'Hard prosperity gospel': Christians outraged over Trump’s appointment of ‘heretic’ pastor
U.S. President Donald Trump and Pastor Paula White attend the annual National Prayer Breakfast at Hilton hotel in Washington, U.S., February 6, 2025.
Trump appointed Pastor Paula White-Cain as head of his “Faith Office” last week, a controversial figure due to her belief that faith is transactional. She has had a long relationship with Trump, helping him appeal to the religious right throughout his political career. Daniel N. Gullotta outlines what her leadership looks like in a piece at the Bulwark published Wednesday.
“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 said. “And we will bring our country back together as one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all.”
“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,” Gullotta writes. In 2019, she said that Christians who voted against Trump would have to “stand accountable before God one day.” In 2020, she said "demonic confederacies" were trying to steal the election.
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Gullotta is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.
“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,” Gullotta writes. “Befitting her spiritual theme, her ministry fuses entertainment, self-help, and economic empowerment, making her a singular figure in the American religious landscape.
Like Trump, White-Cain -- who is married to Jonathan Cain of the band Journey -- believes that wealth is a measure of success.
Gullotta points out that the prosperity gospel is not popular among mainstream Christianity. “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.”
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Indeed, theologian Michael Horton wrote in the Washington Post last month that “Evangelicals should be deeply troubled by Donald Trump’s attempt to mainstream heresy,” naming White-Cain in the article.
Trump and White-Cain met in 2002 after Trump saw her on television. Soon, she was giving him guidance and helping him curry favor with 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,” Gullotta writes.
Mixed reactions to her appointment, Gullotta writes, show that Trump’s Christian base is not monolithic. “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,” he writes.
“It is maximally fitting for Paula White to be the chosen religious representative of a regime fueled by a naked pursuit of profit,” Malcolm Foley, a special adviser to the president of Baylor University and the author of The Anti-Greed Gospel, told the Bulwark.
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