At the end of 2023, Donald Trump assembled an Army of God to bring him victory in the Iowa caucuses.
Now, in 2025, Donald Trump has brought that Army of God to Washington DC. They’ve taken over the US federal government.
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.
We are sharing what we discovered in a book: Donald Trump’s Army of God: Christian Nationalism in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.
The Iowa Faith Leader Coalition secured Trump’s path to the Republican nomination in 2024. Nonetheless, Trump’s claims about the Coalition have been largely unchallenged. The stories of its members have been left untold… until now.
When the authors peered behind the Coalition’s facade of Christian normality, they discovered extremists such as:
- David Leach, the leader of an anti-abortion terrorist network
- Tom Sooter, an exorcist whose obsession with demons led his wife to murder their daughter
- Katherine Watsey, a self-proclaimed prophet who uses Christian magic to fight secret underground Satanic altars across America
The twisted world of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition is a case study in the violent religious extremism that defined the presidential election of 2024 and has consumed American democracy in 2025.
This book provides information about each and every one of the more than three hundred members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.
Even as Donald Trump rose to power, the institutions of American journalism crumbled. There were few local journalists left to investigate and report on the relationship between Donald Trump and the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition. So, we stepped into the gap, determined to uncover the truth about this Christian Nationalist network, and share the facts about what we found.
The Tragedy of Jennifer Sooter
We discovered that the consequences of the religious extremism found in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition can be deeply personal, and shockingly violent. At the age of 24, Jennifer Sooter decided she wanted to be free. She wrote a letter explaining to her parents that she was leaving the church led by Tom Sooter. She packed her things into boxes and prepared to move into an apartment of her own. A few minutes later, she was dead at the hand of her own mother. Now, Tom Sooter is a part of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.
Now Is Not the Time for Apathy
The 2024 presidential election is over, and Donald Trump is now president again. He’s pushing quickly to fulfill the promises he made to Christian Nationalist leaders, destroying the Department of Education, bringing Christian preachers into the government to conduct religious indoctrination sessions in the White House and Congress, and creating a White House office that uses the power of the federal government to amplify the power of Christian organizations.
American democracy is crumbling. Terror and corruption are taking hold, but ordinary Americans still have the ability to stand up for freedom. There is too much at stake for us to turn our eyes away.
The stories of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition reveal a loosely-stitched patchwork quilt of Christian Nationalism that returned Donald Trump to power. By examining this network, we can learn how to stand against the most authoritarian President in American history.