On Saturday night, while Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were acknowledging the cheers of a nation, a spiritual battle was going on in Apopka, Fla.
The crowd gathered at Paula White-Cain’s City of Destiny Church was clearly dispirited at the events of the day; a day that various segments of the Pentecostal/charismatic world had declared would never happen because God would make sure that His chosen instrument, President Donald Trump, would get a second term.
“Keep on believing,” White told the crowd. “There are processes at work. …Don’t get distracted by the voices of the media. Prayer brings the will of God to pass. This is a day of rejoicing. Whenever God is moving, it’s a day of rejoicing.
“We break every spirit of mockery right now. What matters is not what man says, but what God says.”
It was her fourth day of prayer meetings since Election Day to “decree” Trump’s coming victory. At one point, her son, Bradley Knight, said he will quit the ministry if Trump is not elected.
White, as many of you know, is Trump’s highest profile pastor, so we’re not talking about a minor personality here. She is arguably America’s most powerful female religious figure. She is — acting as the spiritual force behind Trump — a key figure who is refusing to concede the election to Biden.
In social media, people are talking about this like crazy. In the news?
Her first stab at praying Trump into a second term got treated as a joke by media who hadn’t a clue of what she was trying to do. They did listen to her words, which is why she’s quoted as accusing demons of rigging the election.
Yep, she did say that.
It all started when RightWingWatch posted a video of White shouting “the Lord says it is done” on Nov. 4 about Trump’s reelection. A sample of her prayers, which read like battle orders asking God to take down Biden votes, are as follows. She prayed that:
“… every demonic confederacy against the election…against who You have declared to be in the White House … we come against people working in high levels right now.
Let your hand establish the outcome of this income … for I hear the sound of victory, I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory.
While saying all this, her shirt half fell off one shoulder, exposing a black bra underneath. Adding an odd note to it all was the sight of a man dressed in shorts and T-shirt pacing back and forth behind her. That was Bradley Knight, her son who co-pastors Destiny along with his mother.
Understandably, social media exploded with reactions that were sassy, humorous or tasteless or a combo of all three. Someone put together a video of White’s proclamations to Eminem’s “Without Me” with a dancing cat in the foreground.
Not surprisingly, White’s church removed the worship service video from its site.
Here was USA Today’s bemused take:
Megachurch pastor and televangelist Paula White-Cain, who is spiritual adviser to President Donald Trump, delivered a prayer service Wednesday night in an effort to secure Trump's reelection.
During the service, which was streamed on Facebook Live, White-Cain called on "angelic reinforcement" from the continents of Africa and South America.
"I hear a sound of victory, the Lord says it is done," she said. "For angels have even been dispatched from Africa right now. ... In the name of Jesus from South America, they're coming here."
Unfortunately, USA Today, which has not had a full-time religion reporter ever since Cathy Grossman (who had the beat for 23 years) took a buyout in 2013, couldn’t find one conservative religious voice in its Rollodex to offer commentary on what was happening in this church service.
This was a subject worthy of cheap, quick mockery and that was that.
White's video has gone viral since it went online Wednesday night. And many have expressed outrage over her words.
"God is sending angels from a place Trump called a [expletive] to help him get re-elected?" Bishop Talbert Swan, a pastor, activist and NAACP Chapter President, wrote on Twitter. "'I hear the sounds of victory...' Consider a hearing aid."
"She’ll be lucky if Stephen Miller doesn’t send those angels to ICE Detention Centers," wrote Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, political strategist and commentator for CNN, Telemundo and The View.
Most journalists didn’t know how to react to White’s mixture of proclamation, declaration (will explain these terms in a bit) and snatches of tongue speaking, so they avoided covering it. The narrative here is that God had chosen Trump for two terms but that nefarious spiritual powers are gumming up the works.
Social media was less shy commenting on it, with folks from Africa weighing in as to why they should be sending angels to America. Typical comments on Facebook included the following:
Apologies for the delay of angels from Africa. Different timezones. They like to be at least two hours late. It’s our culture.
We are praying hard from Africa, so your mockery is out of place
They didn't get visas I guess
Reaction from the born-again brigade was all over the map and the New York Times did a decent piece on evangelical reaction to Biden’s win and mentioned several evangelical leaders who are refusing to accept the outcome:
Like the president, a number of evangelical leaders refused to accept an outcome in which Mr. Trump had lost. Moments after most major news networks calculated that Mr. Biden had won the race, Franklin Graham, the evangelist, cautioned that the results were not “official.”
But they only scratched the surface.
Last I looked, the president’s pastor was still holding the line. White did another prayer video Thursday night (I watched both), which you can find here. (Or go to Paula White.org, click on “livestream” and you’ll get the tapes.)
Yes, that’s White’s husband, Jonathan Cain of the rock band Journey, leading worship.
