By Aaron Zitner

In March, six weeks after President Trump appointed her to lead his White House Faith Office and set her up with an office in the West Wing, evangelical Christian leader Paula White preached in a YouTube sermon that the Passover-to-Easter period provided the faithful with an opportunity to receive "seven supernatural blessings."

"God will assign an angel to you," she said. "He'll be an enemy to your enemies. He'll give you prosperity." Citing a verse from Exodus, she added that God also had decreed that "none shall appear before me empty-handed."

The video then pivoted into fundraising mode, outlining a series of gifts for honoring God and supporting her ministry, culminating in a Waterford crystal cross for a "Passover/Easter resurrection offering of $1,000 or more." Next came footage of Trump in the Oval Office lauding White's ministry and political work. "You have helped us so much in so many different ways," Trump said.

Over a four-decade career as a preacher and televangelist, the 58-year-old White has become both enormously influential and controversial in the evangelical world. Her 24-year friendship with Trump, which she said began when he called her after seeing her preach on a Florida TV station, has culminated in a role that combines religion and politics in ways that have little precedent in modern White House history.

In addition to advising the White House office set up to empower faith groups, White has repeatedly been photographed leading prayer sessions in which she and others -- heads bowed and eyes closed -- lay their hands on the president, including in the Oval Office.

In a recent interview about her work, she said that she and others were simply praying for Trump. "There will be some people that absolutely believe that he is chosen and he is anointed," she said. "We pray for God to use him as he leads and guides his country and just makes critical decisions." A White House spokeswoman said it is common for Christians to place their hands on one another when they pray.

While working for the White House, White has continued to raise money for her ministry, as well as for StoryLife, the church she helps lead in Apopka, Fla., at times incorporating into her pitches images of Trump or references to her work with the president. That troubles some government ethics experts.

"This is the use of a public office for private gain," said University of Minnesota law professor Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer to then-President George W. Bush and a frequent critic of Trump administration ethics. "You cannot use the presidency or any other public office to raise money for private organizations. No private organization should be doing this."

Asked whether White had gotten government clearance for using footage of Trump in her fundraising efforts, a White House official said White regularly consults with the administration's office of ethics, as well as with private counsel.

The video clip of Trump used in her YouTube sermon last month, White said, was one of many filmed by religious leaders and others to mark her 40th year of ministry, and that "it's not tied to an ask or anything else."

There is nothing new about presidents inviting clergy into the White House for prayer and counsel. When George W. Bush was president, he pushed for religious organizations to play a bigger role in providing taxpayer-funded social services. He created what he called the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to expand the opportunities for religious groups -- the "armies of compassion," he called them -- to provide local services.

In the years since then, successor versions of that office have helped religious groups win federal grants and contracts for substance-abuse counseling, prisoner re-entry and other social services. In February, Trump rebranded it the White House Faith Office, and charged it more broadly with fighting perceived anti-Christian and other anti-religious bias.

White brings a unique resume to the position. She has built a national profile preaching a strain of Christianity that holds that God can offer the faithful good health and prosperity. Some critics label such teaching the "prosperity gospel" for tying divine gifts to financial contributions -- a label White and others reject.

She counts musician Kid Rock and model Tyra Banks as friends. In her autobiography, she said she had ministered to members of the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and was called to Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch when the late pop star was facing criminal charges.

When White got married for the third time, to Jonathan Cain, keyboard player for the rock band Journey, she began using the surname White-Cain. Her husband often appears in her video sermons from behind a piano.

White said critics have been unfairly dismissive in describing her ministry. "'Prosperity gospel' is a pejorative," White said. White said she tells listeners in fundraising requests that "you don't give to get."

Long friendship

White's autobiography describes a happy childhood that was destroyed by her father's suicide when she was 5, which led to poverty, her mother's drinking problem, Paula's abuse by caregivers and eventually to bulimia. A religious experience at age 18, she said, led her to the church, a marriage to a pastor and eventually leadership of one of the nation's biggest megachurches, Florida-based Without Walls International.

She spread her ministry through television, appearing first on BET, which serves a primarily Black audience. T.D. Jakes, a prominent evangelical leader and founder of a Texas megachurch, was an important mentor.

In the early 2000s, White said, she received a call out of the blue from Trump, who had seen her sermons on a local Florida station. "You have the 'it' factor," White recalls Trump saying.

"Sir, we call that the anointing," White told him.

That led to a friendship. White visited Trump in New York and eventually bought a condo in one of his buildings. She arranged for evangelical leaders to meet him before his first presidential campaign. After he used the phrase "Two Corinthians" in front of an evangelical audience to refer to the biblical book commonly known as "Second Corinthians," she counseled him to say in the future that his faith is a private matter.

