Former President Donald J. Trump has gruesome rhetorical staples he likes to deploy at his political rallies, including homicidal sharks, bird-killing windmills and Hannibal Lecter. Amid the litany, one less morbid aside tends to escape notice.
“Those beautiful ladies from North Carolina are here again without their husbands,” Mr. Trump observed at a rally in Mosinee, Wis., on Sept. 9, veering off from a rant about the 2020 election. He gestured toward the rafters and a row of a dozen impeccably coifed women in brightly colored pantsuits, as if they had wandered in from an Easter gala.
The women waved and blew kisses at the former president, who speculated that the women had attended “249 or something” rallies. “That means they have money,” he said approvingly.
Mr. Trump has called out the self-described “North Carolina Girls” at rallies this year in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, Arizona and South Carolina, in addition to events in their native state. But the women are unusual in ways beyond their ubiquity.
All are members of an evangelical charismatic Christian church in the tiny town of Spindale (population 4,238) in western North Carolina. The church, Word of Faith Fellowship, has for decades drawn controversy over its cultish insularity and its treatment of children and adults who have been judged by church leaders to be sinners.
As church leaders have acknowledged in legal proceedings, Word of Faith relies on a practice known as “strong” or “blasting” prayer. Former church members have described the entire congregation surrounding and screaming at a single member for as long as an hour in an effort to expunge the evil from the person. Church officials say this characterization is overstated.
Beginning with a report by the TV news journal “Inside Edition” in 1995 and culminating in an investigative series by two Associated Press reporters that would become a book in 2020, numerous former church members have come forward and described being physically assaulted during such prayers.
In an interview, Matthew Fenner, a former congregant who told the A.P. reporters that he was 19 when he was blasted and beaten by five church members in 2013 for being gay, said that Word of Faith rationalized its brutal treatment of him and others. “To them, I wasn’t being abused,” Mr. Fenner said. “I was being saved and delivered.”
Word of Faith has consistently disputed these claims. As one of the members who frequently volunteers at Trump rallies, Hannah Davies, said in a testimonial posted on the church’s website: “I want everyone to know this prayer is not abusive, no one is hit, no one is punched, no one is screamed at. This prayer is full of love and freedom.”
None of the church’s history comes up at Mr. Trump’s rallies, and the former president has never once mentioned the church the North Carolina women belong to.
The women serve as a trusted volunteer arm of the campaign’s advance team. They arrive well before the beginning of a Trump event, set up chairs in the V.I.P. section, run the media sign-in table and disassemble the V.I.P. section after the rally is over. Contrary to Mr. Trump’s assertion that the women attend the rallies without their spouses, in recent months their husbands have been seen distributing floor passes and policing the V.I.P. areas, all of them in blue long-sleeved shirts with “Team Trump” on the back and their first initial and last name stenciled on their shirt pockets.
The women and their husbands declined to be interviewed for this article. Instead, the church’s attorney, Joshua Farmer, emailed a statement from the members explaining what motivated their volunteer work for the campaign.
“God has spoken to our hearts that President Trump is the person who will lead this country in the right direction,” the statement said. The church members did not further specify religious reasons for their support of the former president, instead citing his “policies on important issues,’’ including “economics, immigration, foreign policy and national security.”
In the statement, Mr. Farmer said that his wife, Andrea Farmer, is among the volunteers. Others represent the upper echelon of the church’s hierarchy, beginning with the co-founders of the church, Jane and Sam Whaley. Robin Webster, their daughter and a longtime teacher in the church’s K-through-12 private school, is also a volunteer, as is the church’s associate minister, Kim Waites.
Word of Faith is in Rutherford County, where the Republican Party chairman, Bryson Smith, a church member, encouraged others to travel to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, writing on social media: “Calling all patriots! Our country needs you! The time is now!”
It is unclear whether any of the church members were at the Capitol on Jan. 6, but Holly Morris, the wife of a church leader, posted on social media a month before the 2020 election that “no true Christian” could vote for the Democratic nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr. A few days before Jan. 6, she wrote, “See you in #WashingtonDC @realDonaldTrump.”
Republicans say the church constitutes a formidable voting bloc in the 10th Congressional District, which includes all of Rutherford County. During the 2020 Republican primary, the incumbent congressman, Representative Patrick McHenry, carried every precinct in the district except for the church’s home in Spindale — a likely consequence, Republicans said, of Mr. McHenry’s support for church closings during the first months of the Covid pandemic, which Word of Faith initially resisted.
During the 2022 midterm elections, several Word of Faith members donated a combined $7,850 to the Trump-endorsed incumbent in the neighboring 11th District, Madison Cawthorn. Mr. Cawthorn was defeated in his primary, but church members had worked hard to distribute his campaign literature at numerous precincts, according to the former state representative of the area, Mike Hager.
“I’ll say that for Word of Faith,” Mr. Hager said in an interview. “They’re very involved and they make themselves heard.”
This past July, several Word of Faith members hosted a fund-raiser for Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, at the house of a church member, David Caulder, a prominent realtor in the area. CNN has reported that Mr. Robinson, a vocal opponent of gay rights and abortion under any circumstances, frequented adult video stores throughout the 1990s and referred to himself on message boards as “Black Nazi,” both of which his campaign has vehemently denied.
Among the “co-chairs & hosts” listed on the fund-raising event’s invitation was Ms. Whaley, the church’s co-founder.
The Trump campaign did not respond to questions about the Word of Faith members for this article, except to say that the former president and his team “often acknowledge these supporters because their enthusiastic support is motivational to us all.”
Instead, Mr. Trump has kept things simple in describing the women, as he did at a rally in Columbia, S.C. earlier this year: “They look so wealthy and beautiful.”
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