Thom Nickels: The faith of a president

People can come to religious faith in a number of ways. Often when belief has not been a part of their life, they stumble into it and take the first thing they feel most comfortable with. Consider the atheist who converts to Christianity and heads into the evangelical camp. Later, their faith is refined and matures; you may find that same convert looking into more substantive forms of Christianity, like Orthodoxy or (to a lesser extent), Catholicism. 

President Trump, who has never especially been a religious man, apparently has found something to value in Pentecostal televangelist and pastor Paula Michelle White-Cain.

As an attractive woman (and a blonde), White could easily be a stand-in for any of the women who’ve accused the president of sexual misconduct in years past. It is said the two met in Trump Tower, where the Paula White Ministries was headquartered. Raised in poverty, and the mother of an illegitimate child, the ambitious White worked her way up from church custodian in Florida to a mega-church pastor and TV personality. 

Paula White is not my spiritual cup of tea. The prosperity gospel circuit has become a Broadway show of cookie-cutter good-looking celebrities: it’s the Hollywood red carpet with Biblical flair. But for Trump, who seemingly is just beginning on his spiritual journey, it is a first step. Boiling everything down to the essentials, White preaches what is important: the power of prayer and belief in Jesus Christ. 

Trump made White the senior advisor to the White House Faith Office, which caused a lot of flak after the president posted a picture of himself in a “Jesus-like way” on social media. Many blamed what they perceived as blasphemy and arrogance as being the fault of Paula White. 

Critics pointed to her 2025 Easter message to the president: “No one has paid the price like you.” She then went on to say that the president was “betrayed and falsely accused in a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us.” 

Absolutely inarguable. These are facts. She continued:

“God always had a plan: On the third day, he rose, he defeated evil, he conquered death, hell, and the grave. And because he rose, we all know that we can rise. And sir, because of his resurrection, you rose up," she stated.

Nothing controversial or “heretical” here. 

Yet the phrase, “He defeated evil,” seems to point to Democrats and activist judges who did (and are) doing everything in their power to destroy Trump. 

She has alluded to the assassination attempts on Trump’s life and the legal cases against him while comparing him to Jesus. 

After a prayer session with White, Trump, and Catholic Bishop Baron in the White House, reaction was swift. Liberal Catholic theologian, Rich Raho, a former high school principal and a fan of Pope Leo’s new Synodal Church, posted on X:

"Blasphemous. It’s stunning to see a US Bishop standing right there on the stage while Paula White compares Trump to Jesus Christ." 

Catholic mystics and saints, especially those who have suffered martyrdom, often contrasted their sufferings with those of Christ on the cross. They became “one” with Christ when they offered their sufferings as a prayer to the Redeemer. Anyone who says, “I take up my cross and follow Jesus,” is in effect participating in the Way of the Cross. 

Raho, like another so-called Catholic thinker, Christopher Hale, is a Democrat operative, and not to be taken seriously. 

Other Democrat reactions to Paula White have been insidiously stupid.

In 2020, her enemies twisted her comment in the form of a prayer calling on Christ to “command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry.” When it’s convenient, Democrats will take you literally, so they accused her of urging believers to rip open the bellies of pregnant anti-Christian women and killing their babies. 

The Guardian had a few things to say about Paula White: 

“Other questions about White relate to her beliefs and statements on issues including race and immigration. The Grio reported that White had particular animus for the Black Lives Matter movement, and said in a 2020 speech: ‘Christ’s likeness is not found in my gender, it is not found in my culture, it is not found in my ethnicity, it is not found in KKK, it is not found in Antifa, and it is not found in Black Lives Matter. All of which are anti-Christ, and even terrorist organizations.’”

In other words, you can’t be an authentic Christian and support BLM, gender and trans ideology, abortion, or radical revolutionary groups like Antifa. 

Joe Biden’s informal spiritual advisor when he was in the White House was Jesuit Father Kevin O’Brien, who initially was president of California’s Santa Clara University. 

Fr. O’Brien, an old Biden family friend, announced his resignation from Santa Clara in May 2021 while his Jesuit province investigated reports of his alleged misconduct. Later, a probe found that O’Brien “engaged in behaviors” during dinners with Jesuit graduate students that were “inconsistent with established Jesuit protocols and boundaries."

As “senior advisor” of Trump’s faith office, one of the things that White inspired the president to do is issue an executive order which created a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias”. 

Cynics, however, are constantly on the lookout for a good Paula White financial scandal, or the kinds of scandal that befell other televangelists. They keep hoping and praying that something bad erupts in her ministry because they hate the fact that, given her influence, she has caused the president to become even bolder when it comes to the importance of Christianity.

“While I am in the White House,” Trump has stated, “we will protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, hospitals, and in our public squares, and we will bring our countries back together as one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all.” (This is something Joe Biden never said.) 

You may find talking in tongues as nothing but embarrassing, out-of-control emotionalism, but when a woman of this caliber gets the president to commit to protecting Christians to the extent that Trump has done, you know there’s something good happening here, whether you like her style or not. 

Recently I ran across a blog entitled, “Juicy Ecumenicalism,” in which White has been compared to the long tradition of American self-help enthusiasts who find success by extolling happiness and material blessing.

“She’s not altogether different from Oprah Winfrey, who’s made many more hundreds of millions of dollars with her self-empowering therapeutic spirituality. And then there are successful New Age self-help gurus like Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williams, among countless others.”

Could Trump have made a better choice when it comes to spiritual advisors? Definitely. However, as the author of Juicy Ecumenicalism writes, “God has often permitted the ‘wrong’ person to be placed into a position of authority for reasons we do not understand.”