Gary Scott Smith.Religion in the Oval Office: The Religious Lives of American Presidents.

Abstract

In Religion in the Oval Office: The Religious Lives of American Presidents, Gary Scott Smith builds upon his earlier Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush (2006). Indeed, at several points Scott refers to the “twenty-two men” he has now profiled as a way of drawing conclusions across the two books. In this new contribution, Smith tackles the religious histories of eleven more presidents: 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. Each chapter reads as a religious biography of an individual president that mostly focuses on their time in office, though not exclusively so. The chapter on Quincy Adams, for example, devotes equally as much effort to untangling the role that Adams’ faith played in his lengthy post-presidential career as an abolitionist firebrand. In order to shed light on what are private beliefs, Smith mines information from a variety of sources, including speeches, correspondence, and testimonies from friends.