EXCLUSIVE — President Donald Trump seems to be having a come-to-Jesus moment.

The president was speaking on Fox & Friends Tuesday morning about his efforts to secure peace in Ukraine when he suddenly offered an unprompted reflection on the fate of his immortal soul.

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“If I can save 7,000 people a week from being killed, I think that’s…” Trump told the hosts before trailing off. He continued, “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”

The Washington Examiner contacted Bishop Robert Barron, prelate of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester and founder of Word on Fire, for his pastoral reaction to the president’s uncharacteristically existential remarks.

“I was struck by his humility, admitting that he is at the bottom of the totem pole. That’s a good spiritual attitude to have before God,” Barron said, describing his immediate reaction to Trump’s comments. “Secondly, I was impressed by his motivation. Beyond wealth, power, and pleasure, he was seeking union with God.”

The bishop pointed to the president’s brush with death last year in Butler, Pennsylvania, as a possible impetus for a serious interrogation of his own soul.

“I do think that the assassination attempt last summer affected a change in the president,” Barron said. “It convinced him that he was spared for a purpose, and therefore it opened him to accepting the ways of God’s providence. It also clarified his moral aim and brought into sharper relief the misdeeds of his past.”

While far from an evangelist, Trump’s public statements following the attempt on his life have at times invoked strikingly religious rhetoric.

“It remains my firm conviction that God alone saved me that day for a righteous purpose: to restore our beloved Republic to greatness and to rescue our Nation from those who seek its ruin,” the president said in an address last month commemorating the Butler incident.

But even in such contexts, Trump has always struck a triumphant tone. He has rarely implied a sense of insecurity about his morals or spiritual well-being.

While the president’s comments weren’t exactly an intellectual treatise on the nature of salvation, his choice of phrase is telling about his understanding of God and the afterlife.

Barron told the Washington Examiner that he believes the president was gesturing toward a conception of heaven in line with orthodox Christian belief.

“I think he correctly sees heaven as a place of radical love, which is why he correlates it to the achievement of loving acts here below,” Barron said. “St. Thomas Aquinas said that in heaven, faith will fade away (for we will see God in the face) and hope will fade away (for we will have achieved what we have longed for), but love will remain, for love is what heaven is.”

Trump was raised as a Presbyterian, the religion of his Scottish mother. He identified with the denomination for most of his life, including during his first term as president.

However, Trump told Religion News Service in 2020, “Though I was confirmed at a Presbyterian church as a child, I now consider myself to be a non-denominational Christian.”

Barron, along with other religious clergy, offered a benediction for Trump at the 2025 National Day of Prayer. He is also one of the faith leaders appointed by the White House to serve on its Religious Liberty Commission.

He has frequently sat down with politicians on both sides of the aisle to advocate the Catholic position on issues from abortion to immigration, but stresses that clergy cannot become absorbed into parties or campaigns.

“The thing we can’t do, and we don’t do, is partisan politics,” he told Fox News Digital last year. “We can’t get in the business of saying, ‘OK, don’t vote for him, vote for this guy.’ Bishops don’t do that and priests shouldn’t do that.”

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When asked what advice he would give Trump if the president was indeed concerned about the prospect of the final judgment, Barron said humility is an important virtue to maintain.

“I would urge the president to maintain his attitude of humility before God, to open himself to God’s grace through prayer, and to allow his love for God to express itself in acts of love toward his neighbor,” he told the Washington Examiner.