Theodore Roosevelt: Preaching from the Bully Pulpit. By Benjamin J. Wetzel

Abstract

In this spiritual biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Benjamin J. Wetzel, an assistant professor of history at Taylor University, has done a superb job of examining the 26th president’s religious beliefs and practices. Roosevelt’s religiosity has long been a subject of contention. A politician who sounded like a preacher, T. R. peppered his talks and writings with quotations from the Bible (which he knew extraordinarily well), and he treated the many causes with which he was involved as moral crusades. “Religion was the heart of his life,” averred the Rev. Christian Reisner, an early Roosevelt biographer, but others were not so sure (p. 194). One skeptic, the literary critic Gamaliel Bradford, contended that Roosevelt was not religious because he did not revere God. “He had no need of him and no longing,” wrote Bradford, “because he really had no need of anything but his own immensely sufficient self” (p. 196). Was Roosevelt a true Christian or a Pharisee? That is an interesting question, but Wetzel wisely refrains from providing a concrete answer. “This volume cannot, of course, reach definitive conclusions,” he writes, “about matters that lay buried in Roosevelt’s soul” (p. 197). Rather than focusing on the unknowable, Wetzel focuses on what we can know about Roosevelt’s spirituality.