At the end of 2023, Donald Trump assembled an Army of God to bring him victory in the Iowa caucuses. Our investigation of these radicalized Christians led us to uncover Nazi propaganda, terrorism, murder-suicide, monsters, magical spells, faith healing, fraud, and a growing hunger for global genocidal religious war.

Now, we are sharing bringing together what we discovered about in a book: Donald Trump’s Army of God: Christian Nationalism in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

We aren’t going to mince words. We would like to write this book a calm, deliberative voice, as if our work was motivated by mere intellectual curiosity. That’s not the world we’re living in. 

None of us can be detached in this moment. As much as we might feel exhausted by politics, we cannot step away from it. Politics is on the verge of engulfing us all.

A few years ago, a reasonable voice might have said that what we were experiencing was just a temporary aberration. Nobody can say that now.

Day after day, month after month, the threats have been piling up. Donald Trump has threatened to suspend the Constitution, to put his political opponents behind bars, to open prison camps holding millions of people. He has openly contemplated becoming a dictator, and talked about exterminating his critics as if they are vermin.

These threats have mounted even as Trump has promised to be a champion of Christianity if he returns to the White House. Many Americans have wondered how these two things could both be true.

This book aims to resolve that question, not through discussions of abstract theology or political theory, but by looking at the specific words and deeds of Donald Trump’s foot soldiers in the opening skirmish of the 2024 presidential election, the Iowa caucuses. 

The Iowa Faith Leader Coalition provides us with a case study in the violent extremism that has come to define the 2025 presidential election. We can’t afford to not pay attention.