About the Book:
What comes to mind when you think about religious leaders in Iowa?
What about terrorism?
The popular image of Christian leaders in the American midwest doesn’t include:
- murder-suicide
- money laundering
- obsession with demons
- Nazi propaganda
- magical powers
- hunger for a war of global genocide
Nonetheless, we found that and more when we looked at Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition. Donald Trump’s Army of God: Christian Nationalism in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition is the result of an investigation of the 317 Iowa Christians who enabled Trump to seize the Republican Party nomination in 2024.
Among the members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition profiled in the book are:
- David Leach, the leader of an anti-abortion terrorist network
- Katherine Watsey, a self-proclaimed prophet who uses Christian magic to destroy secret underground Satanic altars across America
- Tom Sooter, an exorcist whose obsession with demons led his wife to murder their daughter
Basic Information:
Category & genre: Nonfiction, politics, religion, Christian Nationalism
Publication date: May 18, 2024
ISBN-13: 979-8325952340
Retail price: $14.75
Format: paperback
Trim size: 5 x 0.59 x 8 inches
Page count: 260 pages
Book Cover Images:
Front cover high resolution
Front cover low resolution
Author images are available upon request.
About the Authors:
When Donald Trump revealed a long list of religious leaders endorsing his campaign in the weeks leading up to the Iowa caucuses, there was little journalistic investigation of the network. With the decline of American journalism, there were few reporters left to cover the story. Authors Clifford Cook and Anise Cook wanted to know more, and so they decided to investigate the story themselves.
Neither author has any experience in journalism or professional writing, and don’t make any pretense of having special influence. They decided to step forward to write about the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition simply because no one else was giving the story the attention it deserved.
Anise Cook manages an independent coffee shop in a small town north of Portland, Oregon. Clifford Cook is a former qualitative market researcher. Clifford Cook is host of the podcast Stop Christian Nationalism.
The cousins are lifelong Nones – Americans who do not identify as members of any religious tradition.
For interviews about the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, Christian Nationalism, and other topics related to the book, please contact Clifford Cook.
FAQs
Why should Americans care about the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition?
Iowa holds a special place in American politics. As the long-standing first state in the presidential primary calendar, Iowa has an influence on the US federal government that by far exceeds its relatively small population.
The Republican Party has come under the control of right wing Christian Nationalists in large part because Christian Nationalists have gained control over Republican Party politics in Iowa.
In the run-up to the 2024 Iowa caucuses, Ron DeSantis appeared at first to have the upper hand over Donald Trump, after evangelical heavyweight Bob Vander Plaats and Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, who is also an evangelical, threw their weight behind DeSantis. Donald Trump regained the lead through his announcement of a longer list of endorsement from Christian leaders – the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.
The story of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition is the story of how Donald Trump came to be the leading candidate in the 2024 presidential primary. Given the extreme changes Trump plans to make to the very foundations of American democracy, that story matters.
What kind of organization is the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition?
The Iowa Faith Leader Coalition appears to be the creation of the Trump campaign. It did not exist before November 2024, and it has not engaged in any activities independently of the Trump campaign.
However, many Coalition members know each other and have worked together to advance Christian Nationalist policy agendas before. There is, at least among a portion of Coalition members, a network of influence that predates their involvement with the Trump for President campaign.
What does it mean when Donald Trump refers to members of the Coalition as “faith leaders”?
The impression meant to be given by the phrase “faith leader” is that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has the support of a wide variety of religious leaders. The truth is exactly the opposite.
There are zero non-Christian religious leaders in Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition. Approximately 30 percent of Iowans are non-Christian. Iowa is home to many Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Neo-Pagan, and other religious communities. However, Donald Trump failed to obtain the endorsement of even one non-Christian religious leader in Iowa.
What’s more, the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition represents only a thin sliver of Iowa’s diversity of Christian denominations. The leaders of moderate and progressive Christian churches did not endorse Donald Trump. In fact, many Christian leaders in Iowa have spoken out against the practice of church leaders endorsing any political candidates at all. The Iowa Faith Leader Coalition contains only right wing Christians who support Christian Nationalism. The very act of exploiting one’s professional position as a religious leader to endorse a partisan political candidate for public office, after all, is an expression of Christian Nationalist ideology.
But then, it turns out that many members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition may not be faith leaders at all.
Hold on. How can members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition not be faith leaders?
As we investigated the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, we failed to find any evidence that 40 percent of Coalition members are actually religious leaders. Some are minor church employees, such as church secretaries. Others appear only to be members of a church. For others, there isn’t any evidence of any connection to any religious organization at all.
That doesn’t mean that all of these people are not religious leaders. It’s possible that some of them are leaders of extremely small religious groups. The fact that we didn’t find evidence for their religious leadership doesn’t necessarily mean that they are all being dishonest in their claims to be religious leaders.
However, for us to find absolutely no evidence that 126 members of Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition are actually faith leaders doesn’t seem likely to be a coincidence. A genuine religious leader occupies a prominent place in society. A religious leader engages in conspicuous public rituals, such as officiating at weddings and funerals.
We find it highly suspicious that there isn’t even one publicly available mention of any religious leadership on the part of 126 members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition. There’s no mention in a local newspaper, no comment by anybody on Facebook. If some of these people are in fact religious leaders of some kind, they aren’t very consequential.
Of course, if we’re wrong, we encourage people from Iowa to get in touch and let us know! We don’t mind admitting that we can make mistakes. We don’t claim to be infallible experts.
If you are not experts, then why should anyone pay attention to this book?
The last thing we want people to do is pay attention to this book because of who we are. We aren’t anybody special. We are fairly typical Americans. We’re not professors, or journalists. This is the first major piece of writing either one of us has ever completed.
Part of what we’re trying to do by writing this book is to question the wisdom of relying on faith to direct our choice of political candidates. Religious leaders want people to follow them with an attitude of faith. By contrast want our readers to question us with an attitude of healthy skepticism.
If more Iowans had cultivated the ability to evaluate political candidates skeptically, Donald Trump would not have won the Iowa caucuses. The Iowa Faith Leader Coalition doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, either.
Unfortunately, the journalistic response to Trump’s announcement of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition was not at all vigorous. There’s a good argument to be made that Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns would not have been as successful as they have been if America still had a healthy journalistic infrastructure. Too many newspapers have closed down, and most of those that remain have very few professionals writing for them. They’re mostly owned and operated remotely by large media corporations that won’t invest in adequate staff.