Religion and Politics

Donald Trump, American Preacher

In The New York Times Magazine, Jeff Sharlet reports on Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and the similarities in his rhetoric to that of prosperity gospel ministers. “American politics tends to produce a limited emotional range, mostly positive, peppered with indignation. But Trump scrawls across the spectrum: not just anger but rage; love and, yes, hate; fear, a political commonplace, and also vengeance,” Sharlet writes. “Politicians have long borrowed from religion the passion and the righteousness, but no other major modern figure has channeled the tension that makes Scripture endure, the desire, the wanting that gives rise to the closest analogue to Trumpism: the prosperity gospel, the American religion of winning.”

Read at The New York Times

• Email
• Print