Spirit and Power S2: E1: Prosperity Gospel, Prosperity President
Why does Donald Trump look and sound like a Prosperity Gospel preacher? What are the actual ties of the president to this tradition of Christian healers and televangelists?
In this episode of Spirit & Power, Dr. Leah Payne speaks with Dr. Gabriel Raeburn - Senior Research Fellow, Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program, Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative - about the health and wealth preachers who love Donald J. Trump, and their affinities with tech billionaires like Elon Musk & Peter Thiel. Fully embracing the glitz and glam of Trump's 21st Century second term, prosperity preachers are setting their own political agendas and living the high life with their favorite president, a long way from their impoverished, Depression-Era roots.
Links and other info for Show Notes:
Resources & Links:
Visible Saints: the History of a Puritan Idea, Edmund Morgan
Oral Roberts and the Rise of the Prosperity Gospel, Jonathan Root
Pew Research Center’s 2006 study: Spirit and Power – A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals
“The Future of “Born-Again Evangelicalism” Is Charismatic and Pentecostal,” PRRI by Fanhao Nie, Ph.D., Flavio Rogerio Hickel Jr., Leah Payne, Tarah Williams, Ph.D.
God Gave Rock & Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music, Leah Payne
Join Leah & many other scholars, activists, and artists considering music the rise of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity at the 2025 Summer Institute for Global Charismatic & Pentecostal Studies at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, May 21-23 in Decatur, GA. Registration is free!
Additional Resources:
Visible Saints: the History of a Puritan Idea, Edmund Morgan
Oral Roberts and the Rise of the Prosperity Gospel, Jonathan Root
Pew Research Center’s 2006 study: Spirit and Power – A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals
“The Future of “Born-Again Evangelicalism” Is Charismatic and Pentecostal,” PRRI by Fanhao Nie, Ph.D., Flavio Rogerio Hickel Jr., Leah Payne, Tarah Williams, Ph.D.
God Gave Rock & Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music, Leah Payne
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To what you have called him to carry out and I ask for divine visitations that you would continue to give him your wisdom according to James 1 5 that you would give him the mind of Christ according to Philippians 2 5 that you said in Psalm 33 that blessed is the nation whose Lord is God and we just thank you for our fighter of faith and for freedom and for religion
God and most of all for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and we give you all the praise and all the glory Pastor Jesus and we give you all the praise and all the glory of God and we give you all the praise and all the glory of God and we give you all the praise and all the glory of God and we give you all the praise and all the glory of God Welcome to Spirit and Power, a limited podcast series about charismatic Christians and politics in the United States.
I'm Leah Payne, a historian and expert in Pentecostal and charismatic movements in the United States and beyond.
Join me for four weeks of insights from journalists and scholars exploring this critical intersection of religion and politics in America.
This week, Prosperity Gospel, Prosperity President.
How Charismatics brought the prosperity gospel to the world and to the highest office in the land.
The voice you heard at the top of the episode is that of Pastor Paula White Kane, leader of President Donald J. Trump's newly created White House faith office.
Paula White Cain, a very glamorous, very controversial televangelist, belongs to a wide network of Pentecostal and charismatic figures who have been living the high life with their favorite president's second term.
You can see glitzy celebrations and selfies with billionaires like Elon Musk on the social media account of Pastor Paula, as well as other charismatic celebrities like Lance Wallnau, Tony Suarez, and Sean Foyt.
How can Christians who practice a religion with scriptures that say things like, blessed are the poor and the love of money is the root of all evil, get so excited about a money-loving gold-plated president and his squad of billionaire tech bros?
For that, we need to understand the people who came to see money not as a temptation to sin, but as a blingy mark of God's blessing.
To explain that story, I knew just who to call.
Hi, I'm Gabriel Rayburn.
I am a historian of American religion and politics.
Currently, I am a fellow at Harvard University.
Dr. Rayburn is a senior research fellow at Harvard and an expert on the growth of the prosperity gospel in the United States.
What can you tell us about the creation of the prosperity gospel?
A big peer research study came out in 2006 in which it identified that almost half of all Christians in the United States believed that God would materially bless.
Those who are faithful.
Now, on the one hand, that isn't a surprising finding.
