Pastor Travis Johnson sees signs everywhere that the country is better off today than it was when President Trump took office a year ago.
Take, for example, the signs at car dealerships and banks around his home city, Mobile, Ala., in December urging people to “Put the CHRIST back in Christmas.” Only a few years ago, Mr. Johnson said, secular businesses might have shied away from that message even here in deep-red Alabama.
“Freedom is back in style,” he said over lunch with his wife and son at a favorite oyster house in Mobile. “Christmas is Christmas.”
Mr. Johnson leads Pathway Church, a growing evangelical congregation where most people take for granted that Mr. Trump is on their side. Many conservative Christians, especially in states like Alabama, feel that their faith is finally ascendant.
The church uses the motto “We exist for God and our city.” But these days, the pastor is often traveling beyond his own city. In 2025, he prayed in the Oval Office, sang hymns in the Roosevelt Room, attended an Easter dinner with Mr. Trump in the Blue Room, and posed in the Rose Garden after the president signed an executive order establishing a commission on religious liberty. On New Year’s Eve, he was in Palm Beach, Fla., with a group of pastors, reassuring the prime minister of Israel that evangelicals stand with him.
Mr. Johnson’s expanded church and social circle reflect how Mr. Trump has radically reshaped the contours of the American evangelical elite. With the help of the televangelist Paula White-Cain, his longtime personal pastor, Mr. Trump has courted a new class of pastors and evangelists like Mr. Johnson, who support him without question. Mr. Trump promised them direct access to the White House, and he has delivered.
In pulpits around the country, soft-edged conservatism is out, replaced by a punchier style advanced by Trump associates like Charlie Kirk, who urged pastors to embrace being perceived as offensive in defense of truth, and dismissed the notion of the separation of church and state.
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Mr. Johnson’s time at Pathway Church in Mobile has overlapped almost exactly with the Trump era. Since arriving from Florida in October 2016, he has leaned into the new political moment, joining Evangelicals for Trump and forging connections with other pastors around the country who supported the new president.
His work continued locally, too. In June 2023, Mr. Johnson was invited to deliver a prayer to open a City Council meeting where the agenda included discussion of a drag show in a public park. He delivered a six-minute prayer asking God to protect children “from ideologies that have zeroed in on them at their youngest and most innocent ages,” drawing criticism from groups alarmed by the eroding wall between church and state. At the same time, he began a sermon series titled “Awake, Not Woke” in which he lambasted the city’s Pride Month celebrations. In August, under pressure from a wider coalition of pastors, the city’s mayor discontinued the city’s L.G.B.T.Q. liaison positions.
Though Mr. Johnson refers to the backlash to his City Council prayer as a “cancellation,” the Trump era has been good for his career. Pathway now has five locations, three in the Mobile area, one in Mississippi and one in Cambodia, where Mr. Johnson has been active in a Christian humanitarian organization since the early 2000s. His first book, “[Un]Embarrassed of Jesus” will be published by a Christian publisher in the spring.
The pastor sees it as a responsibility to be active on social media — X, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, BeReal — and reaches quickly for his phone to share photos and videos of his trips in Washington and overseas. In one recent photo, he and other pastors gaze at the ceiling of the Lincoln Bedroom as Mr. Trump points out a chandelier awkwardly connected to an air vent. The president planned to fix it, Mr. Johnson said, comparing him favorably to a general contractor. He guessed that the president knows his name, though he wasn’t sure.
The country has come a long way since 2015, as Mr. Johnson sees it. He recalled that summer, when the White House facade was illuminated in rainbow-colored lights to celebrate the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage. It remains a touchstone moment for many social conservatives, who speak about it as a kind of desecration of a national monument, proof in lights that their values no longer reigned at the highest levels of power.
“Suddenly everything that was good is now bad, and things that are bad are good,” Mr. Johnson said.
When asked if he had ever said anything negative publicly about Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson paused for several seconds. “I doubt it,” he concluded. After reflecting more, he offered one potential area for improvement: The evangelist Franklin Graham, he said, is working to get the president to stop cursing.
On the Sunday before Christmas at Pathway, trees and wreaths twinkled in the lobby.
In the first service that morning, Mr. Johnson baptized two people, celebrating the chance to “take people public with their faith.” There was a rock-tinged version of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” and a recap of the church’s involvement in a baseball game for young people with disabilities.
Then it was time to preach. The pastor opened with a story about a troublesome tree he had cut down on his property, only to have small shoots grow out of the leveled stump. The lesson was that hope is never lost, that God always has a plan, that faith rewards. “When you’re down to nothing,” Mr. Johnson said, “God is up to something.”
Many church members seemed to have only a hazy sense of Mr. Johnson’s activities in Washington. For Keeli Wall, it was surreal to think about her pastor spending time at the White House. Ms. Wall, a nurse, started attending Pathway a few years ago, after her son began participating in a youth group. It’s a positive sign that a “man of God” like Mr. Johnson has influence in Washington, she said. “I don’t believe religion and government should be separate.”
Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times.
The post An Alabama Pastor Credits Trump for Putting ‘Christ’ Back in Christmas appeared first on New York Times.
