White, who has emerged this year as one of Donald Trump’s most stalwart religious supporters, and has been called Trump’s “spiritual counselor” by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, brought forward three other pastors to pray.
.. As Trump looks to a tough election in November, he needs prominent conservative evangelicals to smooth his way with a constituency that has given 75 to 80 percent of its votes to Republican nominees in recent decades.
.. Russell Moore, who heads the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm and is one of Trump’s loudest public critics, recently called White a “charlatan” and a “heretic” — serious charges — on Twitter.
Moore told Yahoo News that White preaches a “prosperity gospel” that falsely claims that “God’s favor is seen in increasing wealth and freedom from sickness” and that emphasizes — often to lower-income, less-educated congregants — that the more money they give to the church, the more God will bless them.
.. “Father, we just secure him right now by the blood of Jesus. We thank you that no weapon formed against him would prosper, and any tongue that rises against him would be condemned, according to the word of God,” White prayed, one hand on Trump’s stomach and the other on his arm.
.. Linne named Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, T.D. Jakes, Benny Hinn, Creflo Dollar and Kenneth Copeland, along with White, as “false teachers.”
.. There is, however, no question that White is extremely wealthy. Her salary is not known, but she has been reported to receive a multimillion-dollar income and reportedly owns a $3.5 million apartment in Trump Tower.
.. “His plans are not our plans,” White said, smiling. “Here [Trump] is, the nominee. That has to be providence. That has to be the hand of God.”
After the interview, Brody told viewers, “Forget politics for a moment. [White]’s an integral player in Trump’s faith walk.”
.. “I think the Christian community, when they come out for Trump, it weakens our position because — What do you really stand for?,” Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, told Yahoo News. “This guy’s belligerent. He’s denigrating. He’s everything we’re not. But people are so desperate to change things.”
.. White and Trump — who have known each other for more than a decade — share another experience that makes them targets for skeptics in the evangelical community: They have each been married multiple times. Both are on their third marriage, in fact, and have been the subjects of infidelity reports.
.. Years after the two divorced, she met Jonathan Cain on a flight, and the two were married in 2015. Cain is the keyboardist for arena rock band Journey and wrote one of the band’s most famous songs, “Don’t Stop Believin’.”
(Journey’s fame was resurrected in 2007 when HBO’s “The Sopranos” used “Don’t Stop Believin’” in the final scene of its series finale. The band is now scheduled to play at the Republican convention next month in Cleveland.)
.. White has not only attached sacred importance to Trump’s candidacy, but she has also vouched for his character and his Christian credentials.
At the Orlando rally, she defended Trump and said that despite his public reputation, he was “a man who had more integrity than most people that I have encountered,” calling him “a compassionate man, a man who is very strong to his core.”
.. But in recent days, James Dobson, the past president of Focus on the Family, said publicly that he had heard that White had only recently “personally led [Trump] to Christ.”
.. Regardless of whether Trump is actually a born-again Christian, for older members of the religious right, his claims to be one of them might be enough, simply because they cannot bear the thought of Hillary Clinton as president.
“We have only two choices, Hillary or Donald. Hillary scares me to death,” Dobson said. “And if Christians stay home because he isn’t a better candidate, Hillary will run the world for perhaps eight years. The very thought of that haunts my nights and days.”
The Theology of Donald Trump
James Dobson, who is among the most influential leaders in the evangelical world and serves on Mr. Trump’s evangelical executive advisory board, declared that “Trump appears to be tender to things of the Spirit,” by which Dr. Dobson meant the Holy Spirit.
Of all the descriptions of Mr. Trump we’ve heard this election season, this may be the most farcical. As described by St. Paul, the “fruit of the Spirit” includes forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, hardly qualities one associates with Mr. Trump. It shows you the lengths Mr. Trump’s supporters will go to in order to rationalize their enthusiastic support of him.
.. Time and again Mr. Trump has shown contempt for those he perceives as weak and vulnerable — “losers,” in his vernacular. They include P.O.W.s, people with disabilities, those he deems physically unattractive and those he considers politically powerless. He bullies and threatens people he believes are obstacles to his ambitions.
