Trump to read Bible verse from Oval Office after feud with Pope and deleted AI image

Then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump prays during a roundtable discussion in Miami, Florida, in October 2024. (Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

U.S. President Donald Trump will participate in a public Bible reading this week as the administration continues to integrate religion, particularly Christianity, into official business.

“On April 21, President Trump is scheduled to read Scripture via video message from the Oval Office during the 6 p.m. EST hour,” a press release from organizers reads. The event is called “America Reads The Bible.”

Trump’s participation in the weeklong reading is particularly notable given his recent feud with Pope Leo over the Iran conflict and the backlash he received earlier this week for posting – and then deleting – an AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus.

In the video message, Trump, according to organizers, will read a passage from 2 Chronicles 7:11-22, which includes the frequently quoted verse 14: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

The verse also gained public attention when the founder of “Cowboys for Trump,” Couy Griffin, prayed over the crowd at the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot.

But Trump’s ties to the verse go back even further, according to the Christian Post. Soon after his 2016 victory, evangelist Anne Graham Lotz, Billy Graham’s daughter, said it was a sign that God was answering the prayer of his people, just like in 2 Chronicles 7:14.

Founder and president of Christians Engaged, Bunni Pounds, who helped organize the event, told Fox News that they “needed someone special to read Second Chronicles, chapter seven” and that they set aside the passage for Trump to read.

Margaret Susan Thompson, professor of history and political science in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, told CNN the verse has been seen by many Evangelical Christians as a “justification of calling upon God to bless their nation.”

While the Trump administration has recently invoked Christian language in public affairs, Thompson noted that previously American leaders from former president Jimmy Carter to former president George W. Bush have integrated their religious convictions into a mindset that shapes their goals for the nation, but that individual public leaders have not made their faith a mandate.

“The problem is when it is prescribed for the entire nation as normative or as mandatory as a religious kind of doctrine,” Thompson said.

Many administration officials will join the president during the reading, according to the press release, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and chief of staff Susie Wiles.

Trump found himself at the centre of two religious matters last week, which began with a feud with Pope Leo, who has spoken out against the war with Iran.

The president criticized the pope, telling reporters, “We don’t like a pope that’s going to say that it’s OK to have a nuclear weapon,” adding, “I’m not a fan of Pope Leo.”

The pope said in response that he has “no fear of the Trump administration.”

The president then had to defend himself after posting an AI image of himself as Jesus, which drew the ire of some within his own base.

“I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with Red Cross,” he told reporters outside the West Wing. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor making people better. And I do make people better.”

Since Trump returned to office last year, the administration has chipped away at the separation between church and state.

The White House has asked Americans to pray for an hour a week, Bible verses and Christian imagery have appeared on official government social media accounts, and federal agencies have hosted prayer service.

Earlier this year, Hegseth – who has particularly sought to infuse religion into official Pentagon business and regularly evokes scripture – invited a pastor with controversial views to lead prayer service at the Pentagon. The pastor, Douglas Wilson, supports repealing women’s right to vote, believes homosexuality should be a crime and calls for Christian theocracy.

At a Pentagon briefing on the Iran war earlier this week, Hegseth compared reporters to Pharisees, “the self-appointed elites of their time” who doubted Jesus’ “goodness.”