PRAYING TOGETHER, STAYING TOGETHER

ONE steamy Sunday morning last July, Lyndon Johnson assembled 75 friends and aides in the White House movie theater for a 35-minute prayer service conducted by his weekend guest, Evangelist Billy Graham. It was all very informal. Graham read a few verses from the Bible, paid gracious tribute to the Johnsons in a brief sermon, and later joined the impromptu congregation for coffee and small talk in the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. The idea for the service was Johnson's. However, when he was told that no similar rite had ever been held in the Executive Mansion, he hastily clamped a secrecy lid on the entire meeting.

He need not have bothered. In recent weeks, Billy Graham has come on like a White House chaplain-in-residence. Perhaps following the Pauline precept--becoming all things to all men that he might by all means save some--Graham returned to the White House as the Johnsons' guest the weekend before L.B.J. left office. He reappeared at Nixon's inauguration to deliver a prayer that sounded more like a sermon--and was not overly kind to his earlier host at the White House. After all, Graham had urged Nixon to make the race in 1968, and had been on hand at the discussions in Miami in August that led to the choice of Spiro Agnew as Nixon's running mate.

Prayers in the Mail. Last week Graham returned to the White House to conduct a service--with no secrecy at all --on Nixon's first Sunday as President. Graham's regular hymn singer, George Beverly Shea, was there, along with 200 guests, mainly drawn from the Cabinet and Nixon's staff. White House Curator James Ketcham confessed: "I've never heard of anything like it happening here before."

Later in the week, both Nixon and Graham spoke before a crowd of 2,000 at an annual presidential prayer breakfast in the Sheraton-Park Hotel. The President reported that each evening he reads selected letters addressed to him from all over the country. Sounding a little like Graham himself, he said: "Even in this period when religion is not supposed to be fashionable, when agnosticism and skepticism seem to be on the upturn [the mail includes] prayers for this country, for the leadership this nation may be able to provide for the world."

Divided Community. The Nixon brand of official devotions has stirred both thoughtful and frivolous tongues. "The Administration that prays together stays together," goes one current Washington jest. More seriously, the capital's religious community is divided over the issue of Nixon-style Sunday services at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

"The coupling of spirituality and political sentimentality" dismayed the Christian Century's editors, who assailed "those who find their security in sanctifying the status quo." Raising a different objection, the Rev. Dudley Ward, a general secretary of the United Methodist Church, thinks Nixon should attend local churches and not confine his devotions to the White House. Says Ward: "European royalty had its private chapels, insulated from the wider community. The President represents the nation and the people, and cannot isolate himself from the important institutions in our national life."

The Rev. Robert Jones of Washington's Unitarian All Souls Church questions the need for a weekly demonstration of presidential piety. "Ever since Ike," he says, "Presidents have been forced to account for their Sundays. If they didn't go to church, they had to have a good excuse. I admit to be looking forward to the day when a President will tell us all: 'I didn't go to church this morning because I didn't feel like it.' "

Chances are, however, that the President does feel like it--and that the majority of Americans approve. "Grand, just grand," said Methodist Bishop John Wesley Lord. "The President has provided the most important rostrum in the nation for the clergy to be heard." Senate Chaplain Edward L. Elson, Eisenhower's old Washington pastor, agrees. Nixon, he says, "has strongly re-emphasized both his spiritual and moral leadership of the country."

Nixon's parents were both Quakers, and he is still a nominal member of the East Whittier, Calif., meeting of the Society of Friends. But Nixon's Quaker background did not deter him from serving in the Navy in World War II, and he has since seen the inside of Protestant churches of many denominations. He attends the Presbyterian church in Key Biscayne; in New York, he often goes to Norman Vincent Peale's Marble Collegiate Church, where Daughter Julie chose to be married. In short, like many other Americans, the President simply goes to the church nearest at hand. Now he can bring the preachers to him, right into the East Room of the White House.

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