Trump Says He Now Identifies As A Non
President Trump, who has long identified as a Presbyterian, now considers himself a non-denominational Christian, a new report said.
The president shared his change in religious identity in a written interview with the Religious News Service.
Though I was confirmed at a Presbyterian church as a child, I now consider myself to be a non-denominational Christian, Trump wrote, without giving an explanation for the transformation or saying when it occurred.
Trump has a loyal base among white evangelicals, who in 2016 helped propel him to victory.
That year, the religious group made up roughly a quarter of the electorate, and 81 percent of them voted for Trump, according to a report by The Washington Post.
The president told RNS that his parents taught me the importance of faith and prayer from a young age.
Trump, who contracted COVID-19 in early October, attributed his swift recovery to his faith.
I said, There were miracles coming down from heaven. I meant it Melania and I are very thankful to God for looking out for our family and returning us to good health, he told the outlet.
The president received a cocktail of anti-virus drugs while battling COVID-19. After taking an antibody treatment by drugmaker Regeneron, Trump said he felt like Superman.
May 201: Prominent Evangelicals Appointed To The Us Commission On International Religious Freedom
Several prominent evangelicals were appointed to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, either by Trump or Republicans in Congress. Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, was appointed by Sen. Mitch McConnell in May 2018, but Trump himself soon appointed two others: Gary Bauer, another former president of the Family Research Council and director of the Christians United for Israel Action Fund and Johnnie Moore, a former vice president of Liberty University and longtime faith adviser to Trump.
Is Donald Trump Now A Born
After Donald Trump met with a group of evangelical leaders last week, Dr. James Dobson said that Trump “did accept a relationship with Christ,” and he had done so recently.
Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, was talking about the meeting with Trump in an interview with Pastor Michael Anthony on his website, Godfactor.com, and Anthony had said he was taken aback by a “gentler Trump.”
“e did accept a relationship with Christ,”Dobson said. “I know the person who led him to Christ — that’s fairly recent.”
Surprised, Anthony asked him, “How recently, roughly?” And Dobson responded, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know when it was. But it has not been long.”
Trump, who has in the past said he is Presbyterian, has occasionally stumbled over religious references during the campaign. Asked what his favorite Bible verse is, he chose the Old Testament’s “eye for an eye.” And during an address at Liberty University, he referred to Second Corinthians as “Two Corinthians.”
Dobson talked about Trump’s unfamiliarity with the vernacular of evangelical Christians.
“He doesn’t know our language — you know, we had 40 Christians together with him,” he told Anthony. “He used the word hell four or five times. He doesn’t know our language. He really doesn’t.”
One example Dobson pointed to — “he refers a lot to religion and not much to faith and belief.”
But this, Dobson says, is a function of the fact that Trump wasn’t raised in the church.
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‘christian Nationalism’ In The Us
But aside from specific campaign issues, some academics say “Christian nationalism” was behind much of the religious support for Mr Trump’s campaign.
They say Christian nationalism merges Christian identity with national identity: to be American is to be Christian. Proponents believe that America’s success depends on its adherence to conservative Christian positions and warn, in Mr Trump’s words, of “an assault on Christianity” from political opponents.
“Voting for Trump was, at least for many Americans, a symbolic defence of the United States’ perceived Christian heritage,” the sociologist Andrew Whitehead wrote in a paper analysing the support for the president.
Academics such as Mr Whitehead and Philip Gorski, professor of sociology at Yale University, argue that throughout his presidency, Mr Trump explicitly played to Christian nationalist ideas by repeating the claim that the United States is abdicating its Christian heritage.
He promised “to protect Christianity” and for many supporters his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” could have been synonymous with “Make America Christian Again”.
At a rally in Ohio last year he warned a Biden presidency would mean “no religion, no anything”.
“Hurt the Bible, hurt God. He’s against God, he’s against guns,” he claimed.
But American Christianity is divided.
The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the US, the Most Reverend Michael Curry, described the riots as a “coup attempt” and “deeply disturbing”.
