I am a believer in positive thinking. A big believer. But I’m also a big believer in guarding against a downside, because the upside will take care of itself. I’ve always said that.
Donald Trump1
When we search for evidence of religious faith in the lives of prominent people, we tend to rely upon externals. We want connections to mosques, churches, and temples. We listen for tales of bar mitzvahs and baptisms, of christenings and confirmations. We hope for dramatic altar calls to rival the spectacle of Paul on the Damascus Road.
Yet these formal expressions may tell us little of the soul. They may reveal nothing of the imprint of religious ideas or the imagination inflamed by faith. In fact, they could serve to conceal the heart and so cause us to miss entirely what we hope to know of the man or woman as a religious being.
Theologian Paul Tillich urged a different approach. He suggested that if we want to know a person’s true religion, we ought to ask about their “ultimate concern.” By this he meant that what consumes a person’s thoughts, what dominates their conversations, what comes first in their calendar and checkbook, that for which he or she is willing to live or perhaps even to die—this is their religion no matter what their formal associations with religion may be.
Tillich gives us a tool that is particularly helpful in an age like ours that prizes spirituality over traditional religion. Americans are not a people who accept religion unaltered from our ancestors. Instead, we do religion like we do jazz. We customize. We refashion. We curate the old religions into new faiths of our own. In short, we remake religion in our own image. The old labels no longer apply. The old words take on new meaning. The only way to know a person’s religion, then, is to know the ultimate concerns that align his or her life and give it purpose.
This approach is especially helpful in trying to understand the religion of Donald Trump. He was raised a Presbyterian, yet we search in vain for the imprint of that faith on Trump’s life now. He can become weepy when speaking of his praying mother and the religious training of his youth, yet he has lived the life of a celebrated hedonist. Critics claim he has no faith at all. Supporters claim his religion is too personal to know. Cynics claim he has no faith he cannot put to political use.
Tillich rescues us. He urges us to ask: What is Donald Trump’s “ultimate concern”? What dominates his conversation, galvanizes his energies, sets his priorities, and makes him the man he is? The answers come readily from Trump nearly every time he speaks: “self,” “winning,” “being rich,” and “being the best.”
These may not seem like religious terms, but they lead us directly to the true religion of Donald Trump and to the man who imprinted that religion upon his soul: Norman Vincent Peale.
This is precisely what Trump himself has been telling us for years. The only man other than his father whom Trump has ever called a mentor is Norman Vincent Peale. The man who called Trump “his greatest student of all time” was Norman Vincent Peale. He was Trump’s spiritual father. He was Trump’s mentor from his earliest days. He was the man who fashioned the ultimate concerns that now define the Trump we know.
To understand Donald Trump, then, we must understand the life and the message of Norman Vincent Peale.
We should picture a teenage boy standing in the rotunda of the Ohio State House sometime around the start of World War I. He is skinny, wide-eyed, and dressed like most other small-town Ohio farm boys of his age. He has the manner of a loner, of a sensitive soul more at ease alone than in a bruising crowd. Still, there is a gentle determination about him. He lives in an age that expects him to “make something of himself,” and so he harbors ambitions he cannot always admit even to himself.
In the rotunda, he stands before monuments to men like Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and William McKinley. He is enthralled, inspired. He lingers before each image. Then he notices what another boy might not. There is a bare space near these monuments. This stirs his imagination. Years later, he would write of this moment:
My fond ambition was that some day this niche would be occupied by a statue of Norman Vincent Peale, another of Ohio’s Jewels, an immortal political figure of the Buckeye State. I didn’t exactly aim for the Presidency, but I was not unaware that in those days Ohio was known as the “Mother of Presidents.”2
Such was the sense of calling to greater things that burned in the heart of young Norman Vincent Peale. Yet there was little about his life at the time that signaled greatness.
He was born in Bowersville, Ohio, on May 31, 1898. His father was the type of Methodist preacher who converted drunks, rescued prostitutes, and held lengthy, sweaty, passionate revival meetings around the Midwest. His mother was intelligent, opinionated, and hardworking. She wanted her son to be a preacher and Norman knew it every day of his life.
