prosperity white

recycled calvinism, big in african american community //Trump and trump U the donald does not say god favored him with riches but at one remove, gave him the skills to be rich

not include all neglect rww

SEE PROPHET BS

grift seems esp cruel if true about brain damage (see theocracy)

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Sarah Beth Spraggins @ The Spectator: How Paula White-Cain guides Trump through evangelical America

[Paula] White-Cain has platinum blonde hair and a large, Spanish-style house in central Florida, where she spends the majority of her time. Her past two marriages ended but she is currently married to Jonathan Cain, who plays keyboard in the rock band Journey and co-wrote “Don’t Stop Believin’.” She is a televangelist, preacher, fundraiser and founder of Paula White Ministries, a global media and evangelical organization. Like the President, she is an outsider in the upper rooms of the Republican party.

06/16/2026

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RWW

03/06/2026

Peter Montgomery

A week before President Donald Trump started a war against Iran, White House Faith Director Paula White was in Florida finishing up a conference where she portrayed Trump’s agenda as “God’s agenda.” Trump’s purpose, she said, is to “save America” and “restore it to its original condition.”

White criticized conservative Christians who are not as engaged as she wants them to be.

…I believe they love Jesus, but they’re not activated. And that’s why we are all suffering. Because if the church rises up and does what the church is supposed to do, then righteousness will rule and the Lord God will be Lord over the nation.

The theme of this year’s “Unleashed” conference was “It’s Worth Fighting For.” White urged the “enlisted warriors” in attendance to be the “remnant” that will fight relentlessly to fulfill God’s will, saying that the purpose of the gathering was to “commission” them. “I’m looking for who can get in a foxhole with me,” she said.

She compared critics of Christian nationalism and the New Apostolic Reformation to Goliath taunting the Israelites before he was defeated by David. “This generation will not be remembered by surrender,” she said. “It will be remembered by courage. It will be remembered by the fight we put up.

White has used the White House jobs Trump gave her in his first and second terms to promote Christian nationalist ideology and maintain conservative evangelicals’ sky-high support for the “anointed” Trump. At “Unleashed” she portrayed MAGA political wins as spiritual victories over the forces of darkness:

Faith subdued kingdoms. Faith took town wickedness in the Senate, the House. Faith took down wickedness in a DEI agenda. Faith took down wickedness and subdued kingdoms in our school boards and school systems. Faith subdued kingdoms of darkness that wanted to demonically control and possess our kids…

During a two-and-a-half hour performance that closed out the conference, White prayed for Trump and other “godly” politicians and against his political opponents:

Protect President Trump – his mind, his body, his physical being, his family, his office, everything that pertains to his purpose and destiny. Lord we pray for our leaders. We pray that they would be godly. Let the wicked either turn to you and get saved or let them get removed, in the name of Jesus.

White also promoted the religious revival that the Trump administration is hosting in partnership with dominionist leaders on the National Mall on May 17:

“Did I tell y’all that we’re rededicating this nation to God on May 17th? One nation under God. Come on. Did I tell you that we’re gonna have worship and we’re gonna preach the gospel and baptisms, come on, and communion.. Did I tell you that we’re rededicating this nation as one nation under God?

White also opened the Saturday session with some preaching, prophesying, and preaching about prophesying. This is how she introduced “Prophet” Gideon Danso:

Prophet Gideon, I stand in a spiritual and a natural position that by the spirit of God I call you in to prophesy, to activate the army of God that is a remnant church that will raise up in America and not let this land be taken by demonic forces and not let this land be taken by an ideology of Marxism or communism or any other ism that is not God’s will and God’s plan and God’s word.

Danso’s performance style is to take the audience on a roller-coaster ride from soft-spoken to screaming over and over again. Among the phrases he screamed repeatedly were “Let the army rise!” and “Where are the warriors?”

“We decree and declare that this nation is rescued,” Danso said.

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Nate Schatzline Claims Muslim Elected Officials Are Plotting To Subjugate Christians

11/04/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Last week, Christian nationalist Texas state Rep. Nate Schatzline announced that he would not be seeking reelection and, instead, will be taking a position with National Faith Advisory Board "to equip pastors to step up and speak out about religious freedom."

IFrame Content

The National Faith Advisory Board was created by White House faith advisor Paula White and claims that its mission is to, among other things, "fight religious discrimination," which makes the decision to hire Schatzline somewhat questionable, given his views on Islam.

Two days after he announced his new position with the NFAB, Schatzline posted the latest episode of his "Wake Up Church" podcast, which was largely dedicated to declaring that Islam is "a death cult" and "is not compatible with Western society."

"One of the greatest threats to America's national security is the Islamification of the United States," Schatzline said, warning that "the Muslim false god of Allah commands Muslims to lie."

As such, Schatzline claimed that Muslim elected officials are engaged in a coordinated campaign of deception designed to take over the government and subjugate Christians.

"We have to apply it to the public policy positions of the elected Muslims that we see," he said. "When you look at a Muslim who is currently elected in the United States of America; Rep. Ilhan Omar is a great example—openly Muslim—and she will actively, actively vote for pro-abortion policies. However, she herself will never have an abortion, and the reason is because she's never going to kill a Muslim child, but she definitely wants Christians and infidels, Jews, to kill their children."

"We look at these Muslims that are elected to office," Schatzline continued, "and they will continuously advocate for social welfare programs that take away from the taxpayer and replace God with government and local church with government. And you wonder, 'Are you advocating for Muslims to take part in these programs?' Of course not. This is why their mosques and their Islamic communities take care of their communities. So what they're advocating for is not that Muslims would join social welfare programs; what they're advocating for is that Christians, Jews, infidels would join those social welfare programs and then in 50 to 100 years, maybe sooner, when Islam rules as the prime law of the land and we see things like the Ten Commandments and our biblical foundation thrown out the window, then Christians and Jews are in complete submission to the Muslims in power because they control our social welfare programs."

"People, it's not a conspiracy theory," Schatzline insisted. "I'm trying to expose the evil and the darkness that is surrounding this."

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09/23/2025

Peter Montgomery

Donald Trump’s religious-right allies have not been shy about claiming that he was anointed by God to lead the United States. It’s been going on since Trump’s first presidential campaign and gained new intensity since Trump survived an assassination attempt last year. Trump has been happy to amplify his supporters’ claim that he was chosen—and saved—by God to carry out a divine mission as president.

Now Trump, a relentless fundraiser, has adopted a fundraising tactic employed by his spiritual and political adviser, White House aide Paula White. White is a proponent of the prosperity gospel, with a track record of promising supporters that they can obtain spiritual blessings by sending her money. Prosperity preachers call this “sowing a seed of faith,” and many Christians consider White and the prosperity gospel heretical.

But it seems to bring in the bucks, so it’s not entirely surprising that Trump has decided to borrow the rhetorical device. In an email sent to MAGA supporters today, Trump tells supporters, “I need you NOW” and urges them to send him money to defeat the “radical left” on which he has declared war:

And remember this – when you give, you are not just contributing to a political cause. You are sowing a SEED OF FAITH into the future of our Nation.

The Bible tells us faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains. And together, our faith will move America back to GOD. Back to TRUTH. Back to GREATNESS.

Trump’s email opens with the kind of rhetoric employed by religious-right operatives who portray those who disagree with them as enemies of God:

Since the day I returned to the White House, I have felt the mighty hand of God guiding this movement. His Word reminds us: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”*

The enemies of freedom thought they could break us with lies, with courts, with endless persecution – but they were WRONG.

The virtual merger between the evangelical right and the MAGA movement was on display at last weekend’s gathering in honor of the murdered MAGA activist Charlie Kirk, which was partly an evangelical worship service, partly a MAGA rally, and partly a call to war against “the left,” the “forces of evil,” and the movement’s enemies. While Kirk’s widow and successor as head of TPUSA Erika Kirk said she forgave his killer and talked about the Christian imperative to love one’s enemies, she was followed to the microphone by Trump who, in addition to his typical litany of grievances, directly contradicted her when he said he does not love his opponents but hates them, thus giving the event’s massive audience permission to ignore her call to Christian conscience and embrace his call to war.

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an 3 25

The Holy Bible's New Testament, from the Book of Matthew to the Book of Luke, is full of references to corruption among the ultra-rich. Jesus Christ, in Matthew 19:24, is quoted as saying, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God."

Yet among far-right evangelicals, a doctrine known as "the prosperity gospel" claims that the ultra-rich became rich because of their morality — and that the poor are in poverty became their decisions are immoral. President Donald Trump's White House faith adviser, Paula White, is a majority proponent of the prosperity gospel (also known as "prosperity theology"). And Trump appointed her to head the White House Faith Office.

Salon's Amanda Marcotte, in a biting article published on March 14, details the connection between the Prosperity Gospel and Trump's steep new tariffs.

The Prosperity Gospel, which equates wealth with morality and poverty with sin, is controversial among Christians. Many Catholics and Mainline Protestants consider it nonsense, and some evangelicals disagree with it as well.

"Even some far-right Christian conservatives, who otherwise back Trump wholeheartedly, are angry about his relationship to White, calling her views 'heresy,' and balking at treating their religion like a get-rich-quick scheme," Marcotte explains. "But what's striking about the prosperity gospel and its empty promises of future wealth in exchange for current privation is how much it sounds exactly like the excuses Trump and his allies are making for the economic wreckage he's inflicting on the U.S. through unnecessary and unjustifiable tariffs."

Marcotte continues, "During the campaign, Trump promised, 'When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day 1.' Instead, he's doing the opposite: imposing tariffs on most major trading partners, which function like a sales tax that will almost certainly cause inflation — which had been dwindling in the last year of President Joe Biden's term, to skyrocket again."

Trump and his allies, Marcotte notes, are trying to convince MAGA voters that economic pain caused by tariffs now will lead to prosperity in the future — which, she writes, is very much the type of argument that prosperity gospel preachers make when they're begging for donations.

"In truth," Marcotte writes, "the argument that financial suffering now will lead to wealth later is magical thinking, of the same sort that fuels prosperity gospel claims that donating to a preacher's private jet fund will inspire God to fill your coffers. There's significant overlap between prosperity gospel adherents and Trump's fan base. He's likely counting on that fact to sell his tariff lies, assuming — for good reason — that his base voters are accustomed to calls to ignore reality and to have blind faith in their leaders instead."

Marcotte adds, "For his most loyal voters, he's not wrong to believe they have endless patience for being ripped off — which is why so many of them are still writing checks to televangelists when they can barely pay their own bills."

READ MORE:['A stupid fight': Conservative blasts Trump for action 'too absurd to believe'

*Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.

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RWW VIDEO

02/24/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Pastor Paula White, director of the White House Faith Office, is "challenging you" to give her money so that God can bless you. You can give her "a sacrificial offering" of $133, $52, or $414.

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Christian Nationalists Plot To 'Seize The Institutions Of The Federal Government'

02/13/2025

Kyle Mantyla

From the moment President Donald Trump won the 2024 election, self-proclaimed Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau immediately began plotting, declaring on election night that he and his fellow Christian nationalists now had four years to align with the White House to strengthen the Christian church in the United States and abroad while placing right-wing Christians inside the government to tear down spiritual "strongholds."

Shortly thereafter, Wallnau proclaimed that once Trump took office, "the government and the church" would begin "moving together to build the ekklesia" to take control of "the government mountain" globally. ("Ekklesia" is a term used by dominionists to refer to the church as God’s governing body on Earth.)

Wallnau then announced something he called The Nehemiah Project, which is committed to "partnering the prophetic collaboration of government and church and business together to take all the domains we can while we have the wind to our back."

Recently, Wallnau appeared on "The War Room" with Steve Bannon, where the two discussed how the Christian right can use the newly re-established White House Faith Office, run by right-wing pastor Paula White, to "seize the institutions of the federal government."

"Reformation is different than simply a religious renaissance," Wallnau said. "It's the recapturing of institutions—oh, this is what makes the left go crazy when I say these things. It's the recapturing of education, of media, of business, of government, and it's recapturing them with the ideas of Western civilization, which is the ideas of Christian civilization."

"We've got a foothold with Paula White," Wallnau added. "But the expansion of that has got to be the underrepresented Christian population, which is over half the United States in all sectors in what we call the high places of culture, or the mountaintops of culture.":

This is the language of Seven Mountains Dominionism, of which Wallnau has long been a leading promoter. Seven Mountains Dominionism is a radical theology associated with the New Apostolic Reformation that advocates having right-wing Christians control all aspects of society. Followers of Seven Mountains theology believe that they are to “do whatever is necessary” to take control of the seven main “mountains” that shape our culture—education, government, media, business, arts and entertainment, family, and religion—in order to implement the will of God throughout the nation and the world.

"How would you propose to use both of these—the task force and the new Faith Office—to seize the institutions of the federal government?" asked Bannon.

"There are three arteries that make this happen: Legislation, litigation and the shaping of public opinion," Wallnau replied, explaining that they intend to pass laws and file lawsuits to further their Christian nationalist agenda while simultaneously using the power and influence of the media, the government, and the church to shape public opinion in support of that agenda.

"Paula White has to be careful [about] what she says in public.," Wallnau stated. "[But] I believe I might have learned that from her."

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an 2 25

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,. “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.

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 traditionsreject andcondemn 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.”

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.

:{“This is without question Trump's worst appointment. There's no defending this. Virtually any Protestant minister would be better,” podcaster and academic Anthony Stine, who is Catholic, posted on X.

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rww

02/07/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Montana state Rep. Lukas Schubert warns that "South Africa stands as a reminder of what’s to come in America if Democrats take over and implement their explicit anti-white discrimination policies."
In 2023, white nationalist Nick Fuentes said he could no longer support Kanye West because of his repeated blasphemy and sacrilege. But after West's latest declaration that he's a Nazi who loves Hitler, he has regained Fuentes' full support.
The fact that antisemitic Christian nationalist Andrew Torba brags that Vice President J.D. Vance is "influenceable" because "we have plenty of people in his orbit" sure does explain a lot.
Ali Alexander is pretty sure that he "would’ve made a brilliant constitutional lawyer": "Likely the best."

* Finally, "prophet" Mark Taylor is not happy that Paula White has been tapped to run the White House Faith Office: "THE LORD GOD REBUKES YOU PAULA WHITE CAIN, THE ENTIRE SATANIC SPIRITUAL ADVISORY BOARD and ALL THE FALSE PROPHETS OF BAAL THIS DAY! REPENT! MR PRESIDENT DO NOT LET THESE FALSE PROPHETS LAY HANDS ON YOU SIR! THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT! IT'S A TRANSFER OF DEMONS AND DEMONIC INFLUENCE!"

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AN 2 25

When President Donald Trump spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday morning, February 6, he attacked Democrats as anti-religion — claiming, "They oppose religion, they oppose God." Trump vowed to put a stop to attacks on Christianity, which he claims is facing an "anti-Christian bias."

In fact, former President Joe Biden and ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) are known for being devout Catholics. And Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) is a Baptist minister.

Trump announced the creation of a Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty. And the evangelical Rev. Paula White, Trump's longtime spiritual adviser, will head the new White House Faith Office.

MSNBC's Steve Benen examines White's history in a February 7 column, noting her role in Trump's "Stop the Steal" efforts after the 2020 election and her promotion of a controversial doctrine known as "the prosperity gospel."

The "prosperity gospel" claims that God rewards the faithful with material gains, but opponents of the doctrine consider it unbiblical — as parts of the Bible are highly critical of materialism. For example, Luke 18:25 in the New Testament quotes Jesus as saying, "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." And that concept is repeated in Matthew 19:24 as well as in the Koran (the holy book of Islam).

Benen notes, "In 2019, for example, White told her viewers that they had to support her ministry, even if they're struggling, or God would kill their dreams. The same week, White told viewers that some states have 'already passed' laws declaring the Christian Bible as 'hate speech,' which is why America needs Trump's judicial nominees to be confirmed. There are no such state laws."

In 2020, the MSNBC columnist recalls, White claimed that opposition to Trump's campaign was "demonic." And after he lost the election to Democrat Joe Biden, she held prayer services to keep Trump in the White House and insisted that "demonic confederacies" were trying to steal the election.

White was among the speakers at Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally on January 6, 2021, telling attendees that "every adversary" would "be overturned right now in the name of Jesus."

Benen observes, "It's not altogether clear what White's responsibilities will be leading the White House Faith Office, or whether she intends to accept a taxpayer-funded salary."

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no lnx vids

Paula White Is Back In The White House

02/06/2025

by Kyle Mantyla

President Donald Trump spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning, where he announced that his longtime faith adviser Paula White will be heading up White House Faith Office, just as she did during his first term in office, when she treated her position like an unofficial arm of his reelection campaign.

As such, we thought it appropriate to remind everyone of just who Paula White is.

In the wake of Trump's loss in the 2020 election, White held multiple emergency prayer services to battle the "demonic confederacies" that were supposedly trying to steal the election.

When that didn't work, White joined Trump at the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, where she prayed that God would give rallygoers a “holy boldness” and that “every adversary” would “be overturned right now in the name of Jesus.” She said of Trump, “I secure his purpose. I secure his destiny.”

White has repeatedly declared that her mere presence in the White House makes it "holy ground" and warned that to oppose Trump is to oppose God.

Video URL

She has declared that Black Lives Matter is an anti-Christ terrorist organization.

She has preached against marriage equality and reproductive choice.

She has promised her congregation that God will reward them for giving her money, even going so far as telling them to forsake paying their bills in order to donate to her church.

In 2020, White claimed to have ascended to Heaven, where she met God and he "put a mantle" on her.

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rww January 29, 2024

Trump campaign troll Brenden Dilley is not happy with the Family Research Council’s David Closson for criticizing the cultish “So God Made Trump” video produced by Dilley’s “meme team.”: “You’re just bloviating about how you’re an expert on God and the Bible, but what you really are is a gigantic cunt.”
Paula White, former President Donald Trump’s faith adviser, on the other hand, seems to be a big fan of the video.
Ben Zeisloft claims that “the Second Amendment is a Christian proposition”: “The right to protect your life from evildoers flows directly from the inalienable right to life you have from your Creator.”
Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers that the radical legislation he has introduced to abolish abortion, pornography, and no-fault divorce is unlikely even to get a hearing in the legislature.
Finally, self-proclaimed “prophet” Hank Kunneman says that “Jesus wasn’t some little limp-wristed, weak-kneed little guy that walked around.” How does Kunneman know this? “I’ve seen Jesus. He’s a man’s man!”