As far back as the 17th century, Puritans had promoted the notion of quote-unquote visible saints, Christians demonstrating their salvation, their election through prosperity and rightly ordered patriarchal households.
But...
And an interesting caveat to that is that figure they argued was as high as two-thirds when it came to Pentecostals and Charismatics.
How across the 20th century did this notion that God materially blessed those who are faithful come to be not just a huge part of Pentecostal history, but Christianity at large?
Gabriel acknowledges that there are a lot of sources that create the American prosperity gospel, but he says the core of it comes from the Pentecostal movement.
The roots of the prosperity gospel really take shape in a series of Pentecostal healing revivals in the 1950s.
That then form into a full-blown religious movement by the 1970s.
So it might be useful for us to think about those two components first.
So if you think about the 50s, the war, you're coming back from this context of World War II, and you have a generation of Pentecostals who grew up during the Depression, often in areas of...
The Southwest, the South, the Ozarks, the Great Plains, in which they had experienced some of the worst conditions of the Depression.
You must have faith.
You must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses.
Let us unite in vanishing fear.
We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system.
And it is up to you...
And in places like Tulsa, you can also see them grappling with the discoveries of oil wells all around them.
Tulsa is the oil capital of the world until about the 1950s.
And so people are really grappling in these spaces with this kind of really strong poverty that they're grappling with.
And these effectively miraculous discoveries of oil that made people millionaires overnight.
The classic example that we can go to is someone like Ora Roberts, who is born in 1918 in Oklahoma.
He grows up the son of a Pentecostal preacher who, when they move, oil is discovered on the land they used to live on.
They grow up with this real experience, staunch poverty.
Roberts himself is dealing with various illnesses throughout the majority of his childhood into his early adult life.
It's not just that, oh, I heard that there was oil down the road.
The land that his family used to live on makes someone...
Right.
So people are continuously dealing with the kind of the juxtapositions, the tensions of experiencing this.
And I think what happens is there's a generation of Pentecostals who come of age during the Depression through the 1950s, who become ministers.
Many of them become independent evangelists who have had these experiences with poverty that really shape their worldviews, but they...
I'm very keen to live in a much more prosperous presence.
One of Roberts's quips is, I tried poverty, but I didn't like it.
Go about doing, doing good.
And what was the good?
Healing all who were oppressed of the devil.
Another thing preachers like Oral Roberts tried but didn't really sustain, denominations.
In 1954, one of the more radical healing evangelists is a man called Jack Coe.
A woman from Memphis writes to him asking for prayer for her husband who is sick.
And he sends her an anointed prayer cloth and she places it on her husband's stomach where he has the illness.
And then she writes a testimony where she says, I placed the prayer cloth on my husband's stomach and it healed him.
And then I placed it in the cash register of our diner.
And we've been materially blessed.
Our business has been the best it's been in years.
So I think we can see the way in which healing can easily adapt into other miracles, if that makes sense. - It's interesting because that story seems to frame poverty as an illness to be healed. - Yeah.
Yes, I think in this way, healing is seen as something that is This diner owner may have gone beyond the teaching of the evangelists to link wealth to divine blessing.
But what gave her the idea that those two realms could be connected?
What we call prosperity theology do come through Oral Roberts in these spaces.
It's Roberts who starts to lay what I would say is a theological foundation.
So this begins about 1947 when he's reading the third book of John.
Third John, verse two.
Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.
That is a beautiful verse.
So he's reading the third book, John, right?
And he interprets that as a biblical mandate, which says it's not a sin to be wealthy, right?
Your soul can prosper and you can gain healing and you can prosper financially.
That's how he interprets this.
This is a radical departure within Pentecostalism, which for the most part is pretty anti-materialist in much of its...
And particularly when it comes to, say, modesty of dress has a very kind of conservative and modest approach to what people can wear.
And focusing on this transition to wealth is a rupture that we need to think through within Pentecostalism.
Gabriel's talking here about the earliest days of the Pentecostal movement, which came out of a movement called the American Holiness Movement, wherein people would display the work of God, the work of the Spirit in their lives through pretty countercultural, the work of the Spirit in their lives through pretty countercultural, modest
So you can usually recognize it on women right away because as the length of skirts got shorter and shorter through the 20th century, Pentecostal holiness women made sure to keep those dresses long, not wear makeup, not wear even something as potentially not wear makeup, not wear even something as potentially scandalous as a brooch, not cut their hair.
