I spent over twenty years inside the religious right. Not as a casual Family Research Council/CPAC/Exodus International/and others supporter — I was in it. The conferences, the culture, the certainty. I believed the framework. I trusted the institutions. And in 2013, I walked away.
So when I tell you that Paula White comparing Donald Trump to Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday made something in me go cold, I want you to understand: I’m not saying that as an outsider looking in. I know exactly what that room looked like. I know the theology that made it possible. I helped build the permission structure that produced it.
Paula White — Paula White-Cain, spiritual advisor to the President of the United States, head of the White House Faith Office, prosperity gospel empress — stood in the East Room of the White House last Easter week and compared Donald Trump to Jesus Christ. I am not paraphrasing for effect. She looked at the man and said,
“No one has paid the price like you have paid the price. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us.“
On Easter. She said this on Easter.
Think about that for a second.
The holiday literally commemorating the resurrection of Jesus Christ — you know, the one who actually was crucified, actually was buried, actually conquered death — and she used it as a backdrop to cast Donald Trump as a Christ figure. To his face. In the White House. With Franklin Graham in the room and presumably nobody’s jaw on the floor.
This is what modern American evangelicalism has produced; blasphemous monsters being the “leaders” of evangelicalism in the United States.
I didn’t grow up in church. I came to faith as an adult, got swept up in a world that had very clear answers to very complicated questions, and spent two decades trying to make it work. These days I’d call myself a Christian Universalist — I still hold onto something I’d call faith, but it looks nothing like what I left. What I left was a culture that decided Jesus was mostly useful as a means to an end.
Because here’s the thing about Paula White: she’s not an anomaly. She’s the product.
The prosperity gospel she’s been preaching for decades — the idea that God rewards the faithful with wealth, that your $2,025 “prophetic seed gift” will return to you multiplied, that a bottle of anointing oil she prayed over is worth a specified “love offering” — that theology didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a culture that had been drifting toward this for a long time. I watched it drift.
What Paula White sells costs you $2,025 and gets you a bottle of oil and a promise from a woman who has never once revised her prophetic track record. What she offered the President of the United States was a mirror dressed up as a sermon.
The scary part isn’t Paula White. Grifters have always existed. The scary part is the room full of people who nodded along.
I know those people. Some of them I called friends. Some of them are still waiting for a reason to walk out. I walked out in 2013, and I’m still figuring out what I believe. But I know what I don’t believe anymore.
And it looks a lot like what happened in that room on Easter.
If you’d like to keep reading the ramblings of a man who left the religious right, found his way to Christian Universalism, and still has a lot of feelings about it — subscribe to this blog for $2.99 a month. That’s less than Paula White’s anointing oil. Considerably less. And I promise the only thing I’m selling is my unfiltered opinion.