At one time, American evangelicals equated New York City with Babylon, the ancient site associated with power and corruption. Now, it appears, they have shifted their attention to Washington, D.C.

When Billy Graham conducted his revival campaign in Manhattan in 1957, he famously compared the city to Sodom and Gomorrah. He used a text from the prophet Isaiah for his opening sermon (which was reprinted in full in the following day’s New York Times). “Ah, sinful nation, a people laid with iniquity, a seed of evildoers,” Isaiah wailed.

New Yorkers, who are inordinately sensitive about their city, didn’t appreciate the inference, and Graham toned it down over the course of his 16-week campaign.

Now the symbolic locus of evil for evangelicals appears to have moved from New York to the nation’s capital. Paula White-Cain, the Florida prosperity televangelist, has been appointed to the White House Faith Office. Prior to the January 6 assault on the capitol, White-Cain prayed that God would grant the domestic terrorists “holy boldness” and that “every adversary” would “be overturned right now in the name of Jesus.”

Greg Laurie, a product of Calvary Chapel and the Jesus movement, recently visited the White House and declared that he wants the nation to experience a revival. Douglas Wilson, a megachurch pastor in Moscow, Idaho, recently announced that he was setting up a satellite congregation in Washington, an enterprise he characterized as “mission to Babylon.”

Yes, some good old-fashioned repentance is in order these days — for a felon executive, to be sure, and not least for members of Congress who voted for a spending bill that reduces care for those Jesus called “the least of these” in favor of billionaires and big corporations. I wonder if the crusty prophet Isaiah might have some choice words to say about that.

Well, in fact, he did. “You have been a refuge for the poor, a refuge for the needy in their distress,” Isaiah said to the Almighty, “a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat. For the breath of the ruthless is like a storm driving against a wall and like the heat of the desert.”

These evangelical emissaries would surely want to remind a ruthless president of Isaiah’s words. The reference to a wall and the heat of the desert, after all, provides a stark reminder about immigrants and refugees at the nation’s southern border.

And what does the Bible say about those immigrants? I don’t recall any divine directive for deportation, but Leviticus, a favorite among evangelicals, provides other guidance. “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” it reads, adding for emphasis, “I am the Lord your God.”

A prophetic word about avarice, one of the seven deadly sins, would also be in order. Luke’s gospel quotes Jesus as saying, “Watch, and be on your guard against avarice of any kind, for a man’s life is not made secure by what he owns, even when he has more than he needs.” Hmmm. I wonder if that applies to cryptocurrency, golf courses in Vietnam or 747 jets.

I suspect these evangelical missionaries to Washington have plenty of work to do if we’re going to turn the nation’s capital away from its wicked ways.

Alas, I’m not sure that White-Cain, Laurie or Wilson will be much help. They are representatives of what my friend and fellow historian John Fea calls “court evangelicals,” clergy more interested in cozying up to power than donning the sackcloth and ashes of a prophet.

Laurie, who opposes the separation of church and state, gushed about his recent tour of the White House and declared, “God has placed Donald Trump in office.” (Seems a tad unfair to blame Trump’s Second Coming on the Deity.)

Wilson, who bears an uncanny resemblance to 19th-century Mormon patriarchs, decries feminists as “small-breasted biddies who want to make sure nobody is using too much hot water in the shower, and that we are all getting plenty of fiber.” Just guessing here, but somehow I doubt that Wilson will remind the denizens of Babylon on how Jesus treated women or about evangelicals’ historic commitment to women’s equality.

Yes, the nation’s leaders could use a healthy dose of repentance (confessionals in the Capitol and the West Wing?). Sadly, I don’t think Wilson, White-Cain or Laurie are up to the task.

Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Dartmouth College, is the author of “America’s Best Idea: The Separation of Church and State.”