He would speak of his childhood home as a place of joy all his life. He remembered his parents as the happiest of people, family gatherings as filled with excitement and love. This all may have been true, but there was something even then that was biting into his soul. He was beset by an inexplicable but debilitating sense of inferiority. This kept him from speaking well, moved him to the shy edge of every crowd, and robbed him of confidence. He thought he knew its source. He wrote in adulthood:
I was set apart as a different breed, forced always to carry the banner of the church, not able to be just like every other boy. It wasn’t that I wanted to do any wrong or unworthy thing but to carry in gay and careless childhood so heavy a responsibility did not seem fair and it served to deepen an already sensitive inferiority complex.3
He was also grieved by the way the Methodist church mistreated his father. It is a grief familiar to the children of clergy. The constant moves from town to town, the low pay, the churchy politics, and the bitter disregard by denominational officials made Norman ache for his hero/father. He had once been forced to watch while the local banker haughtily handed his father a small stipend and said, “Do you think your sermon justifies this?” Norman took the humiliation to heart.
Both his personal insecurities and his revulsion for church politics sent Norman in search of answers that were outside of the mainstream. He attended Ohio Wesleyan, where professors urged him toward the works of William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Marcus Aurelius. From James he learned the virtue of “healthy-mindedness” and the power of disciplines to remake the personality. From Emerson he learned the power of “self-reliance,” of a man’s ability to make his life what he envisioned it to be. From Marcus Aurelius he learned the value of mental disciplines and the power of attitudes to shape a life. Each of these moved him toward pursuit of personal power and away from institutional and traditional religion.
In 1921, he left Ohio to attend Boston University School of Theology for seminary training. He hated it. He was no longer in a Midwestern and Methodist world. He was in Boston, the bastion of New England intellectualism, and he found it an ill fit. He found the theological liberalism and social gospel ideas then swirling about far too ethereal, too untethered to life as lived each day by men and women walking the streets. He once complained on a seminary questionnaire that the school was giving him no “knowledge of the present.”
There is too much philosophy here—we need a good grounding in philosophy to be sure but oftentimes the main interest appears to be directed toward exalting the ideas of Borden P. Bowne et al. I feel that we need a greater stress on the practical work of the ministry. The world needs more preachers rather than philosophers important as they are.4
He was no scholar and preferred the personal and practical aspects of religion to the abstract and the social aspects his seminary emphasized. He heard a lecture by Emile Coue in which the statement “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better” was urged upon him. He liked it. It fit with all that James, Emerson, and Marcus Aurelius had taught him. It was practical. It was inspirational. It framed a state of mind that in turn framed reality. This was what Peale was looking for.
His father had helped to move him in this direction. During Norman’s first summer home from seminary, he had been asked to fill in for an ailing preacher. He wrote his sermon in the only way he knew—in the style of the Boston preachers and professors. He gave it his best and then asked his father what he thought. “My advice would be to take it out back and burn it,” the elder Peale said bluntly. “The way to the human heart is through simplicity.” It was a turning point.
After seminary, he served in several New York churches and, remembering his father’s rough-hewn advice, began to hit his stride as an orator. He found the confidence to move away from the pulpit and to preach without notes. He allowed himself to be more theatrical in his preaching, which in turn allowed him to remake timeworn Bible stories into tales of inspiration. His church members found him a refreshing change from the staid clergy of his day.
He also learned from his congregations. Many of his members were businesspeople and industry leaders. By watching them closely, he learned much about the craft of salesmanship, of promotion, and of moving customers—or was it lost souls?—to commitment. He was not ashamed to speak of preaching and selling as the same thing and to adopt the methods of business. The language of Wall Street adorned his church signs and bulletins: “Largest Vested Children’s Choir in the State,” “Syracuse’s Youngest Preacher,” “The Greatest University Audience in America,” “Greatest Choir in Empire State.”
He also began to innovate theologically. Though he would claim throughout his life that he had never abandoned the born-again gospel of his Methodist upbringing, he was so eager to find language to persuade his business-oriented congregations and was so desperate to inspire a Great Depression–plagued people that he lessened biblical theology in his sermons in favor of motivational psychology. He had come to believe that a person of normal intelligence had the power to remake himself through thought and deed into whatever he wanted to become. He spoke of the Sermon on the Mount as a “practical program for personality building.”5
His original thinking and rhetorical skills won him a reputation as a rising young star. In 1932, just eight years after he graduated from seminary, he was asked to lead the historic Marble Collegiate Church in New York City. This prestigious congregation dated from 1628 and offered Peale opportunity to do what he loved doing most: preach. He would not be burdened with administrative duties, he would be paid well, and, since attendance had been declining at the church for some time, there was opportunity for an ambitious, energetic young minister to show what he could do. Peale accepted the invitation.
