Editor’s note: This profile is part of a GPAHE series examining the people shaping American Christian nationalism in post–Project 2025 America. Christian nationalism is distinct from Christianity itself; mainstream churches have publicly rejected the movement as a distortion of the Christian faith. The figures profiled here are the architects of a theocratic, political project working to fuse American national identity with conservative Christian supremacist rule and dismantle democratic institutions.
Paula White-Cain built a fortune on a single promise — that God repays the believer who sends money. She has spent a quarter century turning that promise into political power, and she now runs a federal office shaped around her.
Key Takeaways:
- White-Cain runs the White House Faith Office as a special government employee. She takes no federal salary and calls it a covenant never to take a dime from Trump, while she keeps running Paula White Ministries, which solicits donations and promises a supernatural reward.
- A Senate Finance Committee inquiry from 2007 to 2011 scrutinized her ministry, Without Walls, and five other media-based ministries. A Senate staff review documented a leased private jet, a Tampa waterfront mansion, a down payment on a $3.5 million Trump Tower condo, and the church buying the Whites’ own books and tapes.
- In 2019, she launched the One Voice Prayer Movement from inside the White House, which would play an important role in mobilizing Christian nationalists to participate in the events of January 6, 2021.
- Her National Faith Advisory Board, which claims to have more than 70,000 faith leaders, serves as a get-out-the-vote vehicle for conservative Christians.
- Her Faith Office reaches into every federal department, each with a faith director or liaison. It also works with a Justice Department task force that issued a 2026 report casting years of civil-rights enforcement under Biden as persecution of Christians.
In February 2026, a year into her job running the White House Faith Office, Paula White-Cain stood on the stage of her own Unleashed Conference and asked the crowd for $100,000. She pitched it as a “sacrificial seed” for a friend’s ministry and said it wasn’t for her, yet told them to make the checks out to Paula White Ministries anyway. The government job pays her nothing — by her own account, God forbade it — but the ministry is a separate ledger, and it has run without a pause through her time in the West Wing.
On Oct. 28, 2024, eight days before the election, Paula White-Cain packed a megachurch outside Atlanta with more than 1,000 pastors. She called the gathering the first National Faith Summit. Donald Trump sat for a friendly interview with the woman he calls his pastor, and he used his turn onstage to tell the room how they met. She had a church on cheap land in Florida, he recalled, and someone offered to buy it. He advised her to sell, take the money and move farther out, and she kept doing it. “This is a great business,” Trump said. “This is pretty good.”
Then a circle of preachers laid hands on the candidate and thanked God for raising up Donald Trump “to be a warrior for the word of God.” The summit was a campaign event. White-Cain’s coalition had spent the cycle pressing pastors to turn out their congregations. In the same interview, Trump claimed he “got rid of” the Johnson Amendment — the tax rule that bars tax-exempt churches from endorsing candidates — though it remains on the books.
Trump promised the revamped faith office would report straight to him. Three months later, he built it.
White-Cain is a prosperity-gospel televangelist and is considered an apostle of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), the charismatic movement that calls for modern apostles and prophets to take control of government. In 2017, she became the first clergywoman to deliver the invocation at a presidential inauguration. She is now the movement’s highest-placed figure inside the federal government, and her career traces how a theology built on selling miracles for cash worked its way into the West Wing.
The It Factor
White-Cain met Trump around 2001, when he phoned her after catching her sermons on Christian television. “You’ve got the it factor,” he told her; she replied that ministers call it the anointing. In one of their early meetings, she told him, “I don’t want your money … I don’t want your fame … I want your soul.”
She was born Paula Furr in Tupelo, Miss., in 1966. Her parents split, and her father died when she was young. The family fell into poverty, and she has described growing up in an abusive home. As a teenager, she converted at a Church of God in Maryland. She married musician Dean Knight while pregnant with her son, Bradley, in 1985; the marriage ended by 1989.
She met Maryland preacher Randy White in 1987, and they both divorced their spouses in 1989 and married shortly after. In 1991, the couple opened a Tampa storefront church with five members and no money. It grew fast. By 2006, the renamed Without Walls claimed roughly 20,000 worshipers, and her program, Paula White Today, reached nine networks. The BET slot carried her into Black households as well as into white evangelical living rooms tuned to Trinity Broadcasting.
In 2010, the National Enquirer ran photos of White and Benny Hinn holding hands outside a Rome hotel. Hinn built a fortune on stadium “miracle crusades,” telling the sick that a “seed” donation could buy their healing. Hinn was married at the time, and denied an affair: White called it “categorically false” and said the two “were never alone.”
