Opinion | Angels for Sale. Only $1,000.

America needs to nail 95 theses to the megachurch door.

Last month, Paula White, one of President Trump’s most faithful and powerful evangelical supporters and a senior adviser to his new White House Faith Office, began offering “seven supernatural blessings” for the Easter season.

If you “honor God” during the period of Passover and Easter, “God will assign an angel to you, he’ll be an enemy to your enemies, he’ll give you prosperity, he’ll take sickness away from you, he will give you long life, he’ll bring increase in inheritance, and he’ll bring a special year of blessing.”

The suggested price for these extraordinary gifts is an offering to Paula White Ministries of $1,000 or more, and if health, wealth and an angel weren’t enough, White’s ministry will also give you a gorgeous Waterford crystal cross.

If you think White is alone in her cynical, heretical grift, then let me introduce you to Lorenzo Sewell, another of Trump’s Christian favorites. He’s a Detroit-area pastor who delivered a benediction at Trump’s second inauguration in January.

On the afternoon of Jan. 20, hours after he prayed in the Capitol Rotunda, Sewell posted on X, “The crypto community was kind enough to send me $Lorenzo, so I have permanently locked my tokens into a Liquidity Pool, so that I will never sell on the community but rather just earn fees as our token continues to flourish!”

“Amazing day, all the glory to God,” he added.

At this point, it’s safe to say that evangelicals are more responsible than any other American group for Trump’s political power. It is my community that has made him president — twice. If you removed white evangelicals in particular from his coalition, he would have lost all three of his presidential races by a landslide.

In 2016, Trump won 80 percent of the white evangelical vote. The rest of America voted for Hillary Clinton, by a 26-percentage-point margin, 60 to 34. In 2024, Trump won 82 percent of white evangelicals, and 40 percent of everyone else.

After almost 10 long years during which Trump has captured evangelical hearts more than any other president of my lifetime, I am forced to admit that Trump may have been better attuned to conservative evangelical culture than any other Republican president in the modern era.

His bond with evangelicals isn’t just a result of flawed theology. It’s a result of the broken culture that flawed theology helped create. And in some parts of American Christianity the theology is so flawed, and the culture is so broken, that evangelicals don’t see Trump contradicting their values at all — he’s exactly like the men and women who lead their church.

Let’s go back to the examples set by Paula White and Lorenzo Sewell. Both pastors teach elements of what’s popularly called the prosperity gospel. At its essence it teaches that health and wealth are yours if you possess sufficiently bold faith.

Think of it as the power of positive thinking, backed (or even guaranteed) by God. If you can name what you want and claim it in the name of Jesus, then you can have it. In this Christian culture, Christian wealth is admired. Secular success, which they call “victory,” is seen as proof of divine favor.

While other traditions may respect the quiet, humble pastor who loves and serves his community from, say, a modest parsonage or lives a contented, middle-class life, the pastor of the prosperity church glories in his wealth and power.

In fact, these pastors often teach that the most concrete way you can manifest your own faith and thus receive God’s blessing is by giving ever-greater amounts to the pastor’s ministry. You demonstrate your faith by sacrificing to enrich your pastor.

Traditional Christians are used to giving money to help the poor and to keep the lights on at church. Christians who follow the prosperity gospel give money for the pastor’s mansion, and — in extreme cases — the pastor’s jet.

But here’s where things get truly strange. These congregations don’t love the pastor in spite of his obvious exploitation. They give to him or her enthusiastically, inspired by the pastor’s wealth, hoping that by providing him or her their absolute devotion (including their financial resources) they, too, will one day enjoy the same wealth and power.

Think of it as a kind of investment strategy — pastors promise believers that they’ll receive a “hundredfold” return on their gifts (twisting a passage in the Gospel of Mark).

In that sense, why would Trump’s own scams be the least bit offensive? Why would you be offended by Trump hawking his own cryptocurrency or selling Trump Bibles when you’re enjoying your Waterford crystal cross, confident that God’s assigned angel is watching over you and making your enemies God’s enemies?

White and Sewell are part of the independent charismatic movement, also known as independent network charismatic Christianity.

Independent charismatics are Christians who, roughly speaking, believe strongly in the supernatural works of God (such as gifts of healing and prophecy) and worship at nondenominational churches.

Their churches are often founded by pastors who answer to no higher earthly authority than themselves. The pastors’ church boards are subservient, there is no denominational structure, and the pastors claim to receive their authority to preach and teach directly from God.

On Tuesday, I spoke to Matthew Taylor, an expert on the independent charismatic movement, and the author of the book, “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.” Taylor told me that I should think of the theology of the movement in terms of a rope that contains many different theological strands. In different churches, different strands may be more prominent, but a vast majority of the churches contain the same essential strands.

In addition to the prosperity gospel, there’s also the concept of an “anointing,” an irrevocable divine authority to lead. There’s also a heavy emphasis in many churches on various kinds of dominionism, the belief that Christians are entitled to rule.

There’s also a strong emphasis on the Old Testament, including the belief that God’s commands and promises to the ancient nation of Israel apply both to the church today and to individual Christians.

For example, the Book of Deuteronomy tells ancient Israelites that they are to be the “head and not the tail” if they obey God’s commands. This is now interpreted as a promise that individual Christians will enjoy great success if they obey God, and obeying God means giving the pastor their money.

The result, Taylor said, is a kind of “two-tiered vision of humanity” that sees God’s people as chosen to rule, highly favored by the Lord, and everyone else as instruments of evil, or, in the favored language of radical pastors and prophets, as “demonic,” with members of the Democratic Party labeled “demoncrats.”

