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Religion and Politics in US History
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Religion has long been a staple of American politics. At the national level presidents and candidates for the highest office have continually evoked religious themes, whether addressing foreign policy, social, economic, and social issues, or their own convictions. This resource page assembles key statements by US presidents over time and provides an overview of three key themes: values issues (such as abortion), foreign policy, and Islam. It also includes position statements about religion from the platforms of the Democratic Party and Republican Party.
John Adams was the second president of the United States, governing from 1797 to 1801, as well as its first vice-president under George Washington. Adams was a Congregationalist, the dominant denomination in his native Massachusetts. Adams frequently linked moral virtue to the success of the United States, and publicly worried that without enough virtue the new nation may fall from God's approval. Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1781, "Without religion this world would be something not fit...
John Quincy Adams was the sixth president of the United States from 1825 to 1829. As the son of John Adams, he was also a Congregationalist, and benefited throughout his career from the social standing of the Unitarian church in the Northeast. Quincy Adams was a strict defender of religious freedom. During his lifetime the Congregationalist church would fragment, largely over the unitarian-trinitarian debate. Quincy Adams took great interest in these theological debates, and his...
Chester A. Arthur served as the 21st president of the United States from 1881 to 1885. Arthur was an Episcopalian and the son of a Baptist abolitionist preacher, but religion was not a primary factor in his career. He rose to the presidency as a distrusted member of the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party, but became a champion of civil service reform and left office widely respected. His major accomplishment as president was the Pendleton Civil Service Reform, which established a...
James Buchanan was the 15th President of the United States, ruling from 1857 to 1861, during the lead up to the Civil War. Buchanan was a Presbyterian, although he did not officially join the denomination until after leaving the Presidency. In 1857, Buchanan sent the United States Army to Utah to quell unrest in the territory, at that time led by the Mormon leader, Governor Brigham Young. The conflict with the Mormons, which lasted from May 1857 to July 1858, was ultimately solved...
George W. Bush served two terms as the 43rd President of the United States of America after serving as governor of Texas from 1994-2000. Bush's first term was defined by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and his decision to send American and allied troops to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. These conflicts continued into his second term, when the Bush Administration also confronted the 2007 global economic crisis. In part due to his comfort speaking about his born-again faith, Bush...
George H.W. Bush was the 41st President of the United States, serving from 1989-1993. President Bush’s presidency was highlighted by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bush also led the United States in two armed conflicts, the first against Panama and the second against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. George H. W. Bush is an Episcopalian and often attended St. John’s Episcopal Church during his presidency. In the lead up to Operation Desert Storm,...
James ("Jimmy") Carter served as 39th President of the United States from 1977-1981, having completed one term as the governor of Georgia. Carter’s presidency is largely defined by both his foreign policy involvements, including the Panama Canal Treaty and Camp David Accords, as well as the economic uncertainty and stagflation over which he presided. Carter also was a huge proponent of human rights, and at home pressed for racial desegregation, comprehensive health-care reform, and...
Grover Cleveland was the 22th and the 24th President of the United States, serving from 1885-1889 and then later from 1893 to 1897. He was the only president to serve nonconsecutive terms in office. Grover Cleveland was a Presbyterian and the son of a minister. Nevertheless, he was not known for particularly strict religious observance, and his payment of child-support to an ex-mistress provoked a scandal during this presidential campaign. He was tolerant of religious diversity,...
William "Bill" Jefferson Clinton served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993-2001 after twelve years as governor of his native Arkansas. Domestically, his presidency was marked by steady economic growth and fundamental welfare reform legislation, as well as the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Internationally, he grappled with regional challenges in the former-Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and the Middle East. A moderate Democrat, Clinton relied on support from business and...
Calvin Coolidge was the 30th President of the Unites States, serving from 1923-1929. During his presidency, he took a more laissez-faire approach to government than the presidents who directly preceded him. In particular, he reduced the size of the government at a time when most voices called for increased involvement by the state in the economy. President Coolidge was a Congregationalist and strongly believed in protecting the freedom of religion, especially for the minority religions....