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/christian-nationalism/

The insurrection on the U.S. Capitol may have been influenced by former President Donald Trump's dangerous rhetoric but the history of Christian nationalism likely paved the way for the deadly unrest that erupted on Jan. 6, according to Talking Points Memo.

A new op-ed written by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — a known spiritual writer, Duke Divinity School graduate, and evangelical Christian. —highlights the distinctive presence of Christian symbolism at the Trump rally.

From Pastor Paula White's opening prayer at the disgraced former president's "Save America" rally and rioters' victory prayer inside the Senate chamber after invading the Capitol, to the "Jesus 2020" banner that soared outside the U.S. Capitol, symbols of distorted Christianity were visible in Washington, D.C., although many were not televised.

Wilson-Hartgrove noted, "the presence of Christians and Christian symbolism at the Capitol riot was so pronounced that several pro-Trump pastors felt compelled to make public statements condemning the violence in the days that followed." However, the problem appears to be far deeper than one religious leaders can condemn.

In a recent report about the extensive planning leading up to the insurrection, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) also noted that many different extremist groups appeared to be organized and under the direction of many different leaders all gathered in the name of "saving America."

For decades now, right-wing conservatives have used Christianity to justify many facets of extremism, barbarism, and the many lies perpetrated to support the existence of Christian nationalism. Jan. 6 proved to be a pivotal example of how Christianity has influenced the rise of right-wing extremism:

"Nothing in recent history has exposed the lies of Christian nationalism more clearly than a riot at the U.S. Capitol, waged in the Christian God's name. We cannot pretend that what we witnessed on Jan. 6 was a strange departure from the normal practice of Christian nationalist organizations. It was a harvest of the narrative they have sown for the past four decades."

In order to move in a direction that would lead to a resolution for this widespread problem, Wilson-Hartgrove notes that "facing the truth of Christian nationalists' complicity" could be the first step in the right direction.

Wilson-Hartgrove concluded, "But facing the truth of Christian nationalists' complicity in the Capitol riot may help other Christians see what Rev. Barber taught me so many years ago: that there is a way for Christian people of faith to work with their secular and non-Christian neighbors to reclaim a moral narrative that can push the country toward a more perfect union."

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/paula-white-asks-god-to-override-will-of-man-and-keep-trump-in-office-:{her-son-urges-god-to-bring-rage-and-fury:(style="background-color:#ffff33;"):}:-against-those-who-resist-him/

trump spiritual adviser and campaign surrogate Paula White hosted a second post-election prayer service Thursday night, during which she once again declared God’s intention to put President Donald Trump back in the White House and denounced the demonic forces she said are trying to derail God’s plans and Trump’s reelection. As on Wednesday, she wasjoined by her son Brad Knight.

“God has already settled his mind” about the election, White said. “We will override any will of man over the mind of God.”

White explained that “the Lord has already made his decision” but that there is a “spiritual battle” going on. She said that she was going to lead people in spiritual warfare to overturn “every evil wickedness” that was coming “against this nation and beyond this nation, what this nation is assigned to, what this nation has to carry forth with the gospel of Jesus Christ, with the prosperity of other nations, with the alignment of the church.”

“You said you will mow down the wickedness,” White prayed, adding:

So right now, everyagenda that is being pushed, that can affect the release of a premature, satanic alignment that you do not desire, we break it right now. We override it right now. We override it, we overturn it, we overturn it right now, and it will be no more, it will be no more because it is our right by the blood of Jesus, and you will give it to us.

So, we call right now upon the heavens, we call upon angelic reinforcements, we command angels to be released at the command of your word right now. And we push back every agenda that would release a premature satanic agenda, in the name of Jesus. Anything that would be of an Antichrist spirit, we break it right now in the name of Jesus, every Antichrist spirit, we break it right now, every Antichrist agenda that is being pushed, we break it, we override it, we overturn it, we overturn it, we overturn it in the name of Jesus right now. God, we just declare that you will keep the feet of POTUS in his purpose in his position right now. We stop, and we override the will of man for the will of God, we override the will of man for the will of God, we override the will of man for the will of God.

Knight called for God to bring his “wrath” and “fury” on those who reject him and his chosen “king”:

Those who rise up against the destiny of your people, those who rise up against the purpose of your will, those who rise up against the freedom of your church, those who rise up against the proclamation of your word … I thank you that you hold them in derision. For you say, ‘What do they have that I have not made?’

Speak to them in your wrath, God, and terrify them in your fury. God, those who reject you, God, those with even the extension of mercy, God, refuse to submit their flesh because they love whatever they love too much, God, now’s the moment for your wrath. Now’s the moment for your fury. We know that you’re a God of mercy, but you’ll give us what we asked for. And God, let not your children who worship you and sing praises to you and know you, God, let us not suffer in this country and across the world because of the will of the wicked.

Laugh at them, God, deride them, God.

God, you have a chosen King on ion, your holy hill. You have a chosen king.Set them up now and settle every matter in the spirit realm that would prevent the kings of your courts, the kings that you’ve chosen, the kings of your nations, the kings of your church, the kings of your families, God, every king that you have assigned, God, appoint them now. And every accusation that has been risen against that purpose, God, we silence it by the blood of the Lamb, the intercessions of Christ. We thank you that his righteousness speaks for us, and it silences every decree against us.

Knight, who declared himself God’s “David” on Wednesday night, upped the ante on Thursday, saying that God had told him, “You are my son. Today I have begotten you.” Knight followed that declaration by asking God to “make the nations our heritage”:

I will tell a decree the Lord has said to me, “You are my son. Today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations of your heritage.” God, we ask of you now. We ask of you now, God, made the nations our heritage. Make the nations Paula White Cain and Jonathan Cain’s heritage, God. Make the nation our bloodline’s heritage, God, not just us but everybody in this room. Make the nation’s Michael’s heritage, God, and God, make the nation’s America’s heritage.

Knight reminded God that Trump had moved the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem to Israel, and that since the U.S. is an “extension of Israel,” it “moves God’s heart” to protect the U.S. from “the dragons of the East” and other threats rising against both Israel and the United States. He continued:

Make the ends of the Earth our possession, God.

God, everyone who has risen against us, everyone who mocks us, everyone who has power, everyone who thinks they have victory because they’ve plotted, every will even within the church, people in authority, God, people who you’ve mantled, God, if their will is not aligned with you, God, break it, God. Don’t even hear their prayers and nullify their cries. You say you do that, God. God, hear the cries of the righteous alone in this moment, this prophetic time, God, and break them with a rod of iron. Dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.

God, let our kings be wise. God, let this prophetic moment be a warning to the rulers of the Earth. Let them see and have to reckon with the fact that this wasn’t the natural course of man but was the divine course of God. And let them repent, serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. God, where there was animosity, let them kiss the son, and God, where there could be anger and perishment,God, let there be refuge in what you are doing in this nation, in Jesus’ mighty name.

Tags: Brad Knight Paula White Christian Nation Dominionism Election 2020 Spiritual Warfare One Voice Prayer Movement

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/white-house-aide-paula-white-calls-on-god-and-his-followers-to-fight-to-keep-trump-in-office/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trumps-spiritual-advisor-had-a-frantic-election-meltdown-the-internet-responded-with-these-hilarious-remixes/

President Donald Trump's "spiritual adviser" went off in an election-related meltdown that was supposed to resemble a sermon. In it, Paula White ranted that international people should come to the United States to somehow stop the votes from being tallied. That would technically mean a declaration of war.

She was generally ridiculed for the context and her demand for help from a different continent.

"Angels have been dispatched from Africa!" shouted White. It was something fact-checked by many on Twitter since Trump referred to those countries as "sh*thole nations."

Beyond the replies and fact-checks about an international overthrow of the United States, however, there a series of videos where White was remixed with hilarious outcomes.

You can see some of them below:

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/religious-right-pre-election-push-calls-democrats-demonic-warns-against-muslims-secularists/

religious-right groups are making a last-minute push to turn out conservative evangelical voters for Donald Trump by sharing a Virginia pastor’s sermon that denounces theDemocratic Party as evil and demonic and warns evangelical Christians that if they don’t get more involved in politics, they will allow Muslims and secular humanists to shape the country.

In the sermon video, Pastor Gary Hamrick of Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg, Virginia, calls the election a “spiritual war” and says politicians who are “advancing a godless agenda” are “pawns of darkness.” Hamrick was one of the religious-right leaders who attended President Donald Trump’s speech at the White House in August accepting the Republican nomination for president.

Hamrick’s sermon is being promoted by White House aide Paula White’s Once Voice Prayer Movement, a political outreach project of the Trump White House in the guise of an online prayer group. One Voice Prayer Movement promotes dominionist leaders and Christian nationalist rhetoric, and White, herself, has a habit of portraying Trump’s political opponents as demonic.

Unlike most OVPM “prayer alerts”—in effect press releases promoting Trump and his administration—the promotion of Hamrick’s sermon didn’t bother to couch it as a “prayer request” or “prayer need” by the White House. The video was simply sent with a note praising its “boldness and clarity” and urging people to share it.

Closely aligned with One Voice Prayer Movement is Intercessors for America, a group of pro-Trump “prayer warriors” whose leader Dave Kubal helps run OVPM. IFA, whose monthly prayer calls regularly feature right-wing politicians, is also actively promoting Hamrick’s sermon with a five-day “sharing campaign” that began Saturday. IFA is sending its intercessors daily emails encouraging them to share selected clips from Hamrick’s sermon along with a link to copy of the full sermon published on IFA’s YouTube channel.

Hamrick’s sermon began with a dramatic build-up to those sitting in the pews as he delivered it. He said that some people might become so angry that they would leave the church. And he claimed that local law enforcement and state troopers were “stationed throughout the congregation” to enforce Virginia law against disrupting a religious service.

He told congregants that he is not angry with them personally, adding:

But I am angry with the spiritual forces of evil that have hijacked the hearts and minds of people in an effort to try to capture the soul of America. And I’m angry with demonic principalities, and by extension demonic principles that have influenced millennials, Gen Xers, and Gen Zers with godless philosophies and the doctrines of men. I am angry with politicians who are either knowingly or unknowingly pawns of darkness, instead of agents of light, who are advancing a godless agenda that is destructive to our country. And thus, I cannot be silent, I will not be silent and neither should you. America needs to wake up, and it starts with the church of Jesus Christ.

We need to wake up, Christian. We, we need to wake up, Christian.This is a battle. This is a war. This is not a game. It’s a spiritual battle that we are facing for the heart and soul of America and for the heart and soul of the next generation.

Hamrick grounded his sermon in the biblical book of Jeremiah, a prophet who warned of God’s wrath on nations that reject his law. He said the U.S. is at a crossroads, adding that if the body of Christ would get its collective act together and honor God “in this election cycle,” then perhaps God will have mercy on the country.

Hamrick rejected the “pushback” against what he calls his Election Day sermons from people who think pastors should keep politics out of the pulpit. Channeling religious-right pseudo-historian David Barton,Hamrick offered a presentation on pastors “leading the charge” in the Revolutionary War and at other moments in history. And he had a question for his congregants:

Okay, so let me ask you a question. Don’t you think that Rep. Ilhan Omar integrates her faith and politics? Don’t you think that Rashida Tlaib integrates her faith and politics? You better believe it. In fact, for those of you who are not aware, Joe Biden has already publicly declared that he will be adding Muslims to his administration. Listen to him yourself.

Hamrick showed a video that included Joe Biden speaking to Muslims and clips from a civic participation campaign encouraging American Muslims to vote. Hamrick claimed he was not sharing the video to disparage Muslim Americans, who also have freedom to worship in the U.S. But, he added:

Well, what I am saying is that if as Christians, somehow you believe the lie that faith and politics don’t mix, that pastors should stay out of that—it’s just too divisive—then by your apathy and your reluctance, you are actually helping to advance the doctrine and dogma of other world religions and of secular humanism, to influence this nation, rather than the values and virtues of Christianity. That’s what’s happening. Wake up! They’re not asleep. They’re not asleep. Why are Christians asleep today when it comes to this? Now, the fact is that only in recent times, have pastors kowtowed to political correctness, and remained silent or indifferent about faith and politics.

Hamrick read from a prayer guide distributed by Intercessors for America that contrasts positions in the Republican and Democratic Party platforms. He highlighted the Democratic Party’s—and the Biden-Harris ticket’s—support for LGBTQ equality. He said the Democratic platform’s call for “shared prosperity” is “political speak” for socialism. He praised Trump as the “most pro-life” and “most pro-Israeli” president the U.S. has ever had. He played a short video clip from a Trump speech in which Trump said “you still need help from the boss”—meaning God—and joked that he’s not the most famous person in the world because Jesus Christ is.

Hamrick told the Democrats in his congregation that theirs is no longer the party of FDR, JFK, or even Bill Clinton.

Listen to me, I’m going to speak truth to you. If you are a lifelong Democrat, your party has left you. Your party has left you. That ship has sailed. It’s true. I used to believe that the two-party system in America was much like a husband and a wife in a marriage, just differences. Just, you know, different people with different approaches and different perspectives but who shared a common goal and vision in life. And so, therefore, you could learn from each other’s different perspective, and you would balance each other out. I don’t believe that anymore. I believe that there is a liberal progressive agenda influenced by spiritual forces of evil, that if allowed to progress will be the demise of America. I believe it with all my heart. And while people are sitting around, foolishly talking about how they don’t like Trump’s tweets and his unfiltered style and his checkered past, meanwhile, the enemy is roaming around like a roaring lion looking for a nation to devour.

I know Trump is not going to win Miss Congeniality. Get over it! It’s not about personality. It’s about guardians of what is true and what is right in our day. That’s what we need to be concerned about.

Donald Trump is not our savior. Joe Biden is not our savior. Jesus Christ is our savior, and because he is my Savior, as for me in my house, I cannot, I will not vote for a candidate whose party platform advocates the murder of unborn babies, embraces same-sex marriage, encourages transgender behavior, and ignores God and his word in our culture.

I cannot. I will not. Cannot. Will not. Amen.

Listen, if you in good conscience cannot vote for Donald Trump, then don’t. But I don’t know how in good conscience a Christian can vote for an agenda that is evil.

Hamrick called a church that is “silent about the moral issues of our day “complicit in the evil,” like Christians in Nazi Germany that did not resist the regime’s persecution of Jews.

Hamrick’s sermon was posted on YouTube Oct. 18. As of Monday morning Oct. 26, it had nearly 140,000 views; a copy of the video posted by Intercessors for America had another 25,000 views.

Tags: Dave Kubal Gary Hamrick Paula White Intercessors for America One Voice Prayer Movement

schmucks // losers? cohen

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-detests-christians-and-he-deceived-pastors-and-mocked-them-after-they-left-trump-tower-michael-cohens-disloyal/

Michael Cohen’s book about his years as Donald Trump’s fixer is a clarion call to Christians to wake up and recognize that the man many of them revere as a heavenly agent is a religious fraud who loathes them and mocks their faith.

In Disloyal, published today, Cohen shows how Trump is a master deceiver. He quotes Trump calling Christianity and its religious practices “bullshit,” soon after he masterfully posed as a fervent believer. In truth, Cohen writes, Trump’s religion is unbridled lust for money and power at any cost to others.

“Can you believe that people believe that bullshit,” Trump said after pastors prayed over him.

Cohen’s insider stories add significant depth to my own documenting of Trump’s repeated and public denouncements of Christians as “fools,” “idiots,” and “schmucks."

in extensive writing and speeches, Trump has declared that his life philosophy is “revenge.” That stance is aggressively anti-Christian. So are Trump’s often publicly expressed desires to violently attack others, mostly women, and his many remarks that he derives pleasure from ruining the lives of people over such minor matters as declining to do him a favor.

Cohen reinforces these facts with new anecdotes about Trump’s utter disregard for other people and his contempt for religious belief. Cohen’s words should shock the believers who were critical to his becoming president, provided they ever read them. By denouncing the book Trump has ensured that many of those he has tricked into believing he is a deeply religious man will never fulfill their Christian duty to be on the lookout for deceivers.

None of the evangelicals I have interviewed in the past five years knew that in writing Trump has denounced their beliefs and written of the communion host as “my little cracker.”

Trump Detests Christianity

Despite the irrefutable evidence that Trump detests Christianity and ridicules such core beliefs as the Golden Rule and turning the other cheek, America is filled with pastors who praise him to their flocks as a man of god. outside the White House to imply he was chosen by god.

Pastors who support Trump were scolded two years ago by Christianity Today, a magazine founded by Billy Graham, for not denouncing Trump as “profoundly immoral.” Many evangelical pastors then attacked the magazine rather than following the Biblical incantation to examine their own souls.

Cohen writes that as a young man who grew up encountering Mafioso and other crooks at a country club he fell into the “trace like spell” of Trump, whom he describes as an utterly immoral, patriarchal mob boss and con man. Cohen says he was “an active oparticipant” in everything from Trump getting “golden showers” in Las Vegas to corruopt deals with Russian officials.

Trump is “consumed by the worldly lust for wealth and rewards,” Cohen writes, which puts him at odds with the teaching of Jesus Christ about what constitutes a good life.

“Places of religious worship held absolutely no interest to him, and he possessed precisely zero personal piety in his life,” Cohen writes.

Prosperity Gospel Embraced

Cohen explains that the only version of Christianity that could possibly interest Trump is the “prosperity gospel.” That is a perverse belief that financial wealth is a sign of heavenly approval rooted in 19^th Century occult beliefs that is anathema to Christian scripture.

Many actual Christians regard the prosperity gospel as evil. The evangelical magazine founded by Billy Graham, Christianity Today, calls it “an aberrant theology” promoted by such disgraced televangelists including Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Baker.

Early in Trump’s aborted 2012 presidential campaign, Cohen writes, he was ordered to reach out to faith communities. Soon Paula White, now the White House adviser on faith, proposed a meeting at Trump Tower with evangelical leaders. Cohen writes that Trump liked White because she was blonde and beautiful.

