The Soul of an American President: The Untold Story of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Faith
by Alan Sears and Craig Osten with Ryan Cole
Baker Books, 2019
240 pages (hardcover), $22.99
As a US Army chaplain, I have incredible opportunities to engage a broad cross-section of American society with the gospel, while facing the legal restraints natural to a civic institution. Students of church-state ethics will also recognize the inherent tension of serving in such a capacity: chaplains are paid by the government and serve, in part, at the will of civil authorities. Throughout the history of the military chaplaincy, chaplains have felt pressure to preach “nonsectarian” sermons and focus primarily on morals and morale. J. Gresham Machen recognized long ago the temptation in war to sanctify the sacrifice of the soldier as part of a broader civil religion to the exclusion of the gospel.
It was with great interest, therefore, that I read The Soul of an American President: The Untold Story of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Faith by Alan Sears and Craig Osten (with Ryan Cole). Both Sears and Osten have ties to the Alliance for Defending Freedom (ADF)—the former as founder and the latter as a senior director. The ADF has proven to be an effective defender of religious liberty over the past several decades. With this background in mind, it is easy to discern the authors’ intent to explore and defend the oft-neglected and occasionally criticized religious life of President Eisenhower (22–23).
To this end, the authors provide a bit of helpful scholarship. They effectively prove that Eisenhower went out of his way to avoid using his faith for political gain. He became a church member for the first time (at National Presbyterian in Washington, DC) as president, not while running for president, for specifically this reason. As shown through countless letters, he greatly resented any undue publicity of his faith or church attendance.
As the only American president baptized while in office, his faith by all accounts actually seemed quite genuine. He was fervent in his church attendance wherever he traveled, would ask for sermon transcripts when he missed church because of travel, and loved to question his pastors on various biblical passages, doctrines, and sermon points. This level of engagement did not abate when Eisenhower left the presidency and the public limelight. If anything, it increased.
Some historians doubt the credibility of Eisenhower’s faith due to the fact that he didn’t join a church prior to becoming president. The authors, however, easily swipe aside this objection by highlighting the convoluted religious background of his childhood (his mother was a Jehovah’s Witness) and by the transitory nature of his army career. As an army chaplain, I can attest to the reality of this latter dynamic: army chapels are not denominational and tend to lack doctrinal consistency, let alone structures of membership and discipline.
Yet, all that the authors gain in highlighting the authenticity of Eisenhower’s faith is lost in their inability to provide a simple definition for faith, such as faith being a “saving grace, whereby we receive and rest upon [Christ] alone for salvation, as he is offered to us in the gospel” (Westminster Shorter Catechism Q/A 86). Instead, their portrait of faith is largely pragmatic and political in orientation. “Faith” is primarily treated in relation to the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the innate dignity and rights accorded those created in God’s image, the contrast with the evils of atheism and Communism, and the motivation for social change. In other words, it fits better within the American civil religion than within a Christian system of doctrine.
It is not that theologians alone can write spiritual biographies—certainly, they would likely devote more time to definitions and doctrinal substance—but that the authors of this work demonstrate an apparent ignorance of their own worldview and its effect on their interpretation of history. They strip off the mask of another Eisenhower biographer—a religious cynic who thus read Eisenhower’s religion cynically—only to show themselves devout acolytes of American civil religion who venerate Eisenhower as their patron saint.
In light of the present postmodern culture, the authors’ interpretation of history reflects a worldview that now seems hopelessly antiquated. The reader feels a propagandist tug throughout the book to resist the pernicious pull of godless atheism and return to the faith of our fathers, so that God may heal our land. This call, parroting the excesses of several generations of American evangelicalism, will go unheeded. While it was useful in galvanizing Christian civic engagement for the past half century, it did so at the expense of a specifically Christian identity. “Judeo-Christian” is a rallying cry, not a religion; the term should be stricken from the public discourse. It is a cruel irony that this pragmatic exploitation of Christianity is partly to blame for the spiritual mud puddle that is the present culture.
We are not growing more atheistic or secular as a society, but more pagan and spiritual. The call to embrace “faith” and “God” will not garner as much dissent as the authors might assume. Present society is happy to appropriate such ill-defined terms into their own pantheistic categories. Every graduation speaker preaches faith in ourselves, and God has become a suitable term to describe the amalgamation of our ambiguous, platitudinous beliefs and unfettered desires. Even the demons believe—and shudder.
A better spiritual biography of Eisenhower would have highlighted his shallow—yet sincere—faith in the Lord and the comfort this brought him through countless tragedies and hardships. Ike’s principled stands against Communism and segregation would be treated as faithful implications of his faith rather than its substance. Critical terms such as “faith” and “God” would be carefully defined (while being faithfully shown as inarticulately expressed in the life of Eisenhower), so that readers could be inspired by the source of Eisenhower’s hope rather than its reflection.
Faith in any figure cannot be properly treated without regard to its object. American civil religion will not save the reader, let alone my soldiers. Secularism was never the root issue; sin is the problem. And secularism is no longer the dominant cultural paradigm, which means attempts to engage it will prove fruitless. The crying need of the hour is a clear-eyed view of the culture that enables us to faithfully and unambiguously present the gospel in our unique context. We don’t need more faith—we need Jesus.
Stephen Roberts is a US Army chaplain and has written for The Washington Times and The Federalist.