Dwight D. Eisenhower served as the 34th President of the United States, governing from 1953 to 1961, after a military career culminating in his role as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe in World War II. Eisenhower's presidency was largely occupied by foreign affairs, most notably the Korean War, the expansion of United States involvement in the Middle East after the Suez Crisis, and the general deepening of the Cold War. Even domestically many of Eisenhower's achievements were...
Millard Fillmore was the 13th President of the United States, serving from 1850-1853, after the death of the 12th President, Zachary Taylor. President Fillmore was a Unitarian, a church he joined in 1831 after an upbringing by Methodist parents. Fillmore was a strong advocate for the separation of church and state. He lobbied against a New York law that required witnesses in court to swear an oath affirming their belief in God. Fillmore tried above all else to maintain the Union...
Gerald R. Ford was the 38th President of the United States, serving from 1974 to 1977. Ford was an Episcopalian, but his religion did not figure prominently in his public political career. He maintained a close personal relationship with evangelist Billy Zeoli, and participated in Washington prayer circles both during his long years in Congress and during his service in the White House. Ford is most remembered for his controversial decision to pardon former President Richard...
James Garfield was the 20th President of the United States, serving for only a short time in 1881. Garfield had planned a meeting of all American republics in 1882; however, he was shot on July 2, 1881 and later died from his injuries on September 19, 1881. James Garfield was a member of the Disciples of Christ, a relatively small movement in Garfield's younger years that would grow exponentially throughout his life. Garfield was known to have both preached and held revival meetings in his...
Ulysses S. Grant was the eighteenth President of the United States of America but was most famous for his role as a general for the Union during the American Civil War. He served two terms as President for the Republican Party. He had some association with the Methodist Church by upbringing and the faith of his wife, but was not known as a particularly religious man. During both his military career and his Presidency, Grant argued that "Christianizing" Native Americans would...
Warren G. Harding served as the 29th President of the Unites States from 1921-1923. Harding officially ended WWI and began the Veterans’ Bureau, which later became the Department of Veterans Affairs. At home, Harding supported racial equality and religious tolerance, going so far as to advocate for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. However, following his death while in office, allegations of vast corruption, including the famous “Teapot Dome” scandal, were made against his Administration....
Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd President of the United States, governing from 1889 to 1893. Harrison was best known for his foreign policy. In 1889 the first Pan American Congress met in Washington to create what would become the Pan American Union. Harrison also presented a treaty to Congress which would annex Hawaii; however, President Cleveland withdrew this treaty as soon as he came into office. Harrison also signed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which regulates cartels and...
William Henry Harrison was an American military leader and the ninth President of the United States for one month, from March 4 to April 4, 1841. Harrison was an Episcopalian, and a vestryman early in his adult life in Cincinnati. Harrison is famous for leading the U.S. military against American Indians in the Battle of Tippecanoe and as a general in the War of 1812. His military accomplishments on the American Frontier earned him the nickname "Old Tippecanoe", and he played up this...
Rutherford B. Hayes was the 19th President of the United States, serving from 1877 to 1881. Hayes was elected in one of the closest elections in American history and contested votes from Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida allowed him to take the Presidency. President Hayes worked to preserve the rights of African Americans in the South but also withdrew troops from this area, hoping that stability and economic gain would follow. President Hayes moved among Protestant denominations during...
Herbert Hoover was the 31st President of the United States, serving from 1929-1933. Hoover defeated Democrat Al Smith in the 1928 election. Smith was the first serious Catholic candidate for the Presidency, and anti-Catholicism played an important part in Smith's defeat. The Great Depression, which started in 1929, dominated the presidency of Herbert Hoover. He signed the first Federal assistance package to help the unemployed called the Emergency Relief and Construction Act. He also...
Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States, serving from 1829 to 1837. Jackson was a Presbyterian; his faith, like the rest of his personality, drew more from the growing American frontier than from the traditionally wealthy and powerful Episcopalian and Congregationalist churches. Jackson's religious devotion emerges clearly in personal correspondence, especially with his wife. Jackson was also a firm believer in the separation of church and state. He refused to declare a...
Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States, serving from 1801 to 1809, and one of its most influential founding fathers. A principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was the co-founding leader of the Democratic-Republican Party and championed the Republicanism of the United States as a nation of yeoman farmers. Generally considered a Deist, Jefferson broke from conventional Christian views, but he was deeply interested in theology and biblical study....
Lyndon B. Johnson ("LBJ") served as the 36th President of the United States, governing from 1963 to 1969. Having been Vice President under John F. Kennedy, Johnson succeeded to the presidency after Kennedy's assassination. Johnson focused his presidency on the “Great Society” program, which championed civil rights, Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, urban renewal and conservation, as well as the “War on Poverty.” At the same time, he escalated American involvement in the Vietnam War. As a...
Andrew Johnson became the 17th President of the United States, from 1865 to 1869, after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Johnson oversaw a difficult period of reconstruction in America after the Civil War. He is often considered the least religious of all American presidents due to the fact that he cannot be identified with any particular denomination. Although he was identified as Christian due to his Baptist parents, Johnson himself never belonged to any church. Johnson and his wife,...
John Fitzgerald Kennedy ("JFK") was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until he was assassinated in 1963. Kennedy was internationally-oriented, with major Cold War events such as the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Space Race taking place during his presidency. At home, Kennedy created the Peace Corps and was a supporter of the American Civil Rights Movement. Kennedy remains the only Roman Catholic to become president, in spite of...
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from 1861 to 1865, during the United States Civil War. Before his presidency, Lincoln built his career as a lawyer, represented Illinois in the United States House of Representatives, and was one half of the famous Lincoln-Douglass debates on the place of slavery in the American republic. Victory in the US Civil War and abolition of slavery are Lincoln's greatest legacies, although he is also notable for being the first...
James Madison was the fourth president of the United States from 1809 to 1817 and is widely known as the "Father of the Constitution," being its principle author. Madison’s presidency was largely defined by the War of 1812, though he also successfully concluded the Second Barbary War in the Mediterranean. Madison was an Episcopalian Christian who had studied under John Witherspoon at Princeton. While he believed that a Bill of Rights was not necessary to guarantee rights, he eventually...
William McKinley was the 25th President of the United States, serving from 1897 to 1901. He was assassinated by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, in 1901 and succeeded by his Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt. During his time in office, McKinley oversaw the Spanish-American War and annexed the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and Hawaii. William McKinley was a Methodist. He did not believe in a strong separation between Church and State and thought that it was the duty of the United States...
James Monroe served as the fifth president of the United States from 1817 to 1825. He was an Episcopalian, which at the time was the established church of his home state, Virginia. Monroe attended religious school and college and maintained a nominal Episcopalian affiliation, although by all accounts his beliefs tended towards Deism. He was a close colleague of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, his predecessors as president, and followed them in invoking an omnipotent creator as protector...
Richard Nixon was the 37th President of the United States from 1969 to 1974, when he resigned from the office in the midst of the Watergate Scandal. Nixon was raised a Quaker under strict rules against drinking, swearing and dancing. He remained a Quaker his entire life, although he would come under strong criticism from both Quakers and other faith leaders over the escalation of the Vietnam War. Nixon was comfortable engaging conservative Christians of various types, maintained a...
Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States in January 2009, the first African-American to hold the office, and was re-elected to the presidency in November 2012. After graduating from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Obama continued working as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago and became involved in Democratic politics. He taught in the University of Chicago law school (1992-2004) before serving in the Illinois Senate (1997-2004) and as the US...
Franklin Pierce, a Democrat from New Hampshire, was the 14th President of the United States, from 1853 to 1857. The author Nathaniel Hawthorne, a close friend of Pierce, described the president as having "naturally a strong endowment of religious feeling," although he did not identify strongly with any particular denomination. Pierce is one of few US presidents not to use a Bible in taking his oath of office, and he chose to affirm rather than to swear the oath, on religious grounds. He was...
