A religious row has erupted among conservative Christians over President Donald Trump’s decision to re-appoint Paula White-Cain to run the White House Faith Office, with theological fissures erupting within Trump’s Christian coalition as leaders stake out different positions on the Florida pastor.
The debate escalated last Tuesday, when Doug Wilson, an influential Reformed pastor who has emerged as an oft-cited religious thinker in conservative circles, derided White-Cain, a Pentecostal pastor, en su podcast. While responding to others on his show who were critiquing White-Cain, the Idaho pastor referred to her appointment as “a bad pick for all kinds of reasons.”
In a separate interview with media on Thursday, Wilson said he hails from a “conservative Christian quadrant that objects to women preachers in the first place,” and described White-Cain as an “erratic woman preacher who has been all over the map.”
He went on to describe White-Cain, long regarded as Trump’s closest religious adviser, as “the kind of person that embarrassing video footage can be rolled out almost at will.
“It’s not the greatest pick in the world,” he added.
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The remarks are the latest in a back-and-forth that began shortly after Trump anunciado a principios de este mes that White-Cain would once again be heading his Faith Office, a reveal that concluded a week of faith-themed appearances featuring the president y the vice president. While White-Cain’s appointment was widely expected — she served in the same position near the tail-end of Trump’s first term — news of her return to the White House sparked blowback in some conservative Christian online spaces.
Unlike critiques from Trump and White-Cain’s numerous liberal detractors, the latest round of criticism has pitted prominent Pentecostal and charismatic Christians such as White-Cain, who have made up an important part of Trump’s evangelical Christian base, against a cadre of conservative Calvinists — including a subset influential among some of Trump’s advisers and cabinet members.
Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies who has studied the influence of charismatic Christianity on Trump, said the broader evangelical discomfort with Pentecostalism — traditions that engage in practices such as prophecies, faith healing and speaking in tongues — has been around for some time.
During Trump’s first campaign and term in office, Taylor said, it was moderate evangelicals such as Russell Moore, then a Southern Baptist, who voiced their disapproval of White-Cain as well as Trump himself.
But this time the fight is more of a “sibling rivalry” between different factions of the “Christian far-right,” Taylor said, with Calvinists such as Wilson becoming power players over the past four years, alongside stridently conservative forms of Catholicism that have garnered favor with Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert.
“Paula White and her circle truly dominate the Trump advisory circles, the evangelical advisory circles,” he said. “Now you have these kind of natalist, radical traditionalist Catholics that see an avenue to power through JD Vance, and you see these kind of Reconstructionist Calvinist-types who see an avenue through Pete Hegseth and maybe Russ Vought. So now there’s real power and policy in play.”
Efforts to reach White-Cain for comment were unsuccessful, but the criticism quickly spurred her supporters — particularly people who, like White-Cain, operate in Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions, as well as preach a prosperity gospel, or wealth-focused, theology — to publish video testimonials in her defense.
“What was the date that it became okay, in the body of Christ, all of a sudden, to trash people by name that you’ve never met?” said Jonathan Shuttlesworth, a Pentecostal pastor of Revival Today Church, who was among the first to rush to her defense, in a video posted to X. The pastor, whose church meets in both Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and in Texas, is seen as ascendant among Trump’s religious advisers, posting on Friday that he was traveling to the White House to “discuss and write national policy for religious freedom.”
My thoughts on Paula White being appointed by President Trump to the first ever White House Faith Office. pic.twitter.com/1o3GhHu5Pn
— Jonathan Shuttlesworth (@JDShuttlesworth) February 9, 2025
In his video about White-Cain, Shuttlesworth said many of her critics were “Calvinists who believe in God’s sovereignty.”
“So God made a mistake this time? I thought God knows what he’s doing and God has everything planned and we just accept what he planned. Don’t you teach that?”
Shuttlesworth later added, “maybe you’re just a jerk.”
Shuttlesworth was echoed by Lance Wallnau, a fellow charismatic Christian who prophesied Trump’s 2016 victory and hosted a campaign event featuring then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance during the 2024 campaign.
“I can’t believe all the people, mean-spirited people, upset with Trump for working with Paula White. What is up with these wackos?” Wallnau said in a Facebook Live video. “You know what it is? I think a lot of guys don’t like women preachers.”
In his interview with media, Wilson did not deny his opposition to women’s ordination but noted White-Cain’s appointment could be an example of Trump being “transactional.” The president, he argued, may have appointed White-Cain solely as an expression of gratitude for her long-running support, leaving her in charge of an office “he’s going to pay no attention to.”
