The Trump 2024 campaign lists Jacob Paulson as a pastor from Osceola County, Iowa.
There is no record anywhere online of any pastor named Jacob Paulson at any church in Osceola County.
There is a Facebook account of a Jacob Paulson who lives just 10 minutes down the road from Osceola County, however, over in Dickinson County, in the small town of Spirit Lake.
Jacob Paulson likes to post judgmental memes about how other people aren’t the right kind of Christians.
One of Paulson’s memes states: “In case you forgot, in the Bible, Demons refer to themselves as We/They/Them/Us”.
What’s the implication - that genderfluid Americans are demons? This is not a theologically sophisticated argument, especially when one considers that, in the Bible, angels refer to themselves in the plural as well.
In the Gospel of Luke, for example, there’s this passage: “When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”
In the Gospel of Matthew, there’s this line: “The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil.”
From the Book of Genesis: “The two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of the city. When he saw them, he got up to meet them.”
You get the idea.
Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that Jacob Paulson’s theology isn’t well thought out. There’s no indication that he’s actually a pastor working at any church in Osceola County.
In fact, the only record of Jacob Paulson working at any church is of him having the position of “youth leader” at Spirit Life Fellowship, in Spirit Lake, Iowa, which is in Dickinson County, not Osceola County.
It’s an awkward thing, because Donald Trump bragged about having endorsements from Christian leaders in every one of Iowa’s 99 counties, but Jacob Paulson is the only member of Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition who is listed as living and working in Osceola County.
In fact, the available evidence points to Jacob Paulson living and working in Dickinson County, and not as the pastor he is claimed to be.
The youth program that Jacob Paulson leads is branded as Fire Proof Youth of Spirit Life Fellowship. Fire Proof Youth doesn’t look like a very active program, though. In the photographs available showing Paulson leading the program’s activities, there are never more than four or five youths in attendance.
Is this, an endorsement from a guy who teaches Sunday School for a handful of teenagers, a solid basis for a boast from a candidate for President of the United States?
What is Christian Nationalism all about?
We need to look past the hype and theoretical debates. The new book Donald Trump’s Army Of God: Christian Nationalism in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition investigates what Christian Nationalism looks like in practice. The authors detail the identities, beliefs, and activities of Donald Trump’s Christian Nationalist network.
Their work reveals the extremism that enabled Trump to seize the Republican nomination in the Iowa caucuses, and is clearing the ground for him to regain the White House in November 2024.
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.