President Donald Trump's personal spiritual adviser, Paula White, launched a prayer effort alongside other evangelical Christian leaders on Tuesday, offering a prayer condemning the president's opponents, accusing them of being aligned with evil spirits and using sorcery.
The White House officially announced last week that White would spearhead the president's Faith and Opportunity Initiative. Trump and the wealthy televangelist have been friends for years ,and she has been a key religious supporter, rallying her Christian base to back the president.
Alongside fellow Christian leaders Cindy Jacobs, Dave Kabul and Dutch Sheets, White has launched the One Voice Prayer Movement, starting the initiative on Tuesday with a prayer for Trump. "Lord, we ask you to deliver our president from any snare, any setup of the enemy, according to Ephesians 6:12. Any persons [or] entities that are aligned against the president will be exposed and dealt with and overturned by the superior blood of Jesus," she said during her prayer in a conference call with other Christian leaders.
"Whether it's the spirit of Leviathan, a spirit of Jezebel, Abaddon, whether it's the spirit of Belial, we come against the strongmen, especially Jezebel, that which would operate in sorcery and witchcraft, that which would operate in hidden things, veiled things, that which would operate in deception," she continued. "We come against it according to your word."
President Donald Trump talks to Paula White, his spiritual adviser, after a May 2 event to celebrate a national day of prayer.Getty/BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP
White's prayer continued by saying that anyone who stands against Trump "would be exposed and dealt with and overturned in Jesus' name." She said that believers know that Trump and his Christian supporters "do not wrestle against flesh and blood but against principalities, powers, rulers of darkness of this age, hosts of wickedness in heavenly places." White went on: "Stretch out your arm and deliver President Trump and rid him of any bondage the enemy would try to bring against him."
While White has a prominent base of Christian supporters, she has been criticized by other evangelical leaders who view her "prosperity gospel" message as antithetical to the teachings of the Bible. The so-called prosperity gospel, which is also promoted by preachers like wealthy televangelist Joel Osteen, teaches followers that God will bless them financially if they follow him, often while encouraging believers to donate heavily to the preachers' ministries.
"She has done what no one thought she could do, scraping out a place for an unpopular theology beside an unpopular president," Kate Bowler, a professor of Christian history at Duke Divinity School, recently toldThe New York Times.
Meanwhile, white evangelical Christians remain a key base of support for the president. During the 2016 election, about 81 percent of that demographic voted for Trump. The number has remained high, regardless of scandals that have rocked the Trump administration. A poll released last month by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 99 percent of Republican evangelicals are opposed to the fast-moving impeachment inquiry against the president, as well as his removal from office. In recent weeks, other Christian leaders besides White have also equated the president's opponents with witchcraft and evil spirits. "They're trying to place hexes and curses on President Trump," evangelical pastor Perry Stone said in a late-October prayer service, referring to Democrats in Congress.
"I have never, in any nation of the world...seen people raised up with demons in them [like] in Washington," Stone added. "They have demons in them. You can look at their eyes when they almost start foaming at the mouth."
Satanic wombs': the outlandish world of Trump's spiritual adviser
A video has surfaced of Paula White saying ‘We command any satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now!’
Paula White prays with Donald Trump. Photograph: UPI/Barcroft Media
This weekend, a video of Trump’s spiritual adviser, Paula White, surfaced showing her preaching some potentially ungodly words. “We command any satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now!” she says, before clarifying: “We declare that anything that’s been conceived in satanic wombs that it will miscarry, it will not be able to carry forth any plan of destruction, any plan of harm.”
Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons (@GuthrieGF)
“We command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now” — Special Adviser to the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative Paula White pic.twitter.com/gtdZyGfkxy
White has since claimed that her words were taken out of context – she wasn’t praying for literal miscarriages, just metaphorical ones! Right. Whatever the case, it’s not the most outlandish thing she’s ever advocated.
1 She has an assignment from God
White has a close relationship with the president and his family. She offered a prayer at Trump’s inauguration; brags about how she calls Trump first thing in the morning; and reportedly visits the White House once a week. But despite all of her talk about rejecting self-serving actions, she has called her appointment as Trump’s adviser an “assignment from God”. She has also stated that the Lord wanted her to go on national television.
2 She practices prosperity theology
White believes in a school of thought called “prosperity theology”, which sounds a lot like a pyramid scheme. She believes that financial prosperity is a sign of God’s approval. Which means that God must really like her – she has a multimillion-dollar home in a gated community and a private jet. It follows that God must really like Donald Trump, too.
Russell Moore (@drmoore)
@jlupf Paula White is a charlatan and recognized as a heretic by every orthodox Christian, of whatever tribe.
But she has also been branded a charlatan, perhaps because she proselytizes that God will bless those who donate to her church.
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In one interview, an MSNBC reporter asks “Do you tell them that if they give to you they will get financial riches from God?” to which White responds: “I have probably said that. But my 50-year-old self wouldn’t do what my 20-, 30- or 40-year-old self did.” Guardian reporting last year showed that White was encouraging members of her congregation to send their first month’s salary to her ministry to enjoy God’s blessings.
