it is an insightful - but will probably scare you

Posted on: August 1, 2019 at 14:13:09 CT

Trump and his parents attended Marble Collegiate Church, and both of his parents had their funerals there. Peale also officiated at Trump’s 1977 wedding to Ivana, his first wife, as well as that of one of Trump’s sisters. Trump has publicly referred to Peale as “the greatest guy” and someone you could listen to “all day long” — and he has attributed some of his business success to his adoption of Peale’s philosophy. In 2009, Trump told Psychology Today that he credited his father’s formative friendship with Peale with his own belated business success. “Defeat is not in my vocabulary,” he said. “ … I refused to be sucked into negative thinking on any level, even when the indications weren’t great.” He’s a man who has never once publicly allowed failure to cross his consciousness.

Spiritual and faith traditions that emphasize personal introspection and emotional authenticity over doctrine, creed, “experts” or institutions are hardly new. Waves of what you might call “intuitional religion” have been washing across the American religious landscape since the First Great Awakening of the 18th century. In that movement, which lasted from the 1730s into the 1740s, fire-and-brimstone tent revivalists exhorted fair-weather Christians to receive a “new birth” in Christ. America’s separation of church and state made it easy for this self-focused pietism to flourish outside the aegis of established religious institutions.

But few iterations of this American intuitional religion have had such a long-lasting effect on today’s religious landscape as a little-remembered phenomenon called New Thought, a once-ubiquitous craze that, through its 20th-century heirs, came to deeply influence the thinking of Trump, Williamson and tens of millions of others.