But as Pentecostalism started going mainstream, you started seeing Women and men who weren't being as strict with those codes.
So women, like Amy Semple McPherson, would wear makeup and even cut their hair in a bob.
And so that is a really big change in the movement from its earliest days in the holiness movement to when the forms of Pentecostalism, especially white Pentecostalism, when they go mainstream, they start to leave those holiness codes in the past.
What really sets his theological foundation beyond that is in 1954, Roberts is already really successful by the early 1950s.
He goes on television.
It's not perfect to begin with, but he's on TV. He's on radio.
And so he's doing this while he's traveling with a tent around the country.
Go on YouTube, watch all the footage.
He develops this idea of what he calls the Blessing Pact in 1954. So he's actually really concerned that he's losing...
And so he says to his people who are coming to his meetings and people who are part of his ministry, look, if I can place my faith in God, can you place your faith in God as well?
I'm putting all my money into trying to get my message going out.
And so he comes up with this concept of the blessing pact where he says, if you give X amount of money to my ministry, God will bless you.
At least by the amount you gave or more within the next year.
And so you can see how one might look at this very cynically, but this becomes a clear theological cornerstone that prosperity gospel theologians use later on.
God will financially bless you, but you also need to contribute to his wealth as part of that process, that being contributing towards the church.
This blessing pact logic is still very much in use today.
So obviously folks are interested and we want to hear your testimonies.
We want to hear your victory over lack letters that you send us and let us know what God is doing for you and in you and through you and watching you increase.
You are increasing more and more every day, you and your children.
Amen.
It is the will of God for us to prosper.
- And one of the things that... - In a way, it's a kind of an extension of tithing, right?
But with a much clearer, if you do X, you will gain Y. I don't want to take us too far off the railroad tracks here, but I'm delighted by this story about the radio because the 1950s, I include in my book about Christian rock that there was a scramble because radio preachers were getting squeezed out of...
Radio by Rock and Roll, which is another Pentecostal project, which made me laugh really hard.
There's too many of them on the radio waves.
I appreciate you linking it to the healing movement because that seems to be the link to an earlier form.
It allows for the appearance of consistency.
I think that it's a break, but it's one that...
Is tied to one of the foundations of Pentecostalism, which is there are spiritual gifts that are available to the spirit-filled believer, or there are gifts that are available to the spirit-filled believer.
The main one we think about early on, and probably is the consistent throughline within all of Pentecostalism, is healing.
This is an expansion of that.
It just happens to be one that radically departs with an earlier thinking within Pentecostalism.
So it's both coherent and a break, I would say.
I think what allows for that, and tell me what you think about this, is that Pentecostals can do almost anything with a really good story.
So if you can tell a really great story about your husband getting his stomach healed and then that naturally goes over to the cash register, who could argue with that?
It's not really like a theological argument at that point.
It's like a testimony argument, and no one can argue with a testimony.
I think that's actually a really great point.
There are these theological foundations to the prosperity gospel, but I think that we should think about it more in terms of practices.
I mean, testimonies is a great way to actually think through its power, how it comes into being, because it's not until later that you have people like Kenneth Hagen who are saying, here are the theological tenets of the movement, if that makes sense.
But this earlier period is a series of exchanges of conversations in print, on television, of different testimonies.
Of people being healed, of people having material blessings.
I think because Pentecostals are such great storytellers, their ability to be very good at media makes sense.
There is a clear through line in terms of their ability to be foundational in terms of religious television, having all this exposure on radio.
You can listen to Oral Roberts in the 1950s where he's really effectively saying, maybe you're listening in your car and there's something.
You're struggling with in your life.
And he puts his hand on the microphone and he's like, put your hand on the speaker in the car radio and God's healing power will come through this.
So there's this really important material dimension to all of this that has to be continuously grappled with, both in terms of material items, utilizing radio as something that you would touch, not just listen to, in terms of creating these connections between So I'm imagining young Oral Roberts.
He's so charismatic.
