Often, America’s religious life in the 1950s is dismissed as
sterile and conventional. Supposedly President Dwight Eisenhower
typified generic, superficial religion with his oft quoted quip:
“Our government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt
religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”
The quote actually came from Eisenhower in 1952 after
meeting his WWII fellow commander, Soviet Marshal Grigori Zhukov.
Ike was explaining to reporters how America’s creed of equality was
based on the “Judeo-Christian concept,” contrasting with the Soviet
understanding of religion as the “opiate of the people.” Eisenhower
was not describing his own personal theology.
Grandson David Eisenhower’s
Going Home to Glory, a new memoir of his grandfather’s
retirement years, helps to clarify the record. (For a review, go
here.) In religion, as in so much else, Ike was far more
sophisticated than commonly realized. When still a young man in the
1970s, as part of research for the book published 35 years later,
David Eisenhower interviewed the clergy who knew his grandfather
well, including Billy Graham. David’s remembrance is not chiefly
about religion, of course. But the book’s title captures its
underlying theme of an aging solider and statesman who is preparing
to go “home to glory.”
Ike’s mother was the devotee of the River Brethren, an
Anabaptist sect, and she trained her sons extensively to memorize
Scripture. Much later she joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses. For much
of his adult life, though not irreverent, Ike had not belonged to a
church, sometimes attending liberal Mainline Protestant
congregations that he complained focused more on politics. Upon his
1952 election to the presidency, the former general resolved to
become a church member. Joining a pacifist, separatist sect from
his childhood was unlikely for the nation’s chief magistrate and
commander in chief. Billy Graham steered Eisenhower to National
Presbyterian Church, whose pastor had been a World War II military
chaplain. Perhaps Graham also surmised that orderly Presbyterianism
would appeal to the organizer of D-Day. And Mamie Eisenhower had
been Presbyterian.
National Presbyterian Church was then in a stately
downtown sanctuary just south of Washington’s Dupont Circle, only a
brief drive north of the White House. Andrew Jackson and Woodrow
Wilson, among other presidents, had attended the congregation. J.
Edgar Hoover was a member. It offered the perfect dignified stage
for a President’s attendance. But Eisenhower, who was far more
complex than the avuncular golfer often imagined by friends and
critics, was interested in more than show. Reputedly the Rev.
Edward Elson explained to the new President that all new church
members had to be catechized in a membership class. Eisenhower’s
schedule would not allow attendance. But he invited Elson to
instruct him one-on-one at the White House in the ways of
Presbyterianism, which Elson supposedly did. Ike was the first and
only sitting president to be baptized while in office.
Eisenhower composed his own prayer that he read at his
first inaugural. And he also invited cabinet members to open
cabinet meetings with prayer. Urbane sophisticates, then and now,
mocked this supposedly pitiable bourgeois exercise in civil
religion. But like other American statesmen, Ike probably intuited
that Judeo-Christian civil religion was a unifying moral force that
was infinitely preferable to most of its likely
alternatives.
Ike took his churchgoing seriously and sometimes had Rev.
Elson over to the White House to explain his sermons. David
Eisenhower recites in his book how one sermon, “The Love of Christ
Controlleth All Men,” provoked the President into pondering the
impact of his golf course rages. Amusingly, Eisenhower once hosted
the Methodist Council of Bishops at the White House but kept the
meeting very brief so as not to delay his golf holiday. The bishops
could hear the departing helicopter even before they left the
grounds.
After retirement, the Eisenhowers became active at
Gettysburg’s Presbyterian congregation, whose young pastor, the
Rev. James MacAskill, Ike especially appreciated. Young David as a
teenager even found the minister “spellbinding.” Having a former
president in MacAskill’s flock attracted offers of larger churches
with greater salaries. Unwilling to see him leave, Ike intervened
to ensure a higher salary for the minister. In turn, MacAskill was
impressed with Eisenhower’s own depth of religious faith and his
immunity to passing fads.
Reputed to have cited his appointment of Earl Warren as
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice as one of his greatest errors,
Eisenhower disapproved of the 1963 court ruling banning Bible
readings from public schools. Ike saw religion as a crucial moral
force, particularly for civil rights. He had been the first
president to sign civil rights legislation since Reconstruction,
and he supported the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. As David
Eisenhower writes, his grandfather thought the “Warren Court’s bias
against the church undermined its promotion of equal rights because
sociology was no substitute for moral teaching.” In that ruling’s
wake, Ike delivered a sermon at his Gettysburg church.
“I do not see how any Supreme Court in the world can
declare teachings in this vein illegal,” Ike preached. “There is no
reason for Americans to raise their children in a communist type
school that denies the existence of a God.” He noted that the
“theory of the equality of man is religious in origin.” And he
observed: “To raise our children in a moral atmosphere is to
recognize the existence of a Supreme Overlord.”
Five years later, Eisenhower was confined to Walter Reed
Medical Center for his life’s remaining months. One of the last
visitors he summoned was Billy Graham, whom he asked to recite the
plan of salvation Graham had first shared to him 14 years earlier.
Graham did so, to which Ike responded, “I’m
ready.”
Ike’s deep but non-dogmatically articulated faith,
reinforced by his active churchmanship, was reassuring and unifying
for America before the social revolutions and culture wars of later
decades. No president since has quite been able to repeat the feat.
Eisenhower’s religious beliefs and practices may have seemed
conventional, but they were deeply felt, and effectively served the
nation.
