Chris Dix lives in Waverly, Iowa, the county seat of Bremer County. There’s no record of him engaging in a religious ministry there.
There are records of Chris Dix sitting on financial advisory boards overseeing health insurance and pensions in the Iowa Conference of the United Methodist Church. The work he’s done on these boards, however, is financial, not religious in nature.
Chris Dix isn’t really a ministry leader. He’s not a “faith leader”. He’s a financial professional who happens to go to church, and helps his congregation and its state governing organization with financial matters.
For Donald Trump to depict Chris Dix as a faith leader with a ministry is dishonest. So, why did Trump do it?
In the weeks before the Iowa caucus, Donald Trump wanted to demonstrate that he had the most support from right wing Christians of any of the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. The majority of Republican voters in Iowa, after all, are right wing Christians.
So, Donald Trump made a push to get an endorsement on the record from at least one Christian religious leader in every one of Iowa’s 99 counties.
As the Iowa caucuses approached, Donald Trump was failing. He still hadn’t found a religious leader from Bremer County who would endorse his presidential campaign.
So, it looks like in Bremer County, as with many other counties, the Trump campaign decided to play fast and loose with the facts. The Trump campaign seems to have made a push to get the name of anybody who would pose as a religious leader, joining the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition. In Bremer County, the Trump campaign found Chris Dix, a mid-level financial professional.
Donald Trump thought he could get away with this deception. He presumed that no one would check, and for a while, he was right. Now, however, we’ve checked. The information revealing Trump’s deceptions in creating the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition have become plain.
The Iowa caucuses of 2024 are over. Now, the question is this: Will American voters turn a blind eye to Donald Trump’s lies and exaggerations about his support from America’s Christian leaders?
Chris Dix is listed in Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition as a ministry leader in Bremer County, Iowa.
The way Chris Dix describes himself on his Facebook profile is quite different from that, though.
Dix calls himself a level II Credit Analyst at Lincoln Savings Bank. He began this work fourteen years ago, and doesn’t list any other job or community affiliation since then.
Before working in a bank, Dix had a job at The Oak Tree’s Country Cupboard, a food and gifts store in Plainfield, Iowa.
Each one of the 317 members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition carries a story in their minds about what led them as individuals to proclaim that their religious leadership would be devoted to the political career of Donald Trump. Some of those stories have been shared in public, though many of them remain in the privacy of Coalition members’ own consciences.
Beyond these individual stories, there is a larger narrative about the impact of Christian Nationalism on American politics and the radically transformative plans of Christian Nationalists for the American future.
These stories are told in a new book on the subject. It’s called Donald Trump’s Army of God: Christian Nationalism in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.
It sounds crazy, but it’s real. What they intend to do to America is too extreme for us to ignore.
The Iowa Faith Leader Coalition is a radical political organization that violates American law
Let’s learn more about the extremist Christian Nationalists who are members of Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.