Three days before Christmas 1952 and a month before his inauguration as the thirty-fourth president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower addressed the Freedoms Foundation at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. There, the president-elect declared that “our form of government [makes] no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” Ike, no theologian, was subsequently mocked for his seeming indifference to the nuances of religious belief and their impact on public life; his comment confirmed to his cultured despisers their stereotypical (and quite false) view of him as a smiling dunce. In fact, Eisenhower was speaking an important truth, however inelegant his formulation.