Cohen said that among those attending were Jerry Falwell Jr., who recently resigned in disgrace as head of Liberty University, and Creflo Dollar,who corporate jet and who was criminally charged that year with choking his daughter. Dollar said those charges were the work of the devil.

Once the evangelical leaders took their seats, Cohen writes, Trump quickly and slickly portrayed himself as a man of deep faith. Cohen writes that this was nonsense.

Laying on Hands

superspreaders who beleive in small gov't take covis bailout $?!

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trumps-religious-right-backers-get-millions-in-covid%e2%80%8b-19-relief/

Conservative evangelical churches and advocacy groups led by vocal boosters of President Donald Trump have received millions of dollars in coronavirus relief funds, marking a new milestone in the religious right’s long campaign to take a wrecking ball to the wall separating church and state.

The Paycheck Protection Program included in coronavirus relief legislation was designed to help small businesses and other organizations stay afloat and keep people working during the pandemic. Religious-right leaders worked with their allies in Congress and the Trump administration to make sure that churches would be able to receive direct government funding to support clergy salaries and other operational expenses. The program is administered by the Small Business Administration, which waived normal requirements that participants in its loan program abide by nondiscrimination standards.

On June 22, the SBA hosted a “Recovery & Resilience for Faith Based Communities tele-townhall” for leaders of churches and religious nonprofits to urge them to participate in the program by applying before the June 30 deadline—and to lavish praise on Trump for supporting the program. The call was promoted by the White House and religious-right figures like Gary Bauer.

Paula White, who oversees the Trump administration’s faith-based outreach from her perch at the White House, began the call by praying for the president. “Put a hedge and wall of fire around him that no weapon formed against him would be able to prosper,” White prayed.

White praised Trump and his administration’s extensively, saying, “it has always been his heart to make sure that houses of worship and people of faith have been protected.” She continued:

You heard that from way back, he was saying, ‘We’re going to put Merry back in Christmas,’ or talking about the Johnson Amendment. But he’s done so much to accomplish that. Things with religious freedom, like removing restrictions on grants. The PPP is one way that we begin to see this. There are so many others, but there are departments everywhere that have grants, and for years and decades, they’ve had restrictions that people of faith have had very, very difficult time. Well, our president made sure to remove those restrictions on grants, ensuring faith-based has equal access to capital, equal access to grant money.

White’s own City of Destiny church got between $150,000 and $350,000 in PPP funds, according to SBA records.

To overcome the skepticism some conservative Christian leaders might have about getting directly involved with the federal government, officials invited several prominent religious-right leaders to praise the program. While PPP funds could be a lifeline to smaller congregations and nonprofits, it turns out that staying afloat has not been a problem for some megachurches that had online worship and fundraising abilities. Instead, some of those megachurches have used money freed up by paycheck protection to expand their influence in their local communities.

Jentezen Franklin, a member of Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board, is pastor of the multi-campus Free Chapel megachurch, based in Gainesville, Georgia. Franklin was effusive on the SBA call, marveling that his church received a “tremendous amount of money” within three weeks of applying for it. Data released by the SBA Monday make it clearer how “tremendous” that amount was—in the $1 million to $2 million range. With payroll covered by government funds and the ability to “catch up online,” Franklin said his church distributed $340,000 to small churches in his community.

Franklin has urged evangelicals to help reelect Trump or be prepared to face tragic consequences. Trump publicly announced that he was watching Franklin’s worship service on March 15, which Trump had declared a national day of prayer.

Samuel Rodriguez, a pastor who prayed at Trump’s inauguration and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said PPP money was “like manna in the desert of this pandemic.” Rodiguez said the church was “made for this hour,” adding that “for this administration to recognize the church and the faith community as essential is a game changer.”

Rodriguez’s New Season Church in Sacramento, California, received between $150,000 and $350,000. He said the money has helped his own church not just survive but help other churches and expand community outreach. Rodriguez, who recently denounced the Democratic Party as “hostile to our Christian worldview,” called the program a “powerful resource” and a “blessing.”

“This is Uncle Sam helping us do the will of our heavenly father,” Rodriguez said. “So the PPP enabled us to cover payroll for our staff that is right now praying for interceding for the needs of our community, not just physical, spiritual, but in mental and emotional needs, literally saving lives.”

Also on the SBA call was another member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and longtime opponent of reproductive choice and LGBTQ equality. Dobson said that his organization, the James Dobson Family Institute, “has literally been kept solvent this spring and summer by the Paycheck Protection Plan.” Dobson said that thanks to the money his organization had received, adding, “We have not asked for a cent from anybody in six months.”

Other Trump-supporting leaders and organizations have done quite well. Here’s a sampling, drawn from our own research and other reporting on the SBA records:

First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, led by Trump cheerleaderRobert Jeffress, was among the megachurches listed as having received between $2 million and $5 million. Another was Guillermo Maldonado’s King Jesus International Ministry, which hosted an Evangelicals for Trump campaign launch last year.
The American Center for Law and Justice, part of the lucrative legal empire of Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow and his family, got between $1 million and $2 million.
The anti-LGBTQ advocates at Liberty Counsel received between $350,000 and $1 million.
End Times pastor Jim Bakker’s Morningside Church got between $350,000 and $1 million.
Televangelist Rick Joyner’s Morningstar Church got between $350,000 and $1 million.

Initially, the idea of tax dollars directly supporting clergy and church operations was defended as an extraordinary response to the unique situation caused by the pandemic. But on a phone call organized by Paula White’s One Voice Prayer Movement in May,former Rep. Randy Forbes of Virginia, founder of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, celebrated that “precedents for religious freedom” that are being set during the pandemic—specifically the unprecedented use of federal tax dollars to directly fund clergy and churches—“are going to endure long after this coronavirus has gone.”

Marcus Harris, director of faith and community initiatives in the office of Entrepreneurial Development at the SBA, told people in the call, “One thing I’m able to say in my role as the faith-based leader here at SBA is that I know for many of you this is your first interaction with SBA, but we do not want this to be your last,” a sentiment that was repeated by SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza.

Tags: Donald Trump James Dobson Jentezen Franklin Jim Bakker Paula White Rick Joyner Robert Jeffress Samuel Rodriguez Church-State Coronavirus Election 2020 Trump Administration American Center for Law and Justice First Baptist Church Dallas Liberty Counsel Trump Administration

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/paula-whites-one-voice-prayer-movement-a-thinly-disguised-political-operation-for-trump/

rww 520

220 rww

White Claims to Have Gone to the Throne Room of Heaven Where She Saw the Face of God

220 bogus tag, corrupt pending

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trump-spiritual-adviser-tells-followers-to-skip-paying-monthly-electric-bills-so-they-can-send-her-church-more-cash/

no lnx

Trump ‘spiritual adviser’ tells followers to skip paying monthly electric bills so they can send her church more cash

Written by Brad Reed / Raw Story February 17, 2020

Paula White, a prosperity gospel minister who serves as President Donald Trump’s “spiritual adviser,” apparently believes her followers should live in the dark to help keep the lights on at her church.

A lengthy report on White by Mother Jones reveals that the Trump-loving preacher recently told followers at her Supernatural Ministry School in Miami that they could secure God’s favor by sending her church as much money as possible — even if that meant skipping their monthly electric bills.

In particular, White said that followers who send their money to Florida Power and Light (FPL) every month instead of giving it to her church are treating the electric company better than they treat God.

“Instead of writing [that check] to the house of God as I’m instructed to, then what I’m saying spiritually is, ‘FPL, I have now established a spiritual law that put you first,’” White explained to her flock. “So, FPL, save my family, FPL, deliver my drug addicted son. FPL, kill this cancer that doctors say is in my body.”

White, who opened the National Day of Prayer Event at the White House in 2017 and who has just landed an official job at the White House, has drawn criticism from many Christians over the years, including her business in which she sells believers “resurrection seeds” that will grant them eternal life for the low price of just $1,144.

ref 1

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/11/trump-wanted-to-build-a-megachurch-with-prosperity-gospel-grifter-paula-white-report/

[very cozy pix]

prosperity gospel preacher Paula White, who has laid claim as President Donald Trump’s “spiritual adviser,” has told the :{Washington Examiner’s:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}: Paul Bedard that the president has in the past talked about building a megachurch.

According to White, Trump first brought up building an all-glass cathedral with her back in 2006. White says that Trump had even picked out an architect for the project, although she says it never came to fruition because the timing wasn’t right for her....

ref 2

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/02/paula-white-how-do-you-get-from-the-trailer-park-to-a-white-house-job-give-money-to-trumps-spiritual-adviser/

On a Friday morning in February, televangelist Paula White-Cain spent more than two hours preaching at the King Jesus church Supernatural Ministry School in Miami. With top billing on the event website as “Donald Trump’s spiritual adviser,” White stood in front of a stage with a light show befitting a Pink Floyd cover band. With a sanctuary that holds 7,000 people, one of the nation’s largest Latino churches was packed with “apostles” and “prophets” who’d come to be “activated in God’s supernatural power” and learn to expand their ministry.

“They called me trailer trash,” White said, as an interpreter in a blue track suit jacket translated her words into Spanish. “But our God’s in the recycling business.” With her husband, the keyboardist for Journey, providing a stirring backtrack, White testified about her own rags-to-riches tale, starting with her humble roots in Tupelo, Mississippi, her father’s suicide, her out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy, her years working her way up from janitor to Sunday school teacher at a Maryland church.

“God kept opening doors until eventually, 19 years ago, I get a phone call out of the blue, from this man named Donald Trump,” she said, recalling the day in 2002 when the twice-divorced New York real estate mogul reached out to her after catching her show on a local Florida TV station. “He said, ‘You’re fantastic.’ He said, ‘You have the ‘it’ factor.’ I said, ‘Sir, we call that the anointing.’” White said the Lord told her to help Trump know God. “I took on that assignment never knowing that one day that man that God told me to show him who He was would become the president of the United States of America,” she told the crowd, which cheered with enthusiasm.

..see bak

she's a WITCH burn her!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/pretty-messed-up-church-of-satan-jesuit-priest-and-others-blast-white-house-spiritual-advisor-for-commanding-any-satanic-pregnancies-to-miscarry-now/

no lnx

‘Pretty messed up’: Church of Satan, Jesuit priest and more blast White House spiritual advisor for commanding ‘any satanic pregnancies to miscarry’

Written by Elizabeth Preza January 26, 2020

Despite President Donald Trump’s slated appearance at this year’s pro-life “March for Life” rally, his own spiritual advisor prayed for the miscarriage of “satanic pregnancies” in a recent sermon posted Friday by Right Wing Watch.

As seen in a video of the sermon, televangelist Paula White, who serves as special adviser to the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative, called on Jesus to “command any satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now.”

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons

@GuthrieGF

“We command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now” — Special Adviser to the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative Paula White

Embedded video

In response to White’s sermon, the Church of Satan pointed out that “asking your imaginary friend to terminate someone else’s pregnancy against their will is pretty messed up.”

The Church Of Satan

@ChurchofSatan

Asking your imaginary friend to terminate someone else’s pregnancy against their will is pretty messed up. https://twitter.com/GuthrieGF/status/1221208783411650560 …

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons

@GuthrieGF

“We command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now” — Special Adviser to the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative Paula White

Embedded video

11.7K

And James Martin SJ, a Jesuit priest and writer, noted “no one should ever pray for any woman to miscarry.”

James Martin, SJ

@JamesMartinSJ

No pregnancies are satanic. Every child is a gift from God. No one should ever pray for any woman to miscarry. No one should ever pray for evil or harm to befall another person. Jesus asked us to pray for our persecutors, not to curse them. To love our neighbors as ourselves. https://twitter.com/GuthrieGF/status/1221208783411650560 …

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons

@GuthrieGF

“We command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now” — Special Adviser to the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative Paula White

Embedded video

Jennifer Gunter, an OB/GYN, asked White to send her the “spell book” on satanic pregnancies.

Jennifer Gunter

@DrJenGunter

Hi @Paula_White I am an OB/GYN and would love to learn about satanic pregnancies. Can you send me the spell book (I promise to Venmo the $) so I can learn?

Regards,

Jen Gunter MD

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/01/evangelicals-are-anticipating-the-end-of-the-world-and-trump-is-listening/

no lnx

Evangelicals Love Donald Trump for Many Reasons, But One of Them Is Especially Terrifying

End Times.

Stephanie Mencimer January 23, 2020

Mother Jones

The enemies of Israel have unleashed a massive air attack on the Promised Land. Hundreds of fighter jets streak across the sky. But before Israel can be destroyed, fire rains from the heavens and the enemy jets explode in mid-air with no explanation. Hailstones the size of golf balls follow the fire. The ground shakes. Birds pick clean the bodies of the fallen attackers. The enemy is vanquished without a single Israeli casualty, and the country is saved.

These are some of the opening scenes of the bestselling 1995 book Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, by Jerry B. Jenkins and the late evangelical minister Tim LaHaye. But don’t mistake this scenario for a mere action sequence: It’s based on the war of Gog and Magog, a biblical conflict prophesied in the Book of Ezekiel. In the Bible, Gog is the leader of Magog, a “place in the far north” that many evangelicals believe is Russia. According to Ezekiel’s prophecy, Gog will join with Persia—now Iran—and other Arab nations to attack a peaceful Israel “like a cloud that covers the land.” LaHaye, like many evangelicals, believed this battle would bring on the Rapture, the End Times event when God spirits away the good Christians to heaven before unleashing plagues, sickness, and other horrors on the unbelievers remaining on Earth. Meanwhile, the Antichrist reigns supreme.

The story of Gog and Magog is central to the bloody eschatology long embraced by millions of American evangelicals. In recent years, End Times has gained special political currency as believers have seen any number of Middle East conflagrations as fulfilling Ezekiel’s prophecy, notably the US invasion of Iraq and the war in Syria. Gog and Magog took on fresh relevance earlier this month, when the Trump administration assassinated Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force.

On many levels, President Donald Trump’s self-created crisis in Iran seems to have no relationship to any sort of coherent foreign policy or geopolitical plan for the future. The assassination has yielded few if any tangible rewards for the US. But there is an eager constituency for Trump’s improvised policy toward the Middle East and Iran in particular: the evangelical Christians who see it as a means of ushering in the return of Christ. Lured by the promise of conservative Supreme Court justices, anti-abortion measures, and a commitment to Christian supremacy under the guise of religious freedom, white evangelicals voted for Trump in higher numbers than any other group—more than 80 percent.

He desperately needs them if he’s going to be reelected. And while some have expressed concern about the administration’s inching toward war with Iran, many of those with what were once fringe beliefs have cheered the killing of Soleimani. “Iran has this big part to play in biblical history,” says religious historian Diana Butler Bass, who grew up in the evangelical church, attended an evangelical college and seminary, and wrote her Ph.D. thesis at Duke University on American fundamentalism. “There are these particular prophecies from Ezekiel, where there is talk of a war that will happen at a very important moment in Israel’s history. And that war is going to kick off the End Times. People in this prophetic community believe Iran is going to be one of these aggressors.”

“When Iran gets into the news, especially with anything to do with war, it’s sort of a prophetic dog whistle to evangelicals.”

Bass thinks this worldview may be central to understanding Trump’s foreign policy. “When Iran gets into the news, especially with anything to do with war, it’s sort of a prophetic dog whistle to evangelicals. They will support anything that seems to edge the world towards this conflagration,” she says. “They don’t necessarily want violence, but they’re eager for Christ to return and they think that this war with Iran and Israel has to happen for their larger hope to pass.”

Not all or even most evangelicals believe in the literal truth of these sorts of prophecies, though nearly 60 percent of white evangelicals, according to one 2010 poll, believe Jesus is definitely or probably going to return by the year 2050. But those who do subscribe to this apocalyptic world view seem to be overrepresented among Trump’s religious supporters and advisers. In October, a host of influential evangelical pastors came to the White House to pray with Trump to protect him from impeachment. Among those who laid hands on the president as he stood, head bowed, in the Oval Office, was repeat visitor Greg Laurie, pastor of a California megachurch. A few days after the killing of Soleimani, Laurie made a YouTube video with Don Stewart, author of 25 Signs We Are Near the End, to discuss Iran and the End Times. “The scenario that the Bible predicted, seemingly so impossible,” Stewart promised, “is now falling into place.”

From the outset, Trump has surrounded himself with people who hail from the fringes of the evangelical community that is steeped in the language of biblical prophecy, and his administration regularly reflects that language back to them in its messaging. In March 2017, for instance, Trump issued an official White House statement recognizing the Persian New Year in which he misattributed a quote to Cyrus the Great, the libertine pagan leader of the ancient Persian empire who was anointed by God to free Jews in Babylon. Ordinary Americans probably wouldn’t have even noticed the announcement, but evangelicals knew that Trump was speaking their language. Many of them believe Trump is like Cyrus, a flawed nonbeliever who nonetheless is chosen by God to work his miracles on Earth.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was reportedly instrumental in pushing for the killing of Soleimani, is also a master of such messaging. In March, during an interview in Jerusalem with the Christian Broadcasting Network (founded by another apocalyptic preacher, Pat Robertson), Pompeo showed his familiarity with another Iran-centric Bible story popular with End Times evangelicals. In the story, a Persian king is urged to slaughter the Jews in his kingdom at the urging of the evil adviser Haman. But his Jewish Queen Esther convinces him not to and saves her people. Asked whether he thought Trump could be a modern-day Esther, saving the Jews from Iran, Pompeo replied, “As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible.” The secretary of state’s End Times beliefs made headlines again after the Soleimani killing, as meme-makers circulated a quote from a speech he made in a Kansas church in 2015. A few days after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, Pompeo said: “We will continue to fight these battles. It is a never-ending struggle. … until the Rapture.”

The State Department did not respond to questions about how Pompeo’s religious views may affect his foreign policy decisions. But it’s not hard to see how apocalyptic evangelicalism might be influencing the Trump administration as it seeks to mobilize the millions of evangelicals reached by televangelists and megachurch pastors preaching the End Times. The most blatant appeal to this constituency came when Trump made the controversial decision to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a long-desired goal of evangelicals who see it as fulfilling a biblical prophecy necessary in securing the Second Coming. What may be less obvious is how Trump’s disdain for international governing bodies like NATO also dovetails almost perfectly with End Times theology, whether he realizes it or not.

