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Norman Vincent Peale, minister of the church: born Bowersville, Ohio 31 May 1898; married 1929 Ruth Stafford (one son, two daughters); died Pawling, New York 24 December 1993.
NORMAN VINCENT PEALE was one of the most influential figures in modern American Protestantism: a populist who brought the New Thought to millions of mainstream, middle-class believers, a secularising wolf whose evangelical Christian clothing helped smooth the path of the American divinity from rural farmstead to corporate boardroom.
His ability to contain within his person an ultra-liberal immanentist theology with hard-right political conservatism made him particularly attractive to Republicans like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan who needed evangelical votes without the encumbrance of fundamentalist intellectual baggage or the embarrassment of Christian teachings on poverty. Through The Power of Positive Thinking - the most famous of his many books - Peale managed to square the theological circle as neatly as any Trinitarian doctrine, by grafting the individualistic narcissism of the consumer society on to the traditional Calvinist puritanism of small-town America.