Faith in the White House: Examining the Language and Performance of Spiritual Leadership in the U.S. Presidency

Bridging scholarly perspectives across disciplines and within communication subfields on spirituality, civil religion, storytelling in political discourse, I argue the U.S. president performs as a spiritual leader ways scholars have generally overlooked – not necessarily by invoking traditional ideology, but summoning moral language of solidarity through compelling, unitary vision uniquely “American” values. Drawing multimethod design combining qualitative content analysis six presidents’ speeches during times crisis (N = 19) with survey data 374), this research first assesses how modern presidents employed leadership over time then examines public perceptions these performances, exploring roles identity partisanship perceptions. Results show performativity may fail, to some extent, because growing partisanship: In “post-sorting” America fewer cross-cutting identities, appeals “sacredness” presidency no longer be able take root. This offers framework for examining performance variety discursive contexts.