The Bosque Boys

Does Obama actually fit here since he came from an aberrant congregation?

I will defer to the Gardener on this one--but I am not at all sure Rev. Wright's church is really that aberrant within the UCC tradition.

bob and merrill - About the only thing unifying the UCC is that they want to be unified. The UCC "tradition" is only about 60 years old, and comes from 4 fairly divergent denominations. (The pastor who taught my confirmation class at St. John's UCC would be proud of me for knowing that.) Until Trinity UCC, Chicago is officially disowned by the UCC denominational structure (which won't happen, since it's kind of against the UCC's raison d'etre), OR Trinity voluntarily leaves the UCC (more likely), OR Obama officially transfers his membership to another denomination (possible, but going against Presidential precedent while in office), Obama is affiliated with the UCC.

The other option, for the purposes of the Pew Forum's chart, is to classify Obama as "no formal affiliation", since he resigned his membership at Trinity before being inaugurated.

BTW....Nixon was a Quaker?!? Admittedly, I'm not too familiar with this..what, denomination?sect?branch? of Christianity, but isn't there something about pacifism in there? And wasn't there a big nasty war going on when he was Pres? I need to look into this...

In re Quakerism:

Again, I defer to the Gardener, but there is a proud tradition of "fighting Quakers." Our fist secretary of war, in fact, was a Quaker.

RE: Trinity UCC. Except for being more "black", the theology of Trinity UCC is pretty typical of a large chunk of that denomination. RE: Nixon. Although I have not read anything specifically about Nixon's personal religious life, I am unaware of any evidence that he internalized and affirmed some of the Quaker distinctives such as pacifism. For the record, Nixon's goal was to get us out of Vietnam with our international influence intact. I don't recall any wars started by him while in office.

RE: Fighting Quakers. During the Revolution some of the Quaker "meetings" (congregations) split over involvement in the fighting. But, the split healed and Quakers have been consistently pacifist since then.

Off the top of my head, I think Andrew Jackson is properly grouped. He was the ultimate Scotch-Irish American Westerner, which was a very Presbyterian culture. Right?

From Robert Remini on Jackson's religion: his Presbyterian mother hoped he would become a minister. Although Andrew attended church very irregularly throughout his life he considered himself a Christian and joined the Hermitage Presbyterian Church late in life, on July 15, 1838.

I assume him to have been baptized Presbyterian as an infant, but haven't read that he was. So, if he was baptized as an infant, then he was a baptized member all his life, becoming a confessing member after the White House. If he had not been baptized in infancy, then he had no formal affiliation till after the presidency.

An interesting note: Jackson explicitly repudiated the doctrine of election his whole life. His theology and his politics seem to have been of a piece.