'Tis a puzzlement!
I came here to say exactly the same thing.
I’m not sure he’s an atheist, but I am sure he’s very, VERY indifferent to it.
Evangelicals don’t care about that. He’s basically their Cyrus the Great.
He doesn’t appear to know much about the bible–like plenty of Christians
His apparent sins are not unlike those of Christians
And you say…he’s an atheist? Sounds like a typical Christian to me, by the standards you present in the OP.
Where are you going with this? And why does it matter whether or not he’s a Christian?
He is a non-attending (and likely non-practicing)- Presbyterian.
Why?
Leaving a religion may require deep thought or at least the ability to question, but someone brought up atheist is just as likely to be atheist by default as someone brought up religious is to be religious.
Trump is an apatheist, he is too consumed by his narcissism, lust and craving for adulation to care about things like philosophy.
Obama may have been an atheist, but I doubt Trump is. Trump just doesn’t care about anything other than himself enough to ponder the question.
There are going to be unintelligent, uneducated people who grew up in communist nations and east Asian nations who are atheists just because that was the predominant philosophy of the society they grew up in. Just as there are people who grew up there and converted to theism, and people who examined theism but stayed with atheism.
But the issue is Trump has probably never even reflected on philosophy. He seems so mired in his own cravings and ego to notice the world around him. I doubt he has given the idea much thought.
There are different kinds of irreligious thought. Trump doesn’t strike me as someone who contemplated philosophy and rejected theism. He is more someone who never looked beyond his own urges enough to care about the subject.
What Wesley said.
But that’s just it. Trump didn’t decide anything at all. He never gave a thought to whether there is a God. He’s just indifferent to the whole issue. You might say that makes him an atheist, but in general someone who is an atheist has made a judgment or decision of some sort. That is, an atheist is not a person who doesn’t believe there is a god, they believe there is not a god.
If you asked him, I bet he’d say there is a god. I doubt if his religious thinking goes much deeper than that, though.
At some time during the 2016 campaign, he gave a speech at some religious convention. At that time, he told one of the leaders of it that he’d never sinned. This, of course, speaks more to his narcissism than anything else. But it probably shows a reflexive religious belief: he believes in god because most other people do.
I think he pretends to believe in god. And it’s just enough to allow his fan base to pretend to believe him.
This too, and a lot of them ALSO think he is a god, or at least a demigod, and that so many of them also claim to be Christian themselves is the most frightening thing of all.
MHO.
When he was campaigning, he did attend a Presbyterian church in my area, and as he was walking in, he derisively tossed some cash into a bowl that was actually the Communion platter. That indicated to me that he knew nothing about their services; I’ve attended Presbyterian churches over the years, and the collection plate is passed after the sermon. This is true for most mainstream Protestant churches.
As an atheist who absolutely despises Donald Trump, I have to say there’s a fair amount of “No True Scotsman” arguing going on in this thread. In fact, lots of atheists over the years have argued that atheists are simply people who “don’t believe there is a god” (An Introduction to Atheism from way back in 1997; the RationalWiki article on “Atheism”; and something I wrote on this very board, a long, long time ago).
Trump may well be an atheist. He certainly doesn’t strike me as any kind of good Christian, although that, of course, does not make him an atheist; he may believe in some kind of God or Higher Power (even in a Higher Power not named “Donald Trump”) without holding to (or having much knowledge or understanding of) the tenets of Christianity.
Whether or not Trump is really a Christian, some kind of non-Christian theist, or an atheist, he certainly won handily among Christians in America. According to Pew Research, Trump won all major theological subsets of American Christianity: Protestants/other Christians (58% for Trump to 39% for Clinton); Catholics (52% to 45%); and Mormons (61% to 25%). You have to break things down by religion and “race” or ethnicity to start finding large groups of Christians that Trump didn’t win: Hispanic Catholics went for Clinton, 67% to 26%. Conversely, white “born again” Evangelicals went for Trump over Clinton by a whopping 81% to 16% margin.
And who did the “none of the above” Americans vote for? (A group that includes capital-A Atheists, “apatheists”, “spiritual but not religious”, people who have basically made up their own religion but in any event sleep in on Sundays, and so forth): We went for the woman I like to call “the Methodist church lady” over our Possible-Fellow-Nonbeliever by 68% to 26%. Clinton also easily carried Jews (71% to 24%) and “other religions” (e.g., Hindus, and of course Muslims; 62% to 29%).
The problem with Trump isn’t that he is or isn’t an atheist. The problem with Trump is that he’s an asshole.
I doubt Obama is an atheist. He may not be a Jimmy Carter type devout Christian but he is too conservative and too black to be an atheist.
WTH does that mean?
Huh? It’s very well known what church Trump favors. He doesn’t actually visit that church on Sundays ( he golfs instead) , but he gets regular personal attention from the “pastor” Paula White. She preaches the “prosperity gospel”. It basically means that if you’re rich, that means that God chose you to be rich because you’re special and he rewards you. To be seen rich is to be seen as blessed by God.
And if you’re poor, well, that means you’re quite literally undeserving. To be poor, equals being a loser, equals being a bad person.
Such a religion fits Trump perfectly. To know Donald Trump’s faith is to understand his politics | Martyn Percy | The Guardian
It means he identifies with the black community, which is by and large sincerely religious. Churches are at the heart of most black communities. He’s a community organizer. It doesn’t make any sense to me that he would identify as an atheist.
That’s a misreading of the data. White Evangelicals made up half of the Protestant electorate and they favored Trump by incredibly huge amounts. That means that every other Protestant group did not favor Trump. Only 35% of non-“white, evangelicals” voted for Trump and 59% went for Clinton. Mainlines and minorities overwhelmingly favored the “Methodist church-lady” but the insane Evangelical vote overwhelmed them in the overall category.
When I was a kid, I assumed I believed in god but never really thought about it. Eventually I realized I didn’t. God is one of many things that Trump doesn’t think about.