The Faith of our fathers

The White House Wasn't Always God's House:
"In the 19th century, all presidents routinely invoked God and solicited his blessing. But religion did not have a major presence in their lives. Abraham Lincoln was the great exception. Nor did our early presidents use religion as an agency for mobilizing voters. 'I would rather be defeated,' said James A. Garfield, 'than make capital out of my religion.'
"Nor was there any great popular demand that politicians be men of faith. In 1876, James G. Blaine, an aspirant for the Republican presidential nomination, selected Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, a famed orator but a notorious scoffer at religion, to deliver the nominating speech: The pious knew and feared Ingersoll as 'The Great Agnostic'; a 21st century equivalent of Ingersoll would have been booed off the platform at the Republican convention of 2004."

So writes historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., one of the architects of Camelot, in Tuesday's LA Times. He omits the rather interesting fact that Blaine lost the GOP nomination to Chester A. Arthur that year although he did receive the nomination in 1884 only to lose the election to Grover Cleveland.

This is the sort of topic which tends to attract those who have strong pro or con opinions and write the story the way they wish it were. For an example of the other extreme, find a book called The Presidents: Men of Faith by Bliss Isely; the second edition, which I have, was issued in 1954 and covers all the presidents from Washington through Eisenhower. Bliss wrote his presidential profiles for use in Methodist Sunday Schools. Isely mentions at a few places that some presidents refrained from public worship while in office to avoid theological controversies. Thus lack of attendance at church might not mean, as Schlesinger would have it, that religion was a trivial or private matter, but rather that it was the subject of very serious public controversy.