Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women’s Lilac Luncheon in Concord, N.H., on June 27.JOHN TULLY/The New York Times News Service
Speaking before the Faith and Freedom Coalition gala at the Washington Hilton Saturday evening, Donald Trump told the audience: “Together, we’re warriors in a righteous crusade to stop the arsonists, the atheists, globalists and the Marxists.” Then he said, “I’m being indicted for you.”
Just a day later, at the Suburban Collection Showplace, a convention centre in Novi, Mich., Mr. Trump told the Oakland County Republican dinner that he considers his double indictments a “great badge of honour and courage,” adding, “Essentially I’m being indicted for you, 200 million people that love our country.”
And Tuesday, speaking before a Republican women’s political lunch in Concord, N.H., he said it again.
Mr. Trump’s campaign language – including echoes of the New Testament passage in Corinthians 15:3 that “Christ died for our sins” – is increasingly taking on a religious, even messianic tone.
“He has the ‘suffering-servant’ idea in his rhetoric,” said Charles Gallagher, a Jesuit priest and Boston College historian, referring to the prophesies in the Book of Isaiah.
American political oratory has often employed the language of religious faith, but Mr. Trump – who, as an infrequent churchgoer, has been until now something of a naïf in the nave – has taken that tradition into unfamiliar territory: using the vernacular of the vestry to refer not to the country or a cause but to himself.
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“It’s not by mistake that he is sounding messianic,” said Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest and Dartmouth College historian of American religion. “He’s probably delusional enough to see himself in those terms – or manipulative enough to see value in using that language.”
About a third of Americans consider themselves “born again” or evangelical Christians, according to the YouGov/Economist Poll. Mr. Trump has a favourability rating of 63 per cent among such believers.
Americans speak casually about the separation of church and state, but among historians and political activists there rages a debate about whether the country’s Founding Fathers, who placed religion, along with the press, in an honoured position in the First Amendment to the Constitution, intended the country to promote freedom of religion or freedom from religion.
Either way, religious symbolism and rhetoric has been a vital element of American political life for centuries.
All presidents except John Quincy Adams (inaugurated 1825) and Theodore Roosevelt (1901) placed their hands on a Bible while taking the presidential oath of office specified in Article II of the Constitution. Some accounts – not universally accepted by scholars – of the 1789 inauguration of George Washington suggest the first president added “So help me God” to the prescribed oath. In any case, that coda has been customary at least since Abraham Lincoln.
The most famous speech of the end of the 19th century was William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 Democratic National Convention address, in which he argued for ending the gold standard and permitting the free coinage of silver. “You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns,” he said in a reference to the wreath of Christ. “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Sixteen years later, former president Theodore Roosevelt, in accepting the presidential nomination of the splinter Progressive Party, told his supporters, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”
In his address to the country as the D-Day invasion was unfolding in 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered a prayer: ”O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade.” More than half a century later, George W. Bush also employed the word “crusade” after the terrorist attacks of 2001 – but swiftly abandoned the term, which refers to the wars Christians conducted against Muslims, so as not to stoke further antagonisms.
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One of the presidents who was steeped in the American political hymnal and used religious language with great ease was Bill Clinton. In the early days of his 1992 drive to the White House, the Arkansas governor tried out the phrase “New Covenant” – a term that appears repeatedly in both the Old and New Testaments – as a campaign theme. It never stuck, but Mr. Clinton often spoke of religion and took special comfort in the psalms.
That was a reflection of the Christian faith that began when he was a young boy, reared in a family that did not regularly attend church but lived next door to a Baptist preacher. The young Bill Clinton often would be seen walking alone, Bible in hand, to Park Place Baptist Church. Later, as a student at Georgetown University, a Jesuit tried to recruit him to the priesthood. He declined, perhaps in part because of the celibacy obligation of the Catholic priesthood.
“Bill truly was a believer,” said Carolyn Staley, the preacher’s daughter and a lifelong friend of Mr. Clinton’s, in an interview. “This was authentic. It ran deep.”
Religious fervour did not run deep in Lincoln, who had little formal education but – self-educated, largely through reading the Bible – nonetheless drenched his presidential rhetoric in religious imagery.
He continually spoke of “God’s will,” and his famous 1863 Gettysburg Address began with “Four score and seven years ago,” a deliberate evocation of the biblical lifespan in Psalm 90:10 (“The days of our years are threescore years and ten”). He went on to say that “our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation” – a clear invocation of the Lord’s Prayer (“Our father which art in heaven”) and a reference to the Old Testament patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Later, in his 1865 second inaugural address, he invoked several biblical phrases, including his remark that “it may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces,” an echo of the notion in Genesis 3:19 that “by the sweat of your brow you will eat bread.” Additionally, he argued, “Let us judge not, that we be not judged,” a deliberate echo of the admonition in Matthew 7:1.
Mr. Trump is clearly hoping he will be judged by the portion of Americans who are devout.
The former president has a favourability rating of 59 per cent among American adults who go to church more than once a week – nine percentage points higher than his 2024 rival, former vice-president Mike Pence, himself an authentic evangelical, born-again Christian whose 2022 memoir is titled So Help Me God.