White, a longtime Trump advisor, has had a complicated relationship with the Black community over the years.
President Donald Trump on Thursday announced that he would create a new White House Faith Office and named television evangelist Rev. Paula White to lead it. Trump shared the news while speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., where faith leaders and bipartisan members of Congress gathered for the annual event.
It’s not exactly clear what the function of the new White House Faith Office will be, and the White House did not immediately respond to an email request from theGrio seeking more details. However, during his remarks on Thursday, Trump emphasized the need to protect religious liberty. He also announced that the White House is establishing a commission on religious liberty and railed against “anti-Christian bias.”
“If we don’t have religious liberty, then we don’t have a free country. We probably don’t even have a country,” said Trump. “While I am in the White House, 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.”
Rev. Paula White being tapped to lead the new White House Faith Office isn’t exactly surprising. The popular televangelist is a longtime friend and supporter of Trump and introduced him at the breakfast as “the people’s president” and “the greatest champion, of any president that has ever been, of religion.” White served on an evangelical advisory board for Trump’s 2016 presidential election, delivered the invocation at his first inauguration, and was hired as a special advisor to the first Trump administration Office of Public Liason.
White, who became famous in the early 2000s via her show “Paula White Today,” gained considerable notoriety within the Black community in her early career. Her first broadcast aired on BET, and she served as a personal advisor to Black figures like Michael Jackson and former MLB player Darryl Strawberry. White has credited Pastor T.D. Jakes as a major spiritual influence.
However, the political rise of Trump saw Paula White embrace conservative political views that seemingly clashed with mainstream Black politics. Despite initially supporting the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests following the police murder of George Floyd in June 2020, White later embraced an anti-BLM stance just months later in November following Trump’s loss in the presidential election.
“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.”
White’s support of Trump also seemingly resulted in a fractured relationship with the Black church community. When asked about his relationship with Paula White, T.D. Jakes downplayed the notion that he was her mentor and made clear they had different political views.
“I wouldn’t describe her as a mentee. She had had years of ministry experience before she met me. During the period when she was working closely with me, President Trump wasn’t an issue,” Jakes told the online journal, Current. He continued saying that “…by the time she had moved into that area, I don’t think that she really considered herself a mentee of mine. We certainly still have an amicable relationship, but our views on politics are certainly different. And she knows that.”
White’s evangelical and political views have also extended to the topic of immigration, in which she dismissed suggestions that Jesus Christ was a migrant who broke the law, and she defended Trump’s controversial family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“I think so many people have taken biblical scriptures out of context on this, to say stuff like, ‘Well, Jesus was a refugee,’” White told Christian Broadcast Network, according to Vox. She added, “Yes, [Jesus] did live in Egypt for three-and-a-half years. 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.”
Activist and civil rights leader Rev. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign at the time dismissed White’s remarks and called her a “Christian nationalist” who was “enabling injustice” with her “Biblical interpretations” that “echo” slaveholder religious theory.
“If we don’t help people name & condemn #SlaveholderReligion, they are left to believe this is the teaching of the church,” Barber wrote on X. “Trump & the GOP have elevated Christian nationalism to a place where many confuse it w/ orthodox faith.”
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