Empty chairs in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition

This episode of On The Iowa Faith Leader Coalition is available on Apple Podcasts.

At the very start of this episode, I want to make it clear that this podcast is NOT a creation of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

This podcast is ABOUT the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition. The purpose of this podcast is to make people aware of kind of members and activities that characterize the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

The Iowa Faith Leader Coalition is a group of over 300 people that Donald Trump claims are religious leaders who have endorsed his presidential campaign.

We have learned that what Donald Trump claims is true should not be taken at face value. So, we are doing our own investigation of the people Donald Trump has named as members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

This kind of investigation takes a lot of time, so our work is ongoing. So far, we have looked into the background of 50 out of the 302 people who Donald Trump names as members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition. That’s about one sixth of the full number, but already, an interesting pattern has emerged.

In this first full episode of this podcast, I want to talk about this pattern, and what it tells us about the Trump for President campaign.

To be sure, some of the people Donald Trump has bragged about as members of his Iowa Faith Leader Coalition are, in fact, leaders of religious organizations. I will talk about these Iowa faith leaders in the weeks to come.

Tonight, however, I want to point out this: Many of the names on the list don’t measure up to the superficially powerful impression created by the title “faith leader”.

For about half of the names on the Trump’s list so far, there is no evidence we can find that these people are active in leading any significant religious organization.

For some of these people, like Scott Hill, there are records showing that they once were pastors at a church, but no longer have those positions. In some older records, for instance, Scott Hill is listed as pastor for the Heartland Baptist Church in Ames, Iowa. The Heartland Baptist Church survives. It’s a church that preaches that Jews, Muslims, and Hindus are servants of Satan, and that atheists are wicked and cursed.

The thing is, the Heartland Baptist Church now lists other people as its pastors. As for Scott Hill, the Heartland Baptist Church doesn’t talk about him in its documents anymore at all. What’s more, there is no record we can find of any other church in Iowa that has Scott Hill as its pastor.

It appears that Scott Hill is simply a former pastor who has either retired, or lost his professional status as a religious leader completely.

Of course, it’s possible that we’ve got this wrong.

It’s possible that Scott Hill has gone off to be pastor at some Christian church in some tiny town somewhere far away from the main highways that run through Iowa, a church so small that it doesn’t leave any trace that we can find, even in county records of funerals where pastors have officiated.

If that’s the case, however, the church would have to be little more than just a handful of people coming together now and then. That’s what appears to be the case with Tony Hacker, who is on Donald Trump’s list of the Iowa Faith Leaders Coalition, but spends most of his time working at the John Deere factory in Moline, Illinois.

Tony Hacker is the preacher at what people call a “house church”. A house church is nothing more than a gathering of a few Christians at somebody’s house, where they worship together. Many house churches are just a fancy name for members of a single family getting together on Sunday, and their “pastor” is merely an older member of the family. At other times, neighbors from a couple of houses might join in. The thing is that, at a house church, the congregation can fit within one or two rooms in a house. You might get more people coming over for a kid’s birthday party.

So, about half of Donald Trump’s supporters on his supposed Iowa Faith Leader Coalition are either not actually faith leaders at all, or have a just a small handful of people they can count as followers.

There’s nothing wrong with having a small social network, of course. Many people do these days. Also, many people lose their jobs from time to time. So, let’s not insult members of Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leaders Coalition if they are pastors whose careers have fizzled out, or never went much of anywhere in the first place.

The point is that these people are hardly leaders with any significant following. They don’t have much of a social impact. They are not the sort of people whose endorsement carries much weight. They’re just names on a list that are making Donald Trump’s support appear larger than it really is.

Some of these supposed Iowa Faith Leaders may not be religious leaders at all. Some call themselves “elders”, but there’s no record of them even having a volunteer position of authority at a small church. There’s no record of them even mopping the floors of a church.

Anyone can claim to be a religious elder, and there’s no real way to say that they’re wrong. A person could be a self-appointed Christian prophet. There are a lot of those around these days, and many of them are Trump supporters. Such a person could claim to be an “elder” or even a “pastor” without actually having any congregation of followers outside of a few people who have subscribed to their videos on YouTube.

Are these kind of people really faith leaders?

It’s not a positive indication about the presidential campaign of Donald Trump that so many of the supposed faith leaders on his Iowa Faith Leader Coalition can be identified nowhere else other than on Donald Trump’s list of supporters.

Back in the day when Twitter was still Twitter, and Twitter still mattered, Donald Trump claimed to have a huge number of Twitter followers. An investigation discovered, however, that at least half of Donald Trump’s supposed followers on Twitter were nothing more than fake accounts that had been purchased from scammers who make money by helping pretenders to make a social media footprint look bigger than it actually is.

With so many untraceable names on Donald Trump’s list of supposed faith leaders, it looks as if Trump may be pulling the same dishonest scheme with his Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

The Iowa Faith Leader Coalition doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. If you take just a little time to look behind its façade of Christian power, there’s a whole lot of empty space.

This is the reason for this podcast. The Iowa Faith Leader Coalition is a political gimmick that almost no one has bothered to critically examine.

In the 2024 presidential campaign season, when Donald Trump is threatening to become a dictator and treat millions of Americans like “vermin” who need to be “rooted out”, we can’t afford to let Donald Trump’s image go unchallenged.

So, tomorrow, I’ll be back with another episode of this podcast, looking at another aspect of the questionable nature of Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

There will be a new episode of this podcast released every day until the Iowa caucuses are over on the night of January 15… and if need be, we’ll keep podcasting beyond that, into the rest of the campaign season.

Stay tuned.