The Constitution provides that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” But, as Gary Scott Smith of Grove City College writes in his new book, Religion in the Oval Office, “Throughout American history many citizens have viewed strong faith as an asset, if not a requirement, for politicians, especially presidents.”
The biography of faith, such as it is, of the Republican presidential candidate who has led the polls for six months starts with First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Queens. That is the church Donald Trump’s parents attended and in which he was baptized. Trump, who is 69 and a self-described Presbyterian, characterizes Presbyterianism as “down the middle of the road,” even though there are several Presbyterian denominations, with theologies that critically differ, and the Jamaica church is a member of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), for decades one of the most liberal ecclesiastical bodies in the country.
It’s unclear how long the Trumps went to Jamaica Presbyterian before they started taking their family to Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. Founded by the Dutch in 1628, Marble is a member of the Reformed Church in America, a small, theologically liberal denomination. When Trump attended, however, Marble was not a typical RCA church, mainly because of the influence of its head pastor, Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), a New York Times bestseller for three consecutive years.
Trump has nothing but good things to say about Peale, who was at Marble from 1932 to 1984, drawing crowds as large as 4,000 during the 1950s and 1960s. “You could listen to him all day long,” Trump told an Iowa audience last summer, as reported by Gwenda Blair in Politico. “And when you left the church, you were disappointed it was over. He was the greatest guy.” Blair, who has written a biography of Trump, says Peale merged “worldliness and godliness to produce an easy-to-follow theology that preached self-confidence as a life philosophy.” Critics of Peale, writes church historian D. G. Reid, saw the message of “positive thinking” as “religious pragmatism that dilutes Christian theology and promotes American doctrines of self-reliance and materialistic reward.”
As a leading presidential candidate, Trump has drawn the attention of the churches of his youth. In August, after Trump told reporters that “I am Presbyterian Protestant. I go to Marble Collegiate,” the church responded that “as he indicates, he is a Presbyterian, and is not an active member of Marble.”
In October, Gradye Parsons, the stated clerk of the PCUSA, sent a public letter to Trump schooling him on “Presbyterian policies on refugees and immigrants.” By implication the letter was critical of the candidate’s comments about those groups. Trump never responded, at least not publicly. But last month, when he called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” Rutgers Presbyterian Church, which is in the same presbytery (geographical region) as Jamaica Presbyterian, asked “appropriate” church bodies to review Trump’s “standing/membership in our denomination.”
That hasn’t been done, nor will it be done, for the simple reason that it cannot be done. Conceding a lack of “factual evidence that Mr. Trump currently holds membership in any local [Presbyterian] congregation,” Parsons said last month that “the discipline process that would be necessary to remove him from membership is not applicable.” Thus did a church steadily losing members since 1965 miss out on a great deal of publicity—Trump on trial!—if only he had ever joined.
Trump may be a man without a church home, but he does not lack for preachers who like and will meet with him. Unsurprisingly, given his attraction to Peale, Trump has an affinity for preachers of the so-called prosperity gospel. In September, roughly 40 ministers, many of whom may be described as prosperity preachers, gathered with Trump. The event, arranged by Florida megachurch pastor Paula White, included televangelists Jan Crouch and Kenneth and Gloria Copeland. As reported by the Christian Broadcasting Network, the two-hour meeting ended with a laying-on of hands and prayer—”for the Lord to give the GOP presidential frontrunner wisdom, stability, and knowledge necessary to pursue this endeavor.”
The prosperity preachers hold, more or less, that God will provide financial success to believers who have enough faith. Their gospel is a heresy, as Ross Douthat explains in his book Bad Religion. But Trump is not one to dig much beyond the surface of things religious, much less parse doctrine and guard the deposit of faith. On the campaign trail he has talked about what a great book the Bible is, while declining to identify a single favorite Bible verse. And he has said he’s not sure he’s ever asked God for forgiveness. As for attending church, he says he goes when he can but always on Christmas and Easter. In discussing his religion, he often defaults to some formulation or other of “I am a Presbyterian.”
Soon we’ll see how Republican voters regard Trump and in particular the extent to which white evangelical voters, who constitute the party’s largest voting bloc, are willing to support him. In the most recent NBC News/Survey Monkey poll of Republican voters, Trump garnered 33 percent of white evangelical voters, 12 points more than the runner-up, the Southern Baptist Ted Cruz. How this can be, said Gary Scott Smith in an interview, is a mystery, since there are lots of things about Trump that you would think evangelicals wouldn’t like. The list includes his two divorces, ownership of casinos from which he profits from gambling, vulgar remarks about women, immigrants, and minorities, and not being a church member.
None of those things seems to be hurting Trump, at least not yet. Perhaps the reason is that many evangelical voters are willing to set aside concerns they normally take seriously. Indeed, some notable evangelicals are arguing that in Trump’s case, they should do just that. Robert Jeffress, pastor of the 12,000-member First Baptist Church in Dallas, contends that evangelical voters, like all other voters, should select as president someone—meaning Trump—who has “both the leadership skills and tenacity to solve our country’s practical problems, such as the immigration dilemma and our economic stagnation.” Other factors don’t matter.
Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission disagrees. “For evangelicals to support Donald Trump,” Moore told me, “would mean tossing aside everything that evangelicals have previously said about character matters and about human dignity.”
Iowa kicks off the GOP’s nominating process with its caucus on February 1. Over half of the Republican caucusgoers are expected to be evangelicals. Trump spoke at one of their rallies recently. “We love the evangelicals,” he declared, “and we’re polling so well.”
Terry Eastland is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
