A meaningless and fundamentally broken table

[james_davis_nicoll]

Everyone knows that the fraction of American Presidents who were Catholics is nothing as high as the number of Americans who are Catholics. Ever wonder which religions are over-represented amongst American Presidents?


Assuming this table can be taken at face value:

Religious affiliation of US Presidents in order of the degree to which their religion is over-represented amongst US Presidents if they had all been elected today and not in some past era when demographics were different:

Denomination        Number of      Percent of       Percent of              Ratio:
                    Presidents     Presidents       Current U.S. Pop.       % of Pres.
                                                                            to % of Pop. 

Dutch Reformed          2             4.8%             0.1%                   48.0 
Unitarian               4             9.5%             0.2%                   47.5 
Disciples of Christ     3             7.1%             0.4%                   17.8 
Episcopalian           11            26.2%             1.7%                   15.4 
Presbyterian           11            26.2%             2.8%                    9.4
Congregationalist       2             4.8%             0.6%                    8.0 
Quaker                  2             4.8%             0.7%                    6.9 
Jehovah's Witness       1             2.4%             0.6%                    4.0 
Methodist               5            11.9%             8.0%                    1.5 
Baptist                 4             9.5%             8.0%                    1.2 
Catholic                1             2.4%            24.5%                    0.1 

TOTAL                  42            100%            57.0%   

[Fixed to correct Eisenhower's affiliation, to correct some math errors and to take into account reader comments]

Oddly, all but one of these denominations is batting out of its league. I suppose that is a reflection of religious diveristy and the uneven distribution between sects of interest in and possibility of achieving higher office.

I expected more Quakers.

I have not verified the numbers I am using and since I spotted one error in the original there may well be others.

Comments

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Jehovah's Witness 1 2.4% 0.6% 6.0

Not so much an error as a peculiar form of insistence. One would think that Presidents get to choose their religion, rather than being categorized according to the whims or agenda of the compilers. Eisenhower belonged to a pre-JDub sect as a child. He separated from that church at a young age and was baptized a Presbyterian a few weeks before his inauguration.

So why is he the J-Dub on the list?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Huh. I just spotted a major problem with this chart aside from that one.

[tceisele.livejournal.com]

You mean the lack of an entry for "no denomination"?

[martinl-00.livejournal.com]

This line:

Baptist 4 9.5% 8.0% 0.5

is busted as well. 9.5/8.0 = 1.1875

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Ooh, what?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Some of the ratios are very wrong, at least in base ten.

[tceisele.livejournal.com]

Um?

Who was the Jehovah's Witness?

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Eisenhower. (But not really. See comment above.)

[morchades.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised there's been so many Unitarians.

[nwhyte]

What's not to love about Unitarians?

(Anyway the last one elected was a hundred years ago.)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

They're so.... so.... tolerant.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's not very American, is it?

[morchades.livejournal.com]

And so very barely tolerated by the "Traditional" Christians.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Didn't Texas decide they were not a real religion?

[cantkeepsilent.livejournal.com]

It's a complicated history. The Unitarians and Universalists were both founded as Christ-centered religions, but when they merged in 1961 they altered their mission to being one of a disciplined search for personal truths throughout the entirely of historical spirituality. They don't proclaim any specific answers or direction in any theological issues and demand that their members hold no creeds. (The Disciples of Christ are similar, except that they hold that the Bible is not wholly off-base regarding the nature of God and that Jesus is to be the central character in one's search for illumination.)

And while I don't agree with Texas' decision-making in this regard, I can vaguely follow how one might define "religion" in such a way that the UUs are no more religious than the Toastmasters or the Rotarians. (And, if you were actually asking, the Texas comptroller did reverse her decision to rescind their tax-exempt status.)

[j-larson.livejournal.com]

I wonder how many of them are real Unitarians, and how many are basically secular folks who don't want to say, "None of the above."

[gjules.livejournal.com]

At least two -- the Adamses -- were real Unitarians. I sing at the church they were members of (which also happens to be the church they're buried in).

[(Anonymous)]

Unitarianism was heavily represented in the US upper class in the 1800s. I was surprised to learn in "The Education of Henry Adams" (1) that Harvard was a Unitarian institution.

(1) First 3/4 of which I highly recommend.

William Hyde

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

It's still one of the UU seminaries, I note irrelevantly. (Well, semi-officially.)

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing they were all pretty early ones, probably soon after the split with the Congregationalists but before the church merged with the Universalists.

I wonder if, in the future, Obama will be lumped in with the Congregationalists or the Dutch Reformed? Both former denominations are now part of the UCC, Obama's church.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Why is the ratio for Baptists less than 1?

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

You also have to consider the changes in religious population in the USA over the centuries. Lots more of us Dutchmen as a percentage of the population in 1800 than now.

