Sarah Trone Garriott has a Harvard Divinity degree, a Lutheran ordination, and a history of calling Christianity a threat. Now she wants to be your Congresswoman.
Garriott, who is currently serving in the Iowa State Senate and running to flip Iowa’s Third Congressional District blue, made remarks in 2023 that should follow her to every campaign stop, debate stage, and Iowa church pew between now and November. Speaking about religious conservatives, she described them as “uncomfortable” — as something that “feels very threatening” — and linked Christianity itself to “political violence.” Not radical Islam. Not jihadist ideology. Christianity.
She said this as an ordained minister of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Three years later, with Holy Week upon us and a string of Islamic terror attacks fresh in the national memory, Garriott’s remarks deserve to be exhumed, examined, and explained. Not because they were gaffes — they weren’t. They deserve attention because they are a window into exactly what the modern religious Left believes: that the greatest threat to civil society is not the ideology responsible for over 60,800 terror attacks in the last half-century, but the people filling church pews on Palm Sunday.
During Holy Week, as Christian communities are still burying their dead from coordinated massacres in Nigeria, this inversion of morality is morally obscene.
Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world, so it was unfortunately not a complete shock that on Palm Sunday, while progressive politicians were busy casting aspersions on churchgoing Christians, coordinated attacks devastated Christian communities across central and northern Nigeria in what survivors are calling the Palm Sunday Massacres. Entire congregations were targeted. Families were slaughtered on one of the holiest days of the liturgical calendar. Christianity is not causing violence, Reverend Garriott; it is absorbing it.
This is not an anomaly. It is an escalating pattern that cowardly politicians refuse to name. In March of 2026 alone, there were four confirmed Islamist terror attacks on Western soil, with at least four additional major plots thwarted before they reached fruition. As we approach the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks, the trend driving mass-casualty violence is not Christian nationalism — it’s the jihadist radicalism that’s been methodically seeping into this country for decades: Over 60,800 Islamic terror attacks were carried out globally in the last fifty years. The comparable figure for attacks attributed to Christian or Jewish extremism amounts to a few hundred. These are not remotely equivalent threats, and any elected official who pretends otherwise is either ignorant or dishonest.
So what, precisely, does threaten these power-hungry clerics? It is not the Sermon on the Mount. It is not the notion that He is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). What threatens them is the downstream consequence of a populace that actually lives by those words. Christians grounded in Scripture are harder to manipulate, less dependent on the government as their provider, and far less likely to hand power to pseudo-believers whose lives represent the antithesis of everything Christ commands. This dynamic was on full display just this week when Daily Wire host Isabel Brown was publicly castigated for the radical act of suggesting marriage and children are worth pursuing — a principle so foundational it runs from Genesis through the Pauline epistles. Garriott herself has voted against protecting women’s sports from biological males and against banning gender-transition procedures for minors. That is the true threat they fear — not violence, not extremism, but a people too grounded in faith to go along with these cultural lies.
Certainly, there are wolves in the pulpit. There are leaders who have abandoned orthodoxy, twisted Scripture for popularity and applause, and led congregations into confusion rather than conviction. That apostasy is real and genuinely threatening to the Church and her faithful. But the solution to bad theology is not to hand political power to the theologians perpetrating it. In a world where America is still called the “Great Satan” by those who mean it literally, and where our cultural foundations are being eroded daily, authentic Christians are not the problem. They are the last best hope of restoring the Christian values upon which this republic was built.
Sarah Trone Garriott is a wolf in pearls — ordained, Harvard-educated, interfaith-credentialed, and deeply hostile to the faith she claims to represent. A minister who thinks Christianity is an imminent threat is not a pastor; she is a politician in a collar. Don’t let her do to Iowa’s Third District what Judas did in the garden — betray it with a kiss, wearing the vestments of a friend.
