Donald Trump's Personal Pastor Is Not In A Cult
My "The New Apostolic Reformation is not a cult" shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.
Donald Trump has a personal pastor and she is not in a cult, so stop asking.
Paula White doesn’t quite fit the mold of the traditional white evangelical religious leader — for starters, she’s a woman, and for seconds, she’s not really an evangelical. Yet White chaired Trump’s evangelical advisory board during the 2016 election and delivered the invocation at his 2017 inauguration (as well as the opening prayer at his rather eventful January 6, 2021 rally). During Trump’s first term, White led the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative. Today, she leads the newly-formed White House Faith Office.
White is often characterized by the media as a prosperity gospel proponent, which is certainly an accurate but not a complete picture of where her hope lies. Rather, she can more fully be described as an apostle of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).
In 2011, NPR identified American missionary C. Peter Wagner as the architect of the NAR, an “emerging Christian movement that seeks to take dominion over politics, business, and culture in preparation for the end times and the return of Jesus.”
The article must have touched a nerve for Wagner, because he responded with an op-ed to preemptively assure readers that the NAR is “definitely not a cult.”
In technical terms, the NAR is a loosey-goosey mish-mash of Christian dominionism, Pentecostalist practices, far-right evangelicalism, and independent charismatic Christianity swirled together like one of the time-crossed visions its prophets and dreamers claim to see. The NAR is not a denomination — meaning a church cannot exactly join its ranks and the precise number of participants is a slippery thing — but the amount of Christians under the influence of the NAR through their churches and small groups and Bible studies and retreats and conferences ranges from 3 to 33 million. How difficult the NAR is to pin down is a feature, not a bug. The NAR’s strength is its shown through its demonstrated ability to weave itself into the tapestry of American evangelicalism, even if those under its spell could not recognize it by name.
Welcome to the new and improved Reformation.
In 1975, another missionary named Loren Cunningham took a vacation with his family to the Colorado Rockies and heard directly from God.
Cunningham was no stranger to claiming messages from above. The organization he founded, Youth With A Mission (more commonly known as YWAM and beset with its own scandals), was born out of another vision he had of waves crashing onto the shores of every continent on earth — except the waves were made out of “young people” who went all over the world “preaching the Gospel.”
In his 1988 book Making Jesus Lord, Cunningham recalls:
I was stretched out on a lounge chair in the midday warmth, praying and thinking. I was considering how we Christians — not just the mission I was part of, but all of us — could turn the world around for Jesus. A list came to my mind: categories of society which I believed we should focus on in order to turn nations around to God. I wrote them down, and stuck the paper in my pocket.
Cunningham proceeded to have lunch with Bill Bright, the founder of another organization targeting young Christians (Campus Crusade for Christ, which has trendily been renamed Cru as of 2011). Bright shared that he too had received a vision from God sharing the exact same categories of society over which Christians were to take dominion, which were as follows:
Church
Family
Education
Government and Law
Media
Arts, Entertainment, Sports
Commerce, Science, and Technology
This set of twin visions for Cunningham and Bright came two years after R.J. Rushdoony, the father of Christian dominionist theology, published The Institutes of Biblical Law, which laid out essentially the same game-plan for Christians to take dominion over creation (or at least the United States). A coincidence, perhaps.
Nevertheless, these visions lay dormant for the next quarter of a century until a prophet would come along to raise the banner.
The son of an oil executive, Lance Wallnau followed in his father’s footsteps and worked in oil marketing in Texas before switching to a different kind of marketing by founding a church in the 1990s. Deeply influenced by the Latter Rain movement, Wallnau became known in the wide world of charismatic Christianity as a prophet.
Loren Cunningham shared his vision with Wallnau a quarter of a century after initially receiving it. In Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate (co-authored in 2013 with one Bill Johnson, senior leader of charismatic megachurch Bethel), Wallnau tells us:
As I heard Loren tell me this story, I was somewhat stunned. It seemed odd that this message had been out since 1974, yet I had not heard about it earlier. It so transformed my thinking that I have made it central to my message ever since.
Wallnau catchily rebranded Cunningham’s categories of society as mountains to climb, with kings atop each mountain ruling “ideological strongholds.” At the invitation of his mentor, C. Peter Wagner, Wallnau began to teach his Seven Mountain Mandate to Wagner’s International Coalition of Apostolic Leaders. The mandate spread like wildfire throughout the networks of spiritual leaders making up the NAR, giving them a concrete strategy to which they could attach their teachings and prophesies.