He's so good with media.
He's really doing a lot of this stuff around the same time as Billy Graham.
But Oral Roberts has a much different presentation.
Can you say a little bit about race and the prosperity theology really quickly?
Roberts is someone who, part of his background is Native American.
He's from Oklahoma, and he points towards that often when he's talking about racial politics.
He says, I had to deal with stigma and had to deal with prejudice when I was young because I was Pentecostal, but also because I was Native American.
I don't know if it's surprising about prosperity gospel.
But I think one thing about prosperity gospel is that it is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse religious movements in the country.
Even if we might critique some of the implications of its theology when it comes to economic inequality.
One thing that I think really differentiates someone like Oral Roberts or other healing evangelists, say Billy Graham, Billy Graham makes a conscious move in about 1953-1954 to desegregate his meetings in the South.
That happens about the same time that Oral Roberts and Jack Coe and A. Allen, other Pentecostal evangelists, start to do this.
And those processes are never linear.
So there are examples going into the early 1960s when Roberts again concedes to racial segregation.
But I think we need to think through the profound difference of what a Billy Graham service looks like if it's integrated compared to what an Oral Roberts service looks like when it's integrated.
You may have seen a Billy Graham crusade altar call and people will stand and walk to the stage in a pretty orderly way.
There's not usually a lot of touching.
Here's Oral Roberts praying for a sick child.
It's a very physical process.
He can't walk far.
If he gets down, he can't get up.
When he gets down, he can't get up.
What's his name?
Don.
Don, would you let me hold you?
Would you?
Come, Mano.
Hello.
Hello.
Heidi, did you say Heidi?
Why are you crying, Don?
Do you love the Lord?
Yes.
Do you believe he's able to heal you?
Yes.
All right, you just straighten right up here now.
Don't you be frightened.
We're going to pray for you.
And, Don, look at me, darling.
Look here, honey.
Do you believe the Lord can heal you?
Certainly you do.
Now I'm going to put my hand on you, and I'm going to pray for you, and I'll believe that the Lord will heal you.
Will you believe it too?
All right.
Audience, have compassion.
Would you please have compassion?
Oh, God, heal this muscular disease.
This child gets down and can't get up.
Oh, God, heal the legs.
Because as soon as you bring in healing into the situation, and people are...
Touching each other across what were previously considered to be racial boundaries.
That's a completely different space to a kind of neatly organized Billy Graham revival meeting.
Oral Roberts is a Pentecostal.
He's very emotive.
There's crying.
At a Billy Graham crusade, people cry respectively, right?
They're not going to be messy about it.
They stay seated for the most part.
Yes, yes.
But one component is that I do think that some of these Pentecostal spaces become more racially integrated earlier on.
And I think it makes total sense why from an early stage, prosperity theology is appealing across racial boundaries in terms of how empowering it can be for someone who is engaged in those spaces.
The way in which...
Thinking about material blessings on earth, having financial security, all of those things speak, I think, in a way across different racial spaces that I think is really important later on.
Later on, in the mid to late 20th century, Billy Graham's network of conservative white Protestants would become synonymous with evangelical.
But Pentecostals kept going with their healing movement and expanded even further.
Few figures have shaped modern Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity as much as Kenneth Hagin.
He was a minister, a teacher.
He founded a Bible college.
Hagin pioneered something called the Word of Faith movement, a theology that emphasized faith, healing, and the believer's authority.
But Hagin wasn't alone.
He was part of a vast network of charismatic Christians who refused to be hemmed in by any denominational governing body.
These independent ministers create an institutional foundation by the 1970s for the movements.
They have universities, Bible schools, an entire independent structure that is Pentecostal, but it's outside denominational authority, right?
And also it's international from the get-go.
For example, there, from the 1970s, lots and lots of ministers coming from Africa to Tulsa to be trained by Hagen in prosperity theology, who then go back to Africa and create Word of Faith churches, which is his movement there.
And so we have this moment where you have this institutional foundation combined with the rise of Christian television, which is predominantly a Pentecostal enterprise.
The major...
Christian Broadcasting Network, PTL and Trinity Broadcasting Network are all founded and run by Pentecostal Charismatics, even if people like Jerry Falwell are appearing on those stations.