Is Donald Trump The Christian President
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is puzzled. Like many Christians on this side of the Atlantic he doesn’t understand why Christians in the US seem to have supported Donald Trump in such numbers. Or perhaps to put it another way â he doesn’t understand why evangelicals seem to have overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump. I have militant atheist friends who delight in pointing me to President Trump’s latest aberration before they gleefully point out he is ‘my’ President â ie the Christian President. But is he?
The hostile atheists and secularists take great delight in tweeting about a ‘far right, misogynistic, racist, sexual hypocrite, Christian’ . He is the ideal candidate for them to use to justify their hatred for Christians.
On the other hand there are Christians who think that Donald Trump is ‘our’ candidate, the one chosen and anointed by God. The one who though he is flawed is still far better than the alternative. He is the Christian President.
Except it’s not as simple as that. There are professing Christians who are strongly opposed to Donald Trump. John Macarthur made clear his opposition to the ‘vulgar Trump’, as did Russell Moore of the Southern Baptists and many others.
Ah â but didn’t 80 per cent of evangelicals vote for Trump? Didn’t they do this partially because Trump appointed the clearly evangelical former Catholic Mike Pence as Vice President? Isn’t he beholden to Christians, and don’t most Christians support him?
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Trump Once Presbyterian Now Says Hes A Nondenominational Christian
President Donald Trump prepares his offering as he attends church at International Church of Las Vegas, Sunday, Oct. 18, 2020.
Washington In an exclusive interview with Religion News Service, President Donald Trump said in a written statement that he no longer identifies as a Presbyterian and now sees himself as a nondenominational Christian.
Though I was confirmed at a Presbyterian church as a child, I now consider myself to be a nondenominational Christian, Trump, who has repeatedly identified as a Presbyterian in the past, said in a written response to RNS.
Saying that his parents taught me the importance of faith and prayer from a young age, Trump went on to say that Melania and I have gotten to visit some amazing churches and meet with great faith leaders from around the world. During the unprecedented COVID-19 outbreak, I tuned into several virtual church services and know that millions of Americans did the same.
The revelation about Trumps religious identity appeared in an interview that was conducted in writing and covered a variety of faith topics, ranging from the presidents own spiritual life to his plans for the White House office tasked with engaging faith groups.
Questions for the interview, which were first negotiated with the White House press office, were presented to the president by Paula White, a Florida pastor and the head of the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative, according to the White House.
How Has Religion Played A Role In Donald Trumps Presidency
WASHINGTON There has been no shortage of God-talk during Donald Trumps first term in office, with the president regularly consulting and praying with a tight group of evangelical advisers. The 45th president of the U.S. once even declared himself the chosen one.
As Trump prepares to kick off the first day of the 2020 Republican National Convention and his bid for four more years, Religion News Service takes a look back at some of the most impactful religion moments of his administration thus far.
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Donald Trump’s Religious Background And The 2016 Presidential Election
Professor of History and Law, Ohio State University
Now that the Republicans are about to nominate Donald Trump as their party’s presidential nominee, a look at his religious background seems in order. It will likely tell us how well he will fare with churchgoing voters, and especially the most committed Christians among them, this fall.
One key factor in this area is generational. American religion has changed a lot over time, and Trump’s generation was a distinctive one in terms of what religion was like when they were growing up. Donald Trump is an “early” baby boomer. Like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Trump was born in 1946, the first year of the post-World War II baby boom. Trump grew up in New York City during an era when a higher fraction of Americans engaged in weekly religious observance than at any other time in modern American history.
Trump’s parents were Presbyterians, and they and their five children attended Marble Collegiate Church in lower Manhattan. Donald Trump retained a connection to that church in his adult life. He and his first wife, Ivana, were married there in 1977. Though not currently an active member, Donald Trump has stated publicly that he considers Marble Collegiate to be his church.
The author gratefully acknowledges of the assistance of Reverend Tim Ahrens of First Congregational Church in Columbus, OH and Professor David Brakke of the Ohio State University History Department in preparing this blogpost.
How Did Donald Trumpa Thrice
Back in August 2015, when Donald Trumps presidential ambitions were widely considered a joke, Russell Moore was worried. A prominent leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nations largest Protestant denomination, Moore knew that some of the faithful were falling for Trump, a philandering, biblically illiterate candidate from New York City whose lifestyle and views embodied everything the religious right professed to abhor. The month before, a Washington Post poll had found that Trump was already being backed by more white evangelicals than any other Republican candidate.
