(Image source: Eric Thayer for the New York Times)

The day after the 2020 election, before news outlets officially called the presidential race for Joe Biden, a woman got up in her church to preach. Petite, blonde, fashionably dressed, she spoke with the verve and cadence of a gifted televangelist enrapturing a crowd. Stamping her foot and intermittently speaking in tongues, she called for angels from Africa and South America—“angelic reinforcements”—to come to the United States to help assure that Donald Trump would be declared victorious.

That preacher was Paula White-Cain, personal pastor to then-President Trump and chair of his Evangelical Advisory Board. She was also, at the time, a paid White House staffer, leading Trump’s Faith and Opportunity Initiative.

The news stories and academic articles that took note of this episode—often mockingly—chalked it up as a potent example of “Christian nationalism” or, as it’s commonly rendered, “white Christian nationalism.” In American political discourse today, these phrases are usually invoked as though they are uniquely American phenomena. Yes, Paula White-Cain is white, and she does espouse Christian nationalism. But in the background of this ecstatic scene and this pastor’s story lies a radical, ascendant, Independent Charismatic paradigm of Christian nationalism that is neither bounded by American shores nor exclusively inhabited by white Christians. It’s a story that may or may not involve angels transferring between continents, but it definitely involves transcontinental webs of relationships among Christian leaders from North America, Africa, and South America.

Though counterintuitively more transnational, racially diverse, and gender inclusive than other forms of Christian nationalism, this insurgent force in the American religious right should not leave us sleeping more calmly at night. Indeed, the Independent Charismatic style of Christian nationalism that Paula White-Cain and Donald Trump have helped usher into the mainstream of the American right was a driving force in the January 6th Capitol Riot, and it is powering Trump’s third (ever more authoritarian) bid for the White House.

Paula White-Cain, therefore, serves as a useful entry point into understanding the globally attuned charismatic Christian movement that has furnished the spirituality of Christian Trumpism.

The Wild West of Modern Christianity

The phrase “Independent Charismatic” probably sounds obscure to many, so it’s worth pausing to consider the structure and environs of this incipient segment of global Christianity. “Charismatic” here describes a form of Christian belief and practice focused on recapturing the supernatural dimensions of early Christianity, where speaking in tongues, miracles, and prophecy abound. This charismatic subculture feels like home to hundreds of millions of people around the globe but feels utterly foreign to many who locate themselves within the European and North American cosmopolitan mainstream.

Independent Charismatics are the rowdy, unregulated cousins of the Pentecostals, those Holy Spirit-filled, revivalist denominations of modern Christianity. Additionally, there’s a thriving global trend today of Catholics adopting effusive charismatic spirituality. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett was raised in such a community.

But the key characteristic that sets Independent Charismatics apart from these other types is that they are nondenominational. The Independent Charismatics occupy the Wild West of modern Christianity: a free-flowing culture of perpetual new frontiers. Scholars estimate that there were approximately 44 million Independent Charismatics in the world in 1970, but by 2020 they numbered 312 million. That means that, globally, Independent Charismaticism has been roughly doubling in numbers every 20 years, making it one of the fastest growing religious movements ever.

Two features of this global charismatic trend have proven central to the Christian embrace of Donald Trump: 1) a highly networked leadership culture and 2) the aggressive politics of “spiritual warfare.”

For many Christians, “nondenominational” signals the absence of structure (to “denominate” is, literally, to name or categorize), but church governance, like nature, abhors a vacuum. In lieu of institutional superstructure, the entrepreneurial Independent Charismatic leadership culture that has emerged in the past few decades is collaborative and intricately networked. Independent Charismatic leaders go by many titles—pastor, apostle, evangelist, prophet, televangelist, Messianic rabbi, worship leader, revivalist—but they all work together. And among the thousands of global, top-tier nondenominational charismatic pastors and leaders, there is rarely more than two degrees of separation. These webs of relationships among the leaders weave together charismatic movements around the world.

