American Presidents and Childhood Trauma: Intersecting Religious Education from Franklin Roosevelt to Donald Trump

Abstract

This dissertation explores how American presidents’ perceive childhood trauma at the intersection of religious education. Selected first-term elected presidents include Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. The study uses the refracting prism of Lev Vygotsky’s Perezhivanie as the analytical lens to explore presidents at a situational level that builds on the research of Nikolai Veresov and Marilyn Fleer. This phenomenological narrative inquiry uses documents, including research visits at ten presidential library archives, to construct “interviews” with twelve American presidents. The data are the first presented on childhood trauma that relates to American presidents in the aggregate, as is the research framework that is introduced to analyze the data. This is also the first comprehensive study on American presidents that investigates the influence of religious development from a lens of trauma. Descriptive and pattern coding methods in first and second cycle coding were utilized, respectively, for analysis. Discussions include Vygotsky’s Crisis Periods of Development, Social Situation of Development, and Zone of Proximal Development convergent with childhood trauma and religious educational mentorship—impacting a child’s developmental trajectory through a “regressive formational entry point.” Emerging perceptions of selected American presidents include in part, that in general, childhood trauma heightened directive, dutiful, and daring self-awareness when intersected by religious education that involved social/political biblical teaching modeled by stable mentors and regular church attendance. Implications follow that childhood trauma is opportune for spiritual formation, social formation, and leadership formation. Further research from a psychological perspective could hopefully lead to increased human flourishing.