With the February birthdays of both–arguably, our nation’s two greatest Presidents–Washington and Lincoln conflated into a national holiday this past Monday, I found a column by a Charleston (SC) Post and Courier pundit, published that same day, somewhere between amusing and disturbing.
At least this sentence–referring, as it does, to various ambiguities associated with America’s highest elective office. “Religion,’” he wrote, “once mattered, but concerns mount if the word ‘devout’ is attached.”
My observation would, rather, turn this statement on its head. For a President’s religion seems to matter more today–for too may, perhaps–than when one glances across the pages of history.
