Does Trump Really Talk About Jesus More Than Other Presidents?
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump created a “religious liberty commission” to be chaired by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and with a membership that’s made up almost entirely of conservative Christians. As Trump announced this effort with a group of his evangelical and charismatic supporters present at the White House, he dismissed a key constitutional factor that actually protects religious liberty rights.
“They say separation between church and state. … I said, ‘All right, let’s forget about that for one time,’” Trump said. “Whether there’s separation or not, you guys are in the White House where you should be, and you’re representing our country, and we’re bringing religion back to our country, and it’s a big deal.”
Dismissing church-state separation shows Trump’s initiative isn’t really about religious liberty but instead about establishing one slice of Christianity with power and privilege. The membership of the commission echoes that problematic mission as it includes people who have long pushed Christian Nationalism and backed MAGA politics, like Ben Carson, evangelist Franklin Graham, talk show hosts Eric Metaxas and Phil McGraw, attorney Kelly Shackelford, and televangelist Paula White-Cain.
“This commission is not about religious liberty but about advancing Christian Nationalism,” said Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (where I serve on the national board of trustees). “True religious freedom requires equality among religions and between religion and nonreligion in the eyes of the law and at every level of our government. Trump clearly designed this commission to favor conservative Christians, especially those who want to use the power of our government to impose their religion on others. … This commission makes a mockery of religious freedom.”
In addition to advancing Christian Nationalism, the new commission is also part of Trump’s effort to wrap his administration in the veneer of Christianity — even though he hasn’t attended a church service other than inaugurations and funerals in nearly 3.5 years. And the members of the new commission are happy to help him wrap himself in the Christian flag. The new chair praised Trump at the Rose Garden event announcing the new group.
“There’s never been a president who’s invoked the name of Jesus more than you. There’s never been a president who says, ‘Yes, I love Jesus, but I love people of all faiths,’” Patrick declared to Trump as he claimed President Joe Biden instead “attacked people of faith.”
As one who has long studied religious rhetoric in presidential campaigns and administrations, I immediately questioned that claim. While Trump does use religious rhetoric to keep his White evangelical base happy, he’s never been as natural or articulate (or theologically accurate) with his faith comments as other recent presidents like George W. Bush or Barack Obama. Trump also has a history of church attendance that pales in comparison to that of Bush, Obama, or especially Biden.
I’m confident Patrick did not conduct any analysis to study whether his claim about Jesus rhetoric was true. Instead, he just declared it so to make Trump sound holier. So this issue of A Public Witness explores which recent president actually talked about Jesus more. Spoiler alert: Patrick is wrong.
More, More About Jesus
To take a comparative look at how frequently recent presidents mentioned Jesus in a speech or message, I used “The American Presidency Project” database hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara. The searchable database, created by political science professors at UC Santa Barbara over two decades ago, includes more than 169,000 transcripts of speeches, proclamations, and other messages. The database provides an opportunity to not only analyze a large body of presidential comments but also take a comparative look at different presidents.
For each of the last four presidents — W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden — I pulled all references in speeches and messages to “Jesus.” I eliminated those not said by the president, those that were not a reference to Jesus but to an institution (like a congregation’s name or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), those that were an exclamation of surprise or part of a saying (like having a “come to Jesus moment”), and those that referred to a Latino man with the name Jesús. With the remaining invocations of Jesus, I counted both the total number of times the presidents mentioned Jesus and the number of speeches or messages in which such references occurred.
To provide a fairer look, I separated Bush and Obama’s counts into two terms so their numbers could be compared with the same length of time as Trump’s first term and Biden’s term. There’s a clear winner, and it’s not Trump.
During his second term, Obama mentioned Jesus the most — nearly 60% more times than Trump did in his first term. Trump did take second place with his first term, though just narrowly beating out Obama’s first term and Bush’s first term when it came to total references to Jesus. That means Trump’s rate of mentioning Jesus was just a smidge more than average.
So far in his second term, Trump has referenced Jesus seven times in four speeches. That’s pacing more than in his first term and Obama’s terms, though that could be simply because of timing since three of his four messages were to mark Ash Wednesday or Easter (and the other was a message for St. Patrick’s Day). A lighter Christian holiday season the rest of the year until Christmas might bring his rate back down. The focus on significant Christian holidays is not unusual. Christmas and Easter declarations included a majority of references to Jesus in the records from the four presidents.
Other than Trump’s current term, which is too new for good analysis, I looked a the average number of times per year the four presidents mentioned Jesus in a speech or message. Unsurprisingly given the above graph, Obama won since he had the first and third-highest four-year terms. But even when compared just to Bush and Biden, Trump hardly represents the spiritual revival his evangelical followers sometimes make his presidency out to be.
Beyond the number of references and the focus on Christmas and Easter, there are other ways of considering how recent presidents have talked about Jesus. Here, we find some important qualitative differences that also undermine the claims made by Patrick about Trump.
