Presidential Churches Part 2: Lincoln’s New York Avenue Presbyterian

My tour of presidential churches in Washington, DC, stalled last year after visiting St John’s Episcopal, resumed yesterday at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, best known as the congregation of Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday was also yesterday. NYAPC, or at least its predecessor congregation, was also the church of John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson and James Buchanan.

Founded early in the 19th Century when the capital city was still a village, NYAPC’s predecessor was built partly thanks to a generous loan from then Secretary of State Adams. He also was active in the Unitarian church, and much of his life he alternated between Unitarianism and Trinitarianism, thinking the former too liberal and the latter too doctrinaire. He once represented both NYAPC’s predecessor and the Unitarians at an American Bible Society convention. In the 1824 election, three of the four major presidential candidates, including Adams and Jackson, attended NYAPC’s predecessor.

Jackson’s presidency was nearly wrecked thanks to NYAPC’s predecessor, whose pastor crusaded against the allegedly sexually permissive wife of Jackson’s War Secretary, who was consequently snubbed by much of official Washington. The President angrily demanded evidence, which the pastor failed to provide sufficiently. Of course Jackson quit attending the church, although not Presbyterianism, with which he had a lifelong affiliation, and which he officially joined in retirement, in keeping with his late beloved wife’s wishes.

The Lincolns had become active in a Presbyterian church in Springfield after losing a son, and rented a pew at NYAPC shortly after his 1861 presidential inauguration. Besides Sunday attendance, Lincoln often attended a mid-week prayer meeting, although discretely sitting unseen away from the main room.

Both his sanctuary pew, and the sofa he used for prayer meetings, remain on display at NYAPC.

Lincoln became close to NYAPC pastor Phineas Gurley, a Princeton graduate and agile theologian who often talked theology privately with the President. After the Lincoln’s lost a second son, the President became even more reliant on NYAPC and Gurley, who later recalled that Lincoln’s views, as expressed to him, conformed to Christian orthodoxy.

Lincoln never formally joined NYAPC or any church, though Gurley’s daughter, many years later, claimed Lincoln had told her father of his plans to do so. When Lincoln was assassinated, Mary Todd Lincoln summoned him, and he was present, praying, at Lincoln’s death. Gurley, who disapproved of theaters, later expressed regret that Lincoln had been slain in a theater. But he always hailed Lincoln’s character and achievements.

When NYAPC was rebuilt in the 1940s to accommodate the large crowds attracted by famed preacher Peter Marshall, President Harry Truman laid the cornerstone. Marshall died shortly afterwards, and a Hollywood movie about him, A Man Called Peter, was filmed partly at NYAPC. A 1954 Lincoln Day sermon that President Dwight Eisenhower heard in NYAPC reputedly helped inspire the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. NYAPC in the 1960s became an outpost of activism for Civil Rights and opposing the Vietnam War.

NYAPC’s administrator graciously gave me a tour yesterday and sold me a copy of a relatively new, glossy, coffee table sized history of the church, Capital Witness, which is quite informative, and upon which most of this blog is based. She said the church has over 600 members and a regular attendance of about 400.

Hopefully my next presidential church visit will be quicker in coming, perhaps next week. Can you guess where?