UPDATE: The White House shot down the Time magazine report noted below that President Barack Obama and Michelle have picked the chapel at Camp David as the church for their family. Press secretary Robert Gibbs said, “There have been no formal decisions about joining a church.”
Washington has been buzzing for months about where the Obama family will finally lay down some local church roots. Various congregations have been quietly lobbying, but it looks like the president is going to follow in his predecessor’s footsteps and make Camp David’s Evergreen Church his spiritual home, Time reports today. No doubt DC’s black churches are crushed, but Evergreen apparently offered the Obamas a modicum of privacy that the city churches did not. But Evergreen also has another major draw: It’s current chaplain is none other than Lt. Carey Cash, the great-nephew of the late, great music star Johnny Cash.
As Time’s Amy Sullivan notes, Obama couldn’t get much farther from his former controversial minister Jeremiah Wright than he could with Cash. The younger Cash, 38, did a tour of Iraq with a Marine battalion and, like his famous uncle, is a southern Baptist. (Evergreen, though, is a nondenominational church that caters to Camp David’s military personnel.) The Navy rotates chaplains through the church every three years, so Cash’s arrival in January was just a coincidence. But if he has any of his uncle’s charisma, the Obamas are no doubt in for a treat. Johnny Cash was a gospel singer at heart and was considered something of a preacher himself, after all. He was even close to religious icon Billy Graham, who once made a cameo appearance in one Cash’s songs. “The Preacher Said “Jesus Said'” anyone?
