The American Theology of Winning: Trump, Peale, and the Metaphysical Tradition

Was Donald Trump’s election—twice—shaped by the ideological undercurrents of American metaphysical religion? If Norman Vincent Peale’s gospel of self-made success was more than New Thought-evangelical subculture but, as Catherine Albanese argues in The Delight Makers (2024), the fabric of American theology, then Trump’s political ethos—his relentless optimism, self-mastery rhetoric, and ‘Make America Great/Healthy Again’ paradigm—merits reexamination. This paper brings together Albanese’s Delight Makers and Republic of Mind and Spirit (2007), Cathy Gutierrez’s Plato’s Ghost (2009), and Kate Bowler’s Blessed (2013) to trace New Thought’s metaphysical endurance—from nineteenth-century spiritualists to Peale’s midcentury positive thinking through to Trump’s America. It asks whether the metaphysical tradition, fused with neoliberal market logic, has not just shaped the self-help genre but infused American politics with Albanese’s ‘theology of desire’—where ‘faith in belief’ functions as an operational gaze, a mechanism of control. This paper ultimately reconsiders how Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches myth remains a national creed.