—again, by rhetoric and example—summoned the support of citizens. Sometimes they turned their rostrum into a bully pulpit, and sometimes they all but bullied people “in the name of God” to support their policies. Doing both of these in the role we have called priestly has been a bipartisan endeavor in which chance, accident, serendipity, and brutal design—its partisan enemies always call this “hypocrisy”—have left generous records of religious-sounding rhetoric.

Fortunately, while Holmes does not trumpet the claim that he is non-partisan or bipartisan, as each president’s rhetoric usually is advertised, he finds that the gestures and sounds of the president cannot help but lean one way, the president’s way, and against all others. Reading histories of the responses to those gestures and that rhetoric, as Holmes does here often enough, provides illuminating access to the minds of the presidents as they tried to make history or live creatively with events occurring around them. While Europeans often call America secular and many Americans ruefully join them in that assessment, it has certainly been easier for chief executives to respond to religious interests or to try to impose them than it has been to remember the founding impulses. Holmes sorts these out.

Having had adult experience during all the tenures described in this book, and having written extensively on their era, I will stress that Holmes has chosen well from the sources on which he forms his narrative or makes his case. There are surprises, especially when presidents transcend partisan interests for a suprapartisan common good or when presidents having little formal theological training come up with theological interpretations of citizen action. Holmes’s manners are too controlled to permit him to propagandize, overstate cases, or lose his way in the maze of presidential politics, so he comes across as an intelligent, fair-minded, and reliable guide.

It is no surprise that Baptists Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton could cite chapter and verse from the Bible better than could Catholic John Kennedy, but it is a surprise (amid the cultural biases back when Kennedy was elected in 1960) to see how elegantly he tailored his approach and opinions to the means and ways of then-still-Protestant America. It is a surprise that friend-of-evangelicals Ronald Reagan—who could court Bible-believing, Jesus-isthe-only-way-to-salvation constituencies with considerable elegance and appeal while not losing evangelical followers—could also populate heaven with religiously diverse astronauts who, he assured all citizens, had gained heaven. No one expects or should expect consistency among presidents who had to court diverse and sometimes partly contradictory constituencies.

One among many delights of the book shows up in Holmes’s probing and sometimes tender accountings of the parental home-life, the settings and experiences in various locales, and the events in the lives of young presidents-to-be. It is helpful to read what he adduces to show how candidates became winners with the aid of religion; how religion transformed each of them; and how as office holders, they transformed religion. The reader of these accounts through sixty years of presidencies is not likely to find grounds to foresee a decline of religious interests in putatively secular America’s coming years.

Interest groups, churches, voluntary agencies, and others who favor a candidate for office often publish and distribute what they call “voters’ guides” that are full of propaganda. They would do better to help voters gain perspective to make decisions by providing fair historical backgrounds, beginning with this book by David Holmes.

Martin E. Marty

PROFESSOR EMERITUS, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

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