It has been accepted as a matter of faith that Christian Nationalist supporters of Donald Trump are ascendant in the Republican Party to the point that they are unstoppable.

The results of a congressional primary election this week show that this trend only goes so far. David Pautsch, a member of Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, lost in the Republican Party primary in Iowa’s first congressional district.

Pautsch had attempted to replace sitting member of Congress Marionette Miller-Meeks, but he lost the election, gaining only 44% of Republican votes, 12 points behind the showing of Miller-Meeks.

Mariannette Miller-Meeks herself is a right wing Christian Nationalist. She’s a stridently conservative Catholic who seeks to use her position in Congress to impose her religious views on all Americans. She is a supporter of Donald Trump. She opposes reproductive rights, and wants to end LGBTQ equality.

David Pautsch believed that wasn’t far enough, though. Pautsch promised to be an even more extreme Christian Nationalist in Congress than Representative Miller-Meeks.

Pautsch has accused Barack Obama of being a demon, and called for Obama to be lynched while Obama was President of the United States.

Pautsch promised to “restore Christian morality as public policy. Moral neutrality is impossible, confusing and lethal!” Of course, lynching the sitting President of the United States is also lethal, but it certainly isn’t morally neutral.

One of the problems of the Pautsch for Congress campaign was that the bizarre religious obsessions of his extreme Christian Nationalism often failed to translate into coherent political speech. Pautsch was never able to explain, for example, why his campaign promised to ensure that “healing is available for sexual bondage.”

It proved a step too far even for Iowa Republican voters to vote for David Pautsch after he declared that “white supremacist” and “white nationalist” are not offensive terms.

Could the defeat of David Pautsch be a sign that Christian Nationalists have jumped the shark, even in culturally conservative states like Iowa? The general election in November will tell.

The stories of David Pautsch and 316 other Christian Nationalist extremists in Iowa are told in the new book Donald Trump’s Army of God: Christian Nationalism in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.