However, Wilson said he would have preferred Trump appoint someone such as the Rev. Franklin Graham to the office, saying the president “could have done a lot better and shored up support among the more responsible, dissident-right types, as opposed to Jesus-wears-a-MAGA-hat kind of thing.”
Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist whose profile grew during Trump’s time away from power, carries weight within Trump’s new administration. He co-founded a denomination that officially opposes women in combat and includes a church attended by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has praised Wilson’s writings. Wilson, who apareció on programs last year hosted by Trump allies Tucker Carlson and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, has also spoken at events on Capitol Hill alongside Russell Vought, whom Trump appointed to run the Office of Management and Budget.
Vought was referenced on Wilson’s podcast this week by author Joe Rigney, an associate pastor at Christ Church, Wilson’s congregation. Rigney called the choice of White-Cain a “whiff” by the Trump administration but celebrated the selection of Vought, who is widely credited as the architect of Project 2025, a sweeping conservative plan for changing the federal government that has largely overlapped with Trump’s actions during his first month in office.
“Would I rather have someone with Paula White’s theology in Russ Vought’s job or would I rather have him” in the OMB, Rigney said. “And it’s like, ‘Him, because he’s actually going to do the things I want.’”
Rigney’s comments come after a week of defending Vought from criticism from alumni of Wheaton College, an evangelical school and Vought’s alma mater. When the school retracted a statement celebrating Vought’s confirmation as OMB secretary after alumni published a public letter voicing outrage, Rigney llamado the move “a case study in how supposedly conservative Christian organizations are hijacked and steered by the Left,” and has since championed a separate letter by conservative Wheaton alumni criticizing the school.
Asked whether he considers Vought a theological ally, Wilson said he doesn’t know enough about his personal beliefs “to pronounce on it,” but said “I would guess that we’d be on a similar page.”
Wilson insists he is “not in the mix” when it comes to power players in Washington. Although he told media in an email shortly after Hegseth was confirmed that he was “very grateful” the former Fox News host was now tasked with running the U.S. military, Wilson explained on Thursday his only direct connection to the secretary of Defense is that he “knows people who know him.”
He also was willing to criticize Trump associates other than White-Cain. While he celebrated Elon Musk’s efforts to rapidly and dramatically reduce the size of the federal government, for instance, he said he hoped someone would “explain the gospel to him,” lamenting that Musk has had a number of children with women out of wedlock, which Wilson described as a “serial harem of concubines.”
Even so, the debate over White-Cain appears to have done little to dent support for Trump overall among Wilson and his supporters. Asked how he felt about the first month of Trump’s second term, Wilson was jubilant.
“It’s been Christmas every morning,” he said.
Jack Jenkins es un periodista galardonado y reportero nacional de Religion News Service.
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54 Responses
Might want to contact Gene Bailey at Flashpoint or Lance Wallnu to get their opinion on this issue. Know the Mormons are not happy Trump has Biblical Christian as an advisor.
White-Cain is a terrible advisor, but you can’t win them all. Otherwise, he is on a pretty good winning streak.
Thank you for this article. As mainstream evangelical Christians, we need to reject the unconstitutional, inhumane, and extreme ideas of the reconstructionist sect of Christianity, which sound a lot more like Islam’s sharia law rather than the evangelical Christianity we have known in America over the last 250 years. Founded by architect Mr Rushdoony (1914-2001), their cultic beliefs include white supremacy/segregation, an end of women’s civic rights, terror against internal enemies, replacement theology, and replacing the US constitution with biblical laws, which would include the execution of people guilty of various sins not currently a capital punishment. Vought’s published sentiment in project 2025 that he wanted to “…traumatize the federal employees” is absolutely inhumane and unconscionable, and is a taste of what they stand for. Most federal employees are veterans, spouses of veterans or children of veterans, and have been traumatized enough through our wars, keeping America safe. Wake up everyone, today they are targeting federal employees, tomorrow they may want to traumatize another segment of society.
Christian Reconstructionism is a fundamentalist Christian movement that seeks to apply the Bible to all aspects of life. What’s wrong with that, unless you are a liberal Christian who thinks that leftist values are compatible with the Bible ?
