Franklin Delano Roosevelt1933-1945

Roosevelt was born on Jan. 30, 1883, and christened two months later at St. James Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, N.Y. Roosevelt would remain a communicant in the Episcopal Church his entire life, and would later be elected a vestryman and eventually senior warden.
As a teenager he participated in missionary work organized by his boarding school, including on multiple occasions playing organ at rural church services. In his adult life, however, Roosevelt seldom attended church -- a source of aggravation to his wife, Eleanor. In a 1918 diary entry, she noted that his recent attendance two weeks in a row was surely a "great sacrifice to please me." According to Eleanor, Roosevelt was more likely to go out golfing with his friends on Sunday morning than he was to be found in prayer.
Despite his lack of church attendance, Roosevelt maintained a personal inner faith. According to Eleanor, he "had a strong religious feeling and his religion was a very personal one. I think he actually felt he could ask God for guidance and receive it. ... He never talked about his religion or his beliefs and never seemed to have any intellectual difficulties about what he believed." Although less inclined to publicly invoke religious imagery than some of his predecessors, Roosevelt did reference Christian concepts in many of his speeches. He mentioned God in all four of his inaugural addresses, asking for divine guidance through difficult times.
Roosevelt asserted the importance of the Bible in American history, declaring: "We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a nation, without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic. Its teaching, as has been wisely suggested, is ploughed into the very heart of the race." In his famous 1941 State of the Union address, Roosevelt included freedom of religion as one of the essential "four freedoms" that he felt were becoming increasingly threatened by the turmoil abroad.
A year later, in the 1942 State of the Union address, delivered less than one month after the United States entered World War II, Roosevelt framed the conflict in religious terms: "Our enemies are guided by brutal cynicism, by unholy contempt for the human race. We are inspired by a faith that goes back through all the years to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis: 'God created man in his own image.' We on our side are striving to be true to that divine heritage. We are fighting, as our fathers have fought, to uphold the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God."