3 She ran a bankrupted church
White’s former church, Without Walls, which was raking in $40m a year at one point, has faced allegations over the misuse of donations. In a three-year investigation, it was alleged that White and her husband were using church and ministry finances for to benefit themselves. A Congress investigation into the church was closed in 2010 with no penalties – although investigators said they were stifled by lifelong confidentially agreements that had been signed by church employees. The church filed for bankruptcy in 2014.
5 She plays with stereotypes
In late 2001, White signed a $1.5m contract for a show on the Black Entertainment Network. She was accused of “adopting African American idioms” which, if you watch footage from her show, appear to be steeped in problematic race and class stereotypes. In her own TV show, which was picked up for a segment on Late Night with Seth Myers in 2017, she is seen making jokes about eating macaroni cheese out of boxes, and claiming that a woman shouldn’t wonder why her partner leaves her when “yo still got yo funky curlers in yo hair and spinach in yo teeth.”
In the sketch, Meyers says: “It’s hard to tell what’s more offensive, the insinuation that its your fault that your husband left you or the appropriation of black idiomatic speech” – before comedian Amber Ruffin responds: “It’s the black stuff.”
She led Trump to Christ: The rise of the televangelist who advises the White House
She led Trump to Christ: The rise of the televangelist who advises the White House
(Peter Strain for The Washington Post)
By Julia Duin
November 14, 2017
It was an early afternoon in late July, and Paula White was holding court before an audience of about 25 Southern Baptist ministers in an ornate diplomatic reception room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The televangelist was recounting one of her favorite stories — about when Donald Trump reached out to her in 2011 for guidance on a possible White House run. "Would you bring some people around me to pray?" she said he asked her. "I really want to hear from God." White recalled that she and another pastor gathered about 30 ministers from different evangelical Christian traditions at Trump Tower in Manhattan. After the prayer session, when Trump asked her what she thought, she responded: "I don't feel it's the right timing."
He listened, she continued, and the two talked and prayed about the matter over the next four years. When White again gathered religious leaders at Trump Tower in September 2015, she backed the decision he'd already made to run. Videos on YouTube of that event show her standing on his right, head down, laying hands on him as she prayed.
Paula White, Newest White House Aide, Is a Uniquely Trumpian Pastor
Ms. White, a Florida televangelist, is being brought into the Trump administration to help shore up his evangelical base — even though some Christians consider her beliefs heretical.
Paula White’s rise to greater prominence and influence in evangelical circles is strikingly similar to President’s Trump’s rise among Republicans.Credit...Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon turned to Billy Graham, the evangelist so ubiquitous he was known as America’s Preacher. Barack Obama turned to Rick Warren, the author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” which was the best-selling nonfiction hardback in American history after the Bible.
Donald J. Trump has a televangelist from Florida: Paula White, an outsider whose populist brand of Christianity mirrors Mr. Trump’s conquest of the Republican Party. And she is in many ways a quintessentially Trump figure: a television preacher, married three times, who lives in a mansion.
For years he has called her his longtime friend and personal pastor. When he ran for president in 2016, he turned to her to drive his evangelical support. And on Thursday the White House confirmed that Ms. White had officially joined the administration to advise Mr. Trump’s Faith and Opportunity Initiative, which aims to give religious groups more of a voice in government programs devoted to issues like defending religious liberty and fighting poverty.
Her new role gives her a formal seat at the table as Mr. Trump tries to ensure that evangelicals — the foundation of his political base — remain united behind him in his bid to win a second term. As a liaison to Mr. Trump, Ms. White has regularly facilitated meetings for conservative pastors and White House officials, assuring the president’s core constituencies that he addresses their interests.
Among Christians, however, Ms. White is a divisive figure. Her association with the belief that God wants followers to find wealth and health — commonly called the prosperity gospel — is highly unorthodox in the faith and considered heretical by many. And experts on religion in politics said that Ms. White’s ascendancy was unlike any other relationship between a president and a faith adviser in modern times.
“I never would have guessed that Paula White and Donald Trump would be the preacher-president duo people remember like Billy Graham and Richard Nixon,” said Kate Bowler, a professor of Christian history at Duke Divinity School.
“Paula White survived scandal and little support from the religious right to become one of the only stand-alone women in the male-dominated world of televangelism,” Dr. Bowler said. “She has done what no one thought she could do, scraping out a place for an unpopular theology beside an unpopular president.”
Ms. White’s rise to greater prominence and influence in evangelical circles is strikingly similar to Mr. Trump’s rise among Republicans. Both were outsiders who often faced suspicion and scorn from more conventional, established leaders of the spheres in which they sought acceptance. And both survived accusations of financial misconduct and ethical improprieties.
Ms. White, who also goes by Ms. White-Cain after her marriage to Jonathan Cain, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame keyboardist for Journey, did not respond to requests for an interview.
Some argue that by elevating figures like Ms. White, Mr. Trump is undermining Christianity in the same way he has damaged the Republican Party.
The move is “a very ominous sign” and signals that “Christian narcissism” has come into the White House, said the Rev. William J. Barber II, who organized the Moral Mondays protests in North Carolina and who spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2016.