The Seven Mountain Mandate scoffs at any tidy distinctions between church and state. Rather, as Wallnau says:
If the Church leaves a vacuum by failing to occupy these high places with the teaching of the Kingdom, the enemy will seek to disciple the nations by building strongholds of deception that are guarded and advanced through those decision makers who rise to the top of the seven mountains of culture.
Under Wallnau’s mandate, the evangelical priority of winning souls is superseded by the business of climbing mountains. Altar calls, seeker-friendly churches, street preaching — none of these traditionally evangelical strategies are sufficient for what Wallnau characterizes as an epic war between spiritual powers. Instead, Wallnau tells his disciples in battle-ready terms:
If we do not need more conversions, what do we need? We need more disciples in the right places, the high places. Minorities of people can shape the agenda, if properly aligned and deployed.
Late one night in 2002, Trump watched televangelist Paula White’s show Paula Today. Whatever he saw moved him to get in touch. In an interview with PBS, White told the story of their first conversation:
I first met Mr. Trump over 20 years ago. My office said, “Mr. Trump is on the line,” and I was like, “Sure, sure.” They said, “Well, no, Paula, Mr. Trump is on the line.” So I get on the line, and he begins to say to me, “I’ve been watching you,” and he starts to repeat to me, almost verbatim, three of my sermons on the value of vision.
And I was pretty intrigued there, because we had a large congregation. I thought, man, he listens better than most of my congregation. And he said, “You’ve got the ‘it’ factor.” And I said, “Oh, sir, we call that the anointing.”
Over the next two decades, White became a kind of spiritual mentor to Trump. She visited him in New York frequently to hold private Bible studies for the billionaire, was credited by evangelical leader James Dobson with bringing Trump to Christ, and has owned a condo in Trump Tower for the past twenty years (at a cut rate).
The run-up to the 2016 election was not the first time that Trump had considered running for president. In 2011, he consulted his personal pastor to ask for her guidance. To PBS, White relayed the story of how she and her network of spiritual leaders gathered at Trump Tower to pray over this decision for hours at a time. The result?
I’m not the crying type unless I get really moved or touched by God. And I said, “Sir, I believe you’re going to be president one day.” And a little tear rolled down my eye. I’ll never forget this moment, because I said, “But I hate to see the price you’re going to pay.” I believe that was words spoken by God. And I said to him, “But now is not the timing.
Incidentally, this was at the same time that NBC offered a highly lucrative deal for Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice to continue on with the man himself as host. Regardless, the timing was not right.
But it would be soon.
When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for presidency in 2015, still under Paula White’s pastoral care, he was not immediately embraced by the voting bloc of evangelicals that had come out in force for Republican candidates since the days of the Moral Majority. Wallnau and White worked together with their networks of apostles and prophets to change that.
Paula White organized a gathering to introduce multiple charismatic leaders within her networks — including Wallnau — to Trump. After their initial meeting, Wallnau prophesied that Trump would win the presidency, invoking the Old Testament figure King Cyrus. In an article for Charisma entitled “Why I Believe Donald Trump is the Prophesied President,” Wallnau wrote:
I heard the Lord say: ‘Donald Trump is a wrecking ball to the spirit of political correctness.’
He was not the only NAR-affiliated figure to receive such a word. A few days after Wallnau’s prophesy, Jeremiah Johnson, a member of the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders, claimed that God had told him:
I will use the wealth that I have given him to expose and launch investigations searching for the truth. Just as I raised up Cyrus to fulfill My purposes and plans, so have I raised up Trump to fulfill my purposes and plans prior to the 2016 election. You must listen to the trumpet very closely for he will sound the alarm and many will be blessed because of his compassion and mercy. Though many see the outward pride and arrogance, I have given him the tender heart of a father that wants to lend a helping hand to the poor and the needy, to the foreigner and the stranger.
The image of Trump as Cyrus — the historical Persian king who conquered Babylon and ended Babylonian captivity, allowing the Jews under exile to return to Jerusalem and build a temple — was wielded powerfully by Wallnau and company to galvanize evangelicals, the vast majority of which would not have recognized the NAR by name.
If the prophesies were to be believed, Trump was about to be the king of a very significant mountain. The Reformers wanted to ensure they had the ear of the king.
The pull of a movement like the New Apostolic Reformation is that it casts every Christian as the main character, the hero in their own spiritual journey. Those who follow these new Reformers are hanging onto a promise that the way in which the church operates will be turned on its head like tables in a marketplace. Who wouldn’t at least be intrigued by the offer to exchange the mundanity of the church coffee hour for a place in the Lord’s army — to be set apart from other Christians, to be special? (Not I, as a lover of a good coffee hour, but I’m sure someone).
