After Franklin Graham offered a prayer at the White House Easter dinner on Wednesday, he introduced President Donald Trump to a group that already knew him quite well.
“It feels so dumb to have to introduce the president of the United States in his own house,” he said from the podium, sparking laughter around the room. “What a privilege, isn’t it? To have the president of the United States invite us here?”
The crowd was made up of faith leaders, mostly conservative evangelicals and Catholics, whose grassroots support was central to Trump winning his second term. For many, it wasn’t their first time gathering to pray with the president, whose administration has touted an open-door policy for pastors.
The president hasn’t publicly attended a church service since his inauguration day, he doesn’t hold membership in a particular congregation or denomination, he’s gone back and forth over whether he needs to ask for God’s forgiveness, and he avoids speaking in detail about his personal devotional life, so what we know about Trump’s faith comes largely from the pastors around him at the White House—starting with Paula White-Cain.
White-Cain, a prosperity-preaching televangelist and Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser, has been an unofficial guide in introducing him to other faith leaders, gathering his coterie of 25 evangelical advisers during his first term and now leading the White House Faith Office, based in the West Wing.
White-Cain told Fox & Friends during Holy Week that the office has hosted “almost 500 faith leaders” since February. By Wednesday’s dinner, the count had grown: “We’ve actually had over 1,000 faith leaders in through the White House in just this short time period,” she said.
Trump’s White House no longer releases visitor logs, but photos of evangelical supporters praying and worshiping in the Oval Office, dozens at a time, make their way to social media.
Participants regularly tout the “opportunity” and “honor” to be there and promote the administration’s Christian messaging to their followers.
Ahead of reading Scripture at Thursday’s worship service at the White House, Harvest Christian Fellowship pastor Greg Laurie said Trump’s public embrace of Christianity stands in contrast to the Biden administration, and First Baptist Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress claimed Trump is “doing more to celebrate the true meaning of Easter than any president in history.”
Beyond the White House gatherings, peppered with prayers, worship songs, and prepared remarks, are any of the visiting leaders tight enough with Trump to provide pastoral support?
White-Cain is likely the closest. She has known the president for 24 years, knows his faith influences (including fellow televangelist Jimmy Swaggart and singer Bill Gaither), and has prayed with him regularly, including about his decision to step into politics.
White-Cain has come to Trump’s defense when he’s made gaffes about aspects of faith. She’s also counseled him to describe his faith as a private matter.
“He’s very tender toward God,” she said in an interview last month with CBN News. “He’s very attracted to the anointing and to the presence of God. He really is protective over people of faith and understands the foundation of faith.”
At one meeting in the Oval Office, White-Cain noticed two gold cherub figurines Trump had asked to be recently added. He asked White-Cain, “Don’t angels protect you and watch over you?”
“And I said, ‘Good choice, sir!’” she said.
She works alongside Jennifer Korn, who isn’t a pastor but directs the White House faith office. Whenever Korn meets with the president, she said, Trump asks her, “How are my pastors doing, how are my priests, how are my rabbis doing?”
Korn, who previously worked doing Hispanic outreach, served as a special assistant in the White House during the first Trump administration. The White House Faith Office did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
Visiting pastors also say Trump invites one-on-one prayer.
Graham’s interactions with the president come directly through Trump’s office, he told Christianity Today. Graham described their relationship as more of a friendship, and said he tries to avoid being “one of those people who’ll give him an earful.”
But he said that sometimes when they are in person together, Trump will “turn to me and just ask me to pray. So he initiates it.”
Graham believes “something changed” for Trump after the assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania: “There’s a spiritual intuition that I sense when I’m around him,” he said.
When speaking about the attempted assassination, Trump has said he believes he was “saved by God to make America great again.” At the National Prayer Breakfast in February, he said that “I believed in God, but I feel much more strongly about it.”
Graham is hesitant to give an estimate on how often he visits with Trump, noting that they’re both quite busy. “And I don’t want to get caught up into all the politics, you know, of Washington. I try to stay out of that,” said Graham, who leads Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. “If I have something to say to him, I want it to be something that is spiritual. I just don’t want to get involved in politics.”
Being a “pastor to presidents,” as Graham’s father, Billy Graham, was known to be, can be a delicate position. The pastors who visit with Trump emphasize their role to encourage, defend, and support him rather than to keep him in check.
Jeffress, of First Baptist Dallas, speaks up for Trump on cable television and the airwaves. When Episcopal bishop Mariann Edgar Budde called out Trump at an inaugural prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral, asking him to “show mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” Jeffress was in the audience. Later, he criticized Budde on social media, saying there was “palpable disgust” with her words.
As a child, Trump was confirmed at First Presbyterian Church in New York City’s Jamaica neighborhood, a part of the Presbyterian Church (USA). He later attended Marble Collegiate Church, part of the Reformed Church in America, under pastor and self-help author Norman Vincent Peale.
During his previous presidential term, Trump occasionally attended church, including going to an Episcopal church near Mar-a-Lago with his family for Easter in 2017 and dropping in on an afternoon service at McLean Bible Church outside Washington, DC, in 2019.
In 2020, he told his spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain that he now considers himself nondenominational Christian rather than Presbyterian. The move toward a more evangelical understanding of faith may be in part due to the pastors and Christian leaders who have been the most outspoken in their support of Trump.
Jentezen Franklin, an evangelist and senior pastor of the multisite megachurch Free Chapel in Georgia, often leads online prayer calls giving thanks for Trump and also prayed at Wednesday’s dinner. Ahead of the election, Franklin—who belongs to the Pentecostal Church of God denomination—told Trump, “You’re a chosen vessel.”
“Always an honor to pray for [Donald Trump]. I never get used to it,” Franklin wrote in an X post at the time. “Thank you [Paula White] for sharing your circle of influence with President Trump with myself and so many other faith leaders.”
“To be here, being honored to represent members across the nation who don’t get an opportunity like this, we want to say thank you. You don’t have to do this. You’re too busy to do this. But we want to say thank you,” Franklin told Trump this week.
For her part, White-Cain shares a mix of politics and encouragement on social media. “Promises made promises kept,” White-Cain wrote in a Facebook post linking to an announcement of Trump’s week of Easter activities. Just weeks before, she drew controversy for claiming that Christians would unlock supernatural blessings if they celebrated Passover.
Other prominent pastors who can be spotted in Oval Office photos—or seen delivering invocations at rallies or defenses of Trump on cable—include Jack Graham, Prestonwood Baptist Church pastor and former Southern Baptist Convention president; Samuel Rodriguez and Tony Suarez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference; and televangelist Mark Burns. Also in Trump’s circle of Christians are conservative activists, like singer Sean Feucht; Gary Bauer, president of the conservative advocacy organization American Values; and David Barton, evangelical author and WallBuilders founder.
Beyond the White House regulars, Trump has clashed with evangelical, mainline, and Catholic faith leaders and faith-based organizations during the first months of his administration over his moves to scrap refugee resettlement, reduce immigration, and end foreign humanitarian aid.
But dissenting voices were absent from the dinner and prayer services during Holy Week.
“The support I’ve had from evangelical Christians—and everybody, people of faith, really—has been incredible, really,” Trump said when he took the podium for uncharacteristically brief remarks. “I believe it’s been unprecedented.”
