Only one U.S. president was also a preacher.

  • Portrait of James A. Garfield
Portrait of James A. Garfield
Credit: Archive Pics/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine

January 8, 2026

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Before being elected U.S. president, James A. Garfield held a number of varied roles: lawyer, canal worker, Civil War general, and preacher. To this day, he is the only president who was also an ordained minister. At age 18, Garfield was baptized as a Disciple of Christ, the same denomination as his parents; he began preaching while still a student at Hiram College, which was founded by the Disciples of Christ. Though he was never formally ordained, neither were most other Disciples of Christ preachers at the time. 

The subject of Garfield’s first sermon was “The First and Second Comings of Christ,” in which he drew parallels between the lives of Jesus Christ and Napoleon Bonaparte. He also presided over weddings, funerals, and other religious ceremonies throughout Northeast Ohio during his time as a preacher, which ended when he was elected to Congress in 1862. In addition to being the only sitting member of the House of Representatives to be elected president, Garfield also holds a less fortunate distinction: He was the second president to be assassinated, after Abraham Lincoln.

By the Numbers

Did you know?

Garfield developed an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem.

There are many proofs of the Pythagorean theorem, which states that a² + b² = c² when measuring the sides of a right triangle. But only one proof was developed by a president: the one that James A. Garfield came up with a few years before entering the Oval Office, while representing Ohio in the House of Representatives in 1876. Described as “really a very clever proof” by math historian William Dunham, the proof was published in the New England Journal of Education on April 1, 1876, and is unusual for being based on a trapezoid. 

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