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Who was the only US president never to join a church?
Question
#121598. Asked by star_gazer. (May 27 11 9:49 AM)
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AyatollahK
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It would seem that there is a fair amount of controversy about whether several presidents ever formally belonged to a church, so there may be many correct answers. (In some case, as with Johnson and Hayes, their wives were members of churches, but they may not have been -- although that may have been difficult to manage in the 1800s.)
But Obama is not one of them. As discussed in the following AP article, Barack Obama was a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for 20 years before he resigned during his presidential campaign.
 http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9111UBG0&show_article=1
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star_gazer
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Jefferson was raised in the Church of England at a time when it was the established church in Virginia and only denomination funded by Virginia tax money. Before the Revolution, parishes were units of local government, and Jefferson served as a vestryman â€" a lay administrative position in his local parish. Office-holding qualifications at all levelsâ€"including the House of Burgesses, to which Jefferson was elected in 1769â€"required affiliation with the current state religion and an undertaking that one would neither express dissent nor do anything that did not conform to church doctrine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_religion
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AyatollahK
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IN fact, Jefferson (despite his well-known sympathy for the Unitarians in his later years, which is what leads to comments like the one in Wikipedia quoted above by Shiningstar7) was not just a member of an Anglican church but (according to the historian Willard Sterne Randall) a member of the vestry (the administrative committee of an Anglican church):
http://tinyurl.com/books-google-jefferson
P. 138:
"Jefferson, himself an Anglican vestryman since his coming of age, had followed the clash between gentry and clergy in the Parson's Cause controversy."
That's a very specific affiliation, at least during that part of his life.
In fact, Jefferson (despite his well-known sympathy for the Unitarians in his later years, which is what leads to comments like the one in Wikipedia quoted above by Shiningstar7) was not just a member of an Anglican church but (according to the historian Willard Sterne Randall) a member of the vestry (the administrative committee of an Anglican church):
http://tinyurl.com/3srebj8
"Jefferson, himself an Anglican vestryman since his coming of age, had followed the clash between gentry and clergy in the Parson's Cause controversy."
That's a very specific affiliation, at least during that part of his life.
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