Four years ago, Democrat Sarah Trone Garriott’s vocal advocacy against censorship helped her defeat a GOP Senate leader from a swing seat.
Now, as Trone Garriott runs for Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, Republicans are working to use some of those same words against her.
Republicans have scoured the video archives to paint Trone Garriott as too radical for voters in the swing seat considered pivotal to deciding the balance of power in Congress.
Trone Garriott, a West Des Moines Democrat running to oust GOP U.S. Rep. Zach Nunn, rose to prominence in Iowa politics by opposing state book bans and curriculum restrictions, cementing herself as a prominent progressive voice in the state Senate. She built a platform centered on community service and cross-partisan bridge-building, drawing on her background as an ordained Lutheran minister.
But Republicans are using conservative media and social media to recast that same religious background as a liability.
“These false attacks, they won’t stand,” Trone Garriott told the Register in an exclusive interview. “People will see them for what they are.”
Erin Covey, a House analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said it’s unclear how the attacks are impacting voters, though social media algorithms likely amplify them among Republicans.
But once millions of dollars in general election ad spending start trickling into the district, specific lines of attack could break through to the broader electorate and skew a candidate’s public image.
“On some level, all of these Democrats running in competitive races are going to be painted as woke radicals and socialists who want to take away your country and hate America,” Covey said.
“That is going to be with broad strokes the image that Republicans try to paint of these Democrats. Each of them will have different ways of trying to combat that image, whether it’s their record in the Legislature, whether it’s by focusing on other issues, whether it’s by explicitly running to the right on other issues.”
As Republicans repeatedly scrutinize Trone Garriott’s faith on the campaign trail, we examined their major claims.
Republican claim: Trone Garriott officiated a Satanic wedding
Background:
Social media posts from the National Republican Congressional Committee, House Republicans’ campaign arm, claim Trone Garriott officiated a Satanic wedding. GOP U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican National Committee spokespeople also repeated those claims.
Speaking to the Westside Conservative Club in January, Nunn said Trone Garriott “calls herself a pastor, but she is overseeing some of the most wicked forms of matrimony that I’ve ever heard of. Everybody deserves to be married, including satanic worshipers, and if she’s a Christian pastor and that’s where she wants to be, that’s her choice.”
During an April interview with conservative radio host Simon Conway, Nunn said, “But when she … (is) marrying Satanists, she’ll roll out a red carpet.”
Context:
Trone Garriott shared a story with the Des Moines Register Storytellers Project in 2023 about the first wedding she participated in while she was an intern pastor in West Virginia in 2006.
Although the couple identified as Satanists, the ceremony was conducted as a Lutheran wedding in a Lutheran church.
She picked the scriptures to read, but the pastor who was training her officiated the wedding and married the couple. In West Virginia, only ordained ministers can perform marriages, and Trone Garriott was not ordained until 2008.
She recollects reading 1 Corinthians 13 at the wedding, a well-known passage about loving your neighbor unconditionally, even when you disagree with their beliefs.
Trone Garriott’s response:
Trone Garriott said her supervising minister’s policy was to marry anyone who asked. From her Storytellers recounting, she questioned why they were performing the marriage and said in an interview her objections mainly stemmed from the fact the couple “seemed pretty dismissive of our Christian faith.”
Recalling she saw a “change on their faces” as she read the scripture, Trone Garriott said she shared the story publicly “because it’s a story about the power of scripture to change lives.”
“I believe my calling as a minister is to share the word of God with everyone, even the most unlikely people,” she said. “And I saw the power of scripture in that moment. And I do believe it made an impact on them. And it reminded me of my calling to love my neighbor, including the neighbor I don’t agree with and I don’t share the same values with, and I certainly did not have the same beliefs as these people.”
Republican claim: Trone Garriott defended pagan witchcraft and suggested Christians who oppose it are misreading scripture
Background:
An April 14 Fox News article headlined, “‘Pagan’ outreach, Wiccan prayer defense could haunt Dem in battleground race,” highlighted a letter to the editor Trone Garriott wrote in in 2015 in the Register titled “Look closely at scripture before acting in faith.”
Nunn, speaking to the Northside Conservatives in Ankeny on July 10, told the group, “She’s proud to invite a Wiccan in and then wag her finger from the pulpit at folks who decide that they want to leave.”
Context:
In 2015, the Iowa House opened one day with an invocation by Wiccan priestess Deborah Maynard of Cedar Rapids, who gave a modern pagan blessing. Trone Garriott was not yet an elected official when the prayer was delivered.
