Having a President in your Parish can go to a pastor’s head, as Dwight Eisenhower learned soon after he took office. Ike, though personally devout, wasn’t much of a churchgoer, but he didn’t think people would want a President who just played golf on Sundays. So he became the first President to be baptized in office and joined National Presbyterian. The minister had promised there would be no publicity, but as Eisenhower wrote angrily in his diary, “we were scarcely home before the fact was being publicized, by the pastor, to the hilt.”
We still have a lot to learn about the choreography of faith and politics. None of the candidates in this year’s race have looked very graceful, or sounded very wise, about how they would manage the eternal dance between their personal faith and its public expression were they to become President. And the conduct and coverage of this race isn’t making the challenge easier.
For many Democrats, it has been refreshing to welcome a candidate who is not only able but eager to talk about his faith journey, starting two years ago at the Call to Renewal conference when Barack Obama addressed the “God gap” head-on, calling for a “serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy,” and declared that “secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square.” But having brought his own faith and church and pastor into that square, he found them to be serious obstacles on the way to the nomination…
One thing not mentioned is that “Ike” was raised Jehoviah’s Witness. While in his teens (I think) his father became disillusioned with the ‘date setting’ and failed prophecies of the Watchtower Society and took himself and his family out of the group.
Ike went to other churches but joined none, until the baptism service mentioned in the article.
Jim Elliott <><