Some days, I truly despair, and words fail me.
Since it is Sunday, it seems an appropriate time to introduce you to a new marvel - the laying on of pillows:
Mike Lindell spoke at a Christian college and donated My Pillows, which he then called “Prayer Pillows,” and this happened.
I eagerly await the sequel: the resurrection of the bedsheets.
Thank you @realDonaldTrump @VP for hosting #FaithSummit inside the White House Complex today with leaders from across America!
— Sean Feucht (@seanfeucht) December 7, 2019
We worshipped, prayed & learned all this admin. is doing to promote religious freedom across the world!
What an honor to pray inside the Oval Office!
IN CASE ANYONE OUT THERE IS WORRIED ABOUT THE FUTURE OF AMERICA TODAY.... 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
— Sean Feucht (@seanfeucht) December 6, 2019
WE’RE INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE RIGHT NOW 🔥🔥🔥🔥#WorshipTakeOver #DontLoseHope pic.twitter.com/9oknH9nkc4
She’s frequently introduced and identified as “Dr. Paula White” despite not having a college or seminary degree of any kind. No degrees…not even an undergraduate degree from college.What could have been an inspiring story about someone pulling herself out of a very bad background proves less than inspiring, the more one reads about White:
According to Orlando Weekly, “Her mother was an alcoholic and her father committed suicide. Living for a time in a trailer, she was the victim of childhood physical and sexual abuse. As a teen, she says, she was promiscuous, became a single mother and, as a young adult, was bulimic. Years later, she was addicted to prescription medication; her teenage son was addicted to crack, and an adult stepdaughter died of brain cancer. If, through the love and power of Christ, White tells her followers, she has been able to break through these “generational curses,” so can they.”The rub comes in how she has achieved her success, on the backs of her largely low-to-middle-income adherents:
Newsweek reported that White asked congregants to donate as much as a month’s salary to her. “Every time we give, something supernatural happens,” a third reporter saw White tell worshippers who she had asked to donate as much as “a tenth of your gross income.” She once apparently wrote in a fundraising email that donating to her church “will get God’s attention.”I'm not sure about God, but Pastor Paula has certainly benefited from that mantra:
White reportedly owns “several Mercedes”; a Bentley was once photographed in her garage; she and her husband once owned a private jet; she lived in a $2.2 million Tampa mansion. And yet her first church—Without Walls—went bankrupt in 2014 after defaulting on a reported $29 million in loans.Her journey to this mountain of material prosperity, which, in addition to the mansion includes two homes in Trump properties in New York City, has not been, as they say, without controversy:
Shortly after being saved at the age of 18, Paula Furr left her first husband and ran off with Randy White, her Maryland church’s pastor, who was at the time married with three young children – a fact she does not include in her redemption testimony.
At the height of their popularity, Paula and Randy White reported generating $40 million a year from her broadcast ministry and their Without Walls International Church in Tampa. The racially diverse congregation, in two locations, claimed a membership of 28,000, with the co-pastors taking together between $600,000 and $1.5 million a year in compensation.
White was also once the subject of a sensational tabloid exposé in the National Enquirer that linked her with fellow (and separated but still married) televangelist Benny Hinn in a romantic tryst in a five-star Rome hotel. Hinn, another prosperity gospel proponent, was registered in the presidential suite under the biblically suggestive name “David Solomon.” White denied the affair, but Hinn later acknowledged an “inappropriate relationship.”
Most Americans — 65 per cent, according to PRRI — may now find Trump's behaviour undignified and damaging to the presidency, but not white evangelicals. They are, in fact, the only religious group in the survey to disagree.Still not sufficiently despondent? Then watch the following:
There are only two reasonable explanations for this. Trump is the white evangelicals' version of V.I. Lenin's useful idiot, a character who is helping achieve their apocalyptic fever dreams, but who will perish along with the rest of us as the faithful perch in the clouds. Or the white evangelical version of Christianity is a darker, uglier thing than the smiles and the welcoming hugs and the blessings would have you believe.
White evangelicals, for example, are in general keenly alert to Trump's white nationalist, nativist leanings. When he orders families separated at the southern border, most white evangelicals are right there with him.
When he proposes removing protections from transgender people, surely among the most vulnerable of us, they're A-OK.
When he invites children visiting the White House to help build his border wall with their own personalized bricks, his loyal white evangelicals are right there with him.
The 17 women who have publicly accused him of sexual misconduct are just shrugged off as leftist harlots. The senior officials who have spoken out against his abuses of power or investigated him are just the infidel Deep State.
How totally not shocking that Paula White, Trump's official spiritual advisor, is just like him: a lying, narcissistic shakedown charlatan who uses radical, right-wing, fake Christianity to con gullible people to get attention, money, and power. pic.twitter.com/9naBxUmJK7
— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) November 5, 2019
“I don’t dare wear a Trump hat. The evil in this country is so bad if I was a Republican — which I have been my whole life — I couldn’t wear a hat with my candidate on it without concern about being murdered in the street,” Bakker said.