Thank you for your response! First of all, the New Testament makes it very clear, that biblical Christianity is the salvation work of Christ through the preaching of the Gospel, an inward work by the Holy Spirit, and it is NOT designed to be a political system. Therefore, Reconstructionism has little to due with biblical Christianity and is yet just another doctrine by men who wish to seize political power over the nation and its people, in the name of Christianity. Aside from that, is also true to say that some proponents of Reconstructionism are unapologetic holocaust deniers. I have personally visited numerous concentration camps, from Germany, to Austria and Brussels and beyond and I tell you they are hauntingly very real. People lost their whole families in the death camps, because Nazis dehumanized the Jews, immigrants, dissidents, and others, not unlike the dehumanizing rhetoric of some reconstructionist podcasters today. One holocaust survivor, a gentleman who lost his whole family at Buchenwald, in Weimer, and later converted to Christianity told me, we must never learn to hate, and we must “always be our brother’s keeper” (gen 4:9)In order not to repeat the horrific lessons of the past, we must always remember to look at the Old Testament ONLY through the lens of the new covenant of the NT, the Finished Work of the Cross, the blood stained cross, the redemptive work of Christ, for we are all sinners saved by His grace alone. Any so-called bible teacher that does not make the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, the mercy and grace of God for our salvation, the central and primary message every time he opens his mouth, he is not preaching what the apostle Paul preached. Paul said if anyone preaches any other gospel that man is accursed.
Apply these aspects:
“To whom much is given, much is required” – Luke 12:28 “Those who are gracious to the poor lend to the Lord, and the Lord will fully repay them.” – Proverbs 19:17. “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink” – Matthew 25:35-40:
We are the wealthiest nation in the world. The wealthiest man, and a man who inherited wealth, are cutting off aid to impoverished people around the world. They even want to cut out aid to poor children and unhealthy people of this nation.
You say it is in the name of Jesus?
“A dishonest man spreads strife, and a whisperer separates close friends.” – Proverbs 16:18
Lies upon lies. Crickets from Christians. We have turned against our friends – friends who help keep the world safe, friends who came to our defense when we were assaulted.
AND… they are fumbling, bumbling, making mistake after mistake. The inefficient saying they are making us more efficient.
Honorable people who have worked hard to serve and protect the citizens of this nation, in many already short staffed agencies, have been capriciously fired.
Someone who is an immigrant, and someone who marries immigrants, now attempting to sell citizenship to wealthy immigrants.
The “Sheryl Ruthvens” of the world are successful because Christianity has abandoned the teachings of Jesus – “in the name of Jesus.”
Debbie –
Do you NOT see white supremacy/segregation, an end of women’s civic rights, terror against internal enemies, replacement theology, and replacing the US constitution with biblical laws, which would include the execution of people guilty of various sins not currently a capital punishment as problematic? These are extreme, unBiblical, and need to be both exposed and confronted by the church.
And our faith and decision to walk with God through a reconciled relationship through Christ is to be a CHOICE, not legally forced.
This is a very strange article creating a “turf war” between several controversial Christian ministries. That’s not the issue. It is the President choosing a charlatan Prosperity Preacher as a liaison to the Evangelical community at large.
You described Paula White very well, Wayne Henderson.
I’m with JDS. Not a one of you expressed any thanks to God that instead of the wickedness and perversion that was in the White House, there is prayer and communion. A sad reflection on the church.
Wesley – not sure where you get your information, but prayer and communion has always gone on in the WH. The real question is how that prayer and communion informs the ACTIONS coming out of the WH…..
Insert White-Cain leading the blind quote here. Although, I have to admit that if Doug Wilson is against her, she at least has that going for her. (See Sons Of Patriarchy Podcast).
I have NEVER EVER trusted Paula White, ever!!! Look her up…all of the infidelities and breaking up of marriage(s). The trist with that nasty Benny Hinn between his divorce and remarriage. Paula is still peddling that sickening prosperity gospel the Christian church has been plagued with since Oral Roberts rolled it out. But what I’d really love to have Julie Roys and her team investigate is Paula’s affiliation with ‘Mother Moon’.
Paula White is a proven established charlatan. Long meandering explanations trying to qualify her prosperity gospel, tongue talking, miracles galore, background exposes the current fallen apostate 501C-3 church business establishment. Her being picked as spiritual counsel for POTUS makes me cringe.
I love President Trump. However in my opinion Paula White-Cain could be the worst decision He has made thus far.
Timothy Burns
I heard a great prayer from a black preacher at Trump’s inaugaration who would have been good for that position, even Franklin Graham. I have read alot of bad stuff about Paula White, but remember GOD IS IN CONTROL!!!!