The issue of Christian “persecution” is a topic that popped up during numerous terms, but the presidents didn’t always address similar concerns. Some of Trump’s invocations of Jesus during his first term came as he sought to paint liberals as trying to remove depictions of Jesus, along with those of American leaders. He claimed during the summer of 2020 amid protests following the police killing of George Floyd: “I mean, you’re also talking about statues of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln. They’d like to get Jesus; you know that, right? They said, ‘We want to get Jesus.’” Such an approach of weaponizing Jesus to score partisan political points matches Trump’s creation of his “Religious Liberty Commission” and Patrick’s incorrect claim that “there’s never been a president who’s invoked the name of Jesus more than” Trump. Without those messages in 2020 claiming Jesus was being canceled by protesters, Trump would’ve mentioned Jesus in fewer speeches than Biden.
In contrast to Trump’s focus on alleged “persecution” of conservative Christians in the United States, Obama talked about Jesus while highlighting religious persecution in other nations. For instance, two days before Christmas in 2015, he mentioned that some Christians in the Middle East are unable to ring church bells to “celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ” because of the violence of the Islamic State.
Additionally, Obama’s rhetoric about Jesus also shows the lie in Patrick’s claim that “there’s never been a president who says, ‘Yes, I love Jesus, but I love people of all faiths.’” Such a summary actually fits Obama even better than Trump.
“When Syrian refugees seek the sanctuary of our shores, it’s the faithful from synagogues, mosques, temples, and churches who welcome them, the first to offer blankets and food and open their homes,” Obama declared at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2016. “And we’re driven to do this because we’re driven by the value that so many of our faiths teach us: I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper. As Christians, we do this compelled by the Gospel of Jesus, the command to love God and love one another.”
At the National Prayer Breakfast in 2014, Obama expressed his faith in Jesus in clear terms: “In my life, [God] directed my path to Chicago and my work with churches who were intent on breaking the cycle of poverty in hard-hit communities there. And I’m grateful not only because I was broke and the church fed me, but because it led to everything else. It led me to embrace Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. It led me to Michelle — the love of my life — and it blessed us with two extraordinary daughters. It led me to public service. And the longer I serve, especially in moments of trial or doubt, the more thankful I am of God’s guiding hand.”
Compare those comments with Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2020. Before he went to the podium, author Arthur Brooks talked about the need to follow Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount about loving your enemies. Trump then started his remarks by noting he held a different worldview: “Arthur, I don’t know if I agree with you. But I don’t know if Arthur is going to like what I’m going to say.” Trump went on to attack the religiosity of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and then-Sen. Mitt Romney simply because they opposed him politically. And Trump’s only references to Jesus came as he talked about a church rebuilding after an arson fire and quoted the pastor talking about Jesus and Easter. But Trump got most excited about the real estate side of the story: “I’ll bet you it will indeed be bigger, better, and nicer than before.” At this year’s National Prayer Breakfast, Trump didn’t even mention Jesus, though he did claim conservative Christians in the U.S. were being persecuted.
Patrick’s office did not respond to my requests for comments about the sourcing of his claims about Trump talking about Jesus or about the fact that Obama actually mentioned Jesus more.
There’s Just Something About That Name
Just because Obama mentioned Jesus more in speeches and messages than other recent presidents does not mean Obama is more religiously devout. This may sound cynical, but sometimes politicians say things just because they know it will help them politically!
The 1980 election demonstrated this dynamic in terms of religious rhetoric. A divorced former Hollywood actor won after a campaign in which he used more religious rhetoric than the other candidate. But that doesn’t mean Ronald Reagan was the more devout of the two. In fact, he was not. Jimmy Carter the Sunday School teacher was clearly the more religious one. He just didn’t talk about it as much on the campaign trail that year.
Even if Patrick had been right and Trump tossed in references to Jesus more frequently than all other presidents, it wouldn’t have meant what Patrick thought it did. Trump mentioning Jesus doesn’t mean Trump actually believes in Jesus. Nor would it prove that Trump was protecting religious liberty since Christian Nationalists seeking to end religious liberty often talk about Jesus. Such Jesus rhetoric might just be because the president wants to keep key supporters happy. In that way, politically naïve Christians have often been cheap dates at White House events.
Beyond the issue of the name of Jesus perhaps becoming just a talking point to sure up political support, the idea of a president saying “Jesus” more doesn’t indicate which president is actually doing a good job. Neither the presidential oath of office nor the U.S. Constitution mentions Jesus. The sheer volume of Jesus references doesn’t tell us who is going to do a better job. The president, after all, isn’t the pastor-in-chief. Yet, Patrick used his claim to suggest Trump was a great president.
We continue to see this odd dynamic play out where the least religiously observant and most profane president in years is heralded by many Christians not merely as a good president but as a godly leader. Rather than just admitting that they seek power, politicians like Patrick and preachers like White-Cain seek to depict Trump as the embodiment of a Christian in public life. In doing so, they harm the Christian witness. So it would be great if they would just stop mentioning Jesus while they do it.
As a public witness,
Brian Kaylor