About the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition

David Leach is Secretary General of the Army Of God, an organization that has been designated by the US Department of Homeland Security as a Perpetrator Of Terrorism. Donald Trump sought out David Leach's endorsement as part of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition before the Iowa caucuses. Donald Trump celebrated David Leach's endorsement.

When will Donald Trump denounce David Leach's terrorism? Don't hold your breath.

Seriously, Christian Nationalists across Iowa are teaching children in Sunday Schools that female gender identity is made by taking a rib from a man, and then transitioning its gender so that the man can have sex with his own rib. If that isn’t bizarre gender ideology, I don’t know what is!

David Pautsch promises congressional legislation to heal people from sexual bondage. Tom Sooter preaches about demon frogs hopping out of the mouths of dragons. Kelley McAtee warns her dog training clients about the dangers of canine demonic possession. Steve Freeman supports an exorcism at public libraries. This is not normal behavior, and more importantly, it’s not kind and neighborly. The Midwestern Christian Nationalists in Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition show a cruelty and violence that makes them unfit to choose the next President of the United States.

Donald Trump says Mark Sneed is an important ministry leader. There is no publicly available evidence that he is anything other than a real estate agent. Mark, get in touch and tell us the truth.

Matthew Don is signed up in Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition as a “ministry leader” up in Hancock County, but Don himself says that he’s just an aspiring cybersecurity professional all the way down in Des Moines. Who’s lying? Matthew Don, please let us know.

Then there’s Raven Stuefen, who Donald Trump says is an important Christian minister. The funny thing is that Raven Stuefen herself says that she had 30 years in retail, and then some factory work. She doesn’t talk about being a minister. What she does on her TikTok channel is make some very unfunny jokes about throwing electric toasters onto people while they’re in the bathtub. What kind of Christian minister does that?

A pastor without a congregation is like a shepherd without any sheep. Kelly Rose Pabst is a failed politician who is struggling to get by in Laurens, Iowa. She is not a pastor. She’s just an angry and frightened person posting Facebook videos that no one watches of herself alone in the darkness at her kitchen table.

The fact that Donald Trump brags about the endorsement of Kelly Pabst as evidence of his Christian Nationalist entitlement to the White House is a sign of a righteous religious bluff with nothing behind it.

The goal of this podcast was to document a crucial portion of Trump’s efforts to secure the Republican nomination with a demonstration of overwhelming political dominance. This project has focused on the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, a shadowy organization created as a branch of the Trump 2024 campaign with the goal of presenting Donald Trump as the choice of Iowa’s religious leaders.

This podcast went beyond the superficial stories offered by journalists who accepted the Trump campaign’s claims about the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition at face value. We investigated the truth about the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, and covered a lot of ground in the two and a half weeks before the Iowa caucuses.

Douglas Wolfe is a political consultant currently working as campaign manager for the congressional campaign of Dave Giles in Arizona.

Wolfe is also the owner of Grumpy Burgers.

Wolfe also works as a home inspector. He is also a real estate broker at Rockgate Realty.

Wolfe also occasionally works as a pastor-for-hire, charging money for marital counseling services at Marriage Minded Ministries at His Harbor. It is on the basis of this occasional work that the Trump for President lists Wolfe as a “faith leader” in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

Is that really what the life of a bona fide faith leader looks like?

Yes, Christianity is shrinking in Iowa, and across the United States. It’s not happening because of demons. It’s happening because Christians are allowing their religion, in the pursuit of power, to become aligned with the most corrupt, hateful, and violent presidential candidate the United States has ever seen.

Christianity is shrinking in Iowa because of the behavior of Iowa Christians.

It’s not too late for this trend to be reversed.

Republican Iowa Christians have the opportunity tomorrow to let go of the hate and anger in their hearts.

They can go to the caucuses and vote for a candidate who does not threaten to kill their opponents, who does not promise to set up concentration camps, who does not center their campaign upon a thirst for bloody retribution.

If you want people to return to Christianity in Iowa, you need to demonstrate that Christianity is something worth returning to.

The first step in that process is to vote for any other candidate than Donald Trump.

 If you can’t bring yourself to do that, if your religious fury is too strong, you will have no one else to blame but yourself as the number of Iowans who are willing to call themselves Christians continues to wither.

Robin Claeys is far from alone among the members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition in her sincere desire for Jesus to come down to Earth and start killing non-Christian Americans.

Consider the violent theology preached by these other members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

Adam Whitty of the Temple Baptist Church in Charles City, Iowa teaches that non-Christians will be rightfully subjected to “everlasting conscious suffering” after the return of Jesus.

Pastor John Johnson of the Hickory Grove Community Church in Ottumwa, Iowa preaches that, “Whosoever is not found written in the Book of Life, together with the Devil and his angels, the beast, and the false prophet, will be consigned to everlasting punishment in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.”

Joseph Hall is pastor of Crossroads Church in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where the church teaches, “Unbelievers will be judged,” and that “they will be eternally tormented.”

“The Lake of Fire is literal,” says Roger Adkins, pastor of the Real Life Church in Bettendorf, Iowa.

These are just a few examples of the large numbers of members of Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition who preach that when Christianity finally gains control, massive violence to kill billions of people will be the inevitable result. They don’t deplore that violence. On the contrary, they look forward to it. They pray for it.

In 2017, shortly after the networks of churches were used to campaign for the election of Donald Trump, a group of religious leaders from across the United States wrote a letter to Congress raising an alarm about the growing problem of politicians transforming churches into instruments of their partisan political campaigns.

The letter stated:

“We must not allow our sacred spaces to be transformed into spaces used to endorse or oppose political candidates.

Faith leaders are called to speak truth to power, and we cannot do so if we are merely cogs in partisan political machines. The prophetic role of faith communities necessitates that we retain our independent voice. Current law respects this independence and strikes the right balance: houses of worship that enjoy favored tax-exempt status may engage in advocacy to address moral and political issues, but they cannot tell people who to vote for or against. Nothing in current law, however, prohibits me from endorsing or opposing political candidates in my own personal capacity.

Changing the law to repeal or weaken the “Johnson Amendment” – the section of the tax code that prevents tax-exempt nonprofit organizations from endorsing or opposing candidates – would harm houses of worship, which are not identified or divided by partisan lines. Particularly in today’s political climate, engaging in partisan politics and issuing endorsements would be highly divisive and have a detrimental impact on congregational unity and civil discourse.”