James K. Polk was the eleventh president of the United States, serving from 1845 to 1849. His mother and wife were devout Presbyterians, and Polk regularly attended Presbyterian services. However, Polk converted to Methodism later in life and was baptized as such on his deathbed. Polk is most remembered for his foreign policy, especially the idea of Manifest Destiny. This was based on a semi-religious determination that the United States should continue in its territorial expansion to the...
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) served as 40th President of the United States from 1981-1989 after two terms as governor of California. An actor by profession, Reagan achieved electoral success by rallying foreign policy, fiscal, and social conservatives behind a message of national strength, small government, and traditional values. Confrontation with the Soviet Union marked his first term in office, while his second term approached the end of the Cold War. Reagan's election first showcased the...
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) was the 32nd President of the United States, serving from 1933-1945 and the only president to be elected for four terms in office. A Democrat, Roosevelt took office at the height of the Great Depression, which continued through the 1930s. He initiated a series reforms known as the New Deal, including the introduction of social security, and died just as the Second World War was drawing to a close. Roosevelt, an Episcopalian, built a New Deal Coalition that...
Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt served as the 26th President of the United States from 1901 to 1909. He is famous for his personality and charisma, as well as his accomplishments as a politician, military leader, historian, naturalist and explorer. Coming to the presidency following William McKinley’s assassination, Roosevelt led a progressive domestic policy of trust-breaking and government regulation. His foreign policy accomplishments included the mediation of the Russo-Japanese War (for which...
William Howard Taft served as the twenty-seventh President and tenth Chief Justice of the United States. Although he brought on a major schism in the Republican Party between conservatives and the progressives led by his predecessor and once close friend Theodore Roosevelt, Taft's presidency was characterized by many significant accomplishments, including trust-busting, strengthening the Interstate Commerce System, improving the postal system, and expanding the civil service. Taft was a...
Zachary Taylor was a major American military leader and the twelfth president of the United States from 1849 to 1850. Although he was raised Episcopalian and married a devout woman, Taylor never became a full member of the Episcopal Church. He is most famous for his long and distinguished military career, especially his leadership in the Mexican-American War. In his 1849 Inaugural Address, Taylor stated, "The dictates of religion direct us to the cultivation of peaceful and...
Harry Truman was the 33rd President of the United States. He served from 1945-1953, becoming president upon the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. Truman served only briefly as FDR's Vice President, and served as Senator from Missouri prior to that appointment. President Truman's terms were heavily shaped by foreign affairs, including his decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan at the end of World War II, his leadership through the Korean War, and his policy of "containment" of...
John Tyler was the tenth president of the United States, governing from 1841 to 1845. Although officially affiliated with the Episcopal Church, Tyler may have shared in the Deism of Thomas Jefferson, his mentor in Virginia. He was a strong supporter of the separation of Church and State and spoke out for religious tolerance, including public support for religious freedom for "Mahommedans" "East Indians" and Catholics. As William Harrison's vice president, Tyler became president through an act...
Martin Van Buren was the eighth president of the United States from 1837 to 1841. Van Buren was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, and according to one biographer was known for his loud singing voice during services. He was called the Little Magician for his small stature but masterful ability to play partisan politics on a national stage. He played a central role in founding the Democratic Party, which drew on support from both the North and South and signaled the dominant role that...
George Washington was the first president of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1797. Prior to his terms as president, Washington had a career in public life, including service in the Virginia House of Burgesses and as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Washington's sure leadership of the young nation stressed avoiding the entangling conflicts of Europe and respecting the balance of powers between the executive and legislative branches. Like most...
Woodrow Wilson served as the 28th President of the Unites States from 1913-1921. Wilson guided the United States through the First World War, and following the Armistice Wilson went to Paris in order to gain support for the League of Nations and help solidify the Treaty of Versailles. In 1919, he was award the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Wilson was a devout Presbyterian and the son of a minister. He attended church regularly and frequently read the Bible. His religion was a great...