God-Like Confidence: Donald Trump’s Cult of Faith
“Trump is unique among modern American presidents for his seeming lack of deep religious orientation,” the CNN correspondent MJ Lee wrote in 2017. Trump no longer belongs to a church, but he grew up attending services — first at a local Presbyterian ministry in Queens, and then at a church led by Norman Vincent Peale, the Protestant minister turned self-help guru. “Obstacles are simply not permitted to destroy your happiness and well-being,” Peale wrote in his 1952 megahit The Power of Positive Thinking. “You need be defeated only if you are willing to be.” Trump seems to have thoroughly absorbed a secularized version of Peale’s gospel — what was January 6 but a refusal to be defeated by the obstacle of the democratic process? Many have described the president’s appeal as a cult of personality, but his supporters’ devotion is perhaps better understood as a cult of faith — a passionate belief in his ability to bend others to his will.
Political commentators have long highlighted conservative Christians’ unwavering devotion to Trump despite his clear disinterest in religion. A recent poll indicated that he has a 72 percent approval rating among white evangelicals. These communities see in Trump’s culture war swagger a promise to govern in their image and favor. As Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, recently told The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, “I don’t think a mainstream Republican would, in his Inaugural Address, have said ‘In my Administration, there will be two and only two genders: male and female.’” But even more significant is the way they are drawn to him because of how he makes them feel. “Donald Trump is a disruptor,” Mohler, who per Chotiner is “one of the best-known evangelicals in the United States,” continued. “There’s a great hunger on the part of many American conservatives, including conservative Christians, for disruption.”
The Democratic establishment, committed to the notion that reality should be bound by rules and norms, continues to believe that the strategy of pointing out Trump’s flagrant contempt for them will win back hearts and minds. Yet, with a God-like confidence, Trump has reshaped our reality by disregarding it, resetting the terms of the conversation on everything from trade policy to birthright citizenship. For Trump’s followers, his rejection of precedent doubles as an opportunity to embrace radical new possibilities. Seen in this light, the president’s supposed deficiencies become advantages. He needn’t — mustn’t — specify how he will achieve positive change. The vaguer his declarations, the more room his supporters have to provide their own visions of what America can be. And when Trump fails to deliver, each defeat is reconceptualized as a temporary setback, proof of how the system is fundamentally rigged against him. Failure does not undermine him — it sanctifies him.
