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]

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.)

[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."

[(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

[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]

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...

[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.)

[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.