The Trump administration announced Friday that the televangelist Paula White will head the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative, the successor to the Faith-Based and Community Initiatives George W. Bush started in 2001.
But White is no ordinary televangelist. The longtime “God whisperer” to Trump, White is a fire-breathing theocrat who believes that Trump’s enemies are actual demons, and who says that, if you send her enough money, angels will watch over your household and make you rich.
Just last month, for example, White said that whenever she visits the White House, I’m walking around those parameters [sic] saying, “I lift this up and I dedicate every ounce of this place as holy ground and I dedicate it by the superior blood of Jesus.” And every door that God opens for me, I invoke the name of Jesus. I release angels right now and the Holy Spirit and walls of fire. I burn up every demonic altar in the name of Jesus and I call it to crumble and any assignment by any principality, power, darkness, and wickedness against this nation, against other nations, is coming down in the name of Jesus. Let it all fall down, let it crumble, by the fire of God, let it be burned right now. I erect the altar of God right now, I renounce every demonic spirit, I renounce every covenant made with Satan.
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Paula White Dedicates the White House as 'Holy Ground' Sanctified by 'The Superior Blood of Jesus' from Right Wing Watch on Vimeo.
It's not yet known whether White—among the inner circle of evangelical leaders who have promoted the idea that Trump is anointed by God to save the country—will be receiving a taxpayer-funded salary for her new position.
Last June, at a Trump rally in Orlando, White asked God to “let every demonic network that 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.” She added: “I declare that President Trump will overcome every strategy from hell and every strategy of the enemy, every strategy, and he will fulfill his calling and his destiny.”
Whoever that “demonic network” is (CNN?), White has made it clear that actual demonic spirits are behind liberal political and constitutional principles.
“We are scaring the literal hell out of demonic spirits right now,” White said on disgraced-but-rehabilitated televangelist Jim Bakker’s show in 2017. “Because if we get two more [justices], we will be able to overturn demonic laws and decrees that has [sic] held this nation in captivity.”
While White’s Exorcist-style rhetoric may be shocking—policies favored by 60 percent of the US population are “demonic”—it is not unique; it is central to the formerly-fringe evangelical offshoot known as Dominionism, which holds that Christians must seize control of all aspects of American society. One flavor of Dominionism even holds that American cities have been possessed by demons, which must be exorcised by God’s chosen messengers.
As White put it on The Jim Bakker Show, “We were not sent into this earth to fit in. We weren’t just sent here to be a part. We were sent here to take over.”
However bizarre White’s beliefs may seem, her proximity to Trump makes all the sense in the world.
Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at People for the American Way who has covered White extensively in recent years, told the Daily Beast that White is “one of the people who keeps telling Trump that he is carrying out a divine calling. She has had a long-term friendship with Trump and played a major role in getting and keeping religious right leaders in Trump’s camp.”
Trump would never have come close to the White House without the support of the Christian right, and yet he is, to put it mildly, an odd fit for a population concerned with personal ethics: he is not a churchgoer, and is a paragon of all seven deadly sins (pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth).
The answer, for evangelical Trump supporters like White, Jerry Falwell Jr., Franklin Graham, and others, is that Trump has been chosen by God. His unsuitability to that mission only underscores the Divine nature of it.
“It is God who raises up a king. It is God that sets one down,” said White. “When you fight against the plan of God, you are fighting against the hand of God.”
Over 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in the 2016 election, though support has slipped of late.
White is also conversant in more familiar terrain for televangelists: promising blessings in exchange for money.
Last April, her ministry sent out a message soliciting “your best Passover offering” and promising that God would “give you prosperity,” “take sickness away from you,” and “assign an angel to you”—perhaps the original quid pro quo.
White also preaches the so-called ‘Prosperity Gospel,’ which teaches that God wants you to be rich.
Never mind that stuff Jesus said about “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” and “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” According to the Prosperity Gospel, material wealth is a sign of being beloved of God.
Of course, according to many Prosperity Gospel preachers, the best way to become rich is to prove your faith by donating to Prosperity Gospel preachers.
Other Prosperity Gospel preachers like Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar have grown quite rich making such pitches, which conveniently proves that they are favored by God.
All of that may be harmless enough (though, interestingly, not to many evangelicals, who regard the Prosperity Gospel as heretical) but when White turns her rhetoric to American politics, her words are terrifying.
On the same Jim Bakker show back in 2017, White said that “When our forefathers came over… they put their white crosses down and dedicated this land and said that it would be a lighthouse for God and send missionaries around the world so that the Gospel will be preached. That was the original intention for this particular nation. We must take back our school systems, take back our families, take back our homes, take back our nation.”
As this week’s announcement shows, that’s exactly what White and her colleagues have been doing.
