What to Expect from the ‘Heretic’ Pastor Trump Installed in the White House
Paula White-Cain is a leading light of Christian Trumpism.
IF EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE, it seems like destiny that Donald Trump would meet the Charismatic pastor and evangelist Paula White-Cain. Both are high-profile entrepreneurs in their fields; both have a peculiar personal dynamism that has powered them through hard times. And both, it might be argued, worship success. On Friday, the president appointed White to be a senior adviser in the newly established White House Faith Office—birds of a feather, in the air together.
White-Cain has been described as one of the most skilled religious entrepreneurs in modern evangelicalism. She advocates a kind of “hard” prosperity gospel that makes the case for faith in explicitly transactional terms, with material rewards for personal fidelity sometimes quite clearly enumerated. (“Soft” prosperity preachers like Joel Osteen would portray faith as helping to produce a more success-oriented mindset.) Befitting her spiritual theme, her ministry fuses entertainment, self-help, and economic empowerment, making her a singular figure in the American religious landscape.
And setting White-Cain even further apart from her peers is her role as a female pastor in a movement largely shaped and led by men.
A key element of White-Cain’s appeal is her ability to craft a compelling personal narrative. She openly shares her struggles (from an abusive childhood and teenage pregnancy to failed marriages) not merely as testimony but as a strategic means of forging emotional connections with her considerable audience. With success has come pointed criticism: Most Christian traditions reject and condemn the prosperity gospel on theological, ethical, and biblical grounds; within mainstream evangelicalism, it is often labeled a heresy. Where is the room for essential Christian doctrines such as suffering, grace, and God’s sovereignty in a paradigm that puts success above all? The movement White-Cain represents has a reputation for corruption and the exploitation of the vulnerable, who are promised divine rewards in exchange for financial contributions.
White-Cain’s most prominent critics include former prosperity-gospel adherents, famous Calvinist rappers, and the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today. None of that deters her. Mostly ignoring the naysayers, she has forged a personal network among likeminded, success-driven celebrities, business leaders, and politicians. Pop icon Michael Jackson sought her out for spiritual support a month after his arrest on child molestation charges in 2003. (He was later acquitted.) She appeared on The Tyra Banks Show in the 2000s and provided advice and guidance to women navigating issues related to sex, relationships, and self-worth. Her own talk show has featured influential guests ranging from NFL star Deion Sanders to leadership expert John Maxwell. She married Jonathan Cain, the keyboardist and rhythm guitarist for Journey, in 2015.
But her most consequential relationship over the past two decades has been with a New York real estate developer, reality TV host, and U.S. president.
DONALD TRUMP’S LONGSTANDING FRIENDSHIP with White-Cain began in 2002 when he saw her on television and reached out to her. Their relationship quickly deepened; reportedly, it wasn’t long before White was providing Trump with spiritual counsel. She would become one of his most vocal and influential Christian supporters, and she played a critical role in shaping his relationship with the religious right as his political star began to rise.
There are many points of affinity between White-Cain and Trump, but their closest connection may be a shared outlook on the world and its possibilities. Both believe that success—measured by wealth—is a direct sign of divine favor. Trump understands the language of White-Cain’s religious subculture; arguably, it is the language of his own heart. He was exposed to prosperity-oriented preaching from an early age through his father, Fred Trump, a great admirer of Norman Vincent Peale and his famous book, The Power of Positive Thinking. The elder Trump joined Marble Collegiate Church in the 1950s because he so esteemed Peale. Donald came of age there and came to feel similarly about Peale, who would later officiate his first wedding, to Ivana in 1977. Decades later, Trump would remember his feelings after listening to his pastor’s sermons. When the service concluded, “you were disappointed it was over,” Trump recalled in 2015. Peale was “one of the greatest speakers,” he said at another event that year. Underneath the hyperbole, it’s possible to detect real feeling.
And with White-Cain, Trump met the religious guide who could pick up where Peale, who died in 1993, had left off.
By 2011, White-Cain had begun connecting Trump with evangelical leaders, preparing the way for him to make his approach to the religious right. When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, White-Cain helped him navigate his relationship with religious voters, a bloc initially skeptical of the celebrity playboy. She organized meetings with prominent pastors, reassuring them that Trump was not only sympathetic to their concerns but also himself a man of faith. White-Cain helped assemble Trump’s evangelical advisory board, the existence of which was meant to signal his commitment to conservative Christian values. She proved instrumental in helping to endear Trump to Pentecostals and Charismatics, the power base of the president’s earliest support. Throughout Trump’s campaign and presidency, White-Cain worked tirelessly on her friend’s behalf, praying at rallies and praising his leadership at faith-based events. For her efforts, she received a princely reward: an invitation from the newly elected president to deliver the invocation at his 2017 inauguration. She was the first woman to do so.