So Moral Majority Baptist Jerry Falwell may have been amplified by being on TV, but it was the Pentecostals who came up with this means of media production.
The PTL Television Network presents Jim and Tammy.
Praise the Lord.
See the things that he has done.
Praise the Lord.
For the past we want.
Together we'll make it.
Together we will praise the Lord.
Come on now, let's have a great big welcome for Jim and Tammy Baker.
Hello.
Hello.
Hello everybody.
Thank you.
This changing class structure within Pentecostalism, both as charismatics who have often more middle class origins come into the movement, but also as some Pentecostals move predominantly out of the working class into the middle class.
In the 1970s, at a time of political and economic upheaval, the prosperity gospel is really able to both offer people something tangible at a time of economic and political upheaval, but it's also very in line by the 1980s with what is seen as the more secular Wall Street.
Gordon Gekko kind of greed is good culture, the kind of Reaganism economics is able to align with some of the more explicit prosperity theology that we see on, say, Jim Baker's television networks.
And so I think that's able to come together in a very effective way in the 70s and 80s that might not have been able to earlier on.
Eventually, late 20th century conservative charismatics begin to think about putting their skills to use in the U.S. Pat Robertson runs for president.
And this might speak to one of the points, Leah, that you were pointing towards.
Pat Robertson is himself charismatic, so he's part of this world.
And he runs for president in 1988. This is in the Republican primary, which George H.W. Bush eventually wins.
But what's really interesting there is that...
Almost all the kind of traditional evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell, even though Pat Robertson was a religious figure, supported George H.W. Bush, except the Pentecostals and Charismatics, who many of them start to get engaged for the first time politically in 1988. Because what Pat Robertson does, he has an organization within his media empire called the Freedom Council, which is a political wing.
They have, by 1986, so two years before the election, Representatives in every single Assemblies of God and Word of Faith churches in New Hampshire, which is one of the early states.
So early on, they are making sure that their political organizers are in the most mainstream Pentecostal space, the Assemblies of God, and the most prominent prosperity gospel space, the Word of Faith churches.
Wait, can I just say, though, for people who don't know about the...
Pentecostal charismatic landscape.
New Hampshire is not a stronghold for Pentecostalism.
So I think it's really...
They had to work hard, is what I'm saying, to get in there.
I was going to say, and this speaks to the transactional relationship, or who is comfortable with this.
When you talk about how prosperity theology starts to dovetail with the kind of conspicuous consumption of the 1980s, it makes me think of someone who...
Was moving in those circles in the 1980s and had a very, I don't want this to sound pejorative, but I think he'd be okay with this, a gaudy aesthetic, and that would be one Donald J. Trump.
Could we interpret Donald Trump as a prosperity type of figure in the prosperity gospel kind of way?
There's an explicit historical connection between Donald Trump.
And the prosperity gospel movement, which predates him becoming president.
Then there was a practical relationship between him and many prosperity gospel leaders that emerged in the early period of him running for president.
And then, I think, speaking to what you're pointing towards, there is a long-term, what we might call a cultural and aesthetic overlap between them.
One thing that has been written about someone like Jim Baker, who is a Pentecostal, who is really as much of a break from that old-school anti-materialism as you want.
When you give $1,000, you become a lifetime member with PTL. And when you give that $1,000, we're going to give you something special because we want you to be a part of this ministry till either Jesus comes or you go to be with the Lord.
And Tammy Faye...
I think the most exciting thing in all the world is our lifetime partnership.
Oh, Jim, I do too.
It has unbelievable possibilities.
Well, can you imagine when you give your $1,000 gift, you'll receive a special membership card that will allow you to stay here in the Heritage Grand for four days and three nights every year for the rest of your life.
In the 1980s, he's on television wearing just outrageous kind of expensive suits.
And you could look at the studios.
Trinity Broadcasting Network probably has the most opulent of all these studios, but they exude a certain type of wealth.
And a lot of people have pointed towards this idea that however much ridicule someone like Baker gets, Baker represents a form of wealth and wealth accumulation for a generation of people who were not able to attain wealth, right?
And I think similar stuff has been said about Donald Trump.