Beginning in 2007, Sen. Charles Grassley, then the Finance Committee’s ranking Republican, opened an inquiry into Without Walls and five other media-based ministries, Hinn’s among them. The Whites, now divorced, answered only in part, withholding details on their own pay, and the review closed without penalty. Without Walls filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2014. Randy White had resumed leadership of the church in 2012, and White says she played no part in the filing.
In 2015 she married Jonathan Cain, the Journey keyboardist who co-wrote “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Open Arms,” and “Faithfully.” His hitmaking days were decades behind him, and he was still married when they met on a Southwest Airlines flight; after his divorce they wed, and she took his name, becoming White-Cain. Cain still tours with Journey, now on the band’s farewell run, but for the past decade his focus has been on worship music; he sells Jonathan Cain Ministries shirts, CDs, and an “Oh Lord Lead Us” baby onesie from his website.
Her relationship with Trump had been deepening all along. By 2011, she was his pastor. Trump was flirting with a run for president that year and asked her what God made of it. She gathered pastors at Trump Tower and prayed over him for six and a half hours, then told him what she saw: “You’re going to be president. But I hate the price you’re going to pay.” He dropped the 2012 race that May. His real run was five years off.
Dr. Matthew D. Taylor, a visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University whose book The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy maps how the movement’s apostles helped drive Jan. 6 and credits White-Cain with bringing the prophets in from the margins and seating them across from Trump at Trump Tower in the fall of 2015. One of them, Lance Wallnau, had already christened Trump a modern Cyrus, the pagan king God used to free his people, and he now calls the president God’s “messy gladiator,” a divine rebuke to a church too timid to fight.
The Prosperity Gospel
White-Cain made her name in the strand of Pentecostalism that promises material reward in return for donations. Her appeals to donors are blunt. Ahead of Passover in 2025, weeks into her federal job, she told followers to send a gift to her ministry, linking it to seven supernatural blessings drawn from Scripture. For $125, the ministry sent back a Holy Land Communion Set — olive-wood cups, plus unleavened bread and grape juice from Israel, all in a commemorative box. Donors who gave $1,000 or more, “as the Holy Spirit leads,” got a ten-inch Waterford crystal cross.
In 2019, Melissa Rogers, who ran the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships under Obama, noted that White-Cain kept hawking religion-themed items she promised would reward buyers spiritually and materially. “No White House employee who works with religious communities should be able to push and profit from the sale of religion-themed products while they serve,” Rogers wrote. “White House appointees must not use their public office for private gain, nor appear to do so.”
The Road to the Ellipse
White-Cain’s first government post came in the fall of 2019, when Trump placed her in the Office of Public Liaison. Within weeks, she launched the One Voice Prayer Movement, built on a dream that the self-described prophet James Goll said he’d had in early 2019: that of a prayer force interceding over all three branches of government and covering every cabinet member. Its founding circle pulled in prominent New Apostolic Reformation names — Dutch Sheets, Cindy Jacobs, and Dave Kubal of Intercessors for America — and ran monthly conference calls and weekly prayer points for thousands of pastors. For all practical purposes, the operation was headquartered in the White House.
What the movement prayed for became clear around the 2020 election. White-Cain had cast the contest in spiritual-warfare terms that fall and warned that unseen forces were working to steal it from Trump. After the polls closed and the count was unresolved, she led a post-election prayer service and told God that the outcome was already his. “We will override any will of man over the mind of God,” she prayed. Beside her, her son Brad Knight asked God to bring “wrath” and “fury” on those who resisted Trump and to break them “with a rod of iron.” When the race went to Joe Biden, and Trump refused to concede, the network pushed the faithful to read the loss as a theft from God’s anointed.
The conference calls she ran with NAR apostles became a spiritual arm of the Stop the Steal campaign. On Jan. 6, 2021, she opened the Save America rally on the Ellipse, taking the microphone before Trump spoke and asking God to let “every adversary against democracy … be overturned right now in the name of Jesus.” Hours later, the mob stormed the Capitol.
The network survived the loss. When the first term ended, White-Cain folded the coalition into the National Faith Advisory Board, which she launched in 2021 and which kept the network intact through the Biden years.
The Turnout Machine
The board White-Cain built is a political machine. She is the founder and president of the National Faith Advisory Board (NFAB), which claims “over 70,000 faith leaders who represent millions across the country.” Ahead of the 2024 election, the Trump campaign, in a press release announcing her Atlanta National Faith Summit in late October, warned that 104 million people of faith might sit out the race and urged NFAB pastors to prevent that. “As pastors and leaders, we have a responsibility to guide our congregations in standing up for biblical values and ensuring that our voices are heard at the ballot box,” White-Cain said.
