His parents were members of various Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed congregations. Roosevelt was born October 27, 1858, to a wealthy family in Manhattan. Indeed, despite a lack of evangelical bona fides, Roosevelt’s lifelong engagement with Christianity has lessons to teach believers today. While Roosevelt’s faith was not that of contemporary evangelical Protestantism, it was nevertheless real. Lost in all the material about Roosevelt, however, has been the place of his Christian faith. Figuratively, he looms because Roosevelt serves as a touchstone for liberals and conservatives, militarists and environmentalists, big game hunters and those who admire his refusal to shoot a certain “teddy” bear in Louisiana. One hundred years after Theodore Roosevelt’s death, his shadow still looms large in American culture-literally at Mount Rushmore, where his visage can be seen miles away. Marshall, “for if he had been awake there would have been a fight.” “Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping,” remarked Woodrow Wilson’s Vice President, Thomas R. Early in the morning of January 6, 1919, former president Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep at his home on Oyster Bay, Long Island.
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