[argonel.livejournal.com]

While these are some interesting, but useless numbers. More interesting would be a tabulation of presidential denomination compared to the demographics at the time they were elected.

[jennlk]

I'm pretty sure that there were far more people in the Dutch Reformed church in the 1800s than there are now. Numerically, not just as a percentage of US population.

In addition, I'd categorise John Adams and JQA as Massachusetts Unitarian, which would be Congregational anywhere but 1700s Massachusetts, where the Congregational Church was weird. (hence John leaving the church when he grew up.)

[cat-collector.livejournal.com]

I can see one big problem---the table gives the religious affiliations of the current US population and that almost certainly has changed over time. Without looking it up, I would guess that the current percentage of Catholics, for example, is now higher than it was in the time of the first days of the republic.

I expected more Quakers.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

And then I remembered who the two Quaker Presidents were: Herbert Hoover and Richard M. Nixon.

Re: I expected more Quakers.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

And IIRC the only two engineer Presidents were Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter.

Re: I expected more Quakers.

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

The Quaker meeting house in Washington makes a big deal of Hoover and really doesn't mention Nixon at all. Though I think he might have been one of those weird[1] quakers with preachers and services.

[1]Less prejudiced people call them programmed quakers.

Re: I expected more Quakers.

[redbird]

The latter of whom was read out of meeting, for sound theological reasons (well before Watergate).

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

From my Minnesota perspective, the big denomination missing is Lutheran.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Aren't they just an off-shoot of the Catholics?

I did once see a chart that listed the Lutherans as a catagory apart from something called "mainstream protestants", which I thought was an interesting choice.

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

http://www.thearda.com/mapsReports/reports/counties/17043_2000.asp
That's where I live now, in the Chicago suburbs...

http://www.thearda.com/mapsReports/reports/counties/39113_2000.asp
That's where I was born and raised.

http://www.thearda.com/mapsReports/reports/counties/27053_2000.asp
There's Minneapolis.

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

Aren't they just an off-shoot of the Catholics?

Hee!

[argonel.livejournal.com]

If seen from great enough distance yes they are just an offshoot of the Catholics. Of course when viewed from that distance Catholocis start looking very Jewish. The tenants of faith are very similar, but the practice is very different.

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

When I dabbled in Quakerism[1] my Catholic parents were totally freaked out at the idea of me becoming a Protestant. Which amused me greatly.

[1]It didn't take. I'm too atheist, though I liked the idea of the community.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Well, sure, but *everybody* on that list is just an off-shoot of the Catholics.

I'm not real big on protestant theological history, but maybe some people thought the Reformation hadn't gone far enough, and took a few more steps away, and "mainstream Protestantism" centers there rather than back on the Lutherans?

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

Well, if you group "state" churches together, that includes the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglicans, and the Lutheran Church, which supplanted the Roman Catholic Church in many European countries after a lot of bloodshed. What a lot of people call "mainstream Protestant" denominations are the Dissenting Faiths, which usually means dissent with the Church of England, although I don't see why it can't include the Dutch Reformed Church and the Anabaptists (Mennonites and Amish), since they were reactions against the Lutheran state churches in various places.

Early immigrants from Lutheran countries often ended up becoming Episcopalian after arriving here; we have a parish here in Philadelphia called Gloria Dei or Old Swede's Church that is Episcopalian and dates to the early 18th century; they have a big St. Lucia celebration every year, which in most other places in the US is solely a Lutheran affair. It seems to have taken a while for Lutherans to come here and resolve to STAY Lutheran. That's probably part of the reason for the lack of Lutherans on the list. And then there was a period of time when many devout Lutherans in the US (not likely or willing to become Episcopalian or anything else) were immigrants or recent immigrants; by the time there were viable political candidates who were Lutheran who might consider running for national office we had WWI, during which and after which a lot of people downplayed their German ancestry; being "out" about being a practicing Lutheran would be the opposite of this sort of discretion. (My grandmother refused to teach German to my father and uncle in the 20s because of some anti-German sentiment in New Haven after the war.) Then we got WWII and another spate of de-emphasizing German ancestry.

I'm not remembering--if Mondale had been elected, would he have been the first Lutheran? I don't know if he's Lutheran or not, I just know he's from Minnesota, but the two often go together.

[jsburbidge.livejournal.com]

The reason Lutherans get grouped differently is that most protestants are either offshoots of the Reformed/Calvinist tradition (Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, Christian Reformed, (in Canada) United Church, plus some at a further remove such as the Congregationalists) or of the antinomian/anabaptist radicals of the Reformation, who went beyond the Reformed churches (Baptists, Mennonites, etc.).