Toward the end of Trump's first term, he made White an adviser to what was then called the Faith and Opportunity Initiative. Since arriving at the White House for Trump's second term, White said, she has been working on programs related to adoption and foster care and substance-use recovery, coordinating with staff in various federal departments.

White has arranged for groups of religious leaders to meet with Trump. "She has that relationship with the president that's unique, and she has certainly been a vessel through which God has worked to open the doors for us to speak directly to him," said Tim Clinton, president of the American Association of Christian Counselors, who has known White for years.

Matthew Taylor of the nonprofit Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, who has written about nondenominational Christianity, said the "quasi-messianic attachment that many evangelicals have to Trump is a direct product of the bridge-building that Paula White has done." He said clergy who appear in White House photos laying hands on the president "are trying to signal to their followers that they are both aligned with Trump and that he is aligned with God."

White's approach to the job has been expansive, and at times she has appeared to move from the religious realm to the political. One day after Trump's first cabinet meeting, in which the president said he was aiming for $1 trillion in federal budget cuts, White took to her YouTube channel to warn Americans about spending.

"It's going to run out guys...We can't keep spending like this, and funding like this, and never, ever making any cuts," she said in a video sermon posted the next day that didn't explicitly mention the federal budget. Citing the Old Testament's Book of Malachi, she cautioned that forces had arrived "on demonic assignment to literally waste your finances."

Fundraising appeals

White is serving in the administration as a special government employee, a designation that allows someone to work inside the government without giving up outside salaries or investments. White said she is not paid for her administration role and covers her own expenses.

Ethics experts said she still is subject to federal law barring the use of a public position for private gain.

In a sermon and fundraising appeal posted Feb. 16, about one week after she joined the administration, White included video of herself laying hands on Trump in prayer and talking with him on stage at a meeting of the National Faith Advisory Board, a group she founded after his 2020 defeat. In sermons posted on Feb. 13 and March 9 that ask for offerings, White mentions that she served as an adviser to Trump in his first term.

White's sermons include frequent requests for donations to support her humanitarian and evangelizing missions. In recent sermons, she has urged followers to send her $133, reflecting the Bible verse Proverbs 1:33. A gift of $414, reflecting a verse from the book of Esther, brings a book set and an engraved crystal paperweight. "If you hold back now...God can't use you. He doesn't use spectators. He uses participators," she said.

In a recent fundraising appeal, White said: "You don't do this to get something, but you're doing it in honor to God, realizing what you can receive."

Norm Eisen, who served as White House special assistant for ethics under President Barack Obama, said appeals that mention a fundraiser's government position or use Trump's image are potential violations of ethics laws. "The Office of Government Ethics should take a very hard look at these examples," he said.

Others say that because she didn't appear as a government official or on federal property during her fundraising, it's unlikely that White violated ethics laws. A violation could occur if there was "some direct evidence of the office she's currently holding being used to get the donation," said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, director of government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

A White House spokeswoman said that White, as a special government employee, "maintains the right to continue her private job as a minister separate from her official White House duties," a job that involves raising money for her ministry.

Jennifer Korn, who worked with White in Trump's first administration and now serves as a faith director of the White House Faith Office, said Trump's video congratulating White for her 40th year of ministry falls within the tradition of presidential messages.

White said about two-thirds of the money she raises goes to her charitable and humanitarian work, such as food-distribution in Florida and relief from last year's hurricane in North Carolina.

Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has criticized the fundraising messages White delivers in appeals like the Passover-Easter sermon, calling her "a theological nutcase" who is "selling the promises of God in the guise of fundraising for a ministry."

Speaking recently on his podcast, Mohler, who supported Trump last year, said White's strain of teaching "turns into a very manipulative theological system," and that he was concerned about the number of Trump supporters who subscribe to it.

Todd Lamphere, who works with White in her ministry, said that he, like Mohler, is a Southern Baptist, and that Mohler had misjudged White. "She's not a false teacher," he said. "A lot of these folks have just gotten it wrong as it relates to her."

White brushes aside such criticism, saying she teaches that "God wants you to be what he designed you to be." She cites her own story as an example of how faith overcomes adversity.

"I'm a grandma. I lost my father to suicide, I suffered abuse, I lived in poverty, I found faith," she said. "And I also have to say, my entire ministry has been a woman in a man's world. Not been easy. But all of these experiences arrive for a responsibility and a privilege to serve in this office."

In recent weeks, White says, she met with groups to facilitate adoption and foster care. She offered a prayer at the Oval Office ceremony swearing in former Trump attorney Alina Habba as the new U.S. attorney for New Jersey. Last week, she taped a 40-minute interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington.

At a recent White House dinner to celebrate the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Trump called out White as "my friend for a long time and somebody that's done an incredible job with faith, and all of the things that so many in this room stand for."

Write to Aaron Zitner at aaron.zitner@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 16, 2025 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)

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