Then-Rep. Rob Taylor, R-West Des Moines, who is a Protestant, turned his back to the podium as Maynard spoke. He later told the Register: “I thought to myself, ‘What would Jesus do?’ Jesus would be in the chamber from my perspective. He would passively protest, and then he would seek that individual out and have a peaceful conversation with them …”
In response, Trone Garriott penned the Register letter to the editor about Taylor using Jesus’ name to turn his back on the prayer. She pushed back on people who use God’s name without proper understanding of scripture.
While her letter did not defend Wiccanism or express sympathy with their beliefs, it cited scripture that Trone Garriott said shaped her view of how Jesus responded to those with different beliefs.
Trone Garriott’s response:
Trone Garriott said she saw the role of a lawmaker as standing up for all Iowans’ rights, regardless of whether she agrees with them. She said Jesus’ example shows her that all people should be treated with respect.
“I shared examples from scripture that show that that is the witness that we have of Jesus’ life and teachings,” Trone Garriott said. “And I think it’s really important that Christians return to the scriptures and actually look to see what Jesus would do when they’re claiming to act in Jesus’ name.”
Republican claim: Trone Garriott called private Christian schools ‘segregation academies’ designed to create ‘White enclaves’
Background:
A March social media post from RNC Research says Trone Garriott “calls Christian schools ‘segregation academies’ and a ‘White enclave’ for children.” It contains an audio clip from a 2023 speech.
In a Fox News article surfacing her remarks, Nunn said in a statement, “I was raised around Iowans who go to church every week and show up for their neighbors. Sarah Trone Garriott can’t walk into a church without delivering a lecture about how their faith is threatening and their schools are racist.”
Context:
Trone Garriott was invited to speak in October 2023 at Ames First United Methodist Church, where she spoke broadly about Christian nationalism and discussed a movement of schools being erected to avoid racial integration in the 1950s and ’60s.
TIME Magazine reported in 1975 on White parents propping up their own private and segregated academies after the federal courts began to order Southern school systems to desegregate.
In recorded remarks to the congregation, Trone Garriott said: “And so in the ‘50s and ‘60s, we see the formation of Christian schools very specifically in response to integration.
“And when in 1970, the tax status of these schools, which had been called publicly segregation academies, was revoked because of that, very clearly moving away from integrated schools and creating a White enclave, parents argued for their rights, parents’ rights to be free from government overreach and interference in the education of their children, to be able to change that and get that tax exempt status back.”
She did not call all modern private or Christian schools “segregation academies.”
Trone Garriott’s response:
Trone Garriott said she was using historians’ term for private schools created to avoid integration in the 1950s and 1960s.
“Today is a totally different story,” Trone Garriott said.
She supports parents sending their children to schools of their choice, including private Christian schools, and has been a guest teacher for classes at private religious schools.
Republican claim: Trone Garriott’s reaction to 9/11 was to express concern about Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry, rather than about the Americans killed in the terrorist attacks
The Nunn campaign has touted how, after 9/11, Nunn entered the Armed Forces and did three tours of duty in the Middle East, while Trone Garriott instead expressed concern for Muslims.
In a Fox News article, a Nunn campaign spokesman said, “her response to the deadliest attack on American soil was to lecture Americans about bigotry without so much as mentioning the nearly 3,000 people who were killed on 9/11. Her contempt for Iowa and America is on full display.”
Iowa GOP spokesperson Jade Cichy criticized Trone Garriott’s response in the same article.
“Radical woke warrior Sarah Trone Garriott’s main concern after the September 11th terror attacks was ‘anti-Muslim bigotry,’ and she made no mention of the thousands of innocent Americans who lost their lives that day,” Cichy said. “This stunning display of tone-deaf political pandering is just the latest example showing Trone Garriott is out of touch with Iowa values.”
A May social post from RNC Research says Trone Garriott “calls Iowans ‘backwards'” and accused her of further disparaging them by “calling them racist.” It features her quote from an interview: “I think that there is just some horrible animosity towards our Muslim neighbors.”
Context:
One day after 9/11, Trone Garriott began her master’s degree in theological studies at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, just outside of Boston, where two of the hijacked planes departed.
She has said the attacks heightened her awareness of anti-Muslim discrimination on the religiously diverse campus. From 2000 to 2001, FBI data show Islamophobic hate crimes against Muslims climbed more than 1,600% to 481 incidents.
Years later, Trone Garriott said she received hate mail and comments after she shared a prayer in Arabic written by a Muslim woman on the Iowa Senate floor in February 2021.
In an opinion piece she penned for the Iowa Capital Dispatch, she wrote: “They said horrible stereotypical things about my Muslim neighbors — Sharia law, hating freedom, violent religion. … There were some attacks against me, as a Christian leader I was leading people astray, that I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Trone Garriott’s response:
Trone Garriott called 9/11 “a terrible tragedy” but said the contrast is an “unfair and ugly characterization.” She told the Register, “It doesn’t help us to respond to a tragedy with pushing people further apart.”
