On Wednesday, a group of religious-right activists and Christian nationalists were invited to the White House for a meeting with faith adviser Paula White and to pray over President Donald Trump.
Among those in attendance were David Barton, Jim Garlow, Mario Bramnick, Samuel Rodriguez, Robert Jeffress, Gary Bauer, and William Wolfe.
Wolfe is a former Trump administration official and an ardent Christian nationalist who declared in 2023 that "we are getting close" to a point where Christians will have to "heed the call to arms."
Following the meeting at the White House, Wolfe posted a video on social media marveling about his opportunity to meet with Trump, saying that had Kamala Harris won the 2024 election, he and other Christians would have been rounded up by the government and shipped off to a gulag.
"I was concerned, probably more concerned than I've ever been in my entire life, that if that election had gone to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, then sometime over the next four years—because I am a Christian and because I exercised my First Amendment freedoms to speak Christian truth, particularly in the social media realm and the work we're doing with the Center for Baptist Leadership—that sometime sooner rather than later, I would get a knock on my door from the FBI who wanted to investigate me for quote unquote 'hate speech' or something like that," Wolfe said.
"It would have been a nightmare," he continued. "And that's what the regime wanted. And that's ridiculous that that's happening in America, in a country that was founded by Christians and on Christian values and has been a place that has been built in and grown only because it was founded in the soil and the bedrock of Western civilization, which is fundamentally a Christian project and endeavor."
"This is our heritage," Wolfe declared. "This is our land and we've had it really sort of violently taken away from us by radical leftists who are fundamentally steeped in a Marxist worldview that is anti-God, anti-human, anti-family, all those things. That was coming down the line."
But now that Trump is back in the White House, Wolfe said that Christians have been given "a huge amount of breathing room."
"This anti-Christian agenda and persecution that is a core feature of the left and their ideology and their vision for America has been put on pause," Wolfe said. "But it's not enough that gets put on pause. We need to fight back and we need to defend Christian truth, Christian values, and advance Christian policy priorities in the federal government and at the state level over the next four years, while we can."
"Today could have been a video where I was telling you all that I was being investigated by the IRS or that I was going to the gulags and I was going to have to share a cell with a bunch of other of my wonderful followers out there," Wolfe remarked. "But instead, I'm here telling you today that I had a chance to go to the White House and to talk about policies and priorities that are so important to Southern Baptists and to Christians across the country, and to even meet President Donald Trump."
Wolfe was a visiting fellow at OMB Director Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America, which identified Christian nationalism as a priority for the Trump administration. Wolfe’s Center for Baptist Leadership is the latest effort to impose ultraconservative theology and politics on the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