So there's always this idea that Trump's kind of wealth is seen as sickly to a New York elite who think that kind of form of gold everywhere is just obnoxious.
But to a lot of people who aren't part of a kind of aristocratic tradition, that is what wealth looks like for a lot of people.
That's very appealing as those kind of forms, those aesthetics.
And so I think there's that kind of like overlap there between wealth.
I think sometimes when people use that critique, they seem to think that the people to whom that appeals would be embarrassed by their disdain.
And they're not at all.
And actually, this is a great through line because Pentecostals are ridiculed for the majority of their existence.
And then people like Baker start to wear that as a badge of honor.
That's right.
And I think that's really important to grapple with.
We can think about the classic kind of debate over the Hillary Clinton deplorables term in the 2016 election, and then how that became a badge of honor of people identifying with that critique of them.
And so we can see that through line there.
The majority of the mainstream religious right leaders do not support Trump early on.
They support Ted Cruz.
And then once it's very clear, once the primary starts that Trump's going to win, they consolidate around him.
But in that early period, Trump is able to build a small religious base with prosperity gospel and Pentecostal and charismatic leaders from the beginning.
And so Paula White Kane organizes this meeting in Trump Tower in September 2015, in which she brings Trump together about three dozen really prominent.
Pentecostal charismatic prosperity gospel leaders to pray for Donald Trump.
And this meeting is denounced by Russell Moore, who at that time is one of the leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention.
He denounces them all as heretics.
But I think what we should grapple with is from the beginning, Donald Trump was able to build a base with the Pentecostal charismatic community before these mainstream evangelicals came on board.
And I don't think that's by coincidence.
He has a long relationship with two people, one who is not Pentecostal, but we should touch on, which is Norman Vincent Peale, who in the 1950s, part of what is called this kind of positive thinking movement, focused on how you get negative thoughts out of your mind, which dovetails very clearly with elements of prosperity theology.
He officiates one of Trump's...
Maybe Donald Trump's first marriage.
He uses him as a character reference.
And Donald Trump continuously quotes Peel on the campaign trail in 2016. Peel, before he died, says Trump was one of America's top positive thinkers and positive doers.
The other person is Paula White Cain, who is charismatic, who has a long-term friendship with Donald Trump.
And I think she was actually appointed...
To head the White House Faith Office, which has been restarted, she gave the benediction at Trump's inauguration.
These are not just people who came out of the woodwork in 2016 and supported Trump.
He would go on Paula White's, Kane's television show for many years, throughout the 2000s.
And so there's a relationship there.
Become one of those pillars.
Become one of those people, whether it's the 10,000 or the 1,000.
And with all due respect, as great as that name is going to be left there, there's a greater name that's going to be written.
Every treasure you give here on earth is being stored up in heaven.
There is a department of treasury in heaven.
Now, I know Mnuchin's over down here, but I'm telling you, there's a Department of Treasury in heaven that God is watching over everything you do, and you are storing up eternal treasure that will go so far beyond, I think, that we can even begin to imagine that you are mandated that we can even begin to imagine that you are mandated by I feel a mandate.
I know I was supposed to come share my book, but I feel a mandate.
And I think what happens in that early period of the presidential campaign is that Donald Trump realizes this is...
A religious base that I can utilize.
As an early appeal to black voters, he goes to, I think it's Wayne Jackson's Great Faith Ministries.
He accepts a prayer, sure, which has placed on him a demonstration that he was a man of God who was blessed because of his wealth.
But I think also for a lot of Pentecostal and charismatics, they realize the exposure they can gain from being aligned with Trump.
So I think there's a tactical kind of relationship that emerges at the same time.
There is complete synergy between key elements of the practice of Donald Trump and the practice of the prosperity gospel.
If you go back and you watch interviews with early supporters in 2016 of Donald Trump, they will continuously point towards his wealth as not just a reason that he should be president, but as a reason that he is.
He is materially blessed.
We see that emerging amongst his support base.
And one thing that I often have shown in talks or to students, an image of Trump Tower, the inside of Trump Tower, side by side with the inside of Trinity Broadcasting Network.
Ah!
I do that too!
And they are identical, right?
And within both of them, wealth is the sanctified source.
Yes!
They look exactly the same.
