In 1960 President Eisenhower’s motorcade, returning him from a golf game one balmy afternoon, instead of its customary weaving through residential avenues, churned down the thoroughfare of Washington’s busy Connecticut Avenue. Ike was stunned by the casual dress of pedestrians, with women in pants, and men without jackets, ties, or even shirts over their undershirts. The 1960s and a new era against traditional social mores had begun.

More dramatically the year before, Ike had stood by his Postmaster General’s attempts to prevent USA postal distribution of D.E. Lawrence’s risqué Lady Chatterley’s Lover from the 1920s. The Postmaster had even underlined the book’s dirty parts for Ike, who was shocked, although a lifetime in the military surely immunized him from prudery. But the ACLU and the liberalizing courts defeated Ike and the Postmaster, clearing the way for a new bestseller, achieving another cultural milestone against the old morality.

The new era proceeded apace under JFK, who early in his presidency handed his secret service agents at the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach a batch of tropical short sleeve shirts, replacing their suits, probably unimaginable to Ike. The go-go private life of the new president, which possibly peaked with Marilyn Monroe’s sultry, sequined birthday song for JFK, more colorfully emblemized the dawning sexual revolution.

The last president born in the Victorian era, Ike and his staid marriage with Mamie (unproven rumors of his wartime romance notwithstanding) embodied the old morality. He was the last president who fully incarnated the soon to decline Mainline Protestant religious and cultural establishment. His Secretary of State was famously Presbyterian John Foster Dulles, a former officer of the Federal Council of Churches. In 1958 Ike had lain the cornerstone for the new Interchurch Center headquarters of the FCC’s successor, the National Council of Churches, by New York’s Riverside Church in 1958. (Most of the great Mainline church agencies once housed there, including the NCC, have long since left.)

Ike’s parents had been Anabaptists and later Jehovah’s Witnesses, but his Mamie was a more conventional Presbyterian. Upon his election as president, Ike was advised by Billy Graham to join National Presbyterian Church, whose pastor privately catechized his new member. Ike opened cabinet meetings, and his inaugural speech, with prayer, and saw religion as central to America’s moral purpose, especially in the Cold War struggle against Communism. He would be the last president from Mainline Protestantism before its 50 year demographic and cultural collapse began in the early 1960s.

JFK was Catholic of course. LBJ, although technically a Mainline Protestant, frenetically attended a host of Protestant and Catholic churches. Nixon, a former Quaker, hosted eclectic worship in the White House led by pastors, priests and rabbis. Ford and George H. W. Bush were conventional Episcopalians by which time that denomination was no longer so influential or any longer considered the Republican Party at prayer. Carter was very publicly a born-again Evangelical, signifying the political decline of  somber Mainline Protestantism. Reagan attended Ike’s Presbyterian congregation but was politically supported by ascendant Evangelicals and reviled by far-left Mainline officials.

Clinton was a Baptist who attended a liberal Methodist church with his Methodist wife. George W. Bush was a Methodist identifying with Evangelicalism and, in conformity with emerging fashion, attended different churches, especially the chapel at Camp David. Representing the ascendancy of religious non-affiliation, Obama disavowed his former affiliation with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who belonged to the hyper liberal United Church of Christ, and sporadically attends different congregations.

The current presidential candidates represent the disestablishment of Mainline Protestantism. Trump is religiously indifferent, despite awkward protests to the contrary, while professing a remote Presbyterian affiliation through his mother. Rubio is a Catholic who attends Evangelical churches and in his boyhood had a Mormon phase. Kasich was a lapsed cradle Catholic who after a spiritual awakening became Anglican, belonging to the new conservative denomination that broke with the liberal Episcopal Church. Cruz is a red meat evangelical, at least rhetorically, while Sanders is a non-practicing Jew, and Hillary remains Methodist although apparently not church attending.

Of course the religious moral consensus bequeathed by Mainline Protestantism was long ago shattered. Ike spoke for that consensus by opposing a naughty novel and expecting public decorum. Today Sanders and Clinton tout transgenderism as the latest chapter in sexual deconstruction, while Cruz and Rubio cling to traditional public morals, at least during Republican primaries. Trump barely conceals his personal hedonism while offering to serve as bodyguard for increasingly besieged traditional Christians, to whom Lady Chatterley’s Lover would today seem mild. As to the Protestant decorum that Ike thought essential for presidential dignity, Trump strives in a very different direction shaped by the garish amorality of reality television.

Post-Mainline Protestant America seems irretrievably bifurcated into competing cultural ghettoes. Besides the missing moral consensus, there is a reduced understanding of America’s global and historical role within a transcendent Providence. Yet that role persists, even if the once stately, venerable old Mainline Protestant voice is no longer around to articulate it. That Providence perhaps, hopefully, encourages us to to anticipate an eventual new era will emerge that will supersede our own confused times.