The candidates and the church
Trump and Clinton’s religious backgrounds aren’t that different
Back in the 1950s, young Donald Trump was baptized, went to Sunday school and was confirmed at First Presbyterian Church, Jamaica, Queens, N.Y.
At the same time, young Hillary Rodham attended First Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Ill., where she was a member of the youth group and taught Vacation Bible School.
Both future candidates for president were raised in strong mainline Protestant denominations with similar (but by no means identical) histories and worldviews. That was then. Today, both the churches and the candidates are greatly changed.
“Hillary Clinton was formed in the Christian Century, when the churches had a lot of power. That’s not true anymore,” says Kenda Creasy Dean, an ordained United Methodist minister and professor at Princeton Theological Seminary.
But Clinton, Creasy Dean says, has always been true to her Methodist roots. While living in Washington, D.C., she attended Foundry United Methodist Church and was a regular, during her tenure in the Senate, at the Senate prayer circle.
For Trump, the story is more complicated. He still calls himself a Presbyterian and says he attends Marble Collegiate Church (a Reformed congregation in Manhattan), though he is not a member. Last week, James Dobson, the founder of the conservative Focus on the Family, said Trump
recently “did accept a relationship with Christ,” though the candidate has been mum on the topic.
Trump often has tried to reach out to evangelical Christians, with mixed results.
Charles Wiley III cites John Calvin, the founder of Presbyterianism, in discussing Trump’s religion. “Calvin said you can’t see someone else’s heart,” says Wiley, the coordinator of the office of theology and worship for the Presbyterian Church USA.
Historically, Wiley says, Presbyterians have been more “head” and Methodists more “heart.”
Presbyterians traditionally believed in elected salvation — which Wiley describes as “God makes the first move” — while Methodists believed that salvation was available to any believer, says Ted Campbell, a professor of church history at Southern Methodist University.
But for Methodists, there’s a catch, Creasy Dean says. “You can’t just receive God’s grace,” she says. “You have to do something with it. It’s like inhaling and exhaling. You have got to exhale.”
For Methodists, good works are a big part of being a good Christian. “God tends to like working through human beings,” Creasy Dean says.
“I think Hillary Clinton sees her Methodist roots informing her progressive political views,” Campbell says.
“The Methodist social gospel calls for trying to build a heaven here on Earth,” says Chad Seales, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Creasy Dean offers a reminder that churches tends to be big tents. “George W. Bush is a Methodist, too,” she says.
In any case, all mainline Protestant denominations are seeing shrinking memberships and decreased clout. But they are also bridging the once enormous chasms between them.
“Honestly, the Presbyterian church is the closest to United Methodist that you’re likely to see,” Campbell says. One of the few giveaways a layman might notice is that in the Lord’s Prayer, Presbyterians say “forgive us our debts” whereas the Methodists go with “forgive us our trespasses.”
“I can go to a Methodist service and spot verbal and visual cues that tell me I’m in a different place,” Wiley says. “But it’s fairly subtle, the way it should be.”
Trump’s outreach may be missing an opportunity, Seales says. He thinks the numbers for white evangelicals “are just not there anymore.”
And though the traditional evangelical message (think, he says, Sarah Palin) is that the world is not fixable, Seales says even young evangelicals aren’t buying that anymore. He says young people are turning toward causes such as the environment and combatting AIDS.
Instead, the growth areas for religion are in the “prosperity gospel” churches (the Osteens’ Lakewood Church is one) and in the “spiritual but not religious” category.
Not evangelicals. “That brand plays out in the (GOP) primaries but not in the national election,” he says.
And Trump has an unusual and fortuitous ace in the hole: his relationship with Marble Collegiate Church, where his parents were once members.
Before he retired in 1984 (he died in 1993), Norman Vincent Peale was the wildly popular pastor at Marble Collegiate and the author, in 1952, of the megabest-seller “The Power of Positive Thinking.” Young Donald was often in the pews for Peale’s blockbuster sermons, which were heavy on self-esteem and banishing negative thoughts.
It lends itself to parallels with the prosperity gospel, Seales says.
If he wasn’t the grandfather to someone like Joel Osteen, he was at least the great uncle.
“Prosperity gospel cuts across racial, ethnic and class lines. Its message is much more inclusive,” Seales says.
“If Trump could align with Osteen and Oprah,” he says, “he would stand a chance of winning.”