That's the thing.
is I actually remember having that experience as a kid because Trump was doing one of those lifestyles of the rich and famous thing or something like that.
And I remember looking at that thinking, wait a minute, I know what that looks like. - So I think there's obvious overlap in terms of the way that wealth operates as a legitimizer for Donald Trump and as a legitimizer for the prosperity gospel.
The other thing that we should touch on is media.
Donald Trump...
Starts off as a real estate tycoon, but he resurrects his career as the host of The Apprentice, a position in which he plays God on the television screen, making decisions based on the financial success of people involved.
At the same time that media and television is utilized very effectively and by a generation of prosperity gospel preachers.
And one thing that, going back to outside criticisms of the prosperity gospel movement, Norman Vincent Peale, Paula White Cain, Jim Baker before them, they're always criticised, this goes to the point you were saying, about they're not rigorous in their theology, say.
That they dumb down the message to invites.
That they're interested in kind of self-image.
It's actually, you see this critique that it's just positive thinking and branding.
It's not really religion.
But I think it's worth seeing how that critique of the prosperity gospel is not authentic or not real religion or just branding and dumbed down is the same critique that is made about Trump, that he's not serious in terms of what his economic thinking or that he's just branding and make America great again.
It's a brand, not as much as a political slogan.
And so I think there's an interesting overlap in terms of how criticism of the...
He did things that other politicians never would do with Charismatics and Pentecostals.
And when I think about him as a quote-unquote dealmaker, I think he has really delivered.
So I remember when...
He went to the charismatic church, non-denominational, of course, and he was up there on stage and he allowed for these people to do exactly what you were talking about, laying their hands on him, you know, praying in tongues over him.
He looks a little bit uncomfortable, but he does it.
And I can't think of any other presidential candidate that had gone that far with those types of churches or, I don't know, maybe even any other.
Some of the political implications of the prosperity gospel mean that practitioners now find themselves aligned with the wealthiest of the wealthy, the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley.
To explore those connections, I turned to a familiar voice, Dr. Bradley Onishi, who studies religion and politics in Silicon Valley, for his take on why these two groups are so well-suited for one another.
Billionaires and broligarchs and independent charismatics especially is that independent charismatics are the Christians who have really torn down all the kind of institutional oversight.
When I think about folks who are part of the New Apostolic Reformation, you have a leadership structure that is really based on a group of leaders who are an oligarchy.
They have spiritual gifts, prophecy.
They are apostles, and there's no sense of a denomination overseeing them.
There's no committee or board or anyone at the church or at the denominational level who has a kind of control over them in a way that you would see in a Methodist or Episcopalian context, any kind of mainline context, but even in some more evangelical context.
It's the same exact thing with the broligarch and the tech person.
They're from a culture where there is a founder who has almost complete control over a startup and then a company.
There's eventually a board, there's eventually a few, but the leadership structure is very similar and it's intentional.
Both groups do not want regulation.
Both groups are fighting against.
What they take to be institutional sedimentation and stricture and stopping the real work from being done.
And so, in a spiritual sense, a lot of New Apostolic Reformation folks and some other charismatics have a spiritual oligarchy.
And in a financial sense, a lot of tech people would like to have an economic oligarchy.
And what they share is this real disdain for regulation, for oversight, for bureaucracy, and for a process that tries to stop direct access from leadership to those underneath them.
Brad also notes that Tech Bros share with the Prosperity Gospel Set an appreciation for charismatic leaders who attain almost godlike status.
The tech magnate who is J.D. Vance's patron and somebody who's been a proponent of Donald Trump going all the way back to 2016, grew up as an evangelical Christian.
In a lecture about 15 years ago at Stanford, his alma mater, he talked about the idea that the tech founder is in many ways imbued with a charisma and an aura that borders on deification.
Peter Thiel, this was not a bad thing.
This was something that is a really important part of tech culture because it gives that founder the authority to reign over their company as a monarch whose authority is not questioned and who is seen as having a kind of divine plan that is transcendent.
Prosperity gospel communities and tech billionaires share a contradiction at the heart of their posture toward the American government.
These are both movements which are deeply anti-statist or anti-government intervention, which require large-scale state investment.