The prophets did not stay backstage. Jonathan Cahn, a Messianic-Jewish author whose end-times prophecy books have sold in the millions, told the assembled pastors that Trump was the new Jehu, the Old Testament king who slaughtered a corrupt dynasty to seize the throne. Jehu’s road to power ran through a bloodbath.
“President Trump, you were born into the world to be a trumpet of God, a vessel of the Lord in the hands of God,” he declared. “God called you to walk according to the template; He called you according to the template of Jehu, the warrior king.”
Holy War
She has spent years reading the news as prophecy — a script in which history runs through God’s appointed eras toward a final rapture. She spent Trump’s four years out of office telling congregations that the country suffers whenever it turns on him. Rejecting Trump, she told the faithful, is rejecting God.
In an interview published April 11, 2025, she sat across from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and opened by asking whether the signs of Armageddon were coming to fruition. Netanyahu sidestepped the question and steered the conversation to Trump. In March 2026, after Trump launched a war on Iran, she gathered about 20 evangelical leaders to lay hands on him in the Oval Office. To her movement, Iran is the biblical Persia, and a war there reads as the end times drawing near.
That kind of talk rattled members of Congress, who asked the Pentagon to investigate how far the apocalyptic thinking had reached into the chain of command. One conservative writer called her a “psychopathic doomsday cultist.”
At the Easter lunch on April 1, 2026, she compared Trump to Christ and told him, to his face, that no one had suffered the way he had.
The Faith Office
She runs the office the way she built the ministry. For 30 years she made her money by telling followers what a blessing would cost them. The federal job is the same trade at a higher level: she sits where pastors and political appointees reach the president, and she controls who gets through.
Trump made it official on Feb. 7, 2025. He created the White House Faith Office by executive order and named White-Cain a special government employee and senior adviser. She describes the role as a divine assignment; she told CBN it would be “a sin for me to miss the mark” by turning it down.
Trump’s order gave the office primary responsibility for faith policy across the executive branch and directed every federal agency to establish a Center for Faith or appoint a faith liaison within 90 days. Each of those officials reports back to White-Cain’s office. The White House now says the directors and liaisons sit in every department and agency.
Her reach runs past her own staff. White-Cain sits on the Religious Liberty Commission Trump created in May 2025, a panel his order directs to advise the Faith Office she heads. Its roster reads like her own network — Franklin Graham, Eric Metaxas, and a dozen more conservative clergy and activists. Her office also works closely with the Justice Department’s task force on anti-Christian bias. Both bodies help write the religious-liberty rules that other agencies follow, and her hand is in each.
On April 30, 2026, the task force released a report that pulled from 17 federal agencies to brand the Biden administration’s civil-rights enforcement as a war on Christians. The agencies have started acting on it. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed scrapping the rule that keeps federally funded shelters from turning people away over gender identity; under it, a transgender woman could be refused a bed and told it is a matter of religious freedom. Health regulators expanded the exemptions allowing a clinic to refuse her care for the same reason.
In the language of White-Cain’s own movement, she now holds the mountain of government the NAR vowed for years to capture.
For most of White-Cain’s career, being a “doorkeeper” meant deciding which believers gained access to her ministry. Today it means deciding which pastors, activists, and religious leaders gain access to the White House.
In Her Own Words
“We command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now.”
— Sermon to her congregation, Jan. 5, 2020.
“We break and divide every demonic confederacy against the election, against America.”
— Prayer service for Trump’s reelection, Nov. 4, 2020.
“I don’t want your money … I don’t want your fame … I want your soul.”
— CBN, Jan. 15, 2023, recalling what she said in her first meetings with Donald Trump in 2001.
“I would be wrong and maybe even a sin for me to miss the mark, if I didn’t fulfill this.”
— CBN, April 2, 2025, on accepting the White House Faith Office.
“Based on the events that are unfolding today, do you feel that we are seeing these signs of this vision come to fruition?”
— Interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, April 11, 2025, asking whether the End of Days had begun.
“It’s not hard to submit.”
— Interview on Real America’s Voice, April 23, 2025, on submitting to her husband.
“I’ve kept that covenant with God. I’ve never received a dime from President Trump. I won’t take a penny here.”
— CBN, May 8, 2025, on declining a federal salary while leading the Faith Office.
“I have defined myself as a professional doorkeeper for God.”
— CBN, May 8, 2025, on her role in the White House.
“No one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us.”
— White House Easter lunch, April 1, 2026, addressing Donald Trump.
“Our nation … was built on Christian values, on the Bible. … This is really truly rededicating the country to God.”
— National Faith Advisory Board webinar, April 28, 2026.
