The national press is hitting Donald Trump for a having just a superficial understanding of religion, just as Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz begin the final battle for evangelical voters in Iowa before the Feb. 1 caucuses.
Many in the press pounced on Turmp’s speech at Liberty University, when he made a biblical reference.
“Two Corinthians, right,” Trump said, reading from notes. “Two Corinthians 3:17. That’s the whole ballgame. ‘Where the spirit of the lord is, there is liberty.’ And here there is liberty college — Liberty University. But it is so true.”
Because Trump called the verse “Two Corinthians,” as it is printed in the text of bibles, and not “Second Corinthians,” as it is more commonly said aloud, the press accused him of misquoting scripture, even though he quoted the verse accurately.
The New York Times reported that Trump “quotes scripture, sort of, at Liberty University.” Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank said Trump “bungled” the quote and that he “wouldn’t know a Corinthian from a craps table.”
An NPR article said Trump “mispronounced a book of the Bible.”
“Donald Trump Mistakes Biblical Citation at Liberty University Event,” said ABC News.
Buzzfeed editor Katherine Miller mocked the moment with the headline “Donald Trump Knows The Bible So Well He Misquotes It At Christian University.”
Unlike Cruz or Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum, religion is not a subject Trump delves deeply into on the campaign trail. He normally only touches on the subject to identify himself as a Presbyterian, a signal to evangelicals that he’s on the same team, or to say that the Bible is his favorite book, followed by his own book, The Art of the Deal.
Even so, Trump remains popular among conservative Christian voters. A Jan. 5 NBC poll shows him leading with that group with 33 percent support nationally, which has prompted the national press to examine, speculate on and mock his level of devotion.
Even before Trump’s Liberty speech, reporters have questioned other areas of Trump’s faith.
For example, Trump has said as a child in New York, he attended Marble Collegiate College, which was headed by author and motivational speaker Pastor Norman Vincent Peale. Reasoning that Trump’s appeal among evangelicals is “sometimes” about racism, New York magazine writer Ed Kilgore wrote Tuesday that the billionaire developer’s former church was headed by Peale, who is “decidedly not in fashion with any variety of American Christian at present.”
(Peale is the author of The Power of Positive Thinking, a mega-bestseller with 7 million copies sold worldwide.)
On Trump’s “Corinthians” episode at Liberty University, Kilgore said the candidate demonstrated “how little time he’s sat in a pew listening to a Scripture reading.”
While some journalists have questioned Trump’s sincerity on matters of faith, McKay Coppins, a reporter for Buzzfeed, went further. In a column this week for the New York Times, he said Trump’s “religious posturing is not about theology, it’s about branding.”
Coppins said Trump’s religious references are made the same way “hucksters … infect and co-opt America’s faith communities.”
He also said Trump was tapping into “the same visceral force that animated the witch trials in Salem and set fire to the crosses in front of black churches.”
In interviews, Trump has mostly shied away from talking religion at length. In August, Trump was asked by Bloomberg Politics to name his favorite verse from the Bible.
“I wouldn’t want to get into it because for me that’s very personal,” he replied.
A month before that, Trump was asked if he has ever asked God for forgiveness. “I don’t bring God into that picture,” he said, before offering that he takes Holy Communion and, “I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness.”