Moore, a boyish-looking pastor from Mississippi, had positioned himself as the face of the new religious right: a bigger-hearted, diversity-oriented version that was squarely opposed to Trumps us versus them rhetoric. Speaking to a gathering of religion reporters in a hotel ballroom in Philadelphia, Moore said that his first priority was to combat the demonizing and depersonalizing of immigrantspeople, he pointed out, who were created in the image of God. Only by refocusing on such true gospel values, Moore believed, could evangelicals appeal to young people who had been fleeing the church in droves, and expand its outreach to African Americans and Latinos. Evangelicals needed to do more than win electionstheir larger duty was to win souls. Moore, in short, wanted the Christian right to reclaim the moral high groundand Trump, in his estimation, was about as low as you could get.
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Opinion: ‘when I Look At Donald Trump I Do Not See A Christian’
In this Monday, June 1, 2020 file photo, President Donald Trump holds a Bible as he visits outside St. John’s Church across Lafayette Park from the White House in Washington. Part of the church was set on fire during protests the previous night.
A cross on the makeshift alter before Pastor Steffon Arrington conducted Palm Sunday services to worshipers, who sat in their cars, in the parking lot of Spring Woods United Methodist Church, in Houston,Sunday, April 5, 2020. Communion was offered during the service, but with individual, pre-packaged wafers and juice.
Polls show that 82 percent of white evangelical Protestants support President Donald Trump. As a white evangelical Christian who has read the Bible, I find this hard to understand. When I look at Donald Trump, I do not see a Christian. I do not see a conservative. And when I look at Trump from a Biblical perspective, I certainly dont see the chosen one. I dont think believers should have anything to do with Trump.
In the third chapter of Colossians and the fifth chapter of Galatians, we are given a list of attributes of those living their Christian faith: compassion, kindness, humility and gentleness. I do not associate any of these words with Trump.
Goen is a mechanic who has lived in the Houston area since 1995.
Legal Affairs And Bankruptcies
FixerRoy Cohn served as Trump’s lawyer and mentor for 13 years in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Trump, Cohn sometimes waived fees due to their friendship. In 1973, Cohn helped Trump countersue the United States government for $100 million over its charges that Trump’s properties had racial discriminatory practices. Trump and Cohn lost that case when the countersuit was dismissed and the government’s case went forward. In 1975, an agreement was struck requiring Trump’s properties to furnish the New York Urban League with a list of all apartment vacancies, every week for two years, among other things. Cohn introduced political consultant Roger Stone to Trump, who enlisted Stone’s services to deal with the federal government.
As of April 2018, Trump and his businesses had been involved in more than 4,000 state and federal legal actions, according to a running tally by USA Today.
While Trump has not filed for personal bankruptcy, his over-leveraged hotel and casino businesses in Atlantic City and New York filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection six times between 1991 and 2009. They continued to operate while the banks restructured debt and reduced Trump’s shares in the properties.
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Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters
Former aides say that in private, the president has spoken with cynicism and contempt about believers.
One day in 2015, Donald Trump beckoned Michael Cohen, his longtime confidant and personal attorney, into his office. Trump was brandishing a printout of an article about an Atlanta-based megachurch pastor trying to raise $60 million from his flock to buy a private jet. Trump knew the preacher personallyCreflo Dollar had been among a group of evangelical figures who visited him in 2011 while he was first exploring a presidential bid. During the meeting, Trump had reverently bowed his head in prayer while the pastors laid hands on him. Now he was gleefully reciting the impious details of Dollars quest for a Gulfstream G650.
Trump seemed delighted by the scam, Cohen recalled to me, and eager to highlight that the pastor was full of shit. Theyre all hustlers, Trump said.
The presidents alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion. My administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith, he declared at a rally for evangelicals earlier this year. Its a message his campaign will seek to amplify in the coming weeks as Republicans work to confirm Amy Coney Barretta devout, conservative Catholicto the Supreme Court.