He led the church for most of the next half century, fashioning it into one of the nation’s premier congregations. On his first Sunday, he spoke to barely two hundred souls. A year later, the congregation had grown to nine hundred. By the 1950s, that number had increased to over four thousand.
Yet it was his refashioning of Christian truth that made him among the most famous and controversial religious figures of his age. Looking back upon this time decades later, Peale’s own father described his son’s theology as “a composite of Science of Mind [New Thought], metaphysics, Christian Science, medical and psychological practice, Baptist Evangelism, Methodist witnessing, and solid Dutch Reformed Calvinism.”6
It is the casual presence of “New Thought” in this list that is most surprising. Usually regarded as occult by mainstream Christians, the New Thought or mind science movements taught that human thoughts could “manifest” themselves in the real world. This was the teaching of Phineas Quimby, mentor to Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science Church. Followers lived healthy, fulfilled lives by thinking with the “Divine Mind” rather than with the “Mortal Mind.” This amounted to disbelieving in the reality of sin and disease and believing instead in the reality of health and wholeness. As a person thought, so he or she became.
We know this better in our own day as an emphasis of Oprah Winfrey and the phenomenally popular book The Secret. In 2006, Australian television producer Rhonda Byrne compiled traditional New Thought themes into a slickly packaged book and video series she called The Secret. Released in March 2006, the set broke sales records for its genre. By Christmas that year, it ranked in the top five of Amazon’s Christmas bestsellers.
On February 7, 2007, Oprah hosted Byrne on her daily talk show and could not have offered more effusive praise for The Secret. She told her audience that as she opened the book and DVD set, “I took God out of the box.”
Byrne explained on the show that The Secret was nothing more than the Law of Attraction, which meant simply, “Thoughts become things.” This was New Thought teaching captured in three words. “So what you’re saying,” Oprah excitedly asked, “is that we all . . . create our own circumstances by the choices that we make and the choices that we make are fueled by our thoughts? So our thoughts are the most powerful things that we have here on Earth?” Byrne said yes.
Turning to her audience, Winfrey declared, “It means that everything that happens to you, good and bad, you are attracting to yourself. It’s something that I really have believed in for years, that the energy you put out into the world is always gonna be coming back to you. That’s the basic principle.”7 Though neither Byrne nor Winfrey mentioned Phineas Quimby or Norman Vincent Peale, they were perfectly expressing the teaching of these two religious pioneers.
Peale taught this same law of attraction in typically practical, homespun terms. “If you get mad at your wife,” he preached to vast audiences, “something is sure to happen to you; you will bring it on yourself. She won’t have to do a thing but sit and wait for it.” This was little different from Oprah Winfrey’s trendy concept of karma: “The energy you put out into the world is always gonna be coming back to you.”
What distinguished Peale was his attempt to wed New Thought and mind science to the Christian gospel. In his 1938 book You Can Win, for example, he emphasized traditional Christian themes of sin, struggle, and a life surrendered to God. “Simply stated,” he explained, “it means: A man has no power in himself, he is weak; his will is weak; he wants to gain a victory but does not have the strength.”8 That strength, he insisted, came only from God.
This call to rely on God alone did not seem to fit with the idea that a person’s thoughts could determine his or her life. “I am what I think I am” and “I am what God makes me” are two different truths. Peale preached them both and they often led him to the type of nonspecific language he used in You Can Win. “Life has a key,” he wrote, “and to find that key is to be assured of success in the business of living. . . . To win over the world a man must get hold of some power in his inward or spiritual life which will never let him down.”9
Peale wanted to champion both the fiery Methodist gospel and New Thought empowerment at the same time. This produced an uncomfortable tension in his life, in his preaching, and in his reputation. He was eager to reach businessmen and trendy New Yorkers with a snazzy gospel of personal empowerment. He also wanted to call men to salvation through Jesus Christ as his father and generations of Methodist circuit riders before him had done. He became a master of the balancing act required to grasp the one without entirely losing the other.
