For President’s Day: surprising facts about presidents and religion

A few fascinating tidbits from Huffington Post:  

Did you know that Ulysses S. Grant was never baptized and reportedly got into trouble for not attending religious services while he was a student at West Point?

Or that the first national public celebration of Christmas, with the lighting of a national Christmas tree, didn’t happen until the presidency of Calvin Coolidge? 

Or that Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president on Air Force One using a copy of the St. Joseph Missal instead of the bible?

Or that James Garfield was sometimes called “the preacher president”?  An explanation: 

Garfield converted to Christianity at a camp meeting in 1850. The next day he was baptized in the Disciples of Christ Church. “Today I was buried with Christ in baptism and arose to walk in the newness of life,” he wrote.

Though not formally a minister, Garfield preached until becoming a member of Congress in 1863. One of his most famous sermons, “The Material and the Spiritual,” presented Christianity as a remedy to what he saw as a growing materialism: “Men are tending to materialism. Houses, lands, and worldly goods attract their attention, and, as a mirage, lure them on to death. Christianity, on the other hand, leads only the natural body to death, and for the spirit, it points out a house not built with hands, eternal in the heavens.”

Later in the sermon, Garfield described the Jesus he believed in: “Let me urge you to follow Him, not as the Nazarene, the Man of Galilee, the carpenter’s son, but as the ever living spiritual person, full of love and compassion, who will stand by you in life and death and eternity.”

Check out more at the link, or visit the PBS page on “God in the White House“. Fascinating stuff.