Donald Trump’s establishment of the newly-minted White House Faith Office and “anti-Christian bias” task force isn’t merely another gesture to his evangelical base — it’s the methodical implementation of Project 2025’s radical blueprint for installing Christian Nationalist governance throughout the federal bureaucracy. The strategy, emerging with crystalline clarity, reveals how a sophisticated network of religious nationalists has positioned itself to transform executive power and infuse one particular version of religious dogma into American life.
At the nexus of this transformation stands televangelist Paula White-Cain, newly appointed senior advisor to Trump’s Faith Office and current chair of the Center for American Values at the America First Policy Institute, a cousin to Project 2025 and a similar far-right, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-woman think tank with several other Trump appointees among its ranks. White-Cain will be joined by former Trump staffer at the office of Public Liaison, Jennifer Korn, who worked with White-Cain on the National Faith Advisory Board, an organization Trump launched in September 2021 to keep his evangelical base united through the 2024 election. They will be joined by Jackson Lane who worked for the Trump-Vance campaign in faith outreach.
White-Cain’s new role illuminates the intricate connections between Trump’s religious messaging and Project 2025’s policy machinery being assembled to enforce it. Her controversial “prosperity gospel” teachings — which promise material rewards for spiritual devotion and were employed by scandal-ridden PTL Club evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker — have drawn fierce criticism from traditional evangelicals, making her elevation particularly significant.
“The prosperity gospel — the idea that God dispenses material wealth and health based on what we “decree” — is not just fluff. It’s also not just another branch of Pentecostalism, a tradition that emphasizes the continuation of the gifts of healing, prophecy and tongues. It’s another religion,” Michael Horton, a theology professor at Westminster Seminary California wrote in 2017.
Like Trump, who shares a past rife with financial and marital failures, White-Cain’s controversial background includes her former church’s bankruptcy despite reported revenues of $150 million between 2004-2007, multiple marriages that challenged conservative sensibilities, and inflammatory rhetoric that has defined her public presence. She shifts from asking for donations to speaking in tongues in online videos, rebuking “witchcraft in the marine kingdom” and commanding “all satanic pregnancies to miscarry.”
White-Cain is a serious Trump loyalist. A particularly revealing moment came at the January 6, 2021, “Stop-the-Steal” rally, which happened just before the storming of the Capitol, where she cast a magical hedge of faith around Trump and called for divine intervention to destroy “every demonic network” opposing Trump, explicitly framing political opposition as spiritual warfare.
The machinery of this transformation extends far beyond White-Cain’s appointment. Trump’s selection of Russell Vought for the Office of Management and Budget—a self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist and key architect of Project 2025—positions a theological ideologue to oversee the implementation of presidential policies across federal agencies. This appointment, coupled with the February 9 executive order establishing the “anti-Christian bias” task force under Attorney General Pam Bondi, creates a powerful mechanism for embedding religious nationalist principles throughout federal institutions.
The strategic depth becomes apparent through the concentration of New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) adherents in key positions. NAR, a minority but powerful sect within Christianity, believes that Christians led by a divinely ordained Trump should establish dominion over politics, business and culture, fight demonic influences with spiritual warfare, and that success in these realms will bring about the end times and the second coming of Christ.
Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth maintain connections to the movement, while House Speaker Mike Johnson‘s ties complete a triangle of influence. This religious movement views Trump as a divinely appointed agent of disruption, meant to create sufficient chaos for “apostolic pastors” to establish their vision of theological governance.
Trump’s rhetoric at the National Prayer Breakfast — declaring “we want to bring religion back — stronger, bigger, better than ever before” — perfectly aligns with Project 2025’s explicit aim to reorient federal power toward Christian Nationalist objectives. Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership assertion that “Religious devotion and spirituality are the greatest sources of happiness” provides theological justification for this unprecedented merger of religious authority and state power.
The executive order establishing the task force mirrors Project 2025’s concerns about alleged discrimination, particularly its warning that “the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism.” By empowering Bondi to investigate supposed anti-Christian bias within federal agencies, Trump creates a powerful tool for reshaping institutional culture.
As these initiatives unfold, they raise fundamental questions about the future of religious pluralism and the separation of Church and State in American governance. The systematic dismantling of church-state separation, coupled with the concentration of power in the hands of Christian Nationalist ideologues, suggests a transformation more fundamental than mere policy changes. It represents an attempt to reshape American society through the lens of religious nationalism simultaneously destroying our democracy and its Constitutional principles as we have so far known them.