Matthew Avery Sutton, a Washington State University history professor and author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, says evangelicals who believe the end is near have always been hostile to any sort of international organizations. That’s because they believe biblical prophecies that say that in the last days, a world leader who preaches peace will emerge and move toward a one-world government. In fact, the prophecy goes, that leader will be the Antichrist who will force the world to accept a false religion and persecute people who don’t accept him as a Messiah. (In Left Behind, the Antichrist is a Romanian UN secretary-general.) Evangelicals love Trump’s talk of pulling out of NATO, his attacks on the UN, and his trashing of the Paris climate change accord. “They hate the UN,” Sutton says. “Trump’s unilateralism is also music to their ears.”

Trump is not the first president to surround himself with evangelical Christians with an apocalyptic bent. Ronald Reaganwas advised by Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, andpersonally believed in the End Times and the coming apocalypse, writing about it in his journals. He appointed people like Interior Secretary James Watt, a Pentecostal fundamentalist whose disdain for environmental conservation seemed to be informed by his belief that the end of the world was nigh. In an appearance before Congress, he told stunned lawmakers, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”

Apparently George W. Bush was also part of this apocalypse-now group. When Bush was trying to convince French president Jacques Chirac to support an invasion of Iran in 2003, he reportedly told Chirac: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. Biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.” Chirac had no idea what Bush was talking about and had to consult a biblical scholar.

George W. Bush: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. Biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.”

Trump, who seems unable to distinguish between the New and Old Testaments, doesn’t seem particularly fluent in the prophecies of Ezekiel. But he has brought into the White House a host of people who are.Quite a few also hail from what Bass delicately describes as the “not respectable charlatan wing” of evangelical Christianity. They’re the prosperity preachers and prophets of the sort depicted by Sinclair Lewis in Elmer Gantry. “I have no doubt at all that those people are sitting right next to [Trump], giving him these Bible verses, telling him about these prophecies,” Bass says, “which means that they are kind of egging him on, [telling him] that he’s part of God’s prophetic fulfillment for these last days.”

Many of those who have become White House regulars are associated with something known as the New Apostolic Reformation, what Christianity Today describes as “a loosely connected group of Pentecostals and Charismatics.” They’re the ones who speak in tongues, scour the news for clues to biblical prophecies, engage in faith healing, and preach prosperity gospel—the notion that faith in God (or, usually, the preacher) will make people wealthy (or at least enrich the preacher). These apostles tend to embrace “dominionist” theology that implores Christians to take over of all levels of government, media, and education as a way of preparing for the End Times and return of Christ. Influential politicians like former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who has made several visits to the Trump White House, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and former Trump Energy Secretary Rick Perry fall into this camp.

Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at the liberal nonprofit People for the American Way who has tracked the religious right for many years, says that the network of preachers who come from NAR and Pentecostal media operations “are telling people over and over again that Trump was ‘chosen,’ that God intervened in the election. Some of them say very explicitly that Trump is playing a role in God’s End Time plans to bring about the return of Christ.”

One of the most prominent representatives of the Left Behind wing of the evangelical movement is San Antonio televangelist John Hagee, who has been calling for a war with Iran for more than a 15 years. In 2005, Hagee wrote a best-selling book, Jerusalem Countdown, that claimed the Bible predicted a war with Iran. (In2011, it was turned into a movie of the same title, starring Bionic Man Lee Majors and Randy Travis.) Shortly after the book was published, Hagee created Christians United for Israel, a Christian Zionist organization that now claims to have 8 million members. It lobbies for support for Israeli settlements, military aid to Israel, and for the US to join with Israel to launch a preemptive strike on Iran.

He has said that gays caused Hurricane Katrina, referred to the Catholic Church as the “great whore,” called Hitler a “half-breed” Jew, and said that Hitler was part of God’s plan to get the Jews back to Israel.

Hagee, now 79, had once been popular with powerful Republicans during the George W. Bush administration, despite some of his more controversial statements. Among other things, he has said that gays caused Hurricane Katrina, referred to the Catholic Church as the “great whore,” called Hitler a “half-breed” Jew, and said that Hitler was part of God’s plan to get the Jews back to Israel. His star began to fall in 2008 after he endorsed Sen. John McCain for the GOP presidential nomination. McCain rejected his support, calling Hagee’s views “crazy and unacceptable.”

The election of Barack Obama consigned Hagee to his megachurch in San Antonio. But Trump has restored him to the corridors of power in Washington. Hagee endorsed Trump early in 2016. Once Trump was elected, Hagee met with the new president for two hours in 2017 to discuss moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Foreign policy experts feared the embassy relocation would destabilize the region and hamper peace talks, but Trump moved it anyway in May 2018. Israeli troops killed more than 50 people in the protests that followed.

Hagee attended the opening ceremony alongside notables such as Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner, and he gave the closing benediction.“Let every Islamic terrorist hear this message: Israel lives,” he announced. “Let it echo down the marble halls of the presidential palace in Iran: Israel lives.” He later told the Texas Observer that he was looking forward to Trump confronting Iran, explaining, “The sum of Iran’s evil is greater than the whole of its parts.”

When Christians United for Israel held its annual DC confab and lobbying day last summer, Trump sent no fewer than five top administration officials to address attendees, including Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence (both evangelicals themselves), then–national security adviser John Bolton, a special envoy to the Middle East, and the US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman. Pompeo opened the speech by telling the crowd of more than 5,000 people, “This is what it must have looked like to be part of the crowd for the fishes and the loaves. What a miracle that was.” Once more the story of Queen Esther came in handy, this time as Pompeo compared it to modern-day Iran.

Hagee is one of the most prominent of Trump’s evangelical supporters who see a war with Iran as a necessary step towards the End Times, but he’s far from the only one. The White House has hosted a steady stream of dominionists and NAR apostles since Trump took office, including Lance Wallnau, author of God’s Chaos President.An evangelical leader with a consulting business in Dallas, Wallnau has become famous as one of the few evangelicals who accurately prophesied Trump’s election after receiving divine inspiration to read chapter 45 of the Book of Isaiah. That’s the story of King Cyrus, whom Wallnau and many other evangelicals think Trump resembles.(For $45, Wallnau and ex-con televangelist Jim Bakker now sell a Trump/Cyrus coin that people can use to pray for Trump’s reelection.) Dr. Lance, as he’s known, has made several visits to the White House, including for a private briefing on Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace plan.

Facilitating many of these visits is Paula White-Cain, the controversial televangelist associated with the Trinity Broadcasting Network who became Trump’s spiritual adviser after he saw her preach on TV in the early aughts. White led a 20,000-strong megachurch in Tampa that was investigated by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) in 2007 for lavish spending on private jets and big houses and possible violations of its tax-exempt status. His report did not find any wrongdoing—church leaders refused to cooperate with the investigation—but in 2012, White’s church declared bankruptcy. She went on to lead a mostly African American church in Florida where she remained until last spring, when her son took over the ministry.

Now on her third marriage, White has long been at odds with more elite, mainstream evangelicals because of her particular self-help brand of prosperity gospel. Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore called White a “charlatan” and “heretic.” Nonetheless, in late October, Trump installed her in an official post at the White House office of public liaison to do outreach to evangelicals, formalizing access for some of the more extreme members of that group. She has referred to Trump as a modern-day Esther and called his enemies “demonic.”

Bass says that evangelical elites of the sort who associated with President George W. Bush have long looked down their noses at populist preachers like White and her crowd, but Trump has elevated them to positions of power. It’s a win-win situation. The evangelicals are at last in the influential positions those who disparaged them once held. And Trump’s narcissism is receiving special nourishment by their insistence that he was chosen by God. “I think that Trump likes it when people think he’s close to God—he called himself the ‘chosen one’—and to think that all of this has some sort of divine backing,” Bass says. “I don’t think there’s ever been a president who was quite influenced by this stream of evangelicalism as Trump has been.”

Naturally, there are political benefits to all of this. The administration has struggled to provide evidence of any imminent threats from Soleimani, but the timing for the assassination was certainly fortuitous for someone looking to mobilize evangelicals. Not only was Trump embroiled in impeachment hearings, he was still chaffing from a recent editorial in the evangelical publication Christianity Today, founded by Billy Graham, calling for him to be removed from office on moral grounds. Trump announced the killing of Soleimani just hours before appearing at the launch of his campaign’s Evangelicals for Trump coalition in Miami.

That event took place at a Pentacostal Latino church headed by Guillermo Maldonado, who speaks in tongues and hosts a TV show called “The Supernatural Now.” He’s the founder of the King Jesus International Ministry, a Miami megachurch with upwards of 20,000 members and a large TV and radio presence. Maldonado is also another regular White House visitor who has preached that Trump has a role in God’s plans for the End Times. At the 2019 Global Prophetic Summit, he claimed that God told him, “America, I have prepared this time, I have raised somebody in office to open the doors for my gospels.”

André Gagné, a theology professor at Concordia University in Montreal, says the apocalyptic worldview is concerning at such high levels of power, because believers may be rather sanguine about the possibility that assassinating an Iranian general might spur an even bigger war or nuclear confrontation in the Middle East. “If it brings the end of the world, it brings the end of the world,” Gagné says. “They’re ready. They can’t wait for the Rapture to happen. For them it’s the ultimate reunion with God.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-evangelical-meeting-that-convinced-trump-he-is-the-chosen-one-and-why-i-believe-it-to-be-true/

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The evangelical meeting that convinced Trump he is the Chosen One, and why I believe it to be true

Written by DemSem / Daily Kos December 31, 2019

No matter how hard the rightwing media is trying to spin the upcoming Evangelicals for Trump rally in Miami as a good thing, everyone outside the cult knows it’s a scream of panic. I can’t describe how desperate this all is: it would be like Hillary Clinton forced to hold a “Feminists for Hillary” rally. If you don’t have your base locked up by now, you are in real trouble. You can always sense Trump’s desperation by the quality and quantity of his tweets. (Lots of misspellings, strange capitalization, tons of retweets, and healthy doses of “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”)

The latest twitterstorm was brought to you by the good folks at Christianity Today, which helpfully pointed out to stupid people that Trump is 1) guilty and 2) the antithesis of Christianity. This was soon followed by an editor quitting the Christian Post over pro-Trump propaganda. Trump is mortified because he cannot afford to lose even a little bit of the evangelical vote for 2020 since they make up a core of his coalition. It’s the entire reason Trump picked the well-hated Mike Pence for his ticket.

Although there are several evangelicals who are, pardon me, starting to “see the light,” many of them can’t budge, no matter what. These are the ones we need to discuss. Partially, these lost souls can’t move because of the “Sunk Cost Fallacy” and are not capable of extracting themselves out of this very bad situation. Others, however, have deceived themselves that this obviously evil man is the Second Coming—which, by the way, Trump literally tweeted about himself.

It wasn’t all that long ago that self-professed Christians were horrified at having their flag-bearer be Trump. What changed? If you are looking to point fingers, it can be traced, according to Rolling Stone, to a meeting with Trump and several mega-Church/televangelist con artists near the end of September in 2016.

The meeting and other events like it, spread the word, sending radio talk-show hosts and pastors and educators out into the world to preach the gospel of Donald Trump.

They didn’t just promote Trump to their flocks, but they spread the false message that Trump was divinely chosen—“ordained” even. In return, Trump was to do their bidding in a way no president had before. Trump was to give them everything.

And do their bidding the puppet-god did: he fought and repealed discrimination laws, fought the contraception mandate, fought to take money from the public and put into private Christian schools, and argued that churches should get tax-exempt status even if they promote the GOP from the pulpit. Most important to them, however, is that he would reshape the judiciary in their image. Trump and Mitch McConnell would pick severely unqualified, rightwing judges to cement their power.

In return, Trump received, as Tony Perkins put it, a “mulligan” for his serious transgressions. He would be a god-king, and their flocks would be told to treat him as such. Sickeningly, they followed through on this. Jerry Falwell Jr. said it is “immoral” to oppose Trump. Franklin Graham said any opposition comes from “the Devil and his kingdom of darkness”. (So it’s the Devil who wants the migrant children freed from cages in disease-ridden conditions?)

James Dobson excused Trump’s behavior because he is a “baby Christian”. But the worst one is Paula White, who has an official role in the White House as an adviser to the president’s Faith and Opportunity Initiative in the White House’s Office of Public Liaison. Like many of these con artists, she preaches that the gospel is about attaining wealth and power in a twisted interpretation of Scripture known as the “Prosperity Gospel.”

White says the news media is “demonic” and those who oppose Trump “operate in sorcery and witchcraft”. Just like Trump, Paula is a grifter. She promised quid pro quo to her followers: if you give her two grand, you will get a vision from God. Cash or charge? She’s the worst of the worst.

Trump, who already suffers from malignant narcissism, now actually believes that he is a prophet. This is no longer just a role for him, and I can’t stress enough just how dangerous this is to have a leader who believes that everything he does is divinely inspired. It didn’t help at all that Trump surrounded himself with sycophants, like Rick Perry, that repeat to him that he is a prophet. But Donald Trump truly believes that he is, as he calls himself, the “Chosen One.”

1219 schism on djt?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/white-evangelicals-still-view-support-for-trump-as-spiritual-warfare-against-the-demonic-forces-pushing-for-his-impeachment

no lnx

White evangelicals still view support for Trump as ‘spiritual warfare’ against the ‘demonic forces’ pushing for his impeachment

Written by Alex Henderson December 23, 2019

Although President Donald Trump has plenty of critics in Christianity — some Catholics, some Mainline Protestants — he is still quite popular among far-right white evangelical fundamentalists. So when Mark Galli, the retiring editor-in-chief of the evangelical Christianity Today, wrote a scathing anti-Trump op-ed last week, many of Trump’s white evangelical supporters were furious — including Franklin Graham, son of the late Christianity Today founder Billy Graham.And journalist Ed Kilgore, in a December 23 article for New York Magazine, stresses that Trump’s critics shouldn’t think white evangelical support for him is softening — they still view Trump as their champion.

White evangelical support for Trump, Kilgore observes, goes beyond Trump putting so many far-right judges on the federal judiciary: as they see it, fighting Trump’s impeachment and getting him reelected in 2020 is a form of spiritual warfare.

“Many Christian Right leaders and members of their flocks view political battles involving Trump as spiritual warfare between holy and demonic forces, with the crude, self-idolizing and heathenish POTUS treated as unquestionably the champion of the Prince of Peace,” Kilgore explains.

Kilgore points to a December 19 article by Sarah Posner for Type Investigations as having some of the best reporting in recent days on the amount of unwavering support Trump still enjoys among far-right white evangelicals.

Posner reported, “Trump’s evangelical base is a sprawling, interconnected network of political advocacy groups, megachurches, White House advisers, televangelists and prayer warriors. It also includes a formidable, data-driven get-out-the-vote operation.”

Posner’s article cites some of the well-known Christian Right extremists who remain committed to helping Trump win a second term in 2020, and they range from the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Ralph Reed to the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. Another is Jim Bakker.

According to Posner, “Inside this ecosystem, impeachment is, at best, a partisan sideshow concocted by Democrats to distract the public from Trump’s many important accomplishments. At worst, it is a satanic scheme to upend God’s plan for America — which was to install Trump in office in order to ensure the nation is governed by Christians who espouse ‘biblical’ values.”

One of Trump’s top allies in his Christian Right outreach, Kilgore observes, isFlorida-based evangelist Paula White — who preaches an ideology called the Prosperity Gospel. In contrast to all the Catholics and Mainline Protestants who equate greed, materialism and avarice with sinfulness, the Prosperity Gospel associates a fat bank account with being a good Christian and poverty with moral failings.So when Republicans go out of their way to hurt the poor, proponents of the Prosperity Gospel see that as righteous Christian behavior.

Kilgore warns, “No, these people are not going to abandon Donald Trump. They are now so complicit in his presidency that to question him is to condemn themselves to a judgement too terrible to contemplate.”

posner

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In mid-October, less than a month into the House Democrats’ formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, Jim Bakker, the televangelist and convicted fraudster, was in front of a studio audience at his Morningside Church complex in Blue Eye, Missouri, a remote village of less than 200 people in the Ozarks. As the crew prepared the semicircular desk where the 79-year-old conducts freewheeling interviews with evangelical celebrity guests, Bakker took a moment to deliver an important message to the hundred or so people who had come to watch the taping: “God’s sending judgment.”

God, Bakker continued, “anointed your president.” Anyone who crosses the divinely chosen leader, he implied, is risking God’s wrath.

That morning, news had broken of the unexpected death of Democratic Congressman and House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, who aggressively investigated Trump and who would have played a key role in impeachment proceedings. But there would be no prayers or condolences for the civil rights advocate from Bakker, who would only call Cummings “that man.” Instead, Bakker concluded with satisfaction, “one of the number-one enemies of our president fell dead last night. A man who insists on impeaching the president of the United States, he fell dead.”

KEY FINDINGS

As Trump faces impeachment challenges, white evangelicals have dug in as his most loyal defenders; two-thirds believe he did nothing wrong in Ukraine.

The president has secured the loyalty of the evangelical base by handing the movement control over personnel and policy at a level they’ve never seen before.

Evangelical leaders talk about Trump as divinely anointed, and call impeachment a satanic scheme to upend God’s plan to have Trump lead a Christian nation.

Evangelical leaders across the country are laying the groundwork for a historic effort to support Trump’s reelection campaign.

As Trump faces increasingly grim polling numbers over impeachment, white evangelicals have dug in as his most loyal defenders. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted in late October, about a month after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the official launch of the impeachment probe, 80% of white evangelicals opposed impeaching Trump and removing him from office (compared to just 47% of the public at large). Two-thirds of white evangelicals believed Trump did nothing wrong in his dealings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Among white evangelicals who identify as Republican, 99% of them opposed impeachment, according to an October analysis by the Public Religion Research Institute.

This unwavering support is consistent with white evangelical voters’ attitude toward Trump in general. In 2016, 81% of them voted for him, and over the course of his tumultuous presidency, polling has consistently shown white evangelicals to be unfazed by Trump’s scandals and corruption — from pussy grabbing to Stormy Daniels to family separations to Russian election interference. Moreover, white evangelicals approve of Trump’s job performance more than any other demographic does ? a rate 20 and 30 points higher than those of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics, respectively. These numbers have remained static even in the face of House Democrats’ probe into Trump’s efforts to shake down Zelensky for the public announcement of a corruption probe against Joe Biden and his son.

