Johnson's Faith

In matters of faith, U.S. Presidents have ranged from fundamentalist to High Church, from mavericks to doubters. Lincoln discovered a tortured personal belief after anguished self-searching. Rutherford B. Hayes seemed proud to say "I belong to no church," though he refused to be publicly inaugurated on the scheduled day because it fell on a Sunday, and later attended the Foundry Methodist Church in Washington, D.C. James A. Garfield was not only a member of the Disciples of Christ but a minister, whose success as a preacher led to his success as a political crowd pleaser.

Most inherited their faith. Five of the first ten Presidents were Episcopalian because in Virginia, where they were born, the Anglican church was the established church. Four were sons of preachers: Episcopalian Chester Arthur (son of a Baptist), Presbyterians Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson, and Quaker Herbert Hoover. William Howard Taft, the last of four Unitarians to reach the White House, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the most recent of nine Episcopalians to become Chief Executive, were active in church affairs all their lives. Calvin Coolidge (the only Congregationalist President) and Dwight Eisenhower (who was reared in a sect called the River Brethren and became a Presbyterian largely because of his wife Mamie) joined churches only after their inaugurations. Nevertheless, more fervently than other modern leaders, they preached that the moral strength of U.S. democracy depends on a devout religious faith. John F. Kennedy made significant history by becoming the first Roman Catholic President, but he consistently refused to discuss his religious belief in public.

"Aloud & Proud." Lyndon Johnson belongs to those whose beliefs were formed by inheritance, but it is a colorful inheritance. "In our home," he told a group of women at a presidential prayer breakfast in Washington recently, "there was always prayer--aloud, proud and unapologetic."

Grandfather Sam Johnson started but as a Baptist, converted to the Disciples of Christ, ended up a Christadelphian--which may be why Lyndon's Cousin Oriole still belongs to that hyperfundamentalist sect. Christadelphians claim to be living in the "last days of Antichrist," do not feel called upon to engage in social or political welfare, and are not supposed to vote, though Cousin Oriole has voted for Lyndon. Johnson's parents were Hard-Shell Baptists, but at 14 Lyndon joined the Disciples of Christ (the Garfield faith), and was baptized in the Pedernales River a few miles from where it flows past the L.B.J. ranch.

The Disciples, who number 1,800,000 in the U.S., have no formal set of beliefs or doctrines, but rather a broad concept of Christian unity, which is perhaps reflected in Johnson's own wide-ranging churchgoing habits. Since Nov. 22 he has worshiped at: Washington's National City Christian Church; the Harriet Chapel, a little Methodist church near Camp David, Md.; St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Washington; St. John's Episcopal Church, on Lafayette Square across from the White House; Mt. Vernon Place Methodist Church in Washington; and St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Fredericksburg, Texas, an old log cabin that can seat 30 people on a busy Sunday.

Chaplain of the Tribe. Johnson goes often to Episcopal churches because Lady Bird, although raised a Methodist, became an Episcopalian after going to St. Mary's, an Episcopal junior college in Dallas. The Johnsons were married in an Episcopal church in San Antonio, and both Luci Baines and Lynda Bird are Episcopalians. At Camp Mystic in Texas, where she spent many summers, Luci often served as chaplain of her tribe because she could "pray so well when called on unexpectedly."

Lynda Bird's engagement to Roman Catholic Bernard Rosenbach is causing an ecclesiastical murmur. The White House refuses to say whether or not she is taking Catholic instruction. The zealous Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State sees the coming marriage as a chance for the Catholic Church to prove the sincerity of its new ecumenical intentions by "permitting Miss Johnson to choose her own clergyman and waiving the traditional Catholic commitment."

Memorial to God? Meanwhile, Johnson has got himself into hot water with some U.S. Protestants. At the presidential prayer breakfast, he remarked that he thought it was too bad that Washington, with its monuments to Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington, did not have a "fitting memorial to the God who made us all."

The Christian Advocate, official biweekly of the Methodist Church, responded by charging that Johnson was "the victim of some faulty theological advice," and called the notion of putting up a memorial to God a "semantic blunder" because it "speaks of God in the past tense." Christianity Today, a conservative Protestant biweekly, said that while it would welcome "a recognition of the historical Christian roots of the nation," the idea of a monument to a generalized God should be dropped.

White House Aide Bill Moyers, who is a Baptist minister, replied that Johnson did not mean a memorial in concrete and stone, but perhaps a place like the prayer room installed in the Senate when he was a Senator. There the proposal died, and Johnson at least came out of it as a man on comfortable and familiar terms with his God.

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