Is the President America’s Pastor in Chief?
Writing for Christianity Today, Judd Birdsall argues, “[T]he President acts, for better or worse, as the nation’s senior religious figure.” In the absence of an “official hierarchy in the American civil religion,” Cambridge University professor, Andrew Preston, calls the president the “de facto pope.” Birdsall writes, “American presidents have routinely invoked God in ways that more or less reflect mainstream religious opinion.”