“It is a megachurch financed by rich conservative Republicans,” Harp’s estranged brother Preston said of the church.
“Anytime there was a sermon about people who didn’t believe ‘the gospel’ the way [Jeremiah] dogmatically interpreted it, [they] were said to be damned to hell.”
Jeremiah did not immediately respond to Raw Story's request for comment.
The California-based pastor has spent decades developing a following of millions — and made millions in the process, tax records show.
His ministry, Turning Point for God, churns out shows that air on the History Channel, Lifetime, Fox Business, A&E and the Cowboy Channel, among others, and Shadow Mountain Community Church includes eight satellite locations, a Southern California Seminary and Christian Unified Schools.
Among his devotees was Natalie Harp, now 35, who started attending his sermons when she was about 13, according to her brother.
Harp went on to become a top Trump aide, so closely connected to him that the New York Times' Maggie Haberman called her the president's "binky." She is constantly by the president's side, and was one of just three core staffers that he took with him when he swapped planes to avoid threats from Iran. He left many other staffers and members of the press aboard the threatened plane.
While Jeremiah’s worth remains unclear — Turning Points earns between $65 and $100 million a year, according to tax filings accessible on ProPublica’s nonprofit database — it is evident his work makes an impact.
“David Jeremiah is just kind of one of those huge figures out there,” Professor J. Derrick Lemons, head of the Religion department at the University of Georgia, told Raw Story.
“Millions and millions of people have watched him.”
Between delivering sermons on television and on cruises in the Caribbean, Jeremiah has found time to author roughly 100 books, a handful of which have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list.
While the silver-haired, 85-year-old pastor from Toledo, Ohio, presents a persona of a plain-dealing, God-fearing Christian, one former employee has claimed looks can be deceiving.
George Hale, Turning Point’s former chief financial officer, claimed to Christian news site World Magazine in 2014 that he had been ordered to buy about $250,000 worth of Jeremiah’s books from Barnes & Noble in an effort to win bestseller rankings — thus catapulting the pastor to national fame and acclaim.
Hale obeyed — World Magazine reviewed receipts backing the claim — and watched the ministry double in size, bringing in $40 million in 2012, according to the report.
Jeremiah neither confirmed nor denied the claim, but told the outlet, “You can’t just write a book and say I’m not going to have anything to do with marketing.”
Hale disagreed.
“I very much admire David Jeremiah,” Hale told the outlet. He then described Turning Point’s book-buying practice as “deceptive and unethical.”
Jeremiah has also been linked to a subtle political maneuver by Lemons, author of the soon-to-be-released book “Trump and the Politics of Prayer,” in a 2022 article for the The Australian Journal of Anthropology about Trump’s first successful presidential campaign.
In his article, Lemons argued Jeremiah helped solve a serious problem for Trump:
“How would he inspire the evangelical base to vote for him given his reputation as a thrice-married, philandering businessman who made much of his money from casinos?”
Trump needed that base, and he needed them soon, Lemons reported. The election was months away and polling showed the largest block of undecided voters (three out of 10) were evangelicals — many of whom planned not to vote for Trump.
So on June 21, 2016, Trump’s team summoned a slew of powerful pastors — among them Jerry Falwell Jr., Tony Perkins and Jeremiah — and 1,000 critical pastors to the Marriott Hotel in New York City.
And then Trump fielded specific questions, Lemons said.
“One option for this event was to ask Trump the hard questions,” Lemons explained. “‘You've been married multiple times — what do you think about divorce? or, ‘You allegedly had multiple affairs — what do you think about the sanctity of marriage?’
“Those were not questions that were going to come up,” Lemons said, “because the meeting was planned.”
That’s according to Pastor Johnnie Moore, who later revealed to Lemons that the questions were quietly vetted by Trump.
And among those to lob softball questions was Jeremiah, who had strenuously denied endorsing Trump just the year before — after a leaked video of a Trump Tower prayer session outraged his Hispanic followers.
The prayer, which Jeremiah denied served as an endorsement, included this thanks to God:
“Lord, thank you for allowing us to be here for this special moment,” Jeremiah said. “Perhaps we'll look back on this day and remember that we stood together and we prayed over the next president of the United States."
This was to be expected of Jeremiah, who avoids political rhetoric, as was the norm among evangelical pastors before Trump changed the game, Lemons said.
Yet one year later, rather than grill Trump of his knowledge of the Bible, Jeremiah joined pastors who asked “planted questions,” Lemons wrote.
When Jeremiah reportedly declared in front of the pastors, “We want to know how you are going to stand with Israel,” Trump was prompt to respond, “I'm 100 percent for Israel.”
Those 1,000 pastors suddenly found themselves able to support Trump and they spread the word to millions of evangelicals who voted for him in the upcoming election, Lemons reported.
“In an unofficial way, the whole meeting was set up like a multilevel marketing scheme primarily built on selling a product (Candidate Trump) to friends,” Lemons wrote.
“These pastors had experienced a conversion to Donald J. Trump like the conversion to Jesus Christ they had encouraged in many in their congregations.”
Jeremiah would later distance himself from Trump, even as his administration delivered more crucial wins for evangelical supporters than any president before him had done, Lemons told Raw Story.
“David Jeremiah has really pulled back and away from Trump,” Lemons said. “My sense is that he became uncomfortable with what Trump kind of turned into.”
Yet one of his followers would come to express a near-religious devotion to Trump, touting an enormous bag of his printouts, penning fawning letters of praise, and even trying to chase down his golf cart.
“I'm a little surprised that Natalie Hart grew up in his church,” Lemons admitted. “David Jeremiah is the type who would talk about faith and how important it is to live out your faith and public life…he's not particularly political.”
But Preston Harp, in texts with Raw Story, expressed little surprise in his sister’s entry into the political world, and offered a very different perspective on Shadow Mountain “Community” Church — those quotations are his.
Preston Harp said his mother and sister worked in the church office in roughly 2010.
“I can’t remember exactly cause I haven’t lived at home since 18 (2006),” Preston wrote. “I … got kicked out for having ‘doubts’ about their version of Christianity.”
Interestingly, Preston's current views — a belief in Jesus’ “message of tolerance and love for everyone” but not in any religion — were not the first to divide him from his sister, he said.
Natalie didn’t want to tag along with her big brother at church, Preston said.
She preferred to be with Jeremiah.
“I mostly went to the youth group on Sundays,” Preston told Raw Story, but “my sister chose to go with my parents to his sermons with all the adults and older people.”