White’s sale on angels may be heretical and exploitative, but it’s also absurd and comical. Yet there is nothing comical about the movement’s darkest rhetoric.

Taylor asked me to watch a “prophecy” by Jonathan Cahn, a prominent independent charismatic prophet. You might not know who Cahn is, but he’s one of the most popular Christian public figures in America. He’s written multiple best-selling books and was profiled in The Times in 2019.

Cahn delivered what Taylor called the “Jehu prophecy,” where he compared Trump to the Jehu, a vicious king in ancient Israel who is notable for the killing of Jezebel, the evil queen of Israel who came before him.

In Scripture, Jehu ordered the execution of Jezebel and trampled her body with his horse. Wild dogs came and ate her corpse. Jehu’s men then slaughtered a previous king’s sons and piled their heads at the city gates.

As Taylor posted last year, “In other contexts, Cahn has made clear that, in his typology, if Trump is Jehu, then Harris is Jezebel.” In 2016, she was Hillary Clinton. In the prophecy, Cahn says that God called Trump “according to the template of Jehu, the warrior king. He called Jehu to make his nation great again. Jehu came to the capital city with an agenda to drain the swamp.”

Cahn’s defenders might say that this was just a spiritual analogy. He’s not prophesying death and destruction, but rather defeat and disgrace. But if you listen to those words (and I encourage you to actually watch the video because, really, it has to be seen to be understood), is it any wonder that empathy is on the wane in American Christianity? Is it any wonder that Trumpist Christians often express extraordinary venom against their foes?

In this upside-down way of thinking, given what Jehu did to Jezebel, when Trump strips migrants of due process, or has political dissenters seized in the streets, or removes the security details from his political opponents and even his former allies, he’s not being cruel; he’s showing mercy.

Independent charismatics are a subset of conservative evangelicalism. There are countless Christian Trump voters who are appalled by the theology and morality of his more extreme followers. People I love and respect voted for Trump, and they think of White as a heretic and reject Cahn’s prophecies.

But if it’s a mistake to overestimate the numbers of Trump’s independent charismatics (they’re a minority of American Christians), it’s also a mistake to underestimate their influence. White works for Trump. Sewell prayed at Trump’s inauguration. And as Taylor explains in his book, independent charismatics were the Christian shock troops of Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election — online and, on Jan. 6, in real life.

When Martin Luther sent his 95 Theses to the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, in 1517, he was in part attacking the Catholic Church’s corrupt sale of “indulgences,” pardons for sin that were supposed to reduce the period of torment in purgatory.

As the Book of Ecclesiastes declares, “there is nothing new under the sun.” Indulgences are back and better than ever. Now they come with guardian angels and crystal crosses. The people who buy angels for personal gain aren’t hypocrites. They’re living the values they’ve been taught to hold.

And so, when Trump’s most radical Christian followers see Trump’s ostentatious wealth, watch him seethe and rage at his enemies, observe him seeking unchecked power and peddle trinkets for personal gain, it’s all of a piece.

They don’t see a despot or a tyrant or a grifter. They see a president taking the form of a pastor they love.

Some other things I did.

In my Sunday column, I pulled back for a broader view of the Signal chat scandal. Where does it fit in context with the Trump administration’s other actions regarding the military?

The difference between the American and Russian militaries is easy to articulate. At its core, the U.S. military is professional. The Russian military is political. That doesn’t mean that the Russian military doesn’t have professional elements; it’s that when push comes to shove, political loyalty is the ultimate value.

You can reach the highest heights if you have unwavering loyalty to Putin. If you do not, then you can forfeit your career (and even your life). Traditionally in the American military, politics is irrelevant to your advancement. And if politics does intrude, it’s seen as a grave breach of the military ethos.

It’s rare to even know the political affiliation of American admirals and generals. When Dwight D. Eisenhower retired from the Army, for example, both parties courted him to be their presidential nominee.

According to the soldier’s creed, an American soldier isn’t just a warrior; he’s a guardian of “the American way of life.” One does not defend the American way of life by contradicting and violating fundamental American principles of political freedom and accountability.

Trump’s presidency is fundamentally anti-system. If there is anything that unites his coalition (apart from love of Trump), it’s the desire to disrupt, to break things, to smash the system. But what if the system that he’s breaking happens to be the best in the world?

This week, Times Opinion also released a fascinating podcast conversation I had with Aleksandra Gliszczynska-Grabias, a Polish law professor and a member of a nonpartisan coalition of law professors and judges who helped rally Polish citizens to defeat right-wing populists in the Law and Justice party who had defied the rule of law.

The conversation was interesting and inspiring, but it was also sobering. Defeating populism takes time:

French: I’m so interested in that because it sounds like one of the primary means of persuasion that you used was very patient public education, going out to people. In the United States, we might use a word like conducting a seminar, or some people might call it a teach-in, where you go and you literally teach people about the stakes and the cause. So how long was this process? Again, you know, here in the United States there’s a lot of emphasis on doing things now, now, now: What can we do right away that makes change? But what you’re describing seems like that real change actually took some time here.

Gliszczynska-Grabias: It took years, to be honest. Of course, the first moment of shock and actually realizing what’s going on was not the moment for action. But, this educational element and going to small cities and towns by the judges and prosecutors — this was happening all the time, I would say, for sure, five, six years. So it took an enormous effort, and also by many of them a personal price to pay. So this was a kind of coordinated action. But the most important aspect of it was changing people’s minds as to how to vote in the next elections, even though none of the judges or none of the prosecutors were telling the people they met whom to vote for. Absolutely not. They were just saying, “What are the values and the laws that are endangered by the current actions of the government?”