Why evangelicals love Donald Trump

MANY titles bestowed on Donald Trump—from president to commander-in-chief—are hard for non-supporters to digest. But the honorific that most puzzles the world, perhaps, is that bestowed by American conservatives who praise the swaggering, thrice-married tycoon as a man of God.

Expect that gulf of perception to grow still wider as Mr Trump embarks on his first presidential trip overseas on May 19th. Sceptics remember Candidate Trump stoking sectarian rage on the campaign trail. They remember a man who proposed a complete ban on Muslim arrivals and scorned Pope Francis as a Mexican “pawn” for questioning his immigration plans. Yet now White House aides call President Trump a leader bent on uniting the great faiths, who will bring a “message of tolerance and of hope to billions” during stops in Saudi Arabia, Israel and Rome.

Sceptics have long suspected that conservative Christians—and above all white evangelical Protestants, who are among his most loyal backers—are embracing the president for a mix of reasons, including worldly politics and tribal loyalties. Opponents assume that is why pious followers overlook such Trumpian sins as pride, wrath and bearing false witness (or fibbing, to use a layman’s term). They note that when Jerry Falwell junior, head of Liberty University, a Christian college, called Mr Trump a “dream president”, he listed achievements that straddle the realms of God and man, from his appointment of a conservative Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, to his vocal support for Israel.

Some political scientists sound more like anthropologists than theologians when they dissect Mr Trump’s success with whites who call themselves evangelical Protestants and attend church regularly—fully 80% of whom told a recent survey by the Pew Research Centre that they approve of his job performance. Those scholars note that for many whites, notably in small towns and rural areas, adhering to traditional Bible values and embracing a personal relationship with Jesus Christ—to use one common definition of evangelical faith—is another way of saying “I am an upstanding citizen”. Seen that way, piety is hard to untangle from other markers of conservative identity, from gun ownership to feeling the country is going to the dogs.

Still, it is a mistake to seek purely secular explanations for Mr Trump’s bond with religious conservatives. For one thing, the president’s rhetoric is steeped in time-worn stories about a Christian nation under siege. He is the latest in a long line of politicians to cast believers as a faithful remnant, under attack from the sneering forces of modernity. More specifically, Mr Trump’s language is filled with echoes of a much-mocked but potent American religious movement with millions of followers, known by such labels as “positive thinking” or the “prosperity gospel”.

To historians of religion, like Kate Bowler of Duke University, when Mr Trump speaks of spiritual matters his words fairly ring with the cadences of prosperity preachers. In an address to graduating students at Liberty University on May 13th, Mr Trump promised his audience a “totally brilliant future”, and said that his presidency is “going along very, very well”. He ascribed both happy observations to “major help from God”. Lots of believers credit God for success, but Mr Trump went further. He described an America in which winners make their own dreams come true. He hailed a 98-year-old in the audience whose death by the age of 40 had been predicted by experts. He praised strivers who speak hopes aloud, ignoring doubters, and growled: “Nothing is easier or more pathetic than being a critic.”

That boosterism would sit happily in a sermon by preachers like Joel Osteen, routinely watched by television audiences of 7m, or Creflo Dollar, the Rolls-Royce-owning pastor of an Atlanta megachurch with 30,000 members. This is no accident. As Ms Bowler explained this month at the Faith Angle Forum, a twice-yearly conference about the interplay of politics and religion, as a young man Mr Trump attended a New York church led by Norman Vincent Peale, a “positive thinker” who also officiated at his first marriage. A prosperity preacher, Paula White, spoke at Mr Trump’s inauguration, despite grumbles about her hard-sell techniques, with worshippers prodded to make such “demon-slaying, abundance-bringing” donations as $229, chosen to honour I Chronicles 22:9, with its talk of Solomon earning respite from “enemies on every side”.

Favoured by the Almighty

Prosperity preachers are often dismissed by mainstream theologians as pompadoured hucksters (think Oral Roberts, a pioneering televangelist) or as near-heretics, for suggesting that believers can achieve God-like powers over their own health and wealth. But they reflect a Trumpian worldview. “Blessed”, a book about the prosperity gospel by Ms Bowler, describes the fine line between telling boastful untruths and “positive confession”, by which a bankrupt might thank God for an imaginary gusher of money, or a deathly ill congregant might insist that she is already cured, in the belief that naming a desire will bring it about. Like the Trump family, megachurch pastors and their immaculately groomed wives and children are held up as models of divine favour: winners who have found the rungs of an invisible ladder to success. Prosperity ministries revere celebrity—a Los Angeles church gave Jesus his own star, evoking the ones on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. The movement has deep roots, stretching back to 19th-century touring mesmerists and Pentecostal healers, and to the Depression-era pastor whose version of Psalm 23 began: “The Lord is my Banker, My Credit is Good.”

Not every prosperity worshipper is a Trump voter, not least because many are black. But the movement’s influence on the religious right is hefty, and growing. It is a theology for self-made men who scorn the idea of luck. God gives him “confidence”, the president bragged last year. That is a very American creed.