A Christian Nationalist in the Iowa Legislature

In yesterday’s episode, I talked about how, so far, about half of the members of Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition seem to be either not faith leaders at all, or to be extremely minor leaders of just a small handful of people each.

Today, I want to talk about the other side of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition. The other half of people listed as members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition are actual leaders of religious communities. They are not leaders of moderate, good-neighbor religious groups, however. These members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition are religious extremists who encourage hate and violence as they preach a form of Christian Nationalism that is opposed to the tradition of American freedom.

Brad Sherman is one such member of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

Brad Sherman is pastor at solid rock church in Coralville, Iowa and a Republican member of the Iowa State Legislature. As someone who is both an elected government official and a pastor, Brad Sherman has had the power to display his religious ideology in terms of public policy.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Brad Sherman encouraged Americans to avoid taking measures to slow the spread of the virus. Brad put people’s lives at risk for the sake of his political ambitions.

10,538 people in Iowa are dead because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many of these people were killed because of misinformation spread by people like Brad Sherman.

This isn’t a game. Medical records show that 10,538 Iowans are dead because of what extremist conspiracy theorists like Brad Sherman did. His misinformation helped a deadly disease spread. People got killed because of that.

Brad Sherman advocates for a Christian theocracy to replace the traditions of American democracy, writing that “Rights come from God not Government”. It’s a bit weird to hear Brad Sherman say this, because he is himself a government official. When he says “rights come from god not government”, it doesn’t mean that he will refrain from trying to pass laws that will infringe upon the legal rights of the people of Iowa. In fact, exactly the opposite is true.

It is chilling to hear an elected legislator make a statement like this, if you think about what it really means. In the United States of America, we the people democratically elect our own government. Brad Sherman is saying that the people of the United States of America shouldn’t be able to elect their own leaders anymore.

Brad Sherman wants unelected religious leaders like himself to make decisions about who has the right to do what, and who does not have legal rights. Brad Sherman is saying that he wants churches to have the power to deny Americans their legal rights. He believes our own legal rights do not belong to the American people. He believes that his god, and therefore his church, should be able to replace America’s democratically-elected government.

This position is against American traditions. It’s a radical political theory that would remove the stable, reliable foundations of civic society in the United States. Brad Sherman wants to tear it all down, to destroy democracy in the name of Jesus.

In February of 2023, Brad Sherman introduced an amendment to the Iowa State Constitution that would outlaw all marriages other than between a man and a woman, citing “the laws of nature and nature’s God” as justification.

What would Brad Sherman have the Iowa state government do with the many married couples who don’t fit his strict definition of what a marriage should be? The answer seems clear: His proposed law would break up married couples and prevent large numbers of couples from getting married.

Brad Sherman’s legislation is anti-family and anti-marriage. It seeks to wreck people’s marriages, and the only justification it has for attacking marriage liberty is that Brad Sherman believes that Americans should not be able to do anything that does not follow the ancient laws of a religion that was invented thousands of years ago halfway around the world.

Brad Sherman’s anti-family Christian Nationalism motivated him to introduce another bill that if passed would encourage discrimination against married couples who don’t follow ancient religious laws about how to have sex. Brad Sherman wants the Iowa state government to start to make decisions about the private sex lives of people in Iowa.

In another bill in the Iowa State legislature, Brad Sherman proposed changing the law in order to make it easier for schools to ban books from their libraries.

Other legislation proposed by Brad Sherman would give the Iowa state government the power to tell people what their gender is, and force people to behave as if their government-assigned gender is their actual gender. The bill would also legalize discrimination against Iowans on the basis of their gender identity.

Another bill from Brad would ban public schools from being kind and affirming of students’ genders. If his bill became law, Iowa public school teachers and administrators would be forced to act as gender police, compelling students into stereotypical gender expressions regardless of students’ and families wishes.

Brad also introduced two bills in order to prohibit the prescription or distribution of arbortifacient medications such as mifepristone, mifegyne, or ormifeprex.

Brad Sherman is pushing these extreme pieces of legislation because he believes that the truth of his Christianity is absolute, and must not give way to any alternative. He does not desire a future in which people are able to think of things in different ways. His goal is for his religion to conquer and dominate everyone in the United States and around the world. In an essay against humanism, he writes:

“We are called to be soldiers in God's army - and we are supposed to win. Jesus has given us the authority and commissioned us to ‘...make disciples of all the nations’… We are called to boldly proclaim Christian values, not only in our churches, but also in the public square and make disciples of all the nations. We are called to prepare the way for the King and His appearing, at which time every knee will bow and the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord.”

Brad Sherman doesn’t want to get along with his non-Christian neighbors. He doesn’t want the people of Iowa to have the freedom to live the way that they want to live. Brad Sherman is looking forward to a day when every person in Iowa will be forced to kneel in submissions to the soldiers in the army of Christian Nationalism, and his religion will rule over all.

This belief is common among the members of Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition. There may be a few exceptions, but most of the members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition that we are able to find information about take it for granted that Christian Nationalists should have the power to control the lives of all other Americans. They take it for granted that their messiah will return and end American democracy, replacing it with a totalitarian religious dictatorship.

The Iowa Faith Leader Coalition is an organization that is supporting Donald Trump not in spite of Trump’s statements that he wants to become a dictator, but because they want Donald Trump to become a dictator over the United States. Members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition like Brad Sherman believe that democracy is an unholy and Satanic blasphemy against their Christianity. They want nothing less than total power.

Brad Sherman is one of the more prominent members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, but he does not stand alone. Tomorrow, a new episode of this podcast will be available, providing more reporting on the memberships, beliefs, and activities of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, as we move quickly toward the date of the Iowa caucuses.

Stay tuned.