.. What Mr. Trump admires is strength. For him, a person’s intrinsic worth is tied to worldly success and above all to power. He never seems free of his obsession with it. In his comments to that gathering of evangelicals, Mr. Trump said this: “And I say to you folks, because you have such power, such influence. Unfortunately the government has weeded it away from you pretty strongly. But you’re going to get it back. Remember this: If you ever add up, the men and women here are the most important, powerful lobbyists. You’re more powerful. Because you have men and women, you probably have something like 75, 80 percent of the country believing. But you don’t use your power. You don’t use your power.”
In eight sentences Mr. Trump mentioned some variation of power six times, to a group of individuals who have professed their love and loyalty to Jesus, who in his most famous sermon declared, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and “Blessed are the meek,” who said, “My strength is made perfect in weakness,” and who was humiliated and crucified by the powerful.
To better understand Mr. Trump’s approach to life, ethics and politics, we should not look to Christ but to Friedrich Nietzsche, who was repulsed by Christianity and Christ. “What is good?” Nietzsche asks in “The Anti-Christ”: “Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is evil? Whatever springs from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power increases – that resistance is overcome.”
.. Trump embodies a Nietzschean morality rather than a Christian one.
.. Mr. Trump’s entire approach to politics rests on dehumanization. If you disagree with him or oppose him, you are not merely wrong. You are worthless, stripped of dignity, the object of derision. This attitude is central to who Mr. Trump is and explains why it pervades and guides his campaign. If he is elected president, that might-makes-right perspective would infect his entire administration.
.. Evangelical Christians who are enthusiastically supporting Donald Trump are signaling, even if unintentionally, that this calling has no place in politics and that Christians bring nothing distinctive to it — that their past moral proclamations were all for show and that power is the name of the game.
.. Jacques Ellul wrote: “Politics is the church’s worst problem. It is her constant temptation, the occasion of her greatest disasters, the trap continually set for her by the prince of this world.” In rallying round Mr. Trump, evangelicals have walked into the trap. The rest of the world sees it. Why don’t they?
In Love with Donald Trump
I think we aren’t giving the convictions of evangelicals enough credit. They know enough to know what Trump is saying and doing is wrong, and yet they are still supporting him.
.. What happens when the liturgies of our greedy culture train evangelicals to love money and power? What happens when the liturgies of talk radio train evangelicals to love anger and paranoia? What happens when the liturgies of social media train evangelicals to love sensational sound bites more than thoughtful discourse? What happens when the liturgies of modern worship services train evangelicals to love novel, flashy, and glib emotional experiences that feel more like a rally than corporate worship? What happens when the conference culture of the church trains evangelicals to love the big celebrity leader? What happens when preaching that prioritizes relevant, shocking, and brash sermons trains evangelicals to love “tell it like it is” ranting? What happens when the liturgies from the days of the Moral Majority train evangelicals to love America as much as Jesus, which then leads to an incessant longing within churches to “make America great again!”
What happens? Evangelicals in love with Donald Trump happens.
.. Evangelicals don’t believe in Donald Trump as much as they love Donald Trump and all that Donald Trump represents. Watch these rallies and you will quickly see they have nothing to do with inspiring ideas and hopeful policies; they’re worship services
.. But what if the boisterous confidence and the television lights and the waving arms are precisely what evangelicals have been trained to love? What if they can’t listen because they are enraptured? What if they applaud, not because Trump has given them a speech, but because Trump has given them what they love?
.. Evangelicals in our day are in love with the world and things of this world, and that is why evangelicals in our day are in love with Donald Trump.
A Born-Again Donald Trump? Believe It, Evangelical Leader Says
In an interview recorded at the event by a Pennsylvania pastor, the Rev. Michael Anthony, Dr. Dobson said he knew the person who had led Mr. Trump to Christ, though he did not name him.
“I don’t know when it was, but it has not been long,” Dr. Dobson said. “I believe he really made a commitment, but he’s a baby Christian.”
.. “The expectation evangelicals have is of a radical change, a 180-degree turn from the life of sin to following Christ,” said Kedron Bardwell, a political science professor at Simpson College in Iowa, who is the son of an evangelical pastor.