Lutheranism was the "first" and less radical protestantism (it retained far more of the traditional in both its theology and its rites, to such a degree that recent talks with Rome have resulted in a formulation of "justification by faith" which is acceptable to all parties (which would, indeed, make Luther a schismatic but not a heretic). (In fact, it's not acceptable to all parties because many Lutherans (missouri Synod, for example) are rather more radical than Luther was, but that's another matter.)

Middle-of-the-road Anglicans of the Seventeenth Century tended to group themselves with the Lutherans as against the Reformed types. (This is why Swift's Tale of A Tub makes the three allegorical figures Peter (Rome), Martin (Luther) and Jack (John Calvin), where Martin represents a via media in an Anglican sense. From outside, they looked more like a split between standard Calvinists with bishops and Arminian Calvinists (with bishops) as far as their theology went, until the Nineteenth Century brought the Oxford Movement along. Methodists are a spin-off of the Anglicans, with an Arminian Calvinist tinge but more populism.

In both the US and Canada, the mainstream Lutherans and the Anglicans/Episcopalians have formal intercommunion agreements which extend to things like sharing clergy, so you can consider them, for practical purposes, as occupying the same location in the spectrum.

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

I remember writing and running a RPG in modern settings years ago, where there was a church marked 'Montana Synod of the Lutheran Church".

In Ohio, nobody noticed. In Chicago, nobody noticed. In Milwaukee, that set off big red alarm bells.

Of course, the Lutherans would know that there's no such thing as a Montana Synod...

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

*laughs really hard*

There *are* Lutherans in Chicago, though. Missouri Synod*, even.

*I got better.

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

Not nearly as many as lapsed Catholics.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Lutherans are pretty reserved types, not given to overt public display (emotion, patriotism, government, etc.). Have any of our *state* politicians even been Lutheran?

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

My birth religion is Episcopalian (which doesn't really exist outside the USA) and I'm in a Unity church (which didn't exist until the 1900s). My family's (paternal) original religion was Mennonite (the first Rittenhouse was also the first Mennonite leader in the USA), but they dropped that in my branch around the time of the Revolutionary War.

"Pennsylvania Germans are inaccurately known as Pennsylvania Dutch from a misunderstanding of "Pennsylvania Deutsch", the group's German language name. The first group of Germans to settle in Pennsylvania arrived in Philadelphia in 1683 from Krefeld, Germany, and included Mennonites and possibly some Dutch Quakers. During the early years of German emigration to Pennsylvania, most of the emigrants were members of small sects that shared Quaker principles—Mennonites, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, Moravians, and some German Baptist groups—and were fleeing religious persecution."

That's my folks. From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_religion_in_the_United_States

[neonchameleon.livejournal.com]

My birth religion is Episcopalian (which doesn't really exist outside the USA)

The Anglican Communion would like to disagree. With everything including itself, this being the Anglican Communion...

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

My birth religion is Episcopalian (which doesn't really exist outside the USA)

The Church of England would beg to differ. Though not The Church of Scotland, which is Presbyterian.

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

The Episcopalians are a subset of Anglicans.

[avram]

Oddly, all but one of these denominations is batting out of its league.

Another way of looking at it: In the US, there are religions that are regarded as mainstream (various Protestant denominations), and those regarded as out of the mainstream (Catholicism, LDS, anything non-Christian). The Catholics are batting out of their league as the only non-mainstream religion to have hit even one over the fence.

On the other hand, Catholics are over-represented on the Supreme Court, perhaps because they're the branch of Christianity with some kind of intellectual tradition.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, that whole Scottish Enlightenment thing, a bunch of Catholics.

And Portugal, that famous bastion of inquiry and thinking -- they even had an Index of Prescribed books, straight from the centre of classical learning Rome!

And it isn't like the Dissenters ever had any good moral philosophers, or the Lutherans any famous theologians, or the Anglicans any great scientists.

(Don't be a bigot.)

[avram]

Who was that masked man?

[(Anonymous)]

Um, you could always reply to the argument -- that is, that you made an incredibly bigoted and offensive claim which is quite clearly false when checked with the historical record...

(Keir if you must.)

[kd5mdk.livejournal.com]

I'm really surprised that Baptists are only 8% of the population. Are they counting Southern Baptists as a different category?

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

They're probably lumping in all Baptists together, since Jimmy Carter is no doubt one of the Baptists, and I thought he was Southern Baptist.

[schizmatic.livejournal.com]

This chart, for all of its errors, reminds me of something amusing that I once heard:

Jews, Puerto Ricans, and Episcopalians each make up 2% of the U.S. population. Guess which one doesn't think they're a minority?

[j-larson.livejournal.com]

Some years back, Slate magazine had an article about the trouble non-Protestants face in getting elected to the presidency, The Protestant Presidency.