Digging into Donald Trump's religion

Americans like their presidents Christian in some way or another. There are exceptions. Thomas Jefferson was notoriously irreligious, and we had some Unitarians back when it was fashionable. We’ve also had disappointments. Richard Nixon made an unconvincing Quaker, and people were shocked to hear him swearing on the White House tapes.

So Donald Trump, the early Republican frontrunner for 2016, has come under scrutiny for his own religious beliefs. If he were an ordinary candidate, he would simply say he’s a “Presbyterian,” and that would be the end of it. But because he comes across as so arrogant, coarse, and self-absorbed, the opposite of Christian humility, people have been prying into the substance behind his boasts of religion.

He says he’s Presbyterian, but, in his own words, he’s an infrequent churchgoer: “Always on Christmas. Always on Easter. Always when there’s a major occasion.” He attended Sunday school as a boy at a Presbyterian church in Queens. He was later affiliated with New York’s Marble Collegiate Church (Reformed Church in America), where he has fond memories of hearing Norman Vincent Peale, the celebrated author of The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). Peale’s teaching was popular because it downplayed sin and grace, focusing instead on human ability. You can imagine The Donald perking up in his pew.

He seems to have little understanding of even the basics of Christianity. He takes the bread and wine because he feels “cleansed” when he does. But he doesn’t ask God for forgiveness; he just tries not to make mistakes. “I think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right,” he said last month in Iowa. “I don’t bring God into that picture. I don’t.”

He tells crowds at campaign rallies that his best-seller, The Art of the Deal, is his “second favorite book of all time.” His first, he assures them, is the Bible. But when asked in a recent interview for his favorite passages of Scripture, Trump became uncharacteristically bashful and declined to say. He said it’s very personal, as though he were asked about his medical history or the details of his marriage bed. But it was clear that he simply didn’t know any particular verses, not even John 3:16 or Psalm 23. For evangelicals, this was his Sarah Palin moment.

Many Americans strongly believe they are Christians simply because they were baptized, went to Sunday school, and perhaps go occasionally to church. There are people who have their membership at the First Baptist Church of Townsboro, USA, and haven’t attended in years, but that’s their church, and so they are Baptists and they believe it. (Substitute any denomination.)

When I was a boy, I never attended church, but I held in great reverence the Gideon’s New Testament I received in school, though I never read it. As a freshman in college, when a professor argued against God’s existence I felt defensive, even though there was no religion in my life, whether practical or personal—no worship, no prayer, no repentance, no Christ. But I was all for Christianity and believed it to be mine.

That may be Donald Trump. He may be sincere in everything he is saying about the Bible and religion. It fits the profile of an old school, nominal, mainline Protestant of the sort you just don’t see much anymore. Perhaps his religion is a sincerely held, vague, and nominal but respectful Christianity of committed affiliation.

Or he may be playing the religion card because that’s what the angry white voters who support him want to hear. In which case, that would make him … a politician, with perhaps also a politician’s assurances on abortion, same-sex marriage, and healthcare reform. Thankfully, there is time for deeper prying.