Teddy Roosevelt (the 26th President of the United States of America) offered these ten reasons for going to church in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1917:

(1) In this actual world a churchless community, a community where men have abandoned and scoffed or ignored their religious needs, is a community on the rapid downgrade.

(2) Church work and church attendance mean the cultivation of the habit of feeling some responsibility for others and the sense of braced moral strength which prevents a relaxation of one’s own moral fiber.

(3) There are enough holidays for most of us which can quite properly be devoted to pure holiday making…Sunday’s differ from other holidays—among other ways—in the fact that there are fifty-two of them every year…On Sunday, go to church.

(4) Yes, I know all the excuses. I know that one can worship the Creator and dedicate oneself to good living in a grove of trees, or by a running brook, or in one’s own house, just as well as in church. But I also know as a matter of cold fact the average man does not thus worship or thus dedicate himself. If he stays away from church he does not spend his time in good works or in lofty meditation. He looks over the colored supplement of the newspaper.

(5) He may not hear a good sermon at church. But unless he is very unfortunate he will hear a sermon by a good man who, with his good wife, is engaged all the week in a long series of wearing and humdrum and important tasks for making hard lives a little easier.

(6) He will listen to and take part in reading some beautiful passages from the Bible. And if he is not familiar with the Bible, he has suffered a loss…

(7) He will probably take part in singing some good hymns.

(8) He will meet and nod to, or speak to, good, quiet neighbors…He will come away feeling a little more charitably toward all the world, even toward those excessively foolish young men who regard church going as rather a soft performance.

(9) I advocate a man’s joining in church works for the sake of showing his faith by his works.

(10) The man who does not in some way, active or not, connect himself with some active, working church misses many opportunities for helping his neighbors, and therefore, incidentally, for helping himself.

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