George H.W. Bush, who died Friday, was a lifetime Episcopalian, part of the blue blood of America’s founding Christianity. But as a presidential candidate, he was part of a Republican opening to evangelicalism that changed the country’s landscape.
A bombing mission that plunged him into the Pacific Ocean during World War II and his younger daughter’s death from leukemia were among the times when he said he looked to God and prayer.
Bush attended Christ Episcopal Church in Greenwich, Connecticut, as a child. His father, Prescott Bush, was a Republican senator from Connecticut. The future president’s mother, Dorothy Walker, would read to her family from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.