Things got bumpy during Trump 1.0, and White-Cain caught a lot of blowback for her public statements supporting the administration, which often seemed more like the opinions of a political operative than a spiritual counselor (a criticism previously leveled at figures like Billy Graham). The conceptual framework that brought these roles together into one is one she, like many Charismatic preachers, has favored for a long time: that of “spiritual warfare,” which has made it possible to figure political opposition to Trump as evidence of demonic influence over his haters.
White-Cain has long held that Trump was divinely chosen to lead the nation and that he is engaged in an ongoing battle against demonic forces. This rhetoric reached its apex and nadir simultaneously during the 2020 election. In November that year, she led a prayer service calling for “angelic reinforcements” from Africa and South America to intervene on Trump’s behalf. She also warned that Christians who voted against Trump would have to “answer to God” for their ballots. On January 6th, White-Cain delivered the opening prayer at the Ellipse before Trump addressed the crowd, reinforcing—along with many other Charismatic activists who were there that day—the narrative that the election was not just a political contest but a cosmic battle between good and evil. Even after the violence at the U.S. Capitol, she remained a staunch advocate of Trump’s claims of election fraud while continuing to frame his presidency as a battle between God and Satan.
In this apocalyptic struggle, White-Cain seems to see her service to Donald Trump as an act of faithfulness to God. And for her service she has now once again been rewarded.
The president chose to announce White-Cain’s new role in his administration at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 6. Her portfolio includes leading the new White House Faith Office, the primary purpose of which appears to be helping to pursue the goals of Trump’s “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias” executive order, also unveiled that day. The order establishes a task force led by Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate and combat what Trump described in his speech as systemic discrimination against Christians in federal institutions.
“While I’m in the White House, we will protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, in our hospitals, and in our public squares,” Trump declared. “And we will bring our country back together as one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all.” Introducing Trump to the stage, an excited White-Cain called him “the greatest champion, of any president that has ever been, of religion, of faith, and of God.”
TRUMP 2.0 IS ONLY THREE WEEKS OLD, and already things are getting bumpy again for White-Cain. Theological attacks have begun again in earnest, although they arrive already carrying a sense of resignation, even exhaustion, at the prospect of another four years of Trump. Christianity Today’s Mike Cosper tweeted that “the appointment of Paula White is utterly consistent with the logic Trump employs for all appointments.” Malcolm Foley, a special adviser to the president of Baylor University and the author of The Anti-Greed Gospel, wrote in an email, “It is maximally fitting for Paula White to be the chosen religious representative of a regime fueled by a naked pursuit of profit.” And this time around, with White-Cain better known outside the Charismatic world than she was in 2016, even some of Trump’s most ardent Christian supporters have voiced intense disappointment over her elevation.
The mixed to negative reaction across the board to White-Cain’s appointment serves as a reminder that Trump’s religious coalition is far from uniform, notwithstanding evangelicals’ monolithic portrayal in the media or popular literature. The reality is that Donald Trump’s Christian supporters are an uneasy alliance of factions that often disagree with one another and that each support him for different reasons and in pursuit of different goals. Prosperity gospel adherents see his wealth and power as evidence of God’s favor, while populist white evangelicals admire his Samson-like strongman persona and willingness to fight their cultural battles for them. Christian nationalists view him as a vehicle for establishing a theocratic America, while anti-abortion and pro-family conservatives tolerate his personal failings in exchange for policy gains. The evangelicals, Southern Baptists, Charismatics, Pentecostals, and Roman Catholics that belong to the core of Trump’s religious support see his leadership through their own distinct theological and political lenses. All this is to say that while White-Cain’s brand of “name-it-and-claim-it” Christianity may be among the most flamboyant expressions of Christian Trumpism, it does not define the movement as a whole.
But as attacks come in from both movement outsiders and her MAGA fellow travelers, what are the voices of any of these critics to White-Cain? She has less reason to engage with them than ever, and every reason to speak for—and to—one man. After all, Donald Trump might be the most prosperous, the most successful, the most anointed-in-the-eyes-of-God guy of all time.
Over the next four years of the Trump presidency, Christians of all political stripes will be confronted with images and events that force them to think deeply about their faith and works. From how we treat the least of these to loving your neighbor as yourself to whether we serve God or money, these challenges will demand moral clarity. And the Trump administration will present Christians—even those who support many of Trump’s policies—with a deeper test: Will they hold their leaders accountable, or will they embrace a faith that bends to power?
From her new White House perch, Paula White-Cain will seek to sanctify and defend Trump’s policies. If opposition to Trump grows fierce, she may, as she did in 2020, summon divine reinforcements in the name of national greatness. For all this and much more, Paula White-Cain has earned her reward.
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