One of the central organs of this leadership culture is a relatively new model of church governance called apostolic networks. The concept emerges from a modern reinterpretation of Ephesians 4, where the biblical author lists five ministry gifts Jesus gave to the church: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. In the past century, many charismatic leaders began seeing this passage, with its five differentiated roles, as the central New Testament template for church leadership. Though it’s at great variance from how most Christians think of church, the proponents of this “fivefold” or “apostolic and prophetic” model argue that this was the original arrangement of the early church and should be restored now.

In this fivefold model, modern apostles are network-building luminaries whose authority and vision surpasses that of congregation-bound pastors. Apostles offer guidance and oversight to vast coalitions of churches and ministries. Prophets are divinely gifted oracles who hear and speak God’s word, giving supernatural insights to the apostles and the churches under their imprimatur. Within the past 40 years, thousands of churches in the U.S. (hundreds of thousands around the world) have either left their denominations or abandoned their congregational autonomy to join apostolic networks.

The second distinctive feature of Independent Charismatics, as it relates to Christian nationalism, is their high-octane vision of spiritual warfare. “Spiritual warfare” refers to a popular Christian belief in an invisible war going on all around us between angels and demons. Many evangelical, Pentecostal, and Catholic Christians participate in spiritual warfare, using practices like prayer or exorcisms to join the battle against the multitudinous devils and their diabolical agenda to derail Christian faith and thwart God’s purposes on Earth.

Independent Charismatics put these spiritual warfare practices on steroids. Through various correlated revelations from their prophets and new readings of old Bible passages, they have developed elaborate vocabularies and protocols for battling demons. Blowing shofars (ritual rams’ horns that were originally used in Jewish liturgical services), singing worship music, and even dancing can all serve as weapons of spiritual warfare. And they often describe their apostles and prophets as generals of spiritual warfare: divinely appointed leaders with enough authority to take on even the most high-ranking demonic “principalities and powers.” Spiritual warfare is part of the grammar of Independent Charismatic culture, and to even dip your toes into this pulsing subculture is to be drawn into the drama of cosmic combat.

From “Messed Up Mississippi Girl” to Pastor to the President

That context brings us back to Paula White-Cain’s invocations for angels from Africa and South America to aid President Trump. This self-described “messed up Mississippi girl” typifies—and has helped shape—the American branch of this global Independent Charismatic trend.

Born Paula Michelle Furr in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1966, Paula’s early life was marked by escalating tragedy and trauma. After her father’s apparent suicide by car crash when Paula was five years old, her mother took to drinking heavily, and Paula, barely in elementary school, was often left to care for herself.

In her autobiographical books, she recounts numerous sexual and physical abuses she endured from caregivers, relatives, and neighbors. She developed bulimia and characterizes herself at eighteen as “an old soul,” blind to all but “the hopeless carnage of today.”

Then Paula found Pentecostalism. In her late teens, she began dating a singer in a local Maryland rock band, Dean Knight. When she became pregnant unexpectedly, they quickly married and began attending the Pentecostal Church of God where Knight had been raised. The raw devotion and euphoric experiences of Pentecostal piety resonated deeply with Paula, therapy for her wounded soul, and she thought, “This is me.”

But within a few years, their marriage was on the rocks, and Paula fell in love, instead, with the associate pastor of the church, Randy White. Randy was married with three kids, eight years her elder, a fifth-generation Pentecostal preacher, and the son of the senior pastor.

The ensuing scandal of Pastor Randy and Paula both divorcing their spouses to marry each other pretty much ended Randy’s career in the denomination. Denominations have guidelines, strictures, and accountability measures for ordained clergy, and they tend to frown on pastors getting divorced to marry a younger—and mid-divorce—congregation member.

In the face of denominational scrutiny and communal disgrace, Randy and Paula White reinvented themselves and moved to Tampa, Florida in 1991 to start their own church. Their new endeavor was charismatic and nondenominational, and they named it Without Walls International Church.