To explain what reporters are missing in that now-famous Nov. 5, broadcast, White taught that to bring God’s will to pass in the Earth, you have to pray verses from the Bible. That is, “When God wants to speak, He speaks through His church, in alignment with the Word of God,” she said.
So you use verses in the Bible to “decree” what you’re certain what the will of God is. The idea is that Christians have authority to execute God’s will. Some believers in churches of this kind take this further by dividing our culture into seven “mountains” of influence that Christians can and should control.
The first “mountain” is government and Trump, for many Christians, was the man to bring God’s prerogatives to bear. Many Pentecostal believers floated prophecies that Trump would get a second term. In fact, when I was researching my huge Washington Post magazine piece on Paula White back in 2017, Knight told me there were prophecies from people in their circle that Trump will win again. And there was some thought that Pence would get two terms after that.
This clearly isn’t happening and Trump losing an election is a massive faith crisis for these folks. Like I said earlier, Knight even said that if Trump is not reelected, he will quit the ministry. He explained it on the Nov. 6 broadcast, as he walked back and forth in a New York Rangers T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. This is a very long quote, so please stick with me.
Starting around moment 56:
“If he (God) does not come through in 2020 to bring his appointed Cyrus to elected office, then something is disconnected from the God of my personal life that responds to the calls of the righteous from the God of the universe. I do not accept that my God is limited in power and scope. I do not accept that my God will hear the voices of the wicked over the cries of the righteous.
(After a few sentences about false humility) “ … the humble thing to say is that if Donald Trump is not our president in 2021, then I am not going to do ministry any more… I am convinced with every fiber of my being that God has a chosen man who is going to be in that office.
“It’s not simply a matter where I can go, ‘OK God, I guess I just heard you on this issue but not on that one.’ There’s times you can miss it, but not like this. There’s times you can be off but when the body of Christ, when the righteous ones have spoken and prophets have risen up and said what God’s going to do, we don’t have the luxury of then backtracking and saying (as he shrugs)… Well, we don’t have that luxury. That’s not an option…”
Here’s some translation on a key Bible image. Some Pentecostals believe that Trump is the 21st-century version of Cyrus, the Persian king who allowed exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem in 538 BC.
The next sentence, an hour into the broadcast, is crucial:
“When He speaks out about a nation and when we as believers cry out and say, ‘do that thing, God, ‘He is obligated to respond. He is obligated to his Word to respond “For My Name’s sake.” … When you begin to see the prayers of the bold in the Bible, they don’t explain things away, but they wait until those things happen and they don’t move until the promises of God are manifest.
You got that? What these folks believe is that their prayers force God to respond.
“The problem we have today is there are too many people who are either directly aligned with evil or too cowardly to stand by what God promised when it gets tight! When it doesn’t make sense! We say we want to be used by God …and then in a moment like this, we run. In a moment like this, we make excuses for God. In a moment like this, we change the story.
Please understand what is at stake — in this movement — for leaders in this stream of Trump supporters.
If these “prophets” got Trump’s re-election wrong, then they may have gotten everything else wrong too. Knight is saying that if Trump loses, he can no longer trust the voice of God in him.
Why is this news? That depends on whether journalists take a debate of this kind seriously. After all, Pentecostalism is only the fastest growing religious movement in the world.
This is a major crisis in one widespread movement inside the world of Pentecostal Christianity — a movement also known as the New Apostolic Reformation, described in Holly Pivec’s and Douglas Geivett’s 2014 book. It’s not a creedal movement, so it’s a bit squishy as to who does or does not belong to the NAR crowd, but its basic tenet is that God has restored a cadre of apostles and prophets to lead worldwide Christianity in the 21st century.
These believers are putting their statements — that Trump will still win — out there for all to see, and I wish we were seeing more reporters paying attention to this events.
I turned to Dutch Sheets, a South Carolina evangelist who is also considered a prophet in this movement. On Nov. 7, he said in this broadcast:
I believe God has orchestrated all of this, He has heard us and he is going to give us victory. …I believe there has been rampant fraud and deceit in this election …
(After predicting a coming worldwide revival) Donald Trump is a part of this … he needs to be in this position for four more years so the antichrist forces in America…they must not gain power.
“All the prophetic voices I know and trust are in agreement there is a major attempt to steal this election from President Donald J. Trump. Some of it involves outright fraud; other aspects are simply efforts to distort and manipulate.
I know these folks are a subset — a movement among charismatics/pentecostals — of a Christian subset and not well known to the general public. However, when you have flocks of Republicans calling foul on the election and the president’s most high-profile pastor is having nightly prayer meetings because she is certain that prophets have decreed four more years for Trump, it’s time more reporters give a listen. To what degree is this support a factor in Trump’s actions?
PS - I just found a piece in Newsweek magazine by Benjamin Fearnow talking about infighting within the prophetic movement over this exact issue. So…ONE reporter is on this.
And here is my update on this phenomenon for ReligionUnplugged.