Nearly 70% of white evangelical Protestants approve of Donald Trump’s performance as president, and Trump knows their support will be essential in 2020. He bragged before the 2018 midterm elections, “I hear we’re more popular than ever with the evangelicals.”
Paula White is one of them.
Trump’s personal pastor, White has long been informally in charge of Trump’s evangelical outreach. Now, it’s official.
The New York Times revealed last week that the televangelist has been tapped to join the president’s administration as an adviser for the Faith and Opportunity Initiative. She will be in charge of outreach to religious groups, seeking opinions on public policy issues through the Office of Public Liaison.
White’s hiring is clearly poised to cement Trump’s evangelical support. But White is not your typical Southern Baptist or nondenominational Protestant. A friend of Trump’s since 2002, White is a phony who preaches the gospel of self-aggrandizement and not much else.
Similar to her peers Joel Osteen, Benny Hinn, and Kenneth Copeland, she preaches something known as prosperity theology, which boils down to a belief that God is good for her wallet.
Rather than adhering to biblical teaching, she tells those who listen to her sermons that they will be rewarded for sending her money. And she promises “visions” from God for those who send her “ministry” more cash. “We aren’t buying a miracle,” she stresses. “We’re simply being obedient.” Right.
And just as Hinn and Copeland, White was investigated by the Senate Finance Committee in 2007 for misuse of funds.
Her theology and ethics may be iffy, but hey, she’s on the Trump train now. She has said that God told her to serve Trump: “To say ‘no’ to President Trump would be saying ‘no’ to God, and I won’t do that.”
At a Trump rally in her home state of Florida, she called any anti-Trump media demonic: “Right now, let every demonic network who has aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus!”
White has her supporters — more than 3 million just on her Facebook page — but when she recently released her book Something Greater, many evangelicals distanced themselves from her. The Babylon Bee, a Christian satire website, joined her detractors with the headline, “Satan endorses Paula White’s new book.”
Nevertheless, many high-profile leaders offered their support. Unsurprisingly, White has been endorsed by Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham, who only deleted a tweet supportive of her after getting considerable backlash.
Some evangelicals offered not an endorsement but a sigh of resignation.
“For those who do not share her theological disposition, it is wishful thinking to pretend that she is not a major force within American evangelicalism,” authors at Christianity Today wrote. “It is now Paula White-Cain’s world. The question is how we should live in it.”
White may preach a gospel that many evangelicals reject, but this won’t turn many of them off from Trump. They’ve already stuck with him this far, and he loves them because they love him.