In early December, as the House Judiciary Committee held impeachment hearings, Mark Meadows, the Republican congressman from North Carolina, accepted an award at the Impact Luncheon, hosted by Ginni Thomas,a conservative activist and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Speaking at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, Meadows drew enthusiastic applause for his shoutout to his “two buddies,” Jim Jordan of Ohio and Andy Biggs of Arizona, who were “fighting the impeachment fight as we speak.” With Thomas at his side, Meadows said he wanted to figure out how “to compete with mainstream media, when they’re out there each and every day trying to form a narrative that would suggest that this president should be impeached.” He then credited grassroots activists for retweeting his and Jordan’s tweets enough times that they received 163 million impressions, “which is more than the viewership of all the networks combined.”

As impeachment moves to the Senate, where a Republican majority will control the trial, GOP lawmakers are acutely aware of the clout wielded by the Christian right ? not only in the upcoming elections, but in the Trump White House. For them, crossing Trump does not just mean facing his wrath, but also, by extension, the wrath of his most devoted base in the voting booth.

An Evangelical Bubble

Trump’s evangelical base is a sprawling, interconnected network of political advocacy groups, megachurches, White House advisers, televangelists and prayer warriors. It also includes a formidable, data-driven get-out-the-vote operation. Top names in this circle include Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Ralph Reed of the Faith & Freedom Coalition. The two are part of a group of about two dozen Christian leaders who meet regularly at the White House and who blast out full-throated defenses of the president through their organizations’ mailing lists, radio shows, podcasts and television programs.

Inside this ecosystem, impeachment is, at best, a partisan sideshow concocted by Democrats to distract the public from Trump’s many important accomplishments. At worst, it is a satanic scheme to upend God’s plan for America, which was to install Trump in office in order to ensure the nation is governed by Christians who espouse “biblical” values.

Just before Thanksgiving, as the House Intelligence Committee completed its crucial round of public hearings, Reed made a plea for donations, promising that “while we fight to defend the President from the Democrats’ ongoing political assassination attempt, we’re also laying the groundwork for a historic effort that will secure his reelection next year.” In December, as the House Judiciary Committee began a new phase of the impeachment proceedings, Perkins warned followers that “the radical Left is rallied around a single goal: impeaching this president to stop his pro-life, pro-family values, pro-religious liberty agenda, so they can force their radical, anti-American agenda onto voters.”

This rear guard has been poised at every turn of the impeachment investigation to defend Trump.The Family Research Council’s marquee annual event, the Values Voter Summit, came this year in October, just days after FBI agents arrested Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, associates of presidential attorney Rudy Giuliani, as they were attempting to leave the country. The two were charged in a scheme to violate election laws by funneling foreign money to Republicans including then-Texas Rep. Pete Sessions, who in turn pressed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to recall the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. (Both men have pled not guilty.) As the Values Voter Summit got underway, Yovanovitch testified that she had been told by a top State Department official that she was recalled from her post prematurely due to “a concerted campaign against me, and that the Department had been under pressure from the President to remove me since the Summer of 2018.”

[TOM PENNINGTON/GETTY IMAGES

Pastor Robert Jeffress leads the Pledge of Allegiance before President Trump speaks during a "Keep America Great" Rally on October 17, 2019 in Dallas, Texas.]

To Values Voter Summit attendees, however, this tumble of calamitous news was only evidence of a partisan attack against a divinely anointed president. Carly Eli, an attendee from Atlanta, said in an interview that God has told her that Trump is “chosen” and “anointed,” and that she believes God has placed a “hedge of protection” around Trump. Eli claims to have received visions of God placing a crown on Trump’s head twice — something she interprets as a prophecy that Trump will serve two terms.

Another attendee, Jason Farris, came from Colorado, where he is a volunteer with the Truth & Liberty Coalition, a new political advocacy group that is based on 7 Mountains theology, which holds that Christians must take control of the seven major spheres of society — religion, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. When Farris read the July 25 call summary, he said it was “easy for me to see he [Trump] didn’t do anything wrong.” Echoing an increasingly common GOP talking point, Farris claimed that the impeachment proceedings were instigated by Democrats who are disappointed that “the Mueller report didn’t give them what they wanted. ... Even since before the inauguration, the progressive left has wanted to undermine and remove him from office,” he said.

Another attendee, Eric Swanson, a graduate of Liberty University and host of a podcast called All-In America, called the impeachment probe “disgusting” and “the biggest witch hunt in American history.” Instead, he insisted, Joe Biden should be investigated for bribery, echoing a widespread conspiracy theory that Biden “confessed” to bribery in a 2018 appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked.

In this evangelical bubble, the Republican lawmakers who disrupt the impeachment investigation and confuse the public about both the process and the facts of the case are heroes. On Oct. 23, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and other Republican lawmakers stormed the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility where a closed-door deposition was about to take place. That same day, former Arkansas Gov. and onetime Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was taping his flagship weekly television program for Trinity Broadcasting Network. In a segment Huckabee calls “Facts of the Matter,” during which he tries “to make sense of some of the certified Washington, D.C., insanity,” a viewer named Carlos asked whether Gaetz had accomplished anything with his stunt.

In response, Huckabee, who is the father of former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, proceeded to spout disinformation about what had happened. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, Huckabee claimed, “was so frightened by” the Republicans’ entry “that he shut the meeting down, got up and he walked out.” (In fact, the room had to be swept for security reasons after the Republican lawmakers broke security rules by bringing their cellphones inside.) Huckabee further misled his audience that “this was all happening behind closed doors, where only one side even got to call witnesses, one side got to hear the full testimony.” (This also was not true; Republicans could and did attend the depositions and ask questions.) To applause, Huckabee declared that such proceedings might take place “in North Korea, maybe in China, maybe in Iran, but not in America.”

Trump’s evangelical base is a sprawling, interconnected network of political advocacy groups, megachurches, White House advisers, televangelists and prayer warriors.

In the eyes of evangelical loyalists, Trump is a salvific figure who must be defended to save Christian America from a catastrophic downfall at the hands of overweening Democrats. After 25 evangelical advisers met with him at the White House in late October, participants, including the Christian public relations guru Johnnie Moore, whom Trump appointed to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, pushed out photographs of them praying with the president on social media. (Moore did not respond to interview requests for this article.) In an interview the day after the meeting, evangelical adviser Robert Jeffress, the Dallas megachurch pastor and Fox News personality, said that most evangelicals “believe this impeachment is an attempt to overthrow the 2016 election and therefore negate the votes of millions of evangelical Christians.” These voters, he went on, “see it as a war for the soul of our nation.” Jeffress predicted that evangelicals would react “very poorly” to Republican senators voting to convict Trump in an impeachment trial.

Trump’s evangelical boosters have also mobilized their foot soldiers into a spiritual army of prayer warriors who fervently believe their intercession will aid Trump against demonic enemies. This effort fans out far beyond leading Beltway players like Perkins or Reed, or popular television stars like Huckabee or Jeffress. In fact, Trump’s validation has meant greater celebrity for a proliferating network of “prophets” and televangelists, like Lance Wallnau, a speaker and author known for comparing Trump to the biblical King Cyrus, who restored Jerusalem. Wallnau claims to receive divine revelations about Trump, his power, and the attacks on him from a demonic left. Bakker’s Prophetic Encounter conference also featured the evangelist Jeremiah Johnson, who claims to have received many visions from God about Trump, and wrote a book called “Trump, 2019, & Beyond,” in which he claims, among other things, that God warned him about Hillary Clinton in 2012, telling him to “take careful notice of the secrecy that she operates in,” and warning, “The Church must resist her. She has plans to control, plans to influence. Beware!”

As the impeachment probe intensified and the House approved a resolution laying out its procedures, Trump actively sought to reward powerful evangelical figures for their support. In late October, for example, he elevated controversial Florida televangelist Paula White to an official White House post as the adviser to his Faith and Opportunities Initiative, a reinvention of George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. White, Trump’s top spiritual adviser and friend, hails from the world of the prosperity gospel, where God is portrayed as blessing believers with finances and good health, and where prophecies from God — about Trump and otherwise — are commonplace. She has long been a key emissary between Trump and this world, elevating his profile in this community while he in turn has expanded theirs.

Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called White “unfit” for her new position, and denounced the appointment as “yet another example of President Trump pandering to his evangelical Christian supporters as he scrambles to secure his base amidst an impeachment investigation.”

Forming A Defense

The blueprint for the evangelical defense of Trump against impeachment was crafted during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and obstruction of justice by Trump and his associates. In early May, a few weeks after Mueller released his report, Trump assembled his closest evangelical supporters for a Rose Garden ceremony for the National Day of Prayer. There, White declared the White House “holy ground” and prayed that Trump would “fulfill all the will of the Lord and do the assignment God has carried him to do.” Later that month, Franklin Graham organized a group of more than 250 pastors to make June 2 a special day of prayer for the president because his “enemies continue to try everything to destroy him, his family, and the presidency.” (White did not respond to interview requests for this article.)

While the Christian right has, since Ronald Reagan’s presidential run in 1980, rallied around GOP nominees, the tenor and nature of the mobilization for Trump’s reelection is markedly new.

Evangelical leaders also freely weighed in on the substance of the Mueller report itself. “No collusion,” Jeffress told me in June during the Faith & Freedom Coalition Road to Majority Conference in Washington. “I’ve said to the president several times … unless Bob Mueller can produce a photograph of you holding the flashlight while the Russians were breaking into a voting machine — anything short of that he won’t need to worry about,” Jeffress said.

At the Faith & Freedom Coalition Road to Majority Conference in June, attended by a thousand grassroots activists from around the country, administration officials and evangelical activists portrayed Washington as a bubble disconnected from reality and obsessed by the “phony Russian collusion scandal.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell accused Democrats of having “Trump derangement syndrome.” Marsha Blackburn, the Republican senator from Tennessee, told the audience, “Fewer and fewer people believe what they hear on the evening news. They listen to it with skepticism and doubt.” But this conference will “shore you up and give you the information you need to talk to your friends and neighbors,” Blackburn said, because the “most important name in news is you and your circle of friends.”

Conference attendees also heard from John Solomon, the Fox contributor and former opinion writer for The Hill, who reportedly was at the center of spreading disinformation about Joe Biden and his son Hunter. His articles fomented the recall of Ambassador Yovanovitch based on a false claim by a Ukrainian prosecutor who later recanted it, and they promoted the conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election to help Hillary Clinton. At the Faith & Freedom conference, Solomon took aim at his mainstream media peers, lamenting that they had lost their neutrality in reporting the news. “If the media had been neutral, it would have taken a deep breath at the beginning of this Russia scandal and they would have had reason to pause, and say, some of this doesn’t add up, it’s too easy, it doesn’t make sense,” Solomon told the audience. “Instead they just went on this bandwagon and drove off. They eventually drove off a cliff, and they have a story that today is overtly wrong.”

David Brody, political correspondent for the Trump-cheerleading Christian Broadcasting Network, who was moderating the panel on which Solomon spoke, left that comment unchallenged — even though the intelligence community had concluded that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump. After Mueller gave a press conference about his report in late May, stating, “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Brody’s network ran a story headlined, “Case Closed: Special Counsel Mueller Says Russia Investigation Is Over, Nothing More to Say.”

Unprecedented Power

Whether Trump’s evangelical boosters actually believe he is anointed by God or that the evidence really does exonerate him, they have one powerful motive for their unflagging support: Trump has given evangelicals unprecedented power. With him in the White House, Christian right ideologues have virtual carte blanche to run his administration, as he has handed them control over personnel and policy at a level they could have only dreamed of, even under admired presidents like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Trump has handed them conservative judicial nominees, from the Supreme Court down to federal trial courts, and also has installed longtime evangelical allies at key Cabinet posts, including Mike Pompeo at the State Department, Bill Barr at the Department of Justice, Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Development, and Betsy DeVos at Education. Ralph Reed has told his followers, “There are more Christians serving” in the Trump administration “than all previous presidents combined.”

At the Faith & Freedom conference in June, Mercedes Schlapp, who at the time served in the White House but later moved over to the Trump reelection campaign, described her office as “the West Wing Chapel.” Derek Kan, a political appointee at the Office of Management and Budget, recounted how the books of Leviticus, Joshua and Genesis shape his views on regulation and taxes.

Health and Human Services has been ground zero for Trump administration efforts to scale back reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and eroding church-state separation and framing it as “religious freedom” for Christians. HHS Secretary Alex Azar then delivered a speech enumerating “many of the ways that under President Trump HHS has protected life, conscience and faith.” The department, he said, has “never fought more fiercely to protect life at all stages, from conception until natural death. That is thanks above all to the work, the leadership and the courage of President Trump, the most pro-life president in American history.” At the Values Voter Summit, two officials from HHS — Shannon Royce, the head of the department’s Office of Faith and Opportunity Initiatives, and Roger Severino, the head of the Office of Civil Rights, which in 2018 launched a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division — were given front-row seats and a shoutout from Tony Perkins.

In turn, evangelical organizations provide top Trump deputies a platform to tout their Christian credentials to the base ? and shield them from the glare of mounting scandals. The same day that Yovanovitch testified in her closed-door deposition, Pompeo delivered a speech, “Being a Christian Leader,” to the American Association of Christian Counselors, which is led by Tim Clinton, another top evangelical ally to Trump. (Clinton did not respond to a request for comment.) A week and a half later, Pompeo touted religious freedom initiatives carried out by the State Department to a Heritage Foundation President’s Club Meeting in Washington, D.C., joking that the gathering had provided him “shelter from the storm.”

Reelecting A ‘Christian’ President

While the Christian right has, since Ronald Reagan’s presidential run in 1980, rallied around GOP nominees, the tenor and nature of the mobilization for Trump’s reelection is markedly new. While many of the expressed fears — that a Democratic president would nominate pro-Roe v. Wade judges or take away Christians’ religious freedom — are familiar, the motivation now is not just to avert liberal judges and policies. It is much more deliberately an imperative to reelect a singularly “Christian” president. As Ralph Reed reportedly will argue in a book to be published this spring, evangelicals “have a moral obligation to enthusiastically back” Trump in 2020.

With Trump’s reelection once again hinging on slim margins in a few key states, a multifaceted get-out-the-vote operation is getting underway. Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition is aiming to raise $42.7 million for its 2020 Project, aimed at bolstering its “unparalleled values-voter database, supporting field offices, and coordinating volunteers and staff to get out the vote.” It will be, Reed promised supporters, the “largest Christian Get Out The Vote (GOTV) effort in history,” necessary because “the left is already turning the re-election of Donald Trump into a three-ring circus, aimed at impeaching our president and reversing all progress for voters of faith.”

Reed’s organization is not alone. United In Purpose, an organization that provides polling and voter data to Christian right organizations, helped organize a pivotal 2016 meeting between a thousand evangelical leaders and Trump, during which he sealed an alliance by promising to nominate judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade and eliminate the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches from using tax-exempt resources to endorse political candidates. Although his organization is “still in the planning stages” for the 2020 election cycle, UIP’s president, Bill Dallas, said in an interview that the conservative Christian get-out-the-vote operation ? as well as its opposition’s ? will exceed 2016 in terms of “the sophistication, not just the data mining, using every technique to get the votes out.”

Maximizing white evangelical turnout for Trump will be key in Michigan and Wisconsin, two states he won in 2016 by narrow margins. White evangelicals made up 27% and 28% of the electorate in those states, respectively, according to exit polling data. Other closely watched states with high percentages of white evangelical turnout in 2016 include North Carolina (38%), Iowa (34%) and Ohio (33%).

According to Dallas, the views driving Trump’s support among the Christian voters that United in Purpose targets have already begun to solidify. “The reason why Trump has such a strong support base is because he did what he said he would do,” said Dallas. “I don’t see that [impeachment] turning off Christian voters. What would turn off Christian voters is if he didn’t fulfill his promises and commitments that he said he would do if he was elected.”

For the 2020 cycle, My Faith Votes, an organization that boasts Huckabee as its honorary national chairman, has also been organizing voter registration drives. “As Christians,” Jason Yates, the group’s CEO claims, “we must always look to elect leaders who defend our values and believe that God is the ultimate authority in this nation.” (Yates did not respond to interview requests.) In an email to My Faith Votes supporters, Huckabee described the group’s efforts in more detail. Over the course of the year, he wrote, “TV and radio PSAs will be running around the country reaching millions; millennials and Generation Z will be reached on Christian campuses; hundreds of thousands of Christians will be mobilized using peer-to-peer texting and door-to-door outreach, all in an effort to motivate and equip Christians with everything they need to take action.”

In November, Yates announced a partnership with Intercessors for America, an organization based in Purcellville, Virginia, that hosts weekly prayer calls and enlists supporters to engage in prayer against supposed deep-state and George Soros-led schemes against Trump and his allies. In a webcast, Yates and Dave Kubal, Intercessors for America’s president, announced they were developing a phone app to identify Christian voters with a “low propensity” to vote. But apps and microtargeting of voters are not the only way to keep evangelical voters in the Trump camp. The next day, Kubal was on a conference call with Paula White, her chief of staff, Todd Lamphere, and the evangelists Jon and Jolene Hamill announcing the launch of the One Voice Prayer Movement, carrying out, according to Kubal, White’s “vision to see the church of Jesus Christ come together, and pray for this administration and pray for our country.” (Kubal did not respond to an interview request. The Hamills, who are hosting a “Revolution” conference on New Year’s Eve at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, also did not respond to interview requests.)

On the call, White prayed for 10 minutes, during which she asked God to protect Trump and deliver him from his enemies. “Lord, we ask you to deliver our president from any snare, any trap, any setup of the enemy according to Ephesians 6:12,” a verse in the Bible that forms the core of the “spiritual warfare” that Trump’s prayer warriors say they are engaged in on his behalf. (“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”)

But White has a plan to protect Trump from those dark forces, vanquish his enemies, and to defend the “biblical” government that has elevated Christian right personnel and policy priorities. And she left no doubt that the multiple roles she plays — presidential personal pastor, White House employee and defender of Trump against his enemies — have merged into a single message of God’s wrath against anyone who dares criticize him. “Any persons, entities, that are aligned against the president,” she said on the One Voice Prayer Movement launch call, “will be exposed and dealt with and overturned by the superior blood of Jesus.”

Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations.

ABOUT THE REPORTER

Sarah Posner

SARAH POSNER

Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations and author of God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/11/how-mike-pence-meddled-in-foreign-aid-to-reroute-money-to-favored-christian-groups/

Last November, a top Trump appointee at the U.S. Agency for International Development wrote a candid email to colleagues about pressure from the White House to reroute Middle East aid to religious minorities, particularly Christian groups “Sometimes this decision will be made for us by the White House (see… Iraq! And, increasingly, Syria),” said Hallam Ferguson, a senior official in USAID’s Middle East bureau, in an email seen by ProPublica. “We need to stay ahead of this curve everywhere lest our interventions be dictated to us.”< >The email underscored what had become a stark reality under the Trump White House. Decisions about U.S. aid are often no longer being governed by career professionals applying a rigorous review of applicants and their capabilities. Over the last two years, political pressure, particularly from the office of Vice President Mike Pence, had seeped into aid deliberations and convinced key decision-makers that unless they fell in line, their jobs could be at stake.

Five months before Ferguson sent the email, his former boss had been ousted following a mandate from Pence’s chief of staff. Pence had grown displeased with USAID’s work in Iraq after Christian groups were turned down for aid.

ProPublica viewed internal emails and conducted interviews with nearly 40 current and former U.S. officials and aid professionals that shed new light on the success of Pence and his allies in influencing the government’s long-standing process for awarding foreign aid. Most people spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Trump administration’s efforts to influence USAID funding sparked concern from career officials, who worried the agency risked violating constitutional prohibitions on favoring one religion over another. They also were concerned that being perceived as favoring Christians could worsen Iraq’s sectarian divides.

“There are very deliberate procurement guidelines that have developed over a number of years to guard precisely against this kind of behavior,” said Steven Feldstein, a former State Department and USAID official during the Obama administration. When politics intrude on the grant-making process, “you’re diluting the very nature of what development programs ought to accomplish.”

USAID regulations state that awards “must be free from political interference or even the appearance of such interference and must be made on the basis of merit, not on the basis of the religious affiliation of a recipient organization, or lack thereof.”

Last month, USAID announced two grants to Iraqi organizations that career officials had previously rejected. Political appointees significantly impacted the latest awards, according to interviews with officials and other people aware of the process. Typically, such appointees have little to no involvement in USAID grants, to avoid perceptions of undue political influence on procurement.

One of the groups selected for the newest awards has no full-time paid staff, no experience with government grants and a financial tie that would typically raise questions in an intense competition for limited funds. The second organization received its first USAID direct grant after extensive public comments by its leader and allies highlighting what they described as a lack of U.S. assistance to Christians. The two groups — a charity that primarily serves Christian Iraqis and a Catholic university — were not originally listed as front-runners, according to a document seen by ProPublica.

The Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed have previously reported Pence’s interest in increasing foreign aid to Christians and his displeasure with USAID’s activities in Iraq.

Pence’s spokeswoman, Katie Waldman, did not respond to questions. A USAID spokeswoman did not respond to specific questions, including about Ferguson’s email, but said the latest grants were appropriate.

“The Trump Administration has made responding to the genocide committed by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) against religious and ethnic minorities a top priority,” said the spokeswoman, Pooja Jhunjhunwala. “Assistance to religious and ethnic communities targeted by ISIS is not a departure from the norm, but rather a continuation of USAID’s rich history of promoting inclusive development and defending human dignity and religious freedom in our partner countries.”

Approximately 97% of Iraq’s population is Muslim, according to the most recent U.S. figures available. Religious minorities — including Christians, Yazidis and others — make up around 2% to 3% of Iraq’s total population.

The Trump administration’s efforts to steer funding to these minorities in Iraq stand in stark contrast to its overall approach to foreign aid. It has repeatedly proposed cutting U.S. diplomatic and foreign assistance budgets by billions of dollars. In August, as the White House was considering cuts to an array of foreign aid programs, it shielded funding for religious minorities abroad, according to newsaccounts.

As Trump mounts a 2020 reelection effort, he is taking steps to solidify his conservative Christian base, including his decision last week to install his spiritual adviser, Florida televangelist Paula White, in a White House position. Increasing aid to Christians abroad is a core value for his supporters.

In a speech last month at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, a major gathering of the religious right, Trump touted his administration’s work on behalf of religious minorities in Iraq and Syria....

Paula White: Christians Must Vote For Trump Because His Judges Won't Let States Outlaw the Bible

President’s spiritual adviser: Saying no to President Trump ‘would be saying no to God’

Elizabeth Preza October 9, 2019

President Donald Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White says she was ordered by God to serve the Republican president. The prosperity gospel pastor explained that she was compelled to serve as…

Cody Fenwick May 3, 2019

At the White House’s National Day of Prayer event on Thursday, leaders in different religions had the chance to speak before attendees and deliver a brief message or invocation from their…

At the White House’s National Day of Prayer event on Thursday, leaders in different religions had the chance to speak before attendees and deliver a brief message or invocation from their faith traditions. But one speaker stood out among all the rest, the woman who is said to be Trump’s spiritual adviser and personal pastor.

Her name is Paula White, the leader of an evangelical megachurch in Florida and advocate of the prosperity gospel — a widely disparaged creed that offers the promises of present-day riches in exchange for spiritual devotion and faith. It’s a belief system with striking parallels — and often is an outright cover for — financial scams. (“As recently as last year,” the Guardian reported in March, “White encouraged members of her congregation to send their first month’s salary to her ministry to enjoy God’s blessings.”)

While the other speakers approached the lectern and spoke solemnly and calmly, White barreled up to the microphone and began immediately speaking a mile a minute, telling the audience to grab each other hands.

And despite her cheerful demeanor, her speech struck some dark and ominous notes.

“We are not wrestling against flesh and blood but against principalities, wickedness and darkness, so we declare every demonic networkto be scattered right now,” she said. “We declare right now that there is a hedge of protection over our president, first lady, every assignment, the purpose they carry and the mantle.”

She continued: “And like the apostle, apostle Paul, said in Galatians: ‘I was set apart from my mother’s whom, and marked off by boundaries.’ For let him fulfill all the will of the Lord and do the assignment God has carried him to do for your great name, for your great nation and all your people in the world.”

It was a small peek inside the relationship between Trump and White, who has owned an apartment in one of Trump’s buildings for years, The Guardian has reported. She told the outlet that her meeting and forming a relationship with Trump was an ‘assignment” from God.

She has defended the president at some of his lowest movements, such as the revelations around his abusive migrant family separation policy and his deadly neglect of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, giving cover for him with his crucial evangelical base. She has also advised him on policy, according to the Guardian, such as the decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Watch the clip of her remarks from the National Day of Prayer below:

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/top-trump-evangelical-advisor-ruthlessly-mocked-bashing-immigrants-claiming-jesus

Pentecostal televangelist pastor Paula White is the chair of Donald Trump's White House Evangelical Advisory Board, and she's being mocked by actual faith leaders for her claim that Jesus never broke the law. “Yes, he did live in Egypt for three-and-a-half years,” Pastor White told Pat Robertson's CBN News. “But it was not illegal.” “If he had broken the law, then he would have been sinful and he would not have been our Messiah,” White insisted.

That's totally false. "In fact," Talking Points Memo notes, "Jesus was famously crucified specifically for breaking the law by claiming to be the son of God. Before that, he was persecuted by religious leaders and the Romans for violating laws like resting on the Sabbath." White made her remarks to support President Trump's theft of infants and children, separating them from their parents and siblings, and losing track of them. There are currently thousands detained, some in concentration camps, where conditions have been described as horrific.

She told CBN the experience the children have in the concentration camps is "life-changing," which it is, but not as she described. "Not just three square meals, psychiatric care, clinician, medical care, chapel, events, schooling, language, and love." That's been proven to be false. Several actual Christian leaders and many others attacked White for her false interpretation of the Bible. If we don’t help people name & condemn #SlaveholderReligion, they are left to believe this is the teaching of the church. Trump & the GOP have elevated Christian nationalism to a place where many confuse it w/ orthodox faith. https://t.co/rsOjvpCxAj

— Rev. Dr. Barber(@RevDrBarber) July 11, 2018

Incorrect, @Paula_White. Jesus broke the law all the time, both religious and civic ones. For this he was crucified. Do you not read your bible, sis? https://t.co/3DJX7sq2g1

— Rev. Decatúr (@dstarwriter59) July 11, 2018

This is so angering. @Paula_White is saying, if Egypt had immigration laws, Jesus should have been left 4 slaughter. And a law breaker can't be the Messiah? Ya think turning over the tables in the temple was legal? Modern Jesus, Paula would be right there, cheering crucifixion. https://t.co/m9ah7nduSF

— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) July 11, 2018

This is the obscenity of faux Christians. @Paula_White says Mary and Joseph should have ignored the angel and stayed in Israel so their son could be slaughtered if Egypt had immigration laws. Meanwhile, Paula ignores Deut 10:18-19, Matthew 25:31-46 & Romans 12:13. #EvilAmongUs https://t.co/m9ah7nduSF

— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) July 11, 2018

No. Jesus "broke the laws," both religious and civic, several times, which is one of the reasons he was crucified. He healed on the Sabbath, permitted his disciples to pluck grain, had contact with the unclean, and so on. Plus, he was indeed a refugee: https://t.co/sDMECI3IDj https://t.co/sRc4FgqClN

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) July 11, 2018

.@Paula_White - who commits theological malpractice with nearly every word - advises the president of the United States.

Where did she get her theological education? She didn’t. Her highest degree is a high school diploma. https://t.co/s31RO8Ciws

— Rev. Dr. Chuck Currie (@RevChuckCurrie) July 11, 2018

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-new-bbc-report-trumps-predatory-behavior-wont-sway-his-evangelical

no secret that President Trump is wildly unpopular in Europe, and a 30-minute BBC report that aired earlier this week as part of the “BBC Panorama” series is unlikely to improve his image overseas.

Titled “Trump: Is the President a Sex Pest?,” the report contains anecdotes describing Trump’s creepy behavior around women in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the women interviewed, Barbara Pilling, alleged that when she met Trump at a party in New York City in the late 1980s and told him she was only 17, he responded, “Oh, great. So, you’re not too old and not too young. That’s just great.”

Pilling recalled, “I felt I was in the presence of a shark.' Another interviewee, Heather Braden, alleged that when she met Trump at a party in Miami in the 1990s that was attended by 50 female models and only four men, she “felt like a piece of meat in a market.”

The BBC report is hardly the first time Trump has been described as disrespectful of women. Allegations of sexism and misogyny dogged him throughout his presidential campaign of 2016. But those allegations didn’t scare away far-right Christian fundamentalists two years ago when they came out in droves to vote for him, and the BBC report is most unlikely to bother them either. In the minds of the Christian Right, the prosperity gospel gives Trump a sort of diplomatic immunity regardless of allegations that he sexually harassed women in the past or had sex with adult film star Stormy Daniels.

Christianity is diverse and complex in the United States, which has its share of Christians who lean to the left economically—for example, African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church members who are civil rights activists or Sister Mary Scullion (a Catholic nun famous for her liberal/progressive activism and efforts on behalf of the poor and the homeless). Scullion is most certainly not a proponent of the right-wing prosperity gospel, which teaches that the rich are rich because God has blessed them and the poor are poor because God is punishing their immorality.

Prosperity theologyis common among white Pentecostal fundamentalists; Pastor Joel Osteen, for example, is a strong proponent. Although the Houston, Texas-based evangelical never officially endorsed his presidential campaign in 2016, Osteen described Trump as a “friend of our ministry” and “a good man.” And Osteen is hardly the only white evangelical who admires the president. Among the far-right white Christians he has courted, Trump hasn’t lost any popularity.

In a May 2017 lecture, Kate Bowler—religious scholar and author of the 2013 book “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel”—described Trump as the “first American president whose only religious impulses arise from the American prosperity gospel” and explained that “Trump is, in short, the prosperity gospel’s religious trifecta.”

As liberal sex columnist Dan Savage—a blistering critic of Trump—has pointed out, the president is merely portraying a social issue and has hardly lived his life like one. But Trump, Savage noted, gets a pass from far-right white evangelicals because he’s willing to help them abuse the poor and people of color.Right-wing libertarians and right-wing evangelicals have very different views in some respects. While many libertarians combine extreme fiscal conservatism with socially liberal views on abortion, porn, marijuana and same-sex marriage (for example, 2016 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson), the prosperity gospel combines extreme fiscal conservatism with a disdain for those things—although the ultra-rich are so adored in prosperity theology that Trump’s evangelical supporters are quite happy to overlook his sexual history. To prosperity theologists, Trump wouldn’t be so rich if he didn’t enjoy God’s stamp of approval.

While Trump’s overall approval ratings in the U.S. are lower than President Barack Obama’s were—Trump enjoyed a 43% approval among the overall U.S. population in a Gallup poll in May—they are high among white Protestant evangelicals. A March survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that among that demographic, Trump enjoys an approval rating of 75%. And that’s the same crowd that detested Obama when he was president despite the fact that he has a much longer history of attending church and obviously knows a lot more about the Bible. Obama has obviously led a much more clean-cut life than Trump, but to the Christian Right and proponents of prosperity theology, that doesn’t matter. Right-wing white evangelicals equate Donald “Grab ‘Em by the Pussy” Trump with money and power—and therefore, Christian morality—while equating Obama with socialism and giveaways for poor Americans they consider freeloaders, although truth be told, Obama was a decidedly centrist president even though his rhetorical style could sound very populist at times.

The chances that the BBC’s “Trump: Is the President a Sex Pest?” will harm the president’s relationship with his far-right white evangelical supporters are slim and none. And with Trump appointing wingnuts like Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh—severe fiscal conservatives who are also severe social conservatives—to the U.S. Supreme Court, his popularity among the Christian Right is likely to grow even stronger.

Trump, as Savage asserted, is merely portraying a social conservative. But it’s a portrayal that is working extremely well for him among far-right white evangelicals who hate the poor as much as they hate abortion, porn and same-sex marriage.

ref below

http://www.newsweek.com/evangelical-christians-trump-religion-religious-liberty-640310

newsweek no lnx

HURRICANE HARVEY

JOEL OSTEEN

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP

THEOLOGY

CHRISTIANITY

Joel Osteen has faced a storm of criticism since Hurricane Harvey hit Texas.

The Houston televangelist came under fire after the hurricane dumped 27 trillion gallons of rain on Texas, leaving tens of thousands homeless. Commentators slammed Osteen for delaying the opening of his 16,800-seater megachurch to flood refugees until four days after the storm made landfall.

Much of the anger focused on Osteen’s own wealth, which has been estimated north of $40 million.

...

But Osteen was not fazed. The 54-year-old preacher said he had been a victim of a “misinformation” campaign and encouraged victims of Harvey to turn to their faith for solace.

As pastor of the United States’s biggest church—Lakewood reportedly has a weekly attendance of more than 40,000—Osteen is used to coming under scrutiny. And as one of the best-known proponents of a controversial brand of Christianity known as prosperity theology, or the prosperity gospel, Osteen is no stranger to receiving flak, both from inside and outside Christian circles.

Joel Osteen

Joel Osteen, the pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, conducts a service as the city starts the process of rebuilding after severe flooding during Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas, on September 3.

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY

Prosperity theology has been characterized as the theological equivalent to the American Dream. The essence of the prosperity gospel is simple: Faith brings rewards, not only in the afterlife—as taught in all mainstream forms of Christianity—but also in the earthly life. These rewards can take the form of health, career success, and, most controversially, wealth.

Read more: “We’ve got the White House on speed dial.” How evangelicals are influencing Trump]

The movement grew out of 20th-century U.S. televangelism, among other influences. Preachers such as Oral Roberts and William Branham led major revivals across the country in the mid-1900s. The revivals would be spectacular events, including healings and promises of well being. John Osteen, the father of Joel, was part of this movement and founded Lakewood Church in 1959; Joel would succeed his father as pastor.

Osteen has previously denied being a prosperity preacher in the sense of wealth. “If prosperity means God wants us to be blessed and healthy and have good relationships, then yes, I’m a prosperity teacher. But if it’s about money, no, I never preach about money,” said Osteen in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). Newsweek reached out to Lakewood and Joel Osteen Ministries for an interview with Osteen, but received no response.

Joel Osteen

@JoelOsteen

You don’t grow in the good times, you grow in the tough times. Watch this encouraging message from Joel: http://ow.ly/h5Mw30eV3TK

5:46 AM - Sep 5, 2017

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But experts disagree. Kate Bowler, an expert on prosperity theology, tells Newsweek that Osteen falls into the category of “soft prosperity preachers,” who focus on positive thinking as a means to achieve one’s life ambitions, including wealth. But, according to Osteen’s theology, “life’s circumstances still depend on a believer’s use of faith,” says Bowler, a professor at Duke Divinity School in North Carolina and author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel.

Anthea Butler, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is more forthright. “At best he’s a motivational speaker. He’s in the line of Norman Vincent Pealeand others who tell you how to live your best life now, God’s going to bless you if you do certain things. He’s prosperity gospel through and through,” Butler tells Newsweek.

Perhaps Osteen should not be shy to admit his fondness for prosperity theology, since it appears to be popular with believers. While evangelical leaders have renounced it—a 2011 Pew Research Center report found that 90 percent of global evangelical leaders rejected the notion that God would grant health and wealth to those with enough faith—that does not appear to be the case among ordinary believers. A 2006 Pew survey found that 46 percent of U.S. Christians agreed that God grants believers material prosperity, while 56 percent thought believers would be rewarded with good health. Among Pentecostal Americans, the figures were even higher, at 66 percent for wealth and 68 percent for health.

Lakewood Church

Parishioners of Lakewood Church led by Pastor Joel Osteen pray together during a service in Houston, Texas on September 3. The bill, released today, would allow churches to endorse political candidates by curtailing the so-called Johnson Amendment.

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY

One person with whom the prosperity gospel appears to have found a home is President Trump. The Trump family attended Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, where the pastor was Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, a 1952 book that sold millions and was translated into more than a dozen languages. Trump has cited Peale as a mentor, telling the Iowa Family Leadership Summit in 2015 that he could listen to Peale “all day long. And when you left the church, you were disappointed it was over. He was the greatest guy.”

