What’s Wrong— and Right — With Norman Vincent Peale
Donald Trump’s favorite “positive thinker” was more than an enabler of despotism
The Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, author of the 1952 self-help landmark The Power of Positive Thinking, has been widely reported as an influence on Donald Trump, a connection I noted in my 2014 One Simple Idea before Trump became a candidate. I have since called Trump “a kind of Frankenstein monster of the philosophy” of positive thought. Important as the Trump-Peale connection is, it can obfuscate the complexity of the bestselling minister’s place in American culture. I explored some of the historical issues around Peale in my December 16, 2016, Washington Post review of Christopher Lane’s Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life (Yale). To help contextual this often-confounding American religionist, I am reprinting my critique here. — MH
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On a fall morning in 1960, the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale stood before his congregation on Manhattan’s East Side and apologized for having gotten tangled up with a committee of evangelical ministers who questioned John F. Kennedy’s fitness to serve as president on the grounds that Kennedy, as a Catholic, might be subservient to the Vatican.
