Trump is now selling Bibles — but he’s not the first president with holy books for sale

Former President Donald Trump is now selling Bibles emblazoned with the American flag and inscribed with the phrase “God Bless the USA.”

The religious texts — available for $59.99 — also include founding documents like the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

“Let’s Make America Pray Again,” Trump wrote in a March 26 Truth Social post. “As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy.”

He is not the first ex-president to repackage the bible for his own purposes, though.

After leaving office, Thomas Jefferson took it upon himself to recreate his own version of the Bible, which he called “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.”

The differences between the Trump and Jefferson Bibles, which are numerous and stark, shed light on how both men saw the role of Christianity in America, according to historians.

“It would be hard to find a sharper contrast between (Jefferson’s) private, deeply thoughtful experience with Trump’s use of the Bible for political purposes,” Lindsay Chervinsky, a senior fellow at the Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History, told McClatchy News.

The Jefferson Bible

Jefferson, America’s third president, left office in 1809, at which point he considered himself a Christian, but only in a limited way, Thomas Kidd, a professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, told McClatchy News.

“He believed in Jesus’s ethical teachings but virtually none of the supernatural aspects of Christianity,” Kidd said.

With his ample free time in his post-presidency years — made possible by the enslaved people that maintained his Virginia estate — he set out to rewrite the Bible as he saw fit, Taylor Stoermer, a lecturer in public history at Johns Hopkins University, told McClatchy News.

Using a razor, he cut out verses from various versions of the New Testament Gospels in English, French, Greek and Latin.

Then, he assembled them into a “somewhat coherent narrative” that excluded any mention of the supernatural, such as Jesus’ miracles or his resurrection, Stoermer said.

The completed work, which he only shared with close friends, was not published during Jefferson’s lifetime.

But years later, after being sold to the Smithsonian Institution, it became widely available to the public, and was even gifted to new members of Congress. Nowadays, it is available for purchase online, Stoermer said.

Different Bibles, different purposes

Though they both repackaged the Bible after leaving the White House, Jefferson and Trump did so in entirely different ways for dissimilar reasons.

Jefferson’s repurposing of the Bible was wholly a private exercise, one in which he attempted to make sense of Jesus’ teachings.

Aside from sharing it with a few people, including John Adams, Jefferson kept his heavily revised text a secret, Chervinsky said.

“American society in the early 1800s was very religious and would have been outraged by Jefferson’s editing of the Bible,” she said.

On the other hand, Trump has widely marketed his Bible —the King James version — which he appears to be using to help fundraise for his campaign, Kidd said.

The two Bibles — one intended to be kept private and the other offered up to the public — reveal the polar opposite ways in which the two men viewed religion in America, historians said.

For Jefferson, religion was a deeply private matter that had no business being brought into public life, Thomas Balcerski, a presidential historian at Eastern Connecticut State University, told McClatchy News.

In stark contrast, Trump has said he believes Christianity — which he believes is under attack — is of the utmost importance for the state of the country.

“Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country, and I truly believe that we need to bring them back,” Trump said in his Truth Social post. “ ... All Americans need a Bible in their home.”

Further differentiating the two men’s worldviews is Trump’s inclusion of civic documents, like the Constitution, in his Bible, historians said. The combination implies that faith is not only a matter of public concern, but that it is inherently intertwined with the political sphere.

It’s “essentially a Christian nationalist playbook,” Stoermer said.

“The use of flag imagery and political texts in conjunction with the bible suggests a dangerous politicization of Christianity and religion more broadly — the exact phenomenon that Jefferson feared.”

Jefferson, along with many of the Founding Fathers, would no doubt object to Trump’s packaging of civic documents alongside the bible, Stoermer said.

“They would be absolutely aghast and insulted,” Stoermer said. “You could probably count on one hand the Founding Fathers who would think that they have anything to do with one another.”

The American public, though, should not be surprised by Trump’s newly released Bible, Balcerski said.

He’s used the book before for political purposes, Balcerski said, including in the summer of 2020, when, after having protesters forcibly removed from outside the White House, he posed with a Bible outside of a nearby church.

And, it’s important to remember, Balcerski said, that “Trump is a sales person. He’s sold everything under the sun, and the Bible is the next in this series.”

This story was originally published March 27, 2024 at 2:02 PM with the headline "Trump is now selling Bibles — but he’s not the first president with holy books for sale."