(UPDATED) What the president-elect's unusually broad and diverse clergy lineup tells us.
Donald Trump has enlisted a larger, more diverse lineup of clergy than usual to pray him into office at his upcoming inauguration ceremony.
The group—bigger than any president’s since Ronald Reagan—reflects his politics, pragmatism, and personality. It includes evangelical leaders Franklin Graham and Samuel Rodriguez, as well as spiritual advisor Paula White, the Florida televangelist credited with his rumored recent Christian conversion, and a Detroit prosperity preacher, Wayne T. Jackson.
“Taken together, [Graham and White] have embodied Trump’s embrace of the twinned ideologies of Christian nationalism and capitalist Christianity,” Kevin Kruse, a history professor at Princeton University and author of One Nation Under God, told CT.
The two represent the type of “pragmatic spirituality” that Trump evoked throughout his campaign, with Graham advancing a political agenda and White a financial one, according to John D. Wilsey, author of American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion and an assistant professor of history and Christian apologetics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Despite Trump’s Presbyterian identity and upbringing, mainline traditions are not represented among the half-dozen clergy involved, which include one Catholic and one Jewish leader. As Wisley noted, “his Protestants are evangelicals”—a crucial voting bloc that helped Trump win in November.
Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham and president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, recently defended God’s role in securing Trump’s victory in November, and appeared alongside the president-elect during Trump’s “thank you” tour this month. Graham …