(RNS) — Since Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president last month, televangelist Paula White, long a prominent Donald Trump supporter, has been curiously silent on the contest, at least in public. The reason may have to do with White’s current constituency in her Florida megachurch.
Before President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential contest in July, White, the former senior pastor of City of Destiny church in Apopka, near Orlando, had acted as spiritual adviser to Trump when he was a candidate and during his presidency, primarily as an organizer of his national faith advisory board.
When White assumed the pulpit in 2012, City of Destiny had been predominantly African American and Latino. In 2016 and 2020, White’s highly visible work for Trump, who has referred disparagingly to African and Latino migrants, was therefore rarely mentioned in her national ministry newsletter or, with a few exceptions, on the church’s website. White did, however, pray for Trump at his 2016 inaugural.
Since 2012, the petite, blond White, often wearing stiletto heels, has been an odd pairing with the working- and middle-class congregants, most of them people of color, at City of Destiny (formerly New Destiny Christian Center). She had succeeded the church’s charismatic African American founder, Zachery Tims, who had been found dead under mysterious circumstances in a Times Square hotel room.
When White officially retired from City of Destiny’s leadership in 2019, she turned the pulpit over to her son, Brad Knight, and daughter-in-law, Rachel. At that time, the core of the congregation was still African American. That has changed since, but Paula White Ministries, White’s separate televangelism operation, is still heavily supported by Black women, and the ministry’s annual “Unleashed” event is scheduled this year for Oct. 10-13 in Apopka, as the presidential race hits its peak.
White’s less conspicuous public backing for Trump may be explained by her unwillingness to risk alienating these supporters, who may be backing Harris for president.
Since Harris became the Democrats’ nominee, White has been virtually invisible on the national scene. Gone are the photos of evangelical Christians in a “holy huddle” surrounding Trump with White in the front rank, clutching Trump’s shoulder.
White’s office did not respond to a request to comment on this article.
FILE – President Donald Trump smiles as pastor Paula White prepares to lead the room in prayer, during a dinner for evangelical leaders in the State Dining Room of the White House, Aug. 27, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
On Monday (Sept. 9), White headed an off-the-record meeting billed as a “National Faith Advisory Board — Pre-Debate Prayer Call.” The board’s chair, White said she was speaking from a Trump property in Las Vegas, where she appealed to churches to support the former president. She noted that for 20 years she has owned a condo in New York’s Trump Tower. (She did not mention that she had been given a cut rate on the property.)
Introduced by the call’s moderator as an evangelical “superstar,” White did not formally endorse Trump as she did in 2016 and 2020, or specifically pray for his victory over Harris in the debate, though she was effusive in her praise for the former president.
Trump spoke first on the call, charging — without evidence — that if Harris won the election, she would “ramp up the war on Christians.”
White then asked the thousands of evangelicals on the call “to pray over you for tomorrow.” She encouraged listeners to pray that “when he steps on that stage the spirit of God will rest on him” and that, in the end, “let [Trump] recover all,” apparently a reference to the White House.
At the end of the call, after two other evangelical leaders spoke, White said to Trump, “We love you,” and asked those on the call to fast for the next 24 hours on his behalf, because “God is going to use you mightily.”
White is nothing if not a pragmatist in building her profile in the evangelical world and beyond, and her relative lack of visible support for Trump may well be rooted in a private conclusion that Trump will be defeated in November.
In that case, said Frances FitzGerald, author of “The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America”: “What is she to do now? Well, I think she’s done the best thing, which is simply to back off. I think —and she seems to know — that supporting him publicly would alienate her audience.”
But some observers suggest she has already done so. Matthew D. Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore and author of “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy,” takes a sharply different view of White’s election dilemma and its complicated racial politics.
FILE – Pastor Paula White prays during the inauguration of President Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2017, in Washington, D.C. RNS photo by Jerome Socolovsky
Taylor, who devotes a chapter to White in his book and who has tracked her progression with Trump, said sources who know her report that City of Destiny now attracts about 200 mostly elderly, white worshippers on Sunday mornings.
“It’s a far cry from the thriving, majority Black megachurch that it was when she took it over in 2011-2012,” Taylor said in an email.
Without question, he said, White “built her career, especially in the roughly 2000–2015 time frame, around speaking to African American Pentecostals and charismatics.”
“My sense, from talking to some Black charismatic leaders and other Florida pastors, is that White burned a lot of bridges with the Black church community when she took an official White House role in the fall of 2019 and even more when she infamously prayed for ‘angels from Africa’ to help Trump win the election in November 2020.”
Taylor added that White has been more visible through the national faith advisory board than it may appear. “She has been quite active, somewhat behind the scenes, mobilizing Christian voters, especially through pastors’ networks and prayer calls.”
White has proved herself both nimble and flexible in her rise. Married three times, she has survived both financial and sexual scandals. But bridging the divide between her political leadership and her former pulpit may prove to be too much of a stretch for her.
