‘Jesus WASN’T a fan of rich people!’ Donald Trump upsets West Wing Christians by hiring spiritual adviser who preaches ‘prosperity gospel’ and called his political enemies a ‘demonic network’ after planning to build MEGACHURCH with him
- Paula White is a televangelist who has been close to Donald Trump since at least 2002, and says she planned in 2006 to build a megachurch with him
- He has now hired her to work inside the White House, making some Christians in the West Wing uneasy because of her ‘Prosperity Gospel’ teachings
- Prosperity Gospel says giving money to church causes brings health and wealth
- White delivered the invocation at Trump’s inauguration, and later at the launch rally for his re-election campaign
- She called for the defeat of a ‘demonic network’ of the president’s political foes
- White House aides complain that ‘Jesus was born poor’ and ‘died poor,’ and ‘wasn’t a fan of rich people’
- One joked about the Gospel teaching that ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God’
A Florida televangelist who claimed at Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election launch event that his opponents were a ‘demonic network’ has taken a job in his White House, bringing the closest thing the president has to a spiritual mentor – and one of America’s foremost promoters of the divisive ‘Prosperity Gospel’ – under his roof.
Paula White’s new credentials don’t sit well with some in the West Wing. DailyMail.com spoke to seven self-described born-again Christians who are longtime aides, including two in senior positions. They described the decision in terms ranging from ‘troubling’ to ‘mind-blowing.’
The Prosperity Gospel is an evangelical niche teaching that promotes donations to religious causes as a route to material wealth and physical health.
Its preachers are polarizing figures in modern Christianity, but White’s status near the top of their ranks didn’t deter Trump from inviting her to deliver the invocation at his 2017 inauguration.
Speaking to the Washington Examiner on Friday about her forthcoming autobiography, ‘Something Greater,’ White said she and Trump made plans in 2006 to build a megachurch together.
‘He wanted to build a house of God,’ she said Friday. ‘He said, “Let’s do this, let’s build this before we’re too old”.’
Trump and White, a televangelist, have been close for 18-years, and now she’s working for the White House – a state of affairs that makes many Christians in the West Wing uncomfortable
White, Donald Trump’s personal spiritual adviser, said during her invocation at his re-election campaign launch in June that the president has a ‘demonic network’ of political opponents aligned against him
White said last week while promoting her autobiography that she visits the White House several times a week, and now she appears to have an office there
White claimed Trump hired an architect and wanted her to take the project over once it was built, but a divorce from her second husband a year later sidelined everything.
She is now married to Jonathan Cain, the keyboardist from the rock band Journey.
Trump, she said, is a quiet Christian who ‘doesn’t know “Christian-ese”.’
But he proposed ‘a crystal cathedral for God,’ similar to televangelist Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in Los Angeles. Schuller, then an active preacher, died in 2015.
Trump’s lack of command with Christian vernacular showed up duringhte 2016 campaign when he stumbled in a Liberty University speech with a reference to ‘two Corinthians,’ a novice’s misreading of the New Testament book ‘2 Corinthians,’ usually spoken aloud as ‘Second Corinthians.’
White told the New York Post last Saturday that she is still close to Trump and sometimes visits the White House several times a week.
The famously braggadocios Trump, she claimed, has a vulnerable side and ‘does not by any means think he’s the perfect person.’
And she has ‘never seen the base more energized than it is now,’ she boasted.
A White House official said Friday that White will connect the administration with religious groups, mostly Christian in nature, as part of the Office of Public Liaison.
White’s role in the government, the official said, is largely about communicating ‘deliverables’ that evangelical voters care about.
Those include statements about ‘religious liberty,’ policy dictates that marginalize abortion rights, and efforts to unshackle pastors from the tax consequences of politicking – all garden-variety red meat for Republicans wooing the Bible belt.
On Friday, for instance, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a regulatory change designed to protect adoption agencies that refuse to place children with same-sex couples.