“The so-called prosperity gospel is a false gospel,” he said, comparing it to a theology that justified slavery because of economic prosperity. “It is an attempt to interpret the gospel to be primarily about personal wealth and personal power, which is contrary to the theology of Jesus where the good news was always focused on caring for the poor, the least of these, the stranger, the sick.”
But her appeal with some religious Christians helps Mr. Trump reach audiences that are not naturally inclined to support him.
Although hard to quantify, Ms. White’s influence in less politically active evangelical circles, including among televangelists and viewers of the popular Trinity Broadcasting Network, appeared to help Mr. Trump in 2016.
Most polls focused on Mr. Trump’s white evangelical or Roman Catholic support, but conservative political strategists also capitalized on his marginal support in Christian subsets, like some Hispanic and African-American charismatic churches. But in a sign of how unpopular Mr. Trump remains with African-Americans, several hundred people from Ms. White’s heavily African-American congregation left her church because of her association with him.
Mr. Trump’s candidacy had initially divided evangelical leaders, with many prominent social conservatives supporting candidates like Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida during the Republican primary. Mr. Trump largely skirted the traditional Washington evangelical apparatus and instead surrounded himself with outsider figures who had amassed popular, if not traditionally political, influence, like Ms. White and the Liberty University president, Jerry Falwell Jr.
When it became clear that Mr. Trump would be the likely nominee, the two Christian factions came to a détente after two meetings one day in New York, largely around Mr. Trump’s support for anti-abortion policies, religious liberty and persecuted Christians in the Middle East. Ms. White, as the pastor personally closest to Mr. Trump, became a key liaison.
Darrell Scott, a pastor of a largely African-American church in Cleveland who supports Mr. Trump, said that Ms. White had been “active” in African-American and pentecostal circles for decades.
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council who considers himself a more traditional conservative Christian, said that Mr. Trump had cooked up an “evangelical gumbo” by bringing together people from parts of Christianity that would ordinarily never intersect.
“I didn’t know Paula White before,” he said. “She came from a different stream than I’d probably swim in.” But as they’ve become close over the last three years, he said, he and other evangelicals who are not aligned with her theologically have come to realize their role with this administration is the same. “We’re there to influence public policy and move this nation forward where faith is openly welcomed, so that you don’t have to hide the fact that you’re a person of faith,” he said.
Ms. White has become a regular in Washington, organizing frequent meetings for pastors around the country to meet with administration officials. When Mr. Trump met with his informal evangelical advisory coalition this week, she was seated at his right hand.
This past March she helped facilitate a meeting at the White House with Vice President Mike Pence for 100 Hispanic pastors and denominational leaders, said Tony Suarez, the executive vice president of the National Hispanic Christian Leaders Conference, a network of 40,000 Hispanic evangelical congregations.
Ms. White led a pentecostal-leaning church, recently renamed City of Destiny, with thousands of members near Orlando, Fla. She stepped down as senior pastor in May and announced plans to start a university and 3,000 new churches. In 2007, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and the Senate Finance Committee had investigated her ministry’s tax-exempt status, but the investigation was eventually dropped.
Ms. White first met Mr. Trump in 2002, when he called her after seeing her preach on a Christian televangelist program. They stayed in touch, she bought an apartment in his 502 Park Avenue building, and he reportedly attended Bible studies she occasionally led in New York.
He invited her to attend the first season finale of his show “The Apprentice,” where she prayed with the cast and crew before the live taping.
She prayed with him before he went onstage to accept the Republican nomination for president in Cleveland. She became the first clergywoman to lead an inaugural prayer when he took the oath of office, according to Mr. Trump’s inauguration committee.
Her employment at the White House raises questions about whether she may be putting her church’s tax-exempt status in question, as churches are not allowed to engage in overt political activity. Though she has stepped down as the pastor, she could run into difficulty with the Internal Revenue Service if she remained active in the church, even in an informal role, while working for the president.
“My sense is if she is leaving her church position and making a clean break that there would be no I.R.S. problem,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a campaign finance watchdog. But, he added, “If she is continuing in an official public role for the church while working in the White House that would cause a tax status problem as she would be using the church for political purposes.”
Asked if Ms. White had divested her financial stake in the church, a White House spokesman said they would not comment on personnel. Ms. White will not take a salary, according to another White House spokesman.
The divisions about the meaning of Christianity are a point of contention headed into a heated general election, where Democrats are putting Mr. Trump’s vision of morality on trial.
“I get asked this question all the time — how can these Christians support Donald Trump when so much that he says and does is literally antithetical to the person and teachings of Jesus?” said Jim Wallis, a progressive evangelical who has challenged the conservative wing of his church for decades.
“White nationalism isn’t just racist, it’s anti-Christ,” Mr. Wallis added.
Like many of the president’s most devoted followers, Ms. White insists that he is not fazed by the attacks on him. The impeachment inquiry, she said in a recent interview with The New York Post, “wears on him.” But as for his re-election, she said, “I’ve never seen the base more energized than it is now.”