“It’s true that while that was a terrible, awful thing that happened, there was also bigotry at the same time,” Trone Garriott said. “One doesn’t cancel out the other.”
Trone Garriott has shared prayers across faiths, including across Christian beliefs, on the Iowa Senate floor.
“In the Iowa Senate, we have prayer every day,” Trone Garriott said. “And I feel very strongly that if we’re going to have prayer, it should be for all Iowans.”
Republican claim: Trone Garriott characterized religious conservatives in politics as ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘something very threatening’
Background:
During her 2023 remarks to the United Methodist congregation in Ames, Trone Garriott said, “We have seen religion and political violence showing up more and more in our public spaces. It’s something that is just very in our faces and something that we’re very concerned about, and something that feels very threatening right now at this time.”
Republicans have accused her of being discomforted by some public Christian displays, such as the phrase “one nation under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.
A March Iowa Republican email circulated Breitbart and Fox News articles highlighting Trone Garriott’s comments and said: “She also expressed discomfort with the phrase ‘one nation under God, indivisible’ in the Pledge of Allegiance. In addition, she has voiced unease with public expressions of Christianity, linking them to political violence, and described religious conservatives as ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘something that feels very threatening.'”
Context:
The Iowa United Methodist Church Board of Laity invited Trone Garriott to discuss Christian nationalism with the congregation.
She described how America responded to communism by adding the National Prayer Breakfast and phrases such as “Under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950s as a way to reaffirm American identity.
In this same speech, Trone Garriott discussed faith and public displays of Christianity, saying: “It is a good thing to talk about religion and politics together” and “our faith definitely is about how we live as part of a community, how we model our lives, the things that we should be seeking out and wanting, and doing, and saying just how we live together as a people.”
Trone Garriott’s response:
Trone Garriott said she was speaking witha Christian audience that was struggling with how they could bring their faith into the public at a time they saw faith weaponized for political gain.
“They see people who are using faith as a way to divide or gain power, and they don’t like that,” Trone Garriott said. “And so they asked me to come and speak to talk about how you could do that in a positive way, in a way that brings people together and builds community, rather than separates people from one another.”
Republican claim: Trone Garriott said Iowa’s leaders are too White, too Christian and too male
Background:
The Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC backed by Republican U.S. House leadership, wrote in an email after the June 2 primary that Nunn’s opponent “called Iowans racist and is a woke liberal preacher who complained about Iowa’s leadership being ‘too Christian’.”
A February RNC Research post claimed Trone Garriott “complains that Iowan Representatives are ‘mostly Christian.'”
Context:
In a podcast interview, Trone Garriott discussed Iowa’s state government and her decision to seek office and said: “It’s not a very diverse group of leaders. We don’t have people from many religious backgrounds. It’s mostly White, mostly Christian, mostly older men, and so we have tremendous opportunities to get different kinds of people who represent our community into those leadership positions.”
Trone Garriott’s response:
Trone Garriott accused Republicans of “twisting my comments and taking them completely out of context.”
“A lot of Iowans feel like their government is out of touch with them,” Trone Garriott said. “That’s what my comments are referring to.”
Claim: Trone Garriott is uncomfortable with White people.
Background:
A May Fox News article blasted Trone Garriott with the headline, “Iowa Dem admits being ‘uncomfortable’ with whiteness as she seeks to flip competitive House seat.”
And a May Congressional Leadership Fund email claims Trone Garriott “has said White people made her ‘uncomfortable.'”
Context:
Fox News surfaced a 2017 podcast interview where Trone Garriott talked about returning home to northern Minnesota after her stint as an AmeriCorps VISTA working for Northern New Mexico Legal Aid in Gallup, New Mexico, and engaging community and faith leaders around domestic violence. The community was majority Navajo.
In the interview, she described her experience as a racial minority in New Mexico, saying: “Yeah, I remember the first time I came back to northern Minnesota to visit, and I was (just) kind of shocked at how many White people there were. The feeling was very different. I was like ‘whoa,’ and again I was uncomfortable in a different way.”
Trone Garriott response:
Trone Garriott said adjusting to the predominantly Navajo community “was a really fish out of water experience for me.” She said Republicans took her comments “out of context and twist(ed) it.”
“I learned a lot from it,” she said. “And then when I came back to Northern Minnesota, where I grew up, I just saw everything a little bit differently and noticed things about my community that I hadn’t noticed before, because I’d just taken it for granted. It was what was normal.”
Marissa Payne covers the Iowa Statehouse and politics for the Register. Reach her by email at mjpayne@registermedia.com. Follow her on X at @marissajpayne.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: How GOP’s faith-focused attacks are shaping Iowa House race | Exclusive
Reporting by Marissa Payne, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Marissa Payne, Des Moines Register | USA TODAY Network