The presidential board of evangelical advisers, convened by Trump in 2016 to help him (successfully) court the religious right vote, also comprises of several high-profile prosperity preachers. Trump’s closest spiritual adviser, Paula White, the pastor of a Florida megachurch and popular Christian commentator, is one. White told an audience at a 2007 event: “Anyone who tells you to deny yourself is from Satan.”

Kenneth Copeland, another Texas televangelist, teaches that “financial prosperity is God’s will for you” and that believers should pray for financial provision from God. (Osteen is not on the board and never officially endorsed Trump’s presidential bid, though he did describe Trump as a “friend of our ministry” and “a good man.”)

Trump’s mantra of making America great again, which emphasizes American exceptionalism; his championing of his own personal wealth; and his connections to Pentecostal prosperity theology make him the “first American president whose only religious impulses arise from the American prosperity gospel,” said Bowler in a May lecture. “Trump is, in short, the prosperity gospel’s religious trifecta,” she said.

Trump day of prayer declaration

President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and faith leaders say a prayer September 1 during the signing of a proclamation to declare Sunday, September 3, as a National Day of Prayer for people affected by Hurricane Harvey.

In religious circles, prosperity theology has long been controversial for seeming to equate poverty with falling out of God’s favor and apparently contradicting outright many biblical verses. (The Beatitudes, a key segment of Jesus’s teaching, begins : “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.)

But according to some experts, the theology also has political ramifications. Paul Djupe, associate professor at Denison University specializing in religion and politics, says that the ideas behind the prosperity theology—that an individual is responsible for their socioeconomic status, and that financial well being is an indicator of goodness—have permeated Republican politics. “It can be found in the anemic support for welfare and the safety net, weak support for regulations on business, weak support for organized labor,and positive feelings toward the wealthy,” Djupe tells Newsweek via email.

Butler, who recently penned a New York Times editorial on Osteen’s reaction to Harvey, says that prosperity theology leaves little room for compassion for the marginalized. She cites Trump’s recent decision to scrap the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) scheme—which protects some 800,000 undocumented immigrants born or raised in the United States—as an example. Trump previously said that he had a “big heart” for those protected by DACA and has tried to calm fears of those under the scheme since its rescinding was announced.

DACA protest

Immigrants and supporters march past the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles as undocumented people jailed inside tap on the windows in opposition to President Donald Trump's order to end DACA on September 5. Around 800,000 undocumented immigrants, known as DREAMers, benefit from immigration protections under DACA.

“You make a decision based on the fact that there’s 800,000 people here who have only known America as their own country. So he can’t have compassion for them and let them stay in?” says Butler. “That’s part of the problem with these [prosperity gospel] people: they’re rigid, they’re unbending, they believe that their success is based on the fact that they have followed this formula. As we all know, sometimes formulas don’t work.”

In the wake of Harvey, Osteen and Trump were perhaps the two public figures who came in for most scrutiny. (Trump was criticized for not visiting victims during an initial visit to Texas, which he rectified on a later second visit.) But given prosperity theology’s denunciation of negative thoughts and exaltation of the positive, the criticism is unlikely to have any lasting impact.

“Trump and Osteen are really two sides of the same coin,” says Butler. “They’re both selling the same thing. They’re selling their success, their wealth: ‘You can do it too if you just pay attention to me.’”

t burton

The prosperity gospel, explained: Why Joel Osteen believes that prayer can make you rich

The long, strange history of a quintessentially American theology.

In the wake of Tropical Storm Harvey, which has resulted in the deaths of at least 46 people, few narratives have captured the public imagination — or anger — like that of Joel Osteen and his Lakewood Church, one of the largest megachurches in the country. Osteen’s seeming hesitation in opening the church as a shelter for evacuees provoked an intense social media backlash.

Lakewood’s representatives maintain that the church was opened as soon as it was safe and feasible to do so. But whether the backlash was founded or not, it reflects the profoundly ambiguous feelings Americans of different faiths have about wildly wealthy preachers likeOsteen — whose net worth is estimated at over $50 million— and about the “prosperity gospel” he preaches.

As Laura Turner notes in an excellent piece for BuzzFeed, no theological tradition is as rife for accusations of hypocrisy as the “prosperity gospel,” a distinctively American theological tradition. While it’s popular among many evangelical Protestants, it’s been condemned by many others. But to many of its critics, especially since the election of Donald Trump, this tradition has come to represent the worst of the conflation of American-style capitalism, religion, and Republican party politics.

The prosperity gospel has its roots in an American occult tradition called New Thought

The prosperity gospel is an umbrella term for a group of ideas — popular among charismatic preachers in the evangelical tradition — that equate Christian faith with material, and particularly financial, success. It has a long history in American culture, with figures like Osteen and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, glamorous, flashily-dressed televangelists whose Disneyland-meets-Bethlehem Christian theme park, Heritage USA, was once the third-most-visited site in America.

A 2006 *Times* poll found that 17 percent of American Christians identify explicitly with the movement, while 31 percent espouse the idea that “if you give your money to God God will bless you with more money.” A full 61 percent agree with the more general idea that “God wants people to be prosperous.”

Its roots, though, don’t just lie in explicitly Christian tradition. In fact, it’s possible to trace the origins of the American prosperity gospel to the tradition ofNew Thought, a nineteenth-century spiritual movement popular with decidedly unorthodox thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. Practitioners of New Thought, not all of whom identified as Christian, generally held the divinity of the individual human being and the priority of mind over matter. In other words, if you could correctly channel your mental energy, you could harness its material results. New Thought, also known as the “mind cure,” took many forms: from interest in the occult to splinter-Christian denominations like Christian Science to the development of the “talking cure” at the root of psychotherapy.

The upshot of New Thought, though, was the quintessentially American idea that the individual was responsible for his or her own happiness, health, and situation in life, and that applying mental energy in the appropriate direction was sufficient to cure any ills.

Thus, New Thought thinker Ralph WaldoTrine (not to be confused with Ralph Waldo Emerson) could exhort his readers to “See yourself in a prosperous condition. Affirm that you will before long be in a prosperous condition.”

In addition to influencing Christian movements like the prosperity gospel, New Thought has also made its way into many “secular" aspects of American life, including the tradition of positive-thinking self-help represented by books like The Secret,which was written by an Australian but gained popularity when promoted by Oprah.

Today’s prosperity gospel was also shaped by pro-capitalist and Pentecostal thought traditions

A second strand in the development of the American prosperity gospel was the valorization of the “Protestant work ethic.”

Written in 1905, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism traced what he saw as the specifically Protestant approach to labor as integral to the development of capitalism and industrialization.

In Weber’s historical analysis, Protestant Calvinists — who generally believe in the idea of “predestination,” or that God has chosen some people to be saved and others damned — felt the need to justify their own sense of themselves as the saved. They looked both for outward signs of God’s favor (i.e., through material success) and for ways to express inward virtue (i.e., through hard work). While the accuracy of Weber’s analysis is still debated by scholars, it nevertheless tells us a lot about cultural attitudes at the time Weber wrote it.

By 1905, at least, the idea that working hard and receiving material, financial reward for that work was integral to a certain strand of Protestant Christianity had entered the public consciousness. According to a recent Dutch study, that point of view still holds true today: Protestants and citizens of predominately Protestant countries tend to conflate labor with personal satisfaction more than those of other religious traditions.

A final strand of the development of the prosperity gospel was the development of charismatic Pentecostal churches in America. An umbrella term for a decentralized group of churches — comprising over 700 denominations — Pentecostal churches are characterized by an emphasis on what is known as “spiritual gifts” (or charisms,from which the term “charismatic” is drawn). A worshipful Christian might experience, for example, the gift of healing, or might suddenly start speaking “in tongues.” This tradition of worship meant that, for a believer, the idea that God would manifest Himself to the faithful in concrete, miraculous ways in the here and nowwas more prevalent than it would be in, say, a mainline Episcopalian church. In addition, the decentralized nature of these churches also meant that individual leaders, many of whom practiced faith healing or similar practices, had a particularly strong effect on their congregations and could build up individual personal followings.

These three strands collided throughout the twentieth century, as the prosperity gospel came into being. It started — like the “work ethic” Max Weber described — as a way to justify why, during theGilded Age, some people were rich and others poor. (One early prosperity gospel proponent, Baptist preacher Russell H. Conwell, told his mostly-destitute congregation in 1915: “I say you ought to be rich; you have no right to be poor.”) Instead of blaming structural inequality, Conwell and those like him blamed the perceived failures of the individual.

Throughout the twentieth century, proponents of this particularly American blend of theology envisaged God as a kind of banker, dispensing money to the deserving, with Jesus as a model business executive. Both of these characterizations were, at times, literal: In 1936, New Thought mystic and founder of the Unity Church Charles Fillmore rewrote Psalm 23 to read, “The Lord is my banker/my credit is good”; in 1925, advertising executive Bruce Bowler wrote The Man Nobody Knows to argue that Jesus was the first great capitalist. The literal money quote reads, “Some day ... someone will write a book about Jesus. Every businessman will read it and send it to his partners and his salesmen. For it will tell the story of the founder of modern business.”

Yet it was in Pentecostal churches — with their focus on immediate spiritual gifts and the power of God to confer favor (and wellness) immediately — that the prosperity gospel as we know it today took hold. The “Word of Faith” movement — a Pentecostal version of New Thought that saw positive affirmation as central to financial and material success — became more prominent. Figures like Kenneth Hagin, his protégé Kenneth Copeland, Oral Roberts,and, of course, Osteen himself built up individual followings: followings that often grew as a result of cross-promotion (something religious historian Kate Bowler points out in her excellent *Blessed*, a history of the prosperity gospel movement). One preacher might, for example, feature another at his conference, or hawk his cassette tapes.

Central to the prosperity gospel was the idea of tithing, or giving money to the church, ideally one's “first fruits” — or initial earnings. This money, many prosperity gospel preachers promised, was an investment. By showing faith, parishioners could have a “hundredfold” return on their investment, a reference to a verse in the Gospel of Mark about those who suffer for Christ receiving a hundredfold what they have lost. Thus could Ken Copeland write in his Laws of Prosperity, "Do you want a hundredfold return on your money? Give and let God multiply it back to you. No bank in the world offers this kind of return! Praise the Lord!” In this mentality, tithing is a financially responsible thing to do. It’s a show of faith and a shrewd investment alike, a wager on the idea that God acts in the here and now to reward those with both faith and a sufficiently developed work ethic.

Many of the evangelical leaders that surround Trump are proponents of the prosperity gospel

The prosperity gospel tended to ebb and flow in accordance with wider cultural trends — it flourished in the postwar boom of the 1950s, and then again (unsurprisingly) in the no less ostentatious ‘80s, when big hair and big money alike were in. Yet despite the catastrophic fall of some of the most prominent proponents of the gospel — Jim Bakker, for example, spent years in prison for fraud— the movement has persisted well into the present day. Perhaps no less unsurprisingly, two of its major proponents — Paula White and Wayne T. Jackson — were among the six faith leaders invited to pray with Donald Trump at his inauguration.

Certainly Trump is, in some sense, a product of that mentality. In a recent op-ed in The New York Times,theology professor Anthea Butler argued that Donald Trump and Joel Osteen were “mirrors” of one another:

Both enjoy enormous support among evangelicals, yet they lack a command of biblical scripture. Both are among the 1 percent ... Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Osteen’s brands are rooted in success, not Scripture. Believers in prosperity like winners. Hurricanes and catastrophic floods do not provide the winning narratives crucial to keep adherents chained to prosperity gospel thinking. That is why it is easy for both men to issue platitudes devoid of empathy during natural disasters.

It’s difficult to say that the prosperity gospel itself led to Donald Trump’s inauguration. Again, only 17 percent of American Christians identify with it explicitly. It’s far more true, however, to say that the same cultural forces that led to the prosperity gospel’s proliferation in America — individualism, an affinity for ostentatious and charismatic leaders, the Protestant work ethic, and a cultural obsession with the power of “positive thinking” — shape how we, as a nation, approach politics.

What is our collective approach to health care, after all, if not rooted in a visceral sense that the unlucky are responsible for their own misfortune? What is our willingness to vote a man like Trump into office but a collective cultural reward for those who brand themselves as successful?

After all, Trump may have embraced New Thought more than anyone realized: seeing himself in the White House, affirming himself in the White House, before anyone else saw it coming.

He’s gotten his investment back a hundredfold.

power of pos thinking as kid?]

sez it's a wht tang?!

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-are-poor-whites-more-depressed-and-pessimistic-poor-african-americans

AN alex anderson

Carol Graham appeared on Charles Ellison’s “Reality Check” program on WURD AM/FM (a liberal/progressive African-American talk radio station in Philadelphia) and discussed theemotional differences between poor blacks and poor whites. It was a fascinating conservation: according to Graham’s research, poor African-Americans in the United States are, on the whole, more optimistic than poor whites—who Graham described to Ellison as being much more likely to fall into despair. As worried as the African-American community is by the Trump Administration and its horrible policies, Graham finds poor whites to be in a much worse state emotionally and are decidedly more pessimistic.

WURD callers, mostly African-Americans living in Philadelphia, offered different views on Graham’s findings. Some asserted that formerly middle-class whites who fell into poverty during the Great Recession were ill-equipped, emotionally, to handle the types of economic struggles African-Americans have been facing all these years. But another explanation for Graham’s findings is that poor whites—whether they became the neo-poor during the Great Recession or were poor long before that—are much more likely to have been thoroughly indoctrinated into right-wing Republican ideology, especially in Republican-dominated areas of the U.S. And as a result, they feel a certain self-hatred and blame themselves for their economic misfortunes in a way that poor African-Americans don’t. Poor whites (especially the ones based in rural areas or small towns) and poor African-Americans often live in very different worlds—and everything from the media outlets they embrace to the churches they attend to the music they listen to is likely to affect whether they view the poor as morally deficient or as people who have been seriously screwed over.

As much as right-wingers like to whine about the mainstream media having a liberal bias—which, for the most part, it doesn’t—the fact is that right-wing media is vast, from Fox News to white AM talk radio to Breitbart, Townhall, the Weekly Standard and countless other high-traffic wingnut websites. And theright-wing media has invested considerable time and energy in teaching that the poor are useless freeloaders living off the sweat, hard work and innovation of the rich (who Rush Limbaugh calls “the achievers”). Rural whites who have been bombarded with decades of poor-bashing from Fox News and white talk radio are bound to take that message to heart and view themselves as moral failures if they are not doing well financially. The overall message at an African-American talk radio station like WURD is totally different from what one hears on Limbaugh’s show. From the local programming that dominates the station to the Rev. Al Sharpton’s syndicated program, “Keeping It Real,” Donald Trump’s presidency and the Republican Party are painted in a consistently negative light on WURD—and the poor are not painted as parasites or leeches by any means, but as people who have been screwed over by crony capitalism and a rigged game. While WURD callers often sound angry and frustrated over the political climate in the Trump era, the anger doesn’t sound like self-hatred or self-blame. Sharpton and Ellison will encourage education, self-improvement and job training, but in a way that uplifts rather demonizes or belittles the poor.

Christianity comes in wildly different forms in the U.S., where white fundamentalist megachurches often have a very different view of economics than African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denominations. The Christian Right, white megachurches and fundamentalist Pentecostals typically embrace the so-called “prosperity gospel,” which teaches that the rich are blessed with affluence because of their moral superiority and that the poor are poor because of their immoral, sinful ways. But in black AME churches, one often hears that it is a Christian’s duty to feed the poor and help the homeless—and one is more likely to hear Jesus Christ quoted as saying, “It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

In AME churches, the burden of proof is usually on the rich rather than the poor. So, if an African-American in an AME congregation graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school or law school and has a six-figure income, that’s all well and good—but they’re still encouraged to roll up their sleeves and do some volunteer work in a homeless shelter because that’s their duty as a Christian. The prosperity gospel is viewed as wrong-headed and unchristian in many black AME congregations.

Liberal AME pastors view Jesus Christ as an advocate for the poor and the downtrodden. To right-wing white megachurches, Jesus hates the poor and spits in their faces.

Musicis another way in which poor whites and poor blacks can receive radically different messages. The fact that Kanye West said some favorable things about President Trump earlier this year was controversial in the hip-hop community, where Immortal Technique, Public Enemy, Ice-T, KRS-1, Paris, N.W.A, Ice Cube and countless other rappers have been known for their left-of-center views. But modern country-rock is full of right-wing activists who think former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin represents “the real America.” The Dixie Chicks became pariahs in the country music community after Natalie Maines criticized President George W. Bush and the Iraq War in 2003; Maines found out the hard way that being openly liberal can seriously damage one’s career in country music.

The message poor blacks are receiving is that poverty is the result of injustice and the failures of crony capitalism. The message many poor whites are receiving is that if you’re poor, you’re a loser and a parasite. Of course, Jay-Z, Chance the Rapper and other hip-hop stars attract racially diverse audiences and have plenty of white fans. And as many liberals and progressives as there have been in hip-hop, conservative rappers are not nonexistent. But on the whole, the poor receive a lot more emotional support in hip-hop than they do in modern country music. And even though hip-hop has plenty of imagery of bling and Benzes while modern country music likes to portray itself as music of the common man, hip-hop—at the end of the day—tends to view the poor in a much more compassionate and favorable light.

With so many poor whites being demonized whether they’re turning on Fox News, going to a megachurch or hearing their favorite country-rock stars urging them to vote Republican and support President Trump’s agenda, it’s no wonder that so many of them have fallen into despair, hopelessness and self-hatred.

no pix link

After President Donald Trump rescinded an Obama-era executive order that offers work permits to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, many religious communities responded with resounding disapproval. In addition to faith-based groups that physically protested the move, a staggering number of faith groups from across the theological spectrum issued statements condemning the decision, arguing it did not reflect a religious call to compassion and describing it as “immoral,” “reprehensible,” or “cruel.”

Members of Trump’s own evangelical advisory board — a loose band of more than 20 conservative Christian pastors and advocates who have advised the president since his campaign days — took a decidedly different stance.