In God’s Super-Apostles: Encountering the Worldwide Prophets and Apostles Movement, R. Douglas Geivett and Holly Pivec highlight the appeal of the choice that the NAR presents to the everyday believer:
If you submit to their leadership, then you too will work mighty miracles. You’ll become part of a great end-time army that will bring about a world revival and cleanse the earth of evil by calling down hailstones, fire and the other judgments of God described in the New Testament book of Revelation.
If you do not submit to their leadership then, at the very least, you will miss out on God’s end-time plans. And if you actively oppose the apostles and prophets, then brace yourself for the fallout. Others must be warned that you are the pawn of a powerful demon, known as the ‘spirit of religion.’
When White prays publicly for “satanic pregnancies to miscarry” and calls for “demonic networks” aligning themselves against Trump to be torn down, or when Wallnau describes Kamala Harris as having “the spirit of Jezebel,” they are tapping into the language of spiritual warfare that resonates so deeply with their followers. Republicans and Democrats aren’t merely two different political parties — they are light and darkness, angel and demon, blessed and cursed.
As White told Wallnau in a 2020 conversation on her show Faithfully with Jon & Paula (the “Jon” being Jonathan Cain, White’s second husband and, somewhat randomly, a member of the band Journey), the battle to take dominion is a vast and epic one without room for ambiguity:
The clash of the kingdoms is between the kingdom of God, the kingdom of light, and the kingdom of darkness, the kingdom of Satan.
Thanks to apostles like White and Wallnau, the NAR’s call for Christians to take dominion has successfully seeped through the current culture of American evangelicalism right up to the highest echelons of political power.
Take, for instance, a certain flag flown by everyone from January 6th protestors to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito to current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson: the “Appeal to Heaven” flag.
Dating back to the Revolutionary War and originally commissioned by George Washington, the banner’s catchphrase refers to a treatise by philosopher John Locke — when the government unjustly refuses to listen to the people, then the people will make an appeal to God, to heaven. According to scholar Matthew Taylor, the flag took on new life in the hands of Dutch Sheets, a NAR leader who claimed to have received a prophecy that this flag would be a symbol of God’s restoration of America to the Christian nation it was always intended to be.
As Geivett and Pivec tell us:
NAR leaders call their new movement apostolic because they claim to be restoring apostles and prophets to the church. And they call it a reformation because they say it will completely change the way church is done — and its effects will be greater than the 16th-century Protestant Reformation.
That’s a bold claim. Yet many people who are part of this movement don’t know it’s called the New Apostolic Reformation. In fact, they may not even know they are part of a movement at all. And they may not be fully aware of all the extreme teachings associated with it. But they certainly know of — and follow the teachings of — men and women who believe they are apostles and prophets.
It hardly matters that the NAR isn’t visible or recognizable by name to the majority of American Christians, because the movement’s leaders understand that their power is in marketing. They have successfully cast the kind of Christian who wishes to implement the Seven Mountain Mandate as the hero and anyone who dares to challenge them as the villain. When you are on the side of God and your political opponents become your mortal, demonic enemies, a host of behavior that would otherwise be considered dangerous becomes acceptable, applauded even.
On January 6th, 2021, a rioter wore an Appeal to Heaven flag wrapped around his body inside the U.S. Capitol. Another rioter used the Appeal to Heaven flag on a pole to beat back a police officer. It isn’t likely that either rioter had a comprehensive knowledge of the NAR and its relationship to this flag.
That didn’t stop them. It won’t stop whoever’s next.
I’ve read André Gagné and Matthew Taylor’s deep dives on the NAR. You succinctly summarize the key ideas such that someone who never heard of the movement before could get a feel for the neurotic drive motivating the NAR apostles and prophets and the networks of churches they oversee.
As someone who (unfortunately) grew up in and out of NAR churches and was with YWAM for seven years, I can’t tell you how seen I feel that you emphasized the psychological “benefit” NAR participants anchor their faith on. The lure of being special and actively engaged with the divine to change an embattled world is intoxicating. For a person to de-identify from the NAR world, they have to be willing to not only lose their community, but the over-inflated sense of purpose they were indoctrinated with, to de-center themselves and to befriend banality and the mundane. That’s a big ask!
I literally broke out in chills when you mentioned the term “high places”. I’m currently reading through the Bible chronologically and so have just spent a ton of time in the Hebrew bible (the Old Testament), the biblical parallel of worshiping “God” via idols/demonic worship at high places vs God in the temple seems hilariously ironic and also pretty terrifying in light of what these people are claiming to be vs. the false gospel they’re actually teaching.