‘Thanks to President Trump,’ Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said hours later, ‘charities will be free to care for needy children and operate according to their religious beliefs and the reality that children do best in a home with a married mom and dad.’
The intersection of religious and LGBT politics would be politically nuclear for most administrations, but it’s the Prosperity Gospel that has some in the West Wing worrying.
Paula White delivered the prayer at the start of Trump’s inauguration ceremony in January 2017
White spoke during a dinner for evangelical leadership in the State Dining Room of the White House on August 27, 2018
‘Jesus was born poor. Jesus died poor. Jesus wasn’t a fan of rich people!’ said a second White House official, self-described as a Presbyterian like the president.
‘Every time you read about rich people in the Gospel, Jesus is citing them as examples of what not to do.’
A third White House official responded to a text message about White with snark: ‘I left my tiny camel in my other pants.’
White, who writes under the name Paula White-Cain, is promoting her autobiography
The Gospel of Matthew includes the story of Jesus telling his disciples that entering heaven is nearly impossible for the wealthy.
‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God,’ reads chapter 19, verse 24.
A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump enjoyed a whopping 65-point margin of victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 among white evangelical Christians. White, who he has known since at least 2002, will try to ‘keep them on the reservation,’ the official said.
The New York Times first reported White’s hiring on Thursday.
White said in June at an Orlando, Florida Trump rally that she believed in the ‘power of unity,’ and then proposed that thousands in attendance pray for the defeat of the president’s enemies.
‘I need you to really go with me here,’ she prayed. ‘Let every evil veil of deception of the enemy be removed from people’s eyes.’
‘So 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!’ she continued. ‘Let the counsel of the wicked be spoiled right now.’
The Prosperity Gospel had its beginnings in revival tents where itinerant preachers boasted that financial success and physical healing awaited people who dug deep into their pockets to support God’s ministry.
The faith-healing evangelist Oral Roberts oversaw a ministry that eventually surpassed $110 million in total annual income and expanded to include a Tulsa, Oklahoma university bearing his name.
His chauffeur and pilot, Kenneth Copeland, was an Oral Roberts University student when they met. He followed in his teacher’s footsteps, planting a ministry whose success led others like Pat Robertson, Benny Hinn and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker to take up the cause.
Televangelist Kenneth Copeland, one of the original Prosperity Gospel preachers, reportedly has a net worth above $300 million; he insists that he has distributed approximately $25 million to help the poor – something he can only do because he is rich
Rev. Creflo Dollar is a famed ‘Prosperity Gospel’ preacher who has become enormously wealthy by persuading Christians to give heavily to his ministry on the belief that it would make them rich
Faith healer Oral Roberts is pictured at a ‘crusade’ meeting; he was among the first mainstream pastors to preach what evolved into the ‘Prosperity Gospel’
Paula White is among the best-known heirs to their tradition. Others include Joel Osteen and the coincidentally named Creflo Dollar.
Dollar reportedly owns two Rolls-Royces, a Gulfstream III jet and at least three million-dollar homes. He has declined to disclose how much he personally earns from his Georgia-based World Changers Church International.
The Senate Finance Committee opened an investigation into White and five other prosperity preachers in 2017 over their spending. The inquiry ended in 2011 with no charges or penalties.
White said in a 2017 profile that she connected with Trump after he randomly called her to praise her televised sermons. He told her at the time that she had the ‘”it” factor,’ she said.
White stepped down from her role as pastor of the City of Destiny megachurch in Apopka, Florida in May. She said she wanted to focus on opening a Christian university and planting 3,000 churches around the country.
Now, however, she’s planting Trumpism.
‘I declare that President Trump will overcome every strategy from hell and every strategy of the enemy,’ she prayed aloud at thee June rally, ‘and he will fulfill his calling and his destiny.’
White said ‘no weapon’ would be able to be ‘formed’ against the president, and that it was the will of Jesus Christ that Trump was in office and would win again in 2020.
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