Norman Vincent Peale

Norman Vincent Peale grew up the son of a doctor who left medicine to become a Methodist preacher, and the family moved through a string of small Ohio towns as his father was reassigned from pulpit to pulpit. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Findlay and Detroit before deciding, in his early twenties, to follow his father into the ministry. Ohio Wesleyan and Boston University's School of Theology got him ordained in 1922, and by his late twenties he had built a struggling Brooklyn congregation of forty members into one drawing nine hundred, mostly by preaching about confidence and results rather than doctrine. In 1932 that reputation carried him to Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, where he stayed for more than fifty years.

Peale turned Marble Collegiate into a media operation. He broadcast sermons on network radio for fifty-four years, co-founded the magazine Guideposts in 1945, and in 1952 published The Power of Positive Thinking, which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 186 weeks and sold in the millions, outsold among religious books only by the Bible itself. Its method was simple and repeatable: picture the outcome you want, refuse negative thoughts, expect results. Five presidents later praised him on camera for a documentary about his life. He officiated the first wedding of a Queens builder's son named Donald Trump, whose family attended Marble Collegiate for years and who has called Peale a formative influence ever since. Reagan gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984, the year Peale retired from the pulpit.

The book that made Peale famous also made him a target. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called positive thinking "a dangerous cult" that corrupted the gospel; the psychologist Albert Ellis documented patients who suffered breakdowns trying to follow it; a Yale Divinity School dean called the theology behind it "very nearly blasphemous." Peale rarely answered any of them directly. In 1960 he chaired a group of Protestant clergy opposing John F. Kennedy's candidacy on the ground that a Catholic president would answer to Rome, a campaign that collapsed within days under public condemnation from a hundred religious leaders and cost him newspaper syndication. William F. Buckley wrote that Peale "fled from the field, mortally wounded." He never fully explained the episode, and Marble Collegiate did not ask him to leave.

Peale preached until 1984 and died in 1993 at ninety-five, having written 46 books that mostly said the same thing in different words. His method outlived the criticism: the 2006 phenomenon The Secret repackaged his central claim almost unchanged, and the field of positive psychology built by Martin Seligman defined itself partly by insisting on evidence Peale never supplied. His most consequential legacy turned out to run through one Queens family — Donald Trump's decades of citing Peale as the man who taught him to think big have kept Peale's name in circulation in a way none of his 46 books alone could have.

Norman Vincent Peale's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Power of Positive Thinking book
  186 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list 1952
• A Guide for Confident Living book
  His first bestseller 1948
• Guideposts other
  Inspirational magazine co-founded with Ruth Peale and Raymond Thornburg 1945
• What's Your Trouble? television
  Weekly advice program that ran until 1968 1952

• May 31, 1898 aged 0 Born in Bowersville, Ohio
• 1922 aged ~24 Ordained a Methodist minister
• June 20, 1930 aged 32 Marries Ruth Stafford They remained married 63 years.
• 1932 aged ~34 Becomes pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan
• 1945 aged ~47 Co-founds Guideposts magazine
• 1952 aged ~54 Publishes The Power of Positive Thinking
• 1960 aged ~62 Leads a Protestant clergy campaign against John F. Kennedy's candidacy Collapsed within days under public condemnation.
• 1984 aged ~86 Retires from Marble Collegiate and receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom
• December 24, 1993 aged 95 Dies in Pawling, New York, at ninety-five

• Donald Trump b. 1946
  Businessman, media personality, and 45th and 47th president whose populist movement transformed American politics. influenced
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. opposed
• Reinhold Niebuhr 1892–1971
  Theologian whose Christian realism influenced American foreign policy, civil rights, and public ethics. called it a dangerous cult
• Benjamin Spock 1903–1998
  Pediatrician whose 1946 baby-care manual reshaped postwar American child-rearing advice. parallel postwar advice-giver