Author Stephen Mansfield, who has written about the faith of former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, says the current occupant of the Oval Office has captured the “fundamental gripes” of evangelicals but misunderstands just how divided they are these days.
As President Trump completes his first year in the White House, Mansfield has written a book, “Choosing Donald Trump,” about how the chief executive’s faith and relationships with religious leaders helped him get where he is today.
Mansfield identifies Trump’s “spiritual father” as Norman Vincent Peale, a mid-20th-century preacher who popularized the notion of “positive thinking” and whose Marble Collegiate Church in New York the president used to attend. And the author says Florida prosperity gospel preacher Paula White, who gave the invocation at Trump’s inauguration, is the president’s “unofficial chaplain.”
Mansfield, an evangelical himself and former pastor who previously wrote “The Faith of Barack Obama” and “The Faith of George W. Bush,” spoke with RNS about the newest president’s religious trajectory.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve written about the faith of George W. Bush and of Barack Obama. Why isn’t this book called “The Faith of Donald Trump”?
Because the other two had faith lives that had…
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