New reporting from Raw Story revealed previously unreported comments by Trump administration officials leading the White House Faith Office in which they embrace evangelical rhetoric more aggressively than any recent presidency, framing federal dollars and elections alike in explicitly religious and combative terms.
- A White House official called $4 billion in taxpayer funds being spent to address homelessness “God’s money — a move experts call an escalation of evangelical religious rhetoric coming from the Trump administration.
- Dave Donaldson, special assistant to President Donald Trump in the White House Faith Office, spoke at a webinar inviting faith communities to apply for funds through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care program, the largest federal assistance initiative to combat homelessness that provides funding to states, American Indian tribes, nonprofits, and housing entities.
- “I heard the other day, a faith leader said to me, ‘We shouldn’t touch that government money,’ but how many know ultimately it’s not the government’s money? It’s God’s money, and it’s your tax dollars,” Donaldson said.
- “If we do not compete with this HUD Continuum of Care, these funds by default are going to go to perhaps organizations that have values that you do not share, and so I cannot urge you enough to do whatever it takes to compete.”
- Ryan Burge, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies the impact of religion on American life and politics and hosts a popular Substack, “Graphs about Religion,” called the “God’s money” comment “very odd.”
- The second Trump administration has embraced evangelical language, evoking religion more so than previous presidential administrations who tended to reference religion more “generically,” Burge said.
- “Trump 2.0 is a decidedly more evangelical administration than even Trump 1.0. Guys like Pete Hegseth are a great example of that, of being very evangelical in their approach,” Burge said.
- “It’s like ‘God owns everything. God’s providence is over all of us’. That kind of language is very evangelical.”
- Donaldson isn’t the only Trump administration leader who has recently pushed evangelical language.
- Paula White-Cain, a White House faith adviser, in a recent webinar for the National Faith Advisory Board, called on evangelical Christians as “the body of Christ, just the church” to register to vote to ensure “we would never have an election problem again.”
- In the webinar, White-Cain called the election of Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist and Muslim, as a mayor of New York City “a very scary time.”
- “You’re not just talking Socialism … you are talking straight up Marxism, and if you don’t think that has consequences, most of your churches got shut down during COVID,” White-Cain said.
- Burge called that language “couched anti-Muslim rhetoric,” promoting the idea that “Muslims are taking over America, and they’re the real threat facing the country.”
- “It’s sort of an anti-Muslim in a way that I think is very unique today, that wasn’t true even three or five years ago, and it seems like almost like a return to the post-9/11 Islamophobia stuff is coming back,” Burge said.
Published: Aug 13, 2026