By which I mean the prosperity gospel churches, many of them.
Rely on certain forms of tax breaks, not unlike other religious institutions, but that is an important part of how they're able to build such exorbitant amounts of wealth is how the tax structure benefits them.
But that is hidden, right?
People talk about the hidden welfare state as in these ways in which there's a kind of a public welfare state in which people receive support, which often gets critiqued from the right.
But there's a hidden welfare state in which people are able to benefit from certain funding streams from the government, from certain tax breaks.
That happens within these prosperity gospel churches, particularly because in the 60s and 70s, the legal framework of the United States changes, which means that religious organizations are able to receive much more government funding than they were in a previous era.
And this dovetails quite clearly with Silicon Valley, which we can think about the assault on the state we see going on, the anti-bureaucan Bureaucratic, anti-government sentiment.
But these industries themselves required huge amounts of state investment.
If we go back to a lot of the money that's poured into science in the 1950s and 1960s, the fight, the Cold War, which helps give birth to Silicon Valley.
We want to look at either the tax breaks or the state funding of Tesla.
So there is a similarity between the model, which is these are spaces in which the state is required that have become extremely anti-statist in their approach.
As Brad sees it.
The prosperity gospel folks and the tech bros may in fact be doing the same thing, creating new religious communities and ideas that could only really be made in the USA. Tech startups and tech founders are really based on the idea that they're doing something novel.
They're doing something unique, something that will change human history, something that will hack or game or totally alter the direction of our species or of our planet.
For all of their emphasis on rationality and their emphasis on logic, the tech world is filled with epic narratives of changing or saving the world.
And that's what you find in almost every leader of what we might call a cult or a new religious movement, a founder imbued with a vision who is unquestioned.
And so those things coalesce and you see the resonances.
And now, you can see it all over Washington, D.C. This week, I'm also creating the White House Faith Office, led by Pastor Paula White, who is so amazing.
With Donald Trump's winning coalition of tech billionaires and prosperity preachers ascendant, what does that mean for American life?
If I had to guess, you'll see more transactions, charismatic preachers praying public prayers of blessing over Trump and enjoying a bump in their social media platforms, while the Trump administration makes space for them in his policy decisions and in his White House faith office.
I'd also expect more collaborations between anti-statist billionaires and their non-denominational charismatic colleagues.
Paula White's video sermon from February 27th of 2025 seems to suggest that, at the very least, for now, it means coordinated messaging.
Just one day after Elon Musk's February 26th trip to the Oval Office, where he claimed that the U.S. should cut government waste, White Kane posted this to her YouTube feed.
I want to give you an opportunity to honor God with his tithe and your offering.
The Bible says in Luke chapter 6, verse 38, You know, all throughout the word, God talks about bringing his tithe into the storehouse.
Malachi chapter 3, that when we do, he'll rebuke the devourer.
And that means the spirit of waster.
So there are things that come on demonic assignment to literally waste your finances, to waste.
Your money.
There's no other way to say that.
But it's literally to make you have to overspend.
Because the enemy never wants you in God's economy.
But I don't know how in this kind of climate specifically you could trust man's economy.
I mean, it doesn't take rocket science to figure.
It's going to run out, guys.
It's going to be at a place sometime you go, well, we can't keep spending like this and funding like this and never ever making any cuts and pretend like it's not going to affect anyone.
For more from Dr. Gabriel Rayburn and Dr. Bradley Onishi, see our show notes along with links to scholarly resources on the major figures and big ideas we've covered today.
Before I sign off, I wanted to take a moment to invite you to join me May 21st through 23rd at the 2025 Summer Institute for Global Charismatic and Pentecostal Studies at Candler School of Theology.
It's going to be an amazing two-day event in Decatur, Georgia, where we will consider how music has shaped the theology and politics of the global charismatic and Pentecostal movements that I love to study.
it's free to register and I will include a registration link in the show notes that's it for this episode of spirit and power thank you so much for listening I'm Leah Payne listen next week for where the winds of the spirit take us into the halls of American political power
Spirit and Power was created by me, Dr. Leah Payne, in conjunction with the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement, and Axis Mundi Media.
Spirit and Power was produced by Andrew Gill and engineered by Scott Okamoto.
