A Cloud of One's Own

‘I want to be good because you want to prove to God so you go to that next step.’

Trump on his desire to reach heaven, during an Oval Office briefing with reporters. The president has spoken of his mortality several times in recent months and said during the briefing that the subject is “very important” to him.

The Week, Quote of the Day. Wednesday, 8 October, 2025

I have a theory about this, and it goes as follows: That people's responses to the President's comment are more likely to be driven by their political identities than their actual theology. Whether one believes that faith without works is dead, or that people are saved by faith alone, becomes largely irrelevant. For someone whose politics aligns with the President, Heaven is in the cards. For someone who has no patience for Donald Trump's methods of reforming government,  if there's an afterlife, he's going to be dismayed at what he finds.

Part of this is the simple malleability of religion, even Christianity. People simply read into it whatever it is they want to find there, and find ways to do away with those things that don't affirm their understanding of the way the world should be.

But there's also an aspect of this that's based on the idea that Christianity offers a personal relationship with the divine and salvation for anyone. While classic Christian doctrine holds that everyone is in need of forgiveness to attain Heaven, that forgiveness is pretty easy to come by, enough so that being convinced that one doesn't have it is often considered a symptom of very low self-esteem or even poor mental health.

And I think that these factors allow people to see their religion through the lens of themselves, rather than any sort of external criteria. The fact that people are generally the heroes of their own stories pushes them to use themselves as the yardstick for measuring right and wrong. And this allows them to map their own opinions onto the divine, or the Universe at large, as the case may be. And so people, the President included, can convince themselves that doing right in the world and following their own interests are one in the same.