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Religion in the Oval Office: The Religious Lives of American Presidents Gary Scott Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Gary Scott Smith, Chair of the History Department at Grove City College, is the author of numerous books on history and religion, including Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush (2006). This book and the one under review serve as bookends, of sorts. Faith and the Presidency explores the religious thought of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight David Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and John F. Kennedy, the first president to have to publicly defend his Catholic religion as he did in September 1960 before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in Houston, Texas. Shades of Barack Obama, who, almost fifty years later, had to defend himself against persistent charges that he was a Muslim!
Now, in Religion in the Oval Office, Smith takes on eleven more chief executives: John Adams, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William McKinley, Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Smith pays close attention to historical context and America's shifting social and moral values; examines their religious beliefs, commitments, affiliations, and practices; and scrutinizes their...