Journal Time

by Ray Waddle

Lately I've felt a pang of nostalgia for the last U.S. President to faithfully attend a Presbyterian church during his White House years.

Dwight Eisenhower.

Ronald Reagan was nominally Presbyterian, but he never went regularly to church as president. Eisenhower made it a habit. It's startling to learn he was baptized just a few days after his inauguration (in 1953 at National Presbyterian Church). The World War II hero had moved around so much during his military career that he never got baptized. Now it gave him a new sense of church commitment.

(The history of presidential church-going is fascinating in itself. Richard Nixon grew up Quaker but never attended a Quaker service as president. Lyndon Johnson, not noted for great piety, attended more Protestant and Catholics services than any Commander-in-Chief. See the book So Help Me God: The Faith of America's Presidents, by John McCollister, for a nice summary.)

Eisenhower was the last president to speak publicly about God before the nation descended into the social conflicts in the 1960s. Ever since, religious belief has been embroiled in America's ongoing political arguments, pro and con — Vietnam, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, abortion, bans on school-sponsored prayer, war in Iraq. Today a president's occasional religious words are nervously scrutinized by his own staff before they are released as fodder for endless cable news analysis.

Presiding in the far different climate of the Cold War, Eisenhower was remarkably at ease calling upon the Almighty. Driving through the Great Plains recently, I stopped off Interstate 70 in Abilene, Kansas, to visit the Eisenhower Center, a campus that includes his official library, his boyhood home and the "Place of Meditation" where he and his wife, Mamie, and young son Doud, are buried.

The Place of Meditation, built in 1966, is a generic-looking church building that resembles a thousand other Protestant churches in America but is dedicated to nondenominational ideals of public faith. The building symbolizes a serene moment in the nation's religious history. Inside, the blue carpet, beige marble walls and gently trickling water fountain provide a somewhat funereal effect. The stained glass panels offer the only congregational touch. There are no Christian symbols. Instead, the visitor finds quotes on the wall from President Eisenhower's speeches.

One quote says, "The real fire within the builders of America was faith — faith in a Provident God whose hand supported and guided their faith in themselves as the children of God ... faith in their country and its principles that proclaimed man's right to freedom and justice." Another says, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. ... This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."

The statements are plain-spoken and generous. Ike was not a theologian but a military man who spoke his religious principles in simple terms. His Presbyterian instincts —and his colossal experience as the ranking Allied general in history's greatest war —taught him to trust Providence, the God of the Ages, the Father who guided him on D-day. To him, "One Nation, Under God" made pragmatic sense. (It was during his presidency that "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance.) His private faith and public ideals seemed one and the same.

I said Eisenhower's faith personally stirred nostalgia. But that's not quite the word. Born in 1956 I have no serious memory of the Eisenhower era. Ike's America was no utopia. The nation in the 1950s was only beginning to admit to its racist divisions.

Nevertheless, Eisenhower's presidential words about God — his lack of jargon, his ethical bluntness — look refreshing because he connected his faith to pure springs of democratic decency and idealism.

Around that same time, 50 years ago, a young minister in Alabama named Martin Luther King Jr. was pondering those same words — "One Nation, Under God" and "man's right to freedom and justice." He too drew strength from Providence. He used that inspiration to push the land of freedom past habits of prejudice and challenge it to live up to its own ideals.

The language of providence is the monopoly of no party. My favorite places of national inspiration include Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial and the King Center in Atlanta. I'm adding a small Place of Meditation in Kansas to the list.

(Ray Waddle, a writer based in Nashville, is the author of a new book, Against the Grain:
Unconventional Wisdom from Ecclesiastes, published by Upper Room Books.)