Without Walls was founded on the cusp of a flood of American megachurches (Protestant churches with more than 2,000 regular attendees), and it rode the rising tide. Their church attracted more than 700 attendees within the first year of opening. By 2006, when Paula turned 40, they had more than 20,000 members, making it one of the largest churches in America. What quickly became evident was that Randy might have the pastoral pedigree, but Paula was the breakout talent.

(Paula White-Cain with Donald Trump. Image source: Chip Somodevilla for Getty Images)

The Whites’ burgeoning megachurch, like the larger Independent Charismatic sector, was startlingly multiethnic — 30 percent white, 30 percent Latino/a, and 40 percent Black. Recognizing her potential, T.D. Jakes, a popular, up-and-coming Black charismatic preacher, offered to mentor Paula.

She soon got a televangelism show of her own on the Black Entertainment Television (BET) network. Her show was explosively popular, eschewing many conventional televangelism tropes in favor of raw, honest conversations where Paula could speak from her own traumatized past and draw guests into sharing similar stories. A sociologist and a historian who’ve studied her ministry have argued she “represents a nonconfrontational style of postfeminist leadership.”

One day in 2002, out of the blue, Paula received a phone call from famed real estate mogul Donald Trump. He had seen her preaching on television and told her, “You have the it factor.” Paula, half-jokingly rejoindered, “Sir, we call that the anointing.” White and Trump became friends, and she viewed the New York celebrity as “a spiritual assignment” from God. She would visit Trump when she was in New York, and she eventually bought a $3.5 million condo in Trump Tower.

As her fame and stardom rose, Paula faced a series of public scandals. In 2007, Senator Chuck Grassley, chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, announced an investigation into Paula and five other major charismatic televangelists. Coinciding with a messy divorce from Randy, the investigation caused Without Walls to crumble and go into foreclosure. The Senate Committee’s eventual scathing report detailed the Whites’ decadent lifestyle and, tacitly, accused them of corruption.

But Paula landed on her feet. She took over leading a majority Black megachurch in Orlando and renamed it City of Destiny. She also found a new mentor, a charismatic Ghanaian apostle named Nicholas Duncan-Williams, who is credited as one of the most influential religious leaders in Africa. The blonde white woman preacher from Mississippi regularly travels to Africa to sit at the feet of her “spiritual father.” The mentorship of Duncan-Williams corresponded with Paula’s embrace of the fivefold ministry model, and she began calling herself an apostle in 2012. In fact, it was Duncan-Williams who blessed Paula’s third marriage in 2015, this time to Jonathan Cain, keyboardist from the band Journey, famous for helping write the hit songs “Don’t Stop Believin’” and “Faithfully.”

Donald Trump and the Independent Charismatics

Just a couple months after her third wedding, Paula’s “spiritual assignment” rode down the escalator to declare his candidacy for president. Like any savvy Republican politician, Trump knew there was no path to the presidency without evangelical voters, so he invited Paula to “be in charge of reaching out to the evangelicals.”

This presented an interesting problem, in that Paula White-Cain was hardly a conventional evangelical herself. She was a female pastor—which most evangelicals believe is verboten — uncredentialed, thrice married, and a scandal-ridden preacher, to boot. Not having inroads with the buttoned-up, elite evangelicals of the religious right, Paula began inviting her kind of Christian leaders—apostles, prophets, televangelists, Messianic rabbis, and megachurch pastors—to meet with Candidate Trump.

She convened a series of meetings between members of the Independent Charismatic celebrity class and Trump in New York in the fall of 2015. These offbeat outsiders were the first Christian leaders to endorse the reality TV star. They prayed and prophesied over him, pronouncing that he had a special anointing and destiny from God.