A later senior minister at Marble Collegiate Church, Reverend Michael Brown, believed that there were two Peales. In lectures before the wider world, Peale would proclaim, “You can if you think you can.” From the pulpit of his church, he would declare this same truth but in slightly different, more biblical terms: “You can do all things through Christ, who strengthens you.”10 Both the Christian Peale and the New Thought Peale were profoundly influential in American culture.
This was in large part due to the release of The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952. The book not only made Peale the most famous Protestant clergyman in the world but also established him as a religious innovator—some said a religious cult leader. It landed on bookshelves at just the right time and helped define an age. Americans began learning of the plain little volume a few months before Dwight Eisenhower defeated Adlai E. Stevenson in the race for the White House. The suffocating gloom of the Cold War was spreading over the world. It had already been six years since Winston Churchill warned of an “Iron Curtain” descending upon Europe. Americans were ripe for inspiration, for a gospel of personal empowerment, and for distraction.
Peale offered all of this and in the simplest of terms. His chapters included titles like “Expect the Best and Get It,” “How to Create Your Own Happiness,” “Inflow of New Thoughts Can Remake You,” “I Don’t Believe in Defeat,” and “How to Get People to Like You.” Asked about his book’s point of view, he answered, “good over-balances evil.” Asked for a biblical verse to support his message, he quoted Jesus: “Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.”11
The book was an astonishing success. It stayed at the top of the bestseller lists for three years. By the end of the Eisenhower era, it had sold two million copies.12 By 1974, it had sold three million in hardback alone.13 The plain little volume has easily reached sales beyond the twenty million mark since.
The Power of Positive Thinking treated a traditional American theme in nontraditional terms. As early as 1831, visiting Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville had complained of American preachers that “It is often difficult to ascertain from their discourse whether the principal object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the other-world or prosperity in this.”14 That Peale offered success as a by-product of faith in God was nothing new. What was innovative was Peale’s insistence that every person can learn to use his or her thoughts to shape his or her life. This had been the province of cults and psychics for a century or more. Peale mainstreamed it, baptizing it before an eager post-WWII America.
His vocabulary and phrasing may be familiar to us now, living as we do in an age of motivational-speak, self-help, and positive imaging. Yet it would be helpful to list some of Peale’s more representative statements in order to better understand both his pioneering concepts and the way he tried to merge them with traditional Christianity. These are the statements from The Power of Positive Thinking that swirled in the mind of Peale’s “greatest student,” Donald Trump.
When you expect the best, you release a magnetic force in your mind which by a law of attraction tends to bring the best to you. But if you expect the worst, you release from your mind the power of repulsion which tends to force the best from you. It is amazing how a sustained expectation of the best sets in motion forces which cause the best to materialize. (p. 90)
What you ‘image’ (imagine) may ultimately become a fact if held mentally with sufficient faith. (p. 121)
When you elevate your thoughts into the area of visualized attainment you look down on your problems rather than from below up at them and thus you get a much more encouraging view of them. Always come up over your problems. Never approach a problem below. (p. 168)
“Attitudes are more important than facts.” Any fact facing us, however difficult, even seemingly hopeless, is not so important as our attitude toward that fact. (p. 20)
Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop this picture. Never think of yourself as failing; never doubt the reality of the mental image. So always picture “success” no matter how badly things seem to be going at the moment. (p. 22)
To the degree to which your attitude shifts from negative to positive the mastery touch will come to you. Then, with assurance, you can say to yourself under any and all circumstances and mean it, “I don’t believe in defeat.” (p. 107)
If you mentally visualize and affirm and reaffirm your assets and keep your thoughts on them, emphasizing them to the fullest extent, you will rise out of any difficulty regardless of what it may be. Your inner powers will reassert themselves and, with the help of God, lift you from defeat to victory. (p. 21)
Peale’s supporters celebrated him for rearticulating the message of Jesus for the modern world. Most of those who read his books, magazines, newspaper columns, and even greeting cards, or who listened to his radio broadcasts or attended his lectures would have agreed. Others saw his work as more sinister. One scholar called The Power of Positive Thinking a “New Thought classic.”15 The term used most often by critics was “cult.” They described Peale as leading “The Cult of Reassurance,” “The Cult of Positive Thinking,” “The Cult of Easy Religion,” and “The Cult of Happiness.”16
He was stung by the criticism hurled at his bestseller. He had long lived in a tug-of-war between historic Christianity and mind science. Now that tug-of-war was no longer just in his own thoughts. Millions were joining on both sides, each pulling violently in their preferred direction.
Peale insisted he was still a servant of “the old-fashioned gospel.” Yet when an article he had written appeared in the journal Science of the Mind, he told friends, “They think I am one of them, but I am not. Actually I am not opposed to it.”17
He was clearly a man in conflict with himself, as he explained later in an interview.
I’m a conservative, and I will tell you exactly what I mean by that. I mean that I have accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal Savior. I mean that I believe my sins are forgiven by the atoning work of grace on the cross. . . . Now, I’ll tell you something else . . . I personally love and understand this way of stating the Christian gospel. But I am absolutely and thoroughly convinced that it is my mission never to use this language in trying to communicate with the audience that has been given me.18
If Peale would not use the language of the Christian gospel before his audiences, then what was left was the New Thought/mind science confidence in thoughts shaping reality, in victories won and prosperity assured through believing in oneself enough. It was an emphasis Peale did not hide. The first two sentences in The Power of Positive Thinking are “Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities.”
The book helped to make him a cultural force. By 1957, he was reaching a weekly audience of thirty million people. This was in a country with half the population of today. His syndicated newspaper columns attracted ten million readers a week. The Guideposts magazine he had founded reached five hundred thousand subscribers. His sermons were sent to 150,000 people worldwide.19
He had long been outspoken about politics. In 1942, the New York Sun celebrated him as
[A] vigorous assailant of the New Deal, preaching eloquent sermons against bureaucracy, official bungling, mudding and meddling, invasion of individual rights, wrecking of American traditions, coddling the unemployed, providing relief for the undeserving, knuckling to union labor, the menace of a third term, in fact, the entire category of New Deal sins as he sees them.20
With his publishing success granting him greater visibility, Peale used his broadening platform to shape American politics with ever increasing ferocity.
He was almost religiously devoted to the virtues of the free market and said he wanted to wed American churches to capitalism. This set him in opposition to nearly everything Franklin Roosevelt attempted in his New Deal. Harry Truman disgusted him. He furiously opposed John F. Kennedy’s campaign for president, believing Kennedy’s Catholicism required complete submission to a foreign state: the Vatican.
He was famously devoted to Richard Nixon, whom he claimed was “the greatest positive thinker of our times.”21 He traveled to Vietnam to visit American troops at Nixon’s request, officiated at the wedding of Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower, and stood by the beleaguered president during the darkest days of Watergate. Always at home in the Republican fold, Peale received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the hands of Ronald Reagan in 1984.
It was also in that year that Peale’s legacy was playing itself out in American culture. A 1984 Gallup poll revealed that “as many people were involved in positive thinking seminars as belonged to the Methodist Church.”22 Upon hearing the news, the eighty-six-year-old Peale seemed pleased. Calmly, firmly, he said, “I belong to this.”23
The problem with Norman Vincent Peale was exactly the breadth of message that made him so popular. Those who wanted to know more of God and his son Jesus Christ, more of historic Christianity, could hear enough in Peale’s preaching to hold their interest. Those who wanted to be generally religious without being distinctly Christian could also find encouragement in Peale’s message. Yet those trapped in a self-centered age would hear from Peale the same call to confidence in self, the same certainty that people can fashion their own destiny, and the same assurance that prosperity is the measure of a life well lived that other, non-Christian gurus of the age offered. Indeed, it was difficult at times to distinguish the message of Norman Vincent Peale from the spirit of the times, the idols of the age that were proving to be without power to satisfy men’s souls.
This brings us back to Donald Trump. He is a maddening combination of Christian memory and unrelenting self-centeredness, belief in the power of the positive and an even greater belief in the power of himself, certainty about his importance in the world and nagging, inexplicable insecurity.
This is all consistent with the imprint of Norman Vincent Peale upon his life. Peale offered him a religion of empowerment, not of transformation. Trump took from this that it is God’s will to carry him further in the direction he was already going. He did not understand from his time under Peale’s ministry that God empowers a man only after he remakes him.
Does Donald Trump have a religious faith? Yes. It is a faith he has carried with him for many years. It is a faith he holds dear. It is a faith that will guide him while he is president. The problem for both Trump and the nation, though, is that this faith is the one he learned from Norman Vincent Peale.