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(NewsNation) — During a recent interview, President Donald J. Trump said one of his motivations to end the war in Ukraine is to try to get into heaven.
“I want to try and get to heaven if possible. I hear I’m not doing well. I hear I’m really at the bottom of the totem pole,” Trump joked on “Fox & Friends.”
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But, jokes aside, what is the president’s religion, and what role does faith play in his life?
What role does faith play in President Trump’s life?
President Trump was raised Presbyterian, the faith of his Scottish-born mother, and publicly identified as such during much of his life and on the campaign trail in 2016. But in 2020, he told Religion News Service that he considers himself a nondenominational Christian.
There’s little record that Trump has been active in church life, and there have been no public reports of him attending church services regularly since his reelection.
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“I have always been a believer in God. I don’t go to church all the time, but I believe in God,” Trump told the New York Times in 1999.
But in the wake of the 2024 assassination attempt he survived in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump has spoken in a new way about the hand of God in his life and his own faith.
President Donald Trump bows his head in prayer during the White House Faith Office luncheon in the State Dining Room, Monday, July 14, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
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Immediately after the attack, Trump credited God with saving him.
“It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening,” he posted on TruthSocial.
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At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Trump, still the party’s nominee at that point, told his supporters the bullet “came within a quarter of an inch of taking my life” and that “God was on his side.”
In July of 2025, a year after the near-assassination, President Trump said in a statement, “It remains my firm conviction that God alone saved me that day for a righteous purpose: to restore our beloved Republic to greatness and to rescue our Nation from those who seek its ruin.”
