Trump’s antipathy for Pope may have roots in childhood Protestant church

Donald Trump’s attacks this week on Pope Leo, for his criticism of the US attack on Iran and the US president’s decision to post an image of himself as Jesus Christ on social media, make a good deal more sense considering Trump attended services as a young man at the Protestant Marble Collegiate church in Manhattan, which was led at the time by an anti-Catholic pastor.

That church’s pastor in Trump’s youth, Norman Vincent Peale, who would later officiate at Trump’s first wedding, is best-known today as the author of the Christian self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking, but when Trump was 14, Peale made national headlines as the leader of a group of Protestant churchmen who loudly objected to the presidential candidacy of John F Kennedy, on the grounds that he was a Catholic.

As Time magazine reported in September 1960, Peale, “a longstanding Republican whose Protestant following rivals Billy Graham’s as the largest in the US”, was one of the most prominent leaders of a group of “150 Protestant clergymen and laymen, calling themselves the Citizens for Religious Freedom”, who met that month in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel to agree on a statement objecting to the notion that a Catholic could be president.

Peale presided over the meeting, according to two reporters from the Washington Post and Long Island’s Newsday. “Our American culture is at stake,” Peale warned his colleagues. “I don’t say it won’t survive, but it won’t be what it was.”

“At the close of their session,” Time reported, “they issued a 2,000-word manifesto that more than any other statement thus far in the campaign served to make religion the most emotional issue of the 1960 election.”

That statement, which was printed in the New York Times, along with Peale’s photograph, on 8 September 1960, is a reminder of how recently virulent anti-Catholic sentiment was entirely acceptable for the nation’s Protestant establishment.

From the perspective of today, what is most interesting is that the anti-Kennedy screed issued by Peale and other Protestant clergymen in 1960 focused mainly on their claim that a Catholic would refuse to uphold the separation of church and state.

“Brotherhood in a pluralistic society like ours depends on a firm wall of separation between church and state. We feel that the American hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church can only increase religious tensions and political-religious problems by attempting to break down this wall,” Peale’s group wrote. “Much depends upon strong support for this well tested wall of separation by Americans of all faiths.”