- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
TheF79-
Thank you! The myth that we've never had a non-Christian president gets rather tiresome.
As you correctly asserted, Thomas Jefferson was not a practicing Christian, and termed himself a Deist. The two Jameses, Madison and Monroe, were by affiliation Episcopalians (also the religion into which Jefferson was born), but their conception of spirituality seems to have been heavily influenced by Deism. They had serious doubts about the supernatural aspects of Christianity, but were not as vocal about them as Jefferson. Then also there was the Unitarian John Adams, whose church specifically rejected the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. I'm pretty sure if you reject the divinity of Christ, you're not exactly a Christian.
So there's definitely one —and maybe four— of them. And they're kind of a big four, in terms of historical influence. Not a Frank Pierce in the bunch.
