Richard Niebuhr wrote in The Kingdom of God in America, “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” I don’t know if President Trump has ever read Niebuhr, but this quote reminds me of how the new President views his relationship with God. Watch this video clip (click here) in which then-candidate Trump responds to the following question by Republican pollster Frank Luntz during the Family Leadership Summit in 2015: “Have you ever asked God for forgiveness?” Just so you know, the clip is for real; I’m not spinning fake news.
It is worth noting that in developing his answer to the interviewer’s question, Mr. Trump remarked that Norman Vincent Peale had been his pastor. Peale had impacted Trump with his messages that championed the power of positive thinking. While claiming to be religious, Trump told the interviewer that he couldn’t recall having ever asked God for forgiveness for doing something wrong. Instead, he has made it his ambition always to do better the next time around. He also said, “I don’t bring God into that picture.”
Trump’s remarks make him sound a lot like a moralistic therapeutic deist, though he was by no means a teenager when the book addressing this MTD phenomenon among American youth first appeared in print in 2005 (See Christian Smith and Melina Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers {Oxford University Press, 2005}; see also Smith’s synopsis of the book’s theme at this link). Having said that, how really different are we than President Trump when it comes to the subject of sin, repentance, and forgiveness? Trump might simply be more honest than most of us.
Now if the solution to doing wrong is simply to do better next time, who needs repentance and forgiveness? If we are basically good people, we can do better. We simply need to think positively and will ourselves to do better. Maybe we might even call on God to help us do better so that we can live more successful lives, like Mr. Trump. Now, what’s wrong with that? After all, the President’s living the American Dream.
Perhaps Mr. Trump does not wish to ask for forgiveness because that would suggest he is blameworthy and needs to accept relational responsibility for his actions. Such responsibility would involve not simply doing better, but also undoing the wrong—making amends wherever possible. However, in our day of increased alertness to legal liability and the threat of litigation, he may seek to avoid at all cost the appearance of legal fault and vulnerability to the charge that we are weak losers. If true, the U.S. President’s refusal to admit the need to ask for forgiveness might simply make him the iconic representative of a society with an aversion to legal responsibility; in such a society, we can be cleared legally of charges though remain morally corrupt before God.
Just as one cannot separate “moralistic” from “therapeutic” and “deism” in terms of what the words collectively connote, so too, we cannot separate doing wrong, doing right, sinning and asking forgiveness from our views of God or ultimate reality, or from who we are as humans, including our various relationships. The various words and associations hang together as brush strokes of the murals we paint of our existence. Thus, if God is relational, and if God is loving and holy, and if God holds us accountable in the divine pursuit of intimacy, then we had better think twice about simply doing better next time. We have to account for past grievances, and know how to go about doing the accounting.
Now we don’t have to be accountants or business tycoons who think they know the art of closing a deal with God. Rather, we need to look to God alone on how to make things right. The author of 1st John 1:5-10 shoots straight with us on what needs to be done, just like a take-charge executive might talk to his young apprentices:
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. (1 John 1:5-10; ESV)
According to this passage, anyone who claims not to have sinned makes God into a liar. But anyone who confesses their sins to God will find God faithful to forgive their injustices and cleanse them from all unrighteousness. 1st John 1:5-10 is headline news: only those who have confessed their sins will receive true cleansing and have sufficient grounds for positive thinking.
Is this headline news fake? You’ll have to decide who and what to believe—these words from Scripture or words uttered by Presidents and commoners who claim there’s no need to seek forgiveness.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In