Rev. Tony Suarez, a vice president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC) and a member of the board, said Trump’s announcement was actually a victory for faith-based advocacy. He pointed to the president’s inclusion of a six-month window allowing recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to apply for an extension as evidence the White House had been convinced to moderate its stance on immigration policy.

“[The DACA decision] is a major win for the faith advisory council,” Suarez told ThinkProgress over the phone. “I thought it was vindication.”

The DACA decision was “a major win for the faith advisory council…I thought it was vindication.”

The yawning ideological gap between Trump’s faith advisers and the rest of the American religious community has been widening for some time. Pastors who publicly advised Trump’s campaign told ThinkProgress they have endured near-constant calls to step down from their consulting positions for months. Some reported a flood of angry emails and phone calls last month after the president compared white supremacists to counter-protesters who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. One described being heckled at baseball games. Nonetheless, only one board member has officially resigned.

Why have so few religious advisers abandoned Trump? While the loyalty of some faith leaders can be traced to the belief that America should be restored as a “Christian nation,” many board members cite a far more practical reason: unprecedented access to a notoriously independent president.

The precise list of faith leaders who serve on the board is unclear even to participants. But advisers who spoke to ThinkProgress paint a complicated picture of Trump’s inner circle of religious confidantes, where conservative evangelical faith leaders vie for the attention of the president and his staff.

President Donald Trump speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, May 4, 2017, before signing his "religious liberty" executive order. From second from left are, Cardinal Donald Wuerl is the Archbishop of Washington, Pastor Jack Graham, Paula White, senior pastor of New Destiny Christian Center and Vice President Mike

Layers of access to the president

Trump’s faith board is technically unofficial. Whereas the lists of people serving on the real estate mogul’s various business councils were made public — and some CEOs made news for publicly resigning from their posts after Charlottesville — the faith board exists largely outside of official government structures.

Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told ThinkProgress this informal status is likely an attempt to avoid violating the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits the establishment of any state religion.

“I don’t think the [faith] council could have any official role in the U.S. government consistent with the First Amendment of the Constitution,” Painter said, referring to the fact that the board is entirely evangelical.

Nevertheless, board members have managed to carve out a considerable level of access to the president and his staff.

“Some people like politics, I don’t,” the advisory group’s de facto spokesman, Johnnie Moore, told ThinkProgress in an email. “I love people, and — unfortunately — politics is the only way to influence the systems that effect people.”

Moore doesn’t carry the name recognition of some conservative Christian megapastors on the board. But the 33-year-old is well-known in evangelical circles, where he has built a pedigree that includes stints as a vice president at the right-wing Liberty University, an advocate for persecuted Christians abroad, and a faith adviser to Dr. Ben Carson’s campaign for president. His involvement with Trump’s evangelical advisory board dates back to its inception in 2016, when campaign officials asked him to help organize it.

Johnnie Moore ?

@JohnnieM

Such an honor to pray within the Oval Office for @POTUS & @VP .

5:08 PM - Jul 11, 2017

5,657 5,657 Replies 3,362 3,362 Retweets 7,783 7,783 likes

Since then, the scope of the board’s potential influence on policy decisions has become strikingly broad. In addition to serving several officials in a ministerial capacity, groups of pastors have met with representatives and policy experts from the White House, State Department, and the National Security Council, among other government groups. Moore said these conversations can be exhaustive.

“Some have lasted an hour and one lasted seven hours,” Moore said, referring to a meeting with the White House Public Liaison office. “In each meeting certain staff members from the executive office of the president have attended, addressed the group, or taken questions.”

Trump faith adviser regrets saying the president was anointed by God, insists he isn’t racist

She clarified that she believes Trump is anointed, but so was Barack Obama.

The board’s wide reach reflects Trump’s longstanding reliance on evangelical Christians to shore up his coalition. Faith-based resistance to Trump was common before and after his rise to power, but many conservative Christian leaders stood by him despite numerous controversies that dogged his campaign. Some even endorsed Trump after a tape emerged of him bragging about sexual assault, and roughly 80 percent of white evangelical Protestants ultimately backed Trump on Election Day in 2016.

That support has been reciprocal.

“After the strong support of evangelicals during the campaign, the White House surely pays a great deal of attention to what issues evangelicals are passionate about,” Suarez said. “We found that when we can voice our praise or concern directly to the president, he certainly considers it, takes it to heart, and takes it to prayer.”

“If we were in relationship and I was your pastor… I could call you, or you could call me.”

Getting things “directly to the president” isn’t always easy. Most board meetings are with administration officials, not the president himself. But at least one member is understood to have special access to Trump:Florida-based megapastor Paula White.

Sometimes referred to as the president’s “God whisperer,” White often recounts how Trump called her on a whim roughly 15 years ago after seeing her on a Christian television show, telling her she was “fantastic.” White, who stumped for Trump on the campaign and prayed at his inauguration, says the two have been close ever since, and right-wing pastor Jim Bakker recently declared that White can walk into the White House “anytime she wants.”

The claim seemed audacious. But when asked by reporters at the 2017 Religion News Association (RNA) conference about the quip, White did not dispel the notion that she has special access to the president, reiterating that she has a “long-term relationship” with Trump.

Later, White privately insisted to ThinkProgress that her advisory role is the product of a genuine connection with the president — and one rooted in ministry.

“Obviously there are many times [I advise the president] in person. Many times there are phone calls,” White said. “If we were in relationship and I was your pastor… I could call you, or you could call me.”

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a church service at Great Faith Ministries, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

DONALD TRUMP SPEAKS DURING A CHURCH SERVICE AT GREAT FAITH MINISTRIES IN 2016.

Using the DACA fight to test lobbying muscles

In the aftermath of tensions in Charlottesville and controversy over how the president responded to the events there, the fight over DACA turned out to be a key moment for the evangelical board to flex its muscle and win back some good favor with the public.

According to polling firm PRRI, a majority of evangelicals—including white evangelicals—support policies similar to DACA. Members of Trump’s advisory board, particularly Latino evangelicals, were already vocal supporters of the program.

So after Texas and several other states threatened to sue the Trump administration if it did not end DACA by September 5, and the White House signaled that Trump planned to acquiesce, Suarez reportedly worked with other faith leaders — including NHCLC head Samuel Rodriguez, Georgia megapastor Jentezen Franklin, and Paula White — to press Trump into rethinking his pledge to abolish the program.

Most details of these discussions with Trump have not been divulged, but board members claim in-person conversations between the president and advisers were key to steering him towards a less hardline position.

Meanwhile, Suarez and Rodriguez also used their positions to lift up more traditional forms of activism. Suarez told ThinkProgress the two pastors made sure administration officials were aware of letters signed in defense of DACA by thousands of faith leaders organized by groups such as the Evangelical Immigration Table and the NHCLC.

Taken together, Suarez says the team was able to convince the White House to include the six-month delay that allows Congress time to pass a legislative solution for DACA recipients, often called DREAMers.

“The DACA issue proved what Rev. Rodriguez said, which is ‘Access leads to conversations which leads to conviction which leads to compassion; with God’s Spirit, hearts and minds can be changed,’” Suarez said. “We were able to humanize the plight of these DREAMers, and the president’s reaction was that of a father and grandfather. And he showed great compassion.”

Meet the Latino evangelical pastor who just endorsed Trump

“I believe he is a Christian.”

But the moment also shows the profound limits of the faith board’s ability to persuade Trump.

At the end of the day, DACA was still rescinded—a deeply unpopular decision that puts hundreds of thousands of DREAMers in jeopardy—and Franklin couldn’t even assure the Washington Post that Trump would sign a DACA-like bill if Congress ends up passing one.

Faith advisers were also hardly the only voice demanding that Trump maintain DACA, as they were joined by a chorus of activists and even GOP lawmakers who encouraged the president to keep the policy in place.

In this photo taken May 13, 2017, President Donald Trump stands with Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. in Lynchburg, Va. Falwell, and an early backer of Trump, said the president had made a “bold truthful statement” about the demonstration. Falwell said the president’s remarks were a clear repudiation of white supremacists, Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP STANDS WITH LIBERTY UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT JERRY FALWELL JR. IN MAY 2017 IN LYNCHBURG, VA.

What happens when agendas clash?

Although virtually all members of the loose board are evangelicals, they hail from different and sometimes competing faith traditions, and often have conflicting priorities when it comes to domestic and foreign policy.

The board is not unanimous when it comes to DACA, for instance. While speaking to reporters at the RNA conference, Moore noted there were “people who agree, people who disagree” on the issue.

Trump’s decision to ban transgender Americans from the military represents another policy clash. The New York Times reported in September that Tony Perkins, the head of the right-wing Family Research Council, was one of the driving forces behind Trump’s decision to announce this ban. Perkins’ relationship to the board, like many others who attend their meetings, is somewhat amorphous. But he reportedly broached the topic of the ban in a meeting of faith advisory board members just days before Trump announced the change on Twitter. Other members of the board such as Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr., Robert Jeffress, and James Dobson publicly praised the transgender ban.

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Moore, meanwhile, insisted to ThinkProgress that board members “weren’t involved in the transgender issue,” saying, “We have been consulted on dozens of issues, and we have spent more time on criminal justice reform and religious liberty issues, for instance, than any social issue.”

Moore later explained to ThinkProgress that the board has almost functioned as a “network,” where a group that is “more than double or maybe triple” the original list is often invited into meetings.

No matter who initiated the conversation, the episode exposes the potential for tension.

“I think everyone has different issues that are their priority. My priority is immigration,” Saurez told ThinkProgress. “Someone else’s battle might not be my priority. That doesn’t mean someone is going to block or work against what someone else is working on, but they might not be an active voice for that issue.”

Paula White, for example, is hardly the ideal champion of the traditional Religious Right priorities long trumpeted by other board members such as Falwell and Faith and Freedom Coalition head Ralph Reed.

Though she has at times tried to distance herself from this characterization, White—along with fellow faith advisers Mark Burns and Gloria and Kenneth Copeland—is widely considered to be a preacher of the so-called “prosperity gospel,” a religious movement that teaches followers they can become wealthy and successful through faith?, often by giving money to their church. Other members of the board have been deeply critical of the theology.

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Still, board members work to show a united front. In the aftermath of Charlottesville, most of them published statements condemning racism, but stopped short of criticizing Trump — and a few, such as Jerry Falwell, Jr., leaped to his defense. And when New York megapastor A.R. Bernard left the council over the media firestorm, his fellow members were careful not to cast aspersions on their ministerial colleague.

They also often protect and promote each other. Moore, for instance, owns the KAIROS Company, a media relations group that specializes in “elevating reputations and growing circles of influence.” He’s made ample use of his media savvy to help craft the board’s public-facing image: Though the KAIROS website does not list clients, Moore said he represents several evangelical board members, including Robert Jeffress, James Dobson, and Paula White.

Moore’s public relations skills were on full display earlier this month during the RNA conference. The multi-day event included a panel discussion with White, who rarely engages with reporters and who was still reeling from a deeply controversial exchange on the Jim Bakker show. (Many interpreted her on-air remarks as implying that resistance to Trump is an affront to God. She has since worked to clarify her comments, telling ThinkProgress she regretted some of her words.) Moore repeatedly spoke on White’s behalf during exchanges with the press, sometimes amending her comments with his own thoughts.

“[When] she was on the Jim Bakker Show… she wasn’t prepared, she wasn’t thinking through that moment,” Moore said to a gaggle of reporters as White nodded along. “She called me [after the show] and said, ‘I said what?’ And I said, ‘Go watch the video!'”

Members also say differences in opinion are less important than shared ideals.

“I think there is more agreement than disagreement, because everyone realizes the special moment that this is for evangelicals, for faith leaders,” Suarez said. “We’ve come together with the sense that we’re going to make America great again. That group has laid doctrinal differences aside to help the country.”

Faith leaders pray with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

Access comes at a cost

Even with the evangelical advisory board’s power, it would be a mistake to equate proximity to the president with broad influence over his decision making. As several former White House staffers can attest, access does not always equal desired levels of influence, nor does it guarantee long-term loyalty from Trump.

It’s also possible that short-term “wins” can cost board members access in other places. In the wake of the DACA decision, reports emerged of Rodriguez, Suarez, and other NHCLC members being blocked from White House meetings about Hispanic issues not exclusively tied to faith.

It remains to be seen how the faith council will change over time. The White House has met with a number of faith leaders that have never claimed affiliation with the board since Trump was inaugurated, and key influencers will likely shift depending on what issue is up for debate.

No matter what happens, evangelical faith leaders are unlikely to give up seats at Trump’s table. And Trump, who still needs the support of their followers, is equally unlikely to dismiss their concerns–even if he doesn’t always end up turning them into policy.

For many, a listening ear is what matters most.

“I personally believe Christians have always had an influence on politics,” White told reporters at RNA. She later added: “Our president is…an incredible listener."

Similarly, Ole Anthony wrote very criticallyof televangelists in 1994.^[12]

A proportion of their methods and theology are held by some to be conflicting with Christian doctrine taught in long existing traditionalist congregations. Many televangelists are featured by "discernment ministries" run by other Christians that are concerned about what they perceive as departures from sound Christian doctrine.

Many televangelists exist outside the structures of Christian denominations, meaning that they are not accountable to anyone.
The financial practices of televangelists are frequently unclear. A 2003 survey by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch indicated that only one out of the 17 televangelists researched were members of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.^[13]
The prosperity gospel taught by many televangelists promises material, financial, physical, and spiritual success to believers.
Some televangelists have significant personal wealth and own large properties, luxury cars, and various transportation vehicles such as private aircraft or ministry aircraft. This is seen by critics to be contradictory to traditional Christian thinking.^[14]
Televangelism requires substantial amounts of money to produce programs and purchase airtime on cable and satellite networks. Televangelists devote time to fundraising activities. Products such as books, CDs, DVDs, and trinkets are promoted to viewers.
Televangelists claim to be reaching millions of people worldwide with the gospel and producing numerous converts to Christianity. However, such claims are difficult to verify independently and are often disputed.^[15]
Several televangelists are very active in the national or international political arena (e.g., Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, John Hagee), and often espouse conservative politics on their programs. Such televangelists may occasionally arouse controversy by making remarks deemed offensive on their programs or elsewhere, or by endorsing partisan political candidates on donor-paid airtime, at which point some have been threatened that they may have their tax-exempt status taken away if they reside in the United States.

Televangelists often strongly dispute these criticisms and say they are doing God's work. They cite declining attendance at traditional church services and the growth of global mass media as factors necessitating the use of television to 'fulfill the "Great Commission" of the Gospel of Jesus to the generation of the 21st Century.'

Senate probe

In 2007, Senator Chuck Grassley opened a probe into the finances of six televangelists who preach a "prosperity gospel".^[16] The probe investigated reports of lavish lifestyles by televangelists including: fleets of Rolls Royces, palatial mansions, private jets, and other expensive items purportedly paid for by television viewers who donate due to the ministries' encouragement of offerings. The six that were investigated are:

Kenneth and Gloria Copeland of Kenneth Copeland Ministries of Newark, Texas;
Creflo Dollar and Taffi Dollar of World Changers Church International and Creflo Dollar Ministries of College Park, Ga;
Benny Hinn of World Healing Center Church Inc. and Benny Hinn Ministries of Grapevine, Texas;
Eddie L. Long of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and Bishop Eddie Long Ministries of Lithonia, Ga; DocuSeries – SEX SCANDALS and RELIGION did a 2011 investigative episode on his alleged sexual misconduct^[17]
Joyce Meyer and David Meyer of Joyce Meyer Ministries of Fenton, Mo (exonerated); and
Randy White and ex-wife Paula White of the Without Walls International Church and Paula White Ministries of Tampa.^[18]

On 6 January 2011 Grassley released his review of the six ministries response to his inquiry. He called for a further congressional review of tax-exemption laws for religious groups.^[19]

Meet Trump's Peculiar Collection of Religious Leaders He Picked to Speak at His Inauguration

By Peter Montgomery [1] / Right Wing Watch [2]

January 2, 2017

Donald Trump’s inaugural committee has announced that six faith leaders will take part in his swearing-in ceremony by offering prayers or delivering readings. Among them are Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, andBishop Wayne Jackson, who draped a prayer shawl from Israel over Trump’s shoulders when Trump made a campaign stop at his Great Faith Ministries International church in Detroit for a scripted interview [3].

Here’s more on the other announced speakers, Paula White, Franklin Graham, Samuel Rodriguez and Timothy Dolan.

Paula White

Paula White has been in Trump’s “Amen Corner” of prosperity gospel preachers[4] for a long time; she has said that she gave [5] Trump a Bible signed with a “prophetic word” by Billy Graham for his 60th birthday.

“Paula White has spent her life taking money from gullible people in the name of religion,” writes Daily Beast reporter Betsy Woodruff [6], who adds:

Think of Paula White’s ministry as the church version of Trump University. She preaches the prosperity gospel, an approach to Christianity that is, shall we say, unorthodox. Prosperity-gospel preachers teach that God wants people to be rich, and that he makes them wealthy as a sign of his blessing and favor; the richer you are, the more God loves you…These preachers also teach that the way to become wealthy is—you guessed it!—by giving them money. If you make a “seed offering”—and the bigger the better—then preachers like White say the Lord will repay your generosity with bounteous riches.

The Florida-based White helped organize a group [7] of prosperity gospel preachers and televangelists who met with Trump in September 2015 and spoke at a Trump rally in Orlando in March. As we’ve noted, it’s not terribly surprising that Trump and White would find an affinity for each other, since she and other prosperity gospel promoters [8] preach that wealth is a sign of God’s blessing and he told voters that his being rich was proof that he could lead the country.

While promoting his 2006 book “Why We Want You To Be Rich,” Trump appeared on Paula White’s television show [9], where he told White that God “blessed” wealthy people like himself with “a certain something” and a good brain and that in order to succeed in business, “God has to have blessed you with a good mind or, at least, a business mind.”

White was one of the money-making evangelists who reportedly stonewalled an ultimately inconclusive investigation [10] by Sen. Chuck Grassley’s Senate Finance Committee, citing religious freedom [11] to justify their refusal to provide full information about their finances.

Never Trump conservative Erick Erickson has criticized White [12] as “a Trinity-denying heretic” and said “it should be a pretty damn big deal” that Trump is inviting her to pray at the inaugural.