This is the untold backstory of how Donald Trump won over evangelical voters: the elite evangelical establishment kept the uncouth Trump at arm’s length during the 2016 Republican primary. It was Paula White-Cain’s coterie of television preachers and populist prophets who threw open the doors of American evangelicalism to Trump. They vouched for him as “a bold man, a strong man, and an obedient man” and claimed—months before a single voter had cast a ballot—that this notorious miscreant was a chosen instrument in the very hand of God.

By the time Trump had won almost all the 2016 primaries, the old guard of the Christian right had to swallow their pride if they wanted to get in Trump’s good graces. As Stephen Strang, a media mogul of the charismatic world and a long-time friend of Paula’s, put it to me in an interview: “these evangelical hot shots… had to go hat in hand to this thin little blonde lady who looks more like a fashion model than she does a preacher.” As Trump consolidated Republican support and pivoted to the general election, Paula White-Cain was, unexpectedly, in the catbird seat, the gatekeeper portioning out religious leaders’ access to the candidate.

And then, to everyone’s surprise, Donald Trump won the election. The Independent Charismatics, who were the most ardent regiments of Christian Trumpists, rejoiced for their prophecies had been fulfilled.

Fittingly, Paula White-Cain became a trusted advisor to the new president. She was the first female religious leader to offer an invocation prayer at a presidential inauguration: “Let Your favor be upon this one nation under God. Let these United States of America be a beacon of hope to all people and nations under your dominion, a true hope for humankind.”

President Trump asked Paula to chair his official Evangelical Advisory Board, and, in what would become a pattern of her leadership, she stacked it with ethnically diverse Independent Charismatic megachurch pastors, apostles, and prophets. It is a striking fact that among the Christian leaders of color who prominently advised Donald Trump, of whom there were more than a dozen, nearly all of them were nondenominational and charismatic, with most being part of fivefold ministry networks. Paula even managed to finagle having Nicholas Duncan-Williams, her Ghanaian apostle mentor, offer a prayer at Trump and Pence’s private religious service on Inauguration Day. Through Paula White-Cain, the global Independent Charismatic celebrity class was offered unprecedented entrée to the White House.

Amid the chaos and upheaval in the early days of the Trump presidency, it was easy to miss some of the abnormal (at least, by the conventions of the religious right) Christian groups and spiritual practices that surrounded Trump. A group of fivefold apostles and prophets, some of whom were among Trump’s evangelical advisors, created a spiritual warfare prayer initiative in 2017 titled “POTUS Shield.” The POTUS Shield leaders gathered regularly in Washington, DC to do spiritual battle on behalf of Trump and his agenda. They organized round-the-clock prayer shifts for Christians to beseech heaven against the “witches, warlocks, satanists, and anti-christ spirits” that would dare defy God’s anointed leader.

POTUS Shield included some prominent white prophets, but the leadership team featured other voices like Alveda King, a charismatic evangelist, conservative activist, and niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, and Mark Gonzales, a charismatic apostle and founder of the United States Hispanic Action Network. Charismatic pastor Herman Martir, a member of Trump’s Asian Pacific American advisory committee, was central to POTUS Shield, even as he led his own Asian Action Network. Mosy Madugba, a highly connected Nigerian apostle and author, was also included. Needless to say, these leaders do not fit the mold of white American Christian nationalists, but they were all deeply linked to the global charismatic leadership infrastructure and became spiritual combat commanders on Trump’s behalf.

(Background image from the POTUS Shield website)

Likewise, in a little-noticed episode in the lead-up to the 2020 election, Trump launched his “Evangelicals for Trump” sub-campaign at El Rey Jésus, a bilingual megachurch in Miami led by another of his evangelical advisors: Guillermo Maldonado, a Honduran-American apostle who leads his own Supernatural Global Network with more than 450 affiliated ministries in more than 72 countries. On stage at that event, Trump was iconically photographed being prayed over by Maldonado, Alveda King, Paula White-Cain, and another of Trump’s charismatic Miami-based advisors: Alberto Delgado, a Cuban American pastor.

