Like George W. Bush, Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote but won the presidency in the electoral college. Also like George Bush, Harrison tried to apply his Christian faith to public policy. Elected in 1888, Benjamin Harrison had the audacity to have Bible study and prayer in the White House. Harrison died 100 years ago this year, having served one term in the White House in between two terms of Democrat Grover Cleveland. Along with many Republican presidents between Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) and Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), Harrison is ranked in history hooks as neither particularly good nor bad—just holding office without expanding the federal government. But he set an example of a Christian statesman in high office that is worth remembering today. Harrison lost the popular vote in 1888 but won the electoral college majority. Though the election was not in dispute, Harrison barely carried his home state, Indiana, by 2,000 votes out of 537,000 voters. He also won New York state by just 13,000 votes out of 1.3 million voters. The federal government did not give massive federal grants to social service agencies in the late 19th Century, so Harrison never raised the issue that Bush has advocated—the government’s funding faith-based groups for social services. Instead, Harrison gave generously to charities and people in need. When he came to Indianapolis before the Civil War, he was a volunteer in YMCA minis try with young men, in a time when the YMCA had a stronger Christian emphasis. In a commencement address at his graduation from the University of Miami in Ohio, he faulted the poor laws of England for making charity too impersonal. In his thinking, individuals and churches had the primary responsibility to care for the poor—similar to the thinking behind Bush’s initiative. Harrison also was a temperance advocate and an early leader of what became the Republican Party, as part of efforts to stop the spread of slavery. In his loss of the popular vote to Cleveland he may have had a genuine grievance, according to Butler University history professor George Geib. With the abandonment of reconstruction policies, blacks were disenfranchised in the South in the 1880s, according to Geib, costing Harrison thousands of likely Republican votes. In his inaugural address, Harrison warned: “The community that by concert, open or secret, among its citizens denies to a portion of its members their plain rights under the law has severed the only safe bond of social order and prosperity.” Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft has fostered some controversy with his voluntary Bible study in his office. Harrison did something similar as president, without any outcry over separation of church and state. “He started every day at the White House with prayer, right after breakfast,’ notes Phyllis Geeslin, executive director of the Benjamin Harrison Home in Indianapolis. Visitors and extended family were included in the daily Bible study and prayer time in the morning. ‘He lived his faith on a daily basis. He sought God’s counsel on every decision he made.” She traces the disciplines of his Christian faith to his childhood, when he observed his mother following similar practices in the home. In training for Civil War military service, he wrote home to his wife, asking for prayer: “I hope you all remember us at home and that many prayers go up to God daily for my regiment and me. Ask Him for me in prayer, my clear wife, first that He will enable me to hear myself as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” In another assessment, James Cash sums up Harrison in Unsung Heroes, a review of presidents from Ohio: “In his daily living Harrison probably took his religion more seriously than any other president. Part of his eloquence suggests Ecclesiastes or Habakkuk. His condemnation of the rich and selfish suggest influence by Amos anti other Old Testament prophets.” Harrison’s wife died just before the 1892 election, when he also lost the White House to Grover Cleveland’s comeback. As a one-term president, he has received less attention from historians, partly because of a bias among many historians toward presidents who expanded the federal governments reach. But the example of his Christian faith, applied to public policy, is worth remembering as the current occupant of the White House seeks to follow in some of his footsteps.