Of course, to declare Trump anointed by God is to cast his opponents as enemies of God. The more evangelical spiritual zeal and hope built up around Trump, the more these charismatic leaders literally demonized the “Demo(n)crats,” Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and any other mere mortal who would dare defy God’s chosen. When the politics of spiritual warfare are layered into a democracy, polarization and, in extreme cases, political violence are the downstream consequences.

The charismatic spiritual fervor around Trump continued to grow throughout his presidency. Hundreds of charismatic prophets issued prophecies about Trump and his divine mission to bolster and defend conservative Christians, confident that God intended for Trump to have a second term. So, while Paula White-Cain’s petitions for “angels from Africa” to come and reinforce Trump’s cause after the election got the attention, her prayers that day were in step with her cohort’s militancy, sense of divine destiny, and desperation at that moment.

The Spirituality of January 6th

Perhaps the most visible materialization of this convergence of Donald Trump, the global Independent Charismatic celebrity class, and Paula White-Cain is the Capitol Insurrection on January 6, 2021. When Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election and Trump claimed the election had been stolen, Independent Charismatic celebrities kicked their spiritual warfare efforts into the highest possible gear. The Trump-aligned apostles and prophets galvanized their followers to battle against the demons they claimed were stealing the election from Trump. They launched a massive spiritual warfare and activism campaign, enlisting hundreds of thousands of American and global charismatics, to entreat heaven for a Trump miracle. This post-election campaign entailed countless prayer gatherings, prophecy podcasts, conference calls, television shows, and coordinated “Jericho Marches” (charismatic worship and prayer gatherings in swing-state capitals and Washington, DC).

Paula White-Cain was not only the first female religious leader to serve as an advisor to a U.S. president, or the first female religious leader to offer a prayer at a presidential inauguration. She was also the first female religious leader to lead an invocation over an American insurrection. That’s right, the infamous rally on January 6th, the same rally where Rudy Giuliani would lustily call for “trial by combat,” where Donald Trump would demand the angry crowds “fight like hell”—that rally officially began with a prayer by Paula White-Cain. It was a quintessentially charismatic prayer:

“Let us pray, because God is going to be in today. We believe in miracles… God, we ask right now in conclusion for your provision, for your protection, for your power, for an outpouring of your Spirit like never before. I secure POTUS… As his pastor, I put a hedge of protection around him. I secure his purpose. I secure his destiny.”

There were plenty of garden-variety Christian nationalists who showed up on January 6th, but the overwhelmingly dominant form of Christian identity and spirituality on display that day was nondenominational and charismatic. Rioters carried numerous “Appeal to Heaven” flags, a Revolutionary War banner appropriated by prophets and their followers as a spiritual warfare symbol. Groups of Christians around the Capitol did battle against demons, singing worship songs, speaking in tongues, blowing shofars, and prophesying over the besieged building. Over the past three years of research, I have tracked at least 60 Independent Charismatic leaders to the Capitol Riot, far more than any other denomination or expression of Christianity. Only seven of those have faced any legal consequences for their participation that day.

As we hurtle inexorably toward another presidential election with Donald Trump on the ballot, with hints of violence and promises of election-denial gathering like storm clouds on the horizon, Paula White-Cain is still at Trump’s right hand, leading his new National Faith Advisory Board. We are still living through the charismatic sea change in the culture of the religious right that she has helped inaugurate.

The great irony is that this tenacious, talented, tragic, triumphant woman, a religious leader with no formal training to speak of, has helped diversify the religious right in the United States, bringing women, international perspectives, and people of color into the molten core of American Christian nationalism. But in globalizing and diversifying the leadership of the American religious right—aligning the U.S. with the most important and fastest growing trend in global Christianity—Paula and her confederates have also introduced a destabilizing new energy and vision of Manichaean combat into the already fractious American political landscape. They believe God has given them a political savior and promised them ultimate victory over the devil and their liberal enemies—the only question that remains, for them, is when.

Matthew D. Taylor is the author of the new book The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy. He is a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore.