The following article is adapted from the transcript of that podcast episode.

The Iowa Faith Leader Coalition was organized by Donald Trump and his campaign staff as a way of showing how very much support he had from Christians, specifically evangelical Christians. Evangelicals are only about 19% of the population of the state of Iowa. Christianity more broadly is at about 70% of Iowans.

Yes, that’s right. About three out of ten Iowans are not Christians. What’s more, evangelicals are not a majority, even of the Christians in Iowa. Nonetheless, Donald Trump was going for the Republican Party nomination and he wanted to show that he had the support of evangelicals, who tend to be the loudest of all Christian denominations.

Trump got the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition together, a group of 317 different people claiming to be religious leaders. And some of them were. They all endorsed Donald Trump.

Part of Christian nationalist ideology is the idea that nations are either blessed by the Christian God or cursed by the Christian God. Entire countries of people are supposed to be either on the side of the angels or the demons. Demons are real in this way of looking at the world, not at all imaginary.

I’m going to share some very personal things about a tragedy in Tom Sooter’s life. I’m not doing this lightly. There are some ethical considerations that are involved. If this were just anybody who had a story like this, I would not share this information. However, Tom Sooter has placed himself in a very special position.

Tom Sooter has entered the realm of politics. He’s left his personal life behind. He has voluntarily opened up his life and his identity to scrutiny in order to endorse Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy as a member of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

Additionally, Tom Sooter has claimed the privileges of the social rank of a pastor. Part of this claim is the implication that as a religious leader, he should be granted the authority to get involved in partisan political campaigning, telling all of America who the next President of the United States should be. For that reason, I’m going to share this information about Tom Sooter’s life.

For years, Tom Sooter has been going around the country telling the very same story to public audiences that I am going to tell you today. In fact, a lot of what you’re going to hear today is Tom Sooter’s own voice telling the story in his words. Tom Sooter has made this personal tragedy part of his professional brand, and it is that professional brand that he brings as an asset to Donald Trump’s campaign. With Tom Sooter’s help, Donald Trump moved quickly through the Iowa caucuses to wrap up the Republican presidential nomination.

In a sermon delivered in a church down in Alabama last year, Tom Sooter began by quoting Ephesians chapter 6, verse 12. This Bible passage should be familiar to anyone who is aware of the extreme theology of American Christian Nationalism. Sooter told the church:

“Here’s what the Bible says. For we, that would be you and I, for we wrestle not against flesh and blood. I know husbands and wives, you can have some spats and the kiddos at home. Listen to what the scripture says. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities. By the way, you know what a principality is? It’s a prince in the invisible dark world over a municipality. Against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Now, please don’t be fooled into thinking that we’re fighting against Democrats and Republicans. There’s something much more cynical behind all of that. In the Satanic services, you reach higher power with the shedding of blood. Now, our poor nation may not realize it, but there’s evil and wickedness going on.”

These are not metaphorical demons. Tom Sooter is talking about actual Satanic services, as if he knows exactly what those are. I’m sure he believes that he does have such knowledge, sincerely.

The consequences of that sincere belief in demons is that Tom Sooter’s wife and daughter ended up dead. Both of them. On the same day.

How does the idea of Satan get into a family living in the American Midwest? Listen to what Tom Sooter said next during his sermon.

“We were always very picky as independent fundamental Baptists. We never let our kids go stay all night anywhere or anything like that, except for one time. One time, we let our little daughter Jenny go stay all night with grandma and grandpa. That would be my mom and dad. And they were not saved at the time, but they loved their grandchildren, but little did we know that that one night decision was going to completely flip-flop our whole entire lives.”

In Tom Sooter’s telling, this night is the one that set the tragedy in motion, this one night when he allowed his, as he calls her, “little daughter Jenny”, to spend one night away from her mother and father, away from Tom Sooter’s authority, with her own grandparents. That was enough, according to Tom Sooter, to let Satan and his demons in.

“All of a sudden, it was one of those things where she didn’t want to go over to grandma’s anymore. And she began to touch herself in areas. We thought, well, maybe little kids get infections and stuff. And so, we kind of got past that. But then, life really got weird. So our oldest daughter, same mom and dad, same church, same pastor me, like a straight arrow. But this little second daughter was like, I don’t know, something was really wrong. She was just wandering all over the place.”

Something was suddenly wrong with this second daughter, according to Tom Sooter, because she was touching herself. Now, somebody might wonder if he suspects that there was some sexual abuse that took place maybe when she was at her grandparents’ house. That’s a possibility, of course, but there is no evidence of anything like that.

Sooter sees that all of a sudden, his daughter Jenny is corrupted, not a straight arrow. She’s just wandering all over the place. The older daughter, she’s like a straight arrow, with the same church, the same parents, the same pastor, who happens to be her own father. Tom Sooter is the pastor of this fundamentalist church, her father and her pastor at the same time.

Tom Sooter fast-forwards to when Jennifer Sooter is a 19-year-old young woman. 19 years old. And I want you to listen to the language that he uses in describing her.

“I asked when she was about like, I guess it would be probably 19 years old, still living at home. I asked the deacons, my friends, best friends, I said, “Would you men try to help me and my wife with this little daughter?” They said, “Sure, pastor, what can we do?”

I said, “Well, I don’t know, really, but I would like to be able to have you men sitting there and let’s just ask God to put our hearts together and see if there’s something we can discover about our little daughter.” And they said, “Sure, we’ll be glad to help any way we can. So we brought her in and we asked her questions.”

“I even asked her beforehand. I said, “Jenny, I just don’t know exactly what to do to help, sweetheart.” She’s gone through all kinds of issues, struggles, and I said, “I would like to get some counsel from the deacons.” And she said, “Well, Dad, that would be okay. I like those men.”

So now she’s 19 years old. Now, leading up to that, I would have to say to you, she asked me one time, she said, you know, you see these things later. She said, “Dad, you know my cousin so-and-so?” I said, “Yes, honey.” She said, “Dad, did he ever hurt me or anything?” I said, “Well, no, honey. You know, that side of the family is kind of headed in one direction, and we’re headed in another direction.”

How many of you know that’s what happens when you get saved? And so, and I didn’t put two and two together. So we’re meeting there with the deacons, and so they were asking her questions.

“I asked some questions, and really it didn’t seem like we were getting anywhere. So I sent her down the hall in the parsonage, way back to the back bedroom with her mom. And so we got to talking, trying to compare notes, trying to rescue this little daughter of ours.”

This little daughter, he describes, this little sweetheart, “our little girl, ” as he says, she is not a little girl. She is 19 years old. He is not the father of a little daughter anymore. By this point, Jennifer Sooter a young woman, not a little child

Nonetheless, Tom Sooter was still talking about her is if she was just Jenny, a sweet little girl who needed to be rescued. And how was he going to rescue her?

I want you to keep in mind from this point forward that we’re hearing Tom Sooter’s version of events. Jennifer Sooter and Tom Sooter’s wife, Mary Lee Sooter, are dead, and they’ve been dead since the year 2000.

What we’re hearing about at this point in Tom Sooter’s sermon are events that took place in the mid-1990s. We’re moving up toward the time of Jennifer Sooter and Mary Lee Sooter’s death, but we’re not there yet.

None of us can really be sure what actually was going on. We weren’t there. However, this is a story that Tom Sooter tells in his sermons. He’s written a book that he sells, telling this version of the events.

What actually took place may have been very different from the story Tom Sooter tells now. I’m not just saying that because I have my own individual suspicions. I’m considering the words of somebody who was living in the same community as the Sooters at the time of Jennifer Sooter’s death, somebody who went to school with Jenny Sooter.

Tom Sooter kept very tight control of his daughters. He did not allow his daughters to go to public school. They went to a Christian school that was affiliated with his church.

Aaron Hartzler was a schoolmate of Jennifer Sooter’s. They went to that Christian school together. So this is somebody who had an inside perspective. What Aaron says is that, “Sooter had been planning to resign for weeks due to his daughter’s desire to leave the church and move out of their family’s home.” Hartzler says that he heard this information from his own father right after the shooting, before people had the time to talk to each other and get their cover stories straight.

It seems that Jennifer Sooter, at the time of her death, had wanted to leave the family home and leave Tom Sooter’s church. A year later, Tom Sooter told a reporter from the Salina Journal that he knew all about his daughter’s plans before her death. When he talked to police at the time of the death, however, he said he didn’t know anything about that. In a strange way, details in Tom Sooter’s version of this story change over time.

Sometimes, Tom Sooter claimed he didn’t know at all that his daughter wanted to leave the church and wanted to go live on her own. At other times, he claims he was going to help Jennifer leave, and it was really only his wife who objected to her leaving.

Tom Sooter’s sermon continued:

“I said, ‘Now, men, I don’t know what to think of this, but I’ve just been reading a book, and it was a Christian book on what Satan and demons can do to Christians.’ By the way, how many of you know that just because you get saved, you don’t automatically get free from the battle that we’re just reading about here? We wrestle not against flesh and blood.

And so, I read about a page, maybe a page and a half, out of this book, and they said, ‘Wow, do you think it could be something like that?’ I said, ‘Man, I don’t know.’

We started asking those questions, and as we started asking those questions, she started flushing red from her neck up, and her neck cranked way back, and she started clawing like an animal. And low guttural voices spoke out of her voice, and they said, ‘Leave her alone,’ low guttural voices, ‘Leave her alone. She belongs to us.’”

Tom Sooter happened to be reading a book, and so he brought into this meeting with his deacons the idea that Satan and his demons can do things to Christians. The idea was demons were the explanation for why Jennifer Sooter was behaving in a way where she was not obedient to her father, starting to act independently at the age of 19 years old.

You see, as a 19-year-old, Jennifer Sooter was still living with her father and her mother. They didn’t want to let her go.

At the age of 19, Jennifer Sooter had still only had that one night she had been allowed, years before, to stay with her grandparents. That one night only. Her parents were still strictly controlling her, not allowing her to go out on her own, as if she was still a small child.

So, maybe Jennifer Sooter was acting out. Maybe she was not behaving in the way that Tom Sooter wanted her to. Most people would expect that kind of behavior in circumstances like that. Most of America would regard it as a normal reaction to an excessively controlling parent.

Tom Sooter didn’t see it that way. Instead of realizing that his daughter was a young adult and needed to have some freedom, Tom Sooter decided her anger and rebellion was due to demonic possession.

Remember, once again, we’re hearing Tom Sooter’s version of events.

He says that his daughter started to get red in the face. She started making angry noises, saying that she wanted to be left alone. When Tom Sooter heard that, and he couldn’t listen to her. When his daughter expressed her outrage, he could only hear the voices of demons.

“And so, this Christian book was telling me that we’re in a warfare battle. Jesus Christ is our commander, and He’s given us power and authority over the enemy. So here’s what I did in kind of basic ignorance: I, scared, I stood up as she’s shaking and clawing. I said, ‘In Jesus name and through his blood, whoever’s doing this is my daughter, stop it!’

Boom, it quit. She kind of came to, ‘Dad, Dad, what’s happening to me?’

So that was our first experience. Now, as the men left that night, it was late. One by one, as they walked out, they said, ‘Wow, now we understand why maybe she’s having these problems.’

Okay, so there’s demonic something going on. But how in the world did this happen? And so I’ll be real frank with you, so I got that Christian book. I’d read another chapter. I’d go in and tell my wife, ‘Okay, now, honey, you and Jenny, we need to sit down here,’ and I’d pray again, like the scripture was telling me from this book.

And pretty soon, Jenny started having flashbacks. See, when you have something happen to you as a little kid that’s really traumatic, you tend to take that. You don’t know what to do with it. You tend to stuff it down in the basement, in the subconscious. And so you can keep on growing and keep on doing your math facts and learn how to tie your shoes and things like that. And so she started having flashbacks.

And so here’s what happened. That night at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, an older teenage cousin, mad with the world. Nobody knew at the time, but he had been trapping animals and killing them and using it for ceremonies in the dark forces that we just read about.

And my folks let him stay downstairs, and the night he came up and took our daughter out of the home to another location, where they were having a full-blown satanic ritualistic ceremony. And her flashbacks were seeing people in hooded robes, and basically they killed an animal, put blood on her. Now, by the way, that’s how they do it.

In the invisible demonic realm, they try to duplicate what God does. Remember in the Old Testament? Without the shedding of blood, there’s no remission of sin.

So whatever the Scripture does, they try to counterfeit it for evil. And so over the years, we’ve worked with people, demonic spirits speaking out of them. We’ve worked with wizards, warlocks, all kinds of people in the satanic realm.”

Tom Sooter’s story gets really strange at this point. He begins talking as if he is an expert about what tis done in the invisible demonic realm.

The obvious question is: If there is an invisible demonic realm, how does Tom Sooter know what’s happening there? It’s invisible. By definition, no one can see it.

We are learning that Tom Sooter’s religious leadership, the thing that has given him the standing necessary to join Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, to help give Trump that victory in the Iowa caucuses, was that Tom Sooter has been working as an exorcist. He’s been working with warlocks and wizards, and that’s why Donald Trump invited Sooter to join the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

Tom Sooter is having extended prayer sessions with her. We’ve heard him describe what he did during that first session. He shouted at his daughter, had a bunch of deacons surround her and pepper her with questions until she got into a rage and freaked out, because she just couldn’t take it anymore.

This kind of abusive exorcism had been going on over and over and over again for years. Only then, Tom Sooter says, did Jennifer Sooter all of s sudden start having memories that she didn’t have before. He calls them “flashbacks.”

Any reasonable psychologist is going to explain to you that under these kinds of coercive situations, these supposed flashbacks cannot be relied upon to provide an accurate depiction of past events.

When people are under pressure, they can invent false memories to deal with it. You may have heard about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early 1990s. There were people like Tom Sooter who got it into their heads that there must be Satanists all over the place in Satanic cults, and they must be killing babies, eating babies, forcing children to kill and eat babies in child care centers across America.

The stories weren’t true. There were not Satanic cults killing and eating babies across America. There was zero evidence to support such tales.

Those facts didn’t stop Christian fundamentalists like Tom Sooter from believing the stories of ritualized Satanic abuse were true. Their faith was stronger than the facts.

During the Satanic Panic, untrained and unscrupulous interrogators inserted themselves into already fraught situations, and prodded children develop false memories by repeating their interrogations over and over again. That’s very much like what Tom Sooter did to his daughter.

Jennifer Sooter, under the pressure of being prayed at in intensive prayer sessions, which were tantamount to exorcism, over and over again for years, started telling her father what he wanted to hear. She finally told him that yes, on that one night she was allowed to sleep away from home at her grandparents, she was taken by a cousin and initiated her into a Satanic cult, just like in that Christian book her father had read.

“So her and I went soul hunting one day, a pretty rich neighborhood, quite frankly, by our church. And so just door to door, and knocked on the door, and this little short gal with short blonde hair came to the, a wife came to the door, and I gave my soul winning thing, and she just looked right at me, and then she turned and looked at my daughter, and she said, we know who you are, you used to be one of us, you’re a traitor. So it shook her up. And it shook me up. How can, how can they know that?”

How, indeed, could that woman that Tom Sooter met for the first time, how could that woman who lived right next to the church, where Jenny Sooter has been going for all of her life, possibly know anything about Jenny Sooter? Tom Sooter doesn’t know about any connection this woman may have had with his daughter. So, he leapt to the conclusion that this young woman must be talking about a Satanic cult.

Tom Sooter continued his sermon:

“My wife would always say, ‘You know, honey, whenever you travel, you go someplace to preach, it seems like I’m, I always have trouble with with Jenny.’ And she told us, she said, ‘Dad, you know, when like when you leave, she said, I hear things, I hear voices, I can see things in my room.’ And so, we began to see something, we began to see her slide a little bit.”

Tom Sooter has this idea that whenever he is not in charge of his women, Satan comes in, and demons intrude. He seems to believe that women can only be protected from the influence of evil spirits, when their man, their patriarch, is in control of them.

His wife and daughter start to tell him some stuff about how they’re hearing things and seeing things. He presumes these things are real, that they are demons. Those of us who live in the modern world understand that people have hallucinations when they’re under stress. We know that there are many natural causes of hallucinations. When Tom Sooter heard about his wife and daughter seeing and hearing things, however, he presumed that sinister magical creatures must be involved, and decided that the solution must be for him to maintain tight control over their lives.

Tom Sooter just wanted his daughter to believe exactly the way that he did. She didn’t. He said,

“We began to experience oppression in the parsonage. Her room was right below ours in the bedroom. And then another thing happened.

So my wife and I were at the mall, and we came home, and she really shook up. She said, Dad, you know, three teenagers into the twenties came to the parsonage door, knocked on the door. She said, I went to the door, and they said almost the same thing as the lady said. ‘Now, we know who you are. You’re one of us,’ and even called her by name.

She had never seen him before. Now, all I’m trying to say to you is, she started this downhill slide. And in the parsonage, I had used the word oppression before in messages, but I never really felt it. My wife and I would be in bed at night, and all of a sudden, like the hairs on my leg would stand up like porcupines. And you just sense things.

I got to the point now, I’m just telling you, because she said to us, she said, ‘Dad, I feel like I need to move out. ‘Now, she’s 24 years old now. 24 years old. ‘I feel like I need to move out, because, Dad, I’m afraid they’re going to hurt you and Mom.’

And I said, ‘But sweetheart, now look, we’re not afraid. See, not greater is he than in us, that is in us, than he that is in the world.’ But by me saying that, I wish I could have some kind of an injection inside her and she would go, ‘Yes! I believe just like you do,’ but I don’t know how to do that, do you?”

The one thing young people long for, that makes them feel emotionally healthy is the feeling of belonging with people their own age. Jennifer Sooter told her father that she was visited by three people who were roughly her own age. They came to the door and they told Jennifer Sooter, ‘Hey, you’re one of us.’

That’s a welcoming act, but Tom Sooter saw it as is a threat, because it challenged his authority, and his place as the center of his daughter’s life. His interpretation was that these strangers must be from a Satanic cult.

At this point, Sooter admits, the members of his church saw that something was not right. They told him and his wife to go away for a while. They needed a break, church members said, to have some time away from their daughter and calm down. They saw that Tom Sooter’s wife Mary Lee was beginning to become increasingly agitated. Living with the belief that demons are lurking all around at all times, Tom Sooter’s wife was having a hard time taking it anymore.

So they went on that break, Tom said in his sermon, but it wasn’t enough.

“My late wife had calmed down, and I don’t know what it’s like being a mother, I’m just telling you, but she was just afraid that Jenny was going to be lost to that whole dark side if we didn’t keep her at home.”

Think about what were you doing when you were 24 years old. Think about what you hoped to do at that time in your life. Was it living at home with mom and dad? Probably not

At that point in your life, you would hope to have been out of college for a couple of years. You would have a career. You could be earning money. You might have your own home. You might have your own pets. You might even have a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Jennifer Sooter never got to enjoy any of those things.

Tom Sooter finally came to the climax of his sermon:

“I thought we had things pretty much settled and mellowed out. But then, Jenny got worse, and you could just tell the darkness was kind of all over her again.

It was a Saturday morning. I was at the church, quite frankly, preparing for a wedding. And one of my good deacons came rushing in. He said, ‘Now, pastor,’ he said, ‘I heard what sounded like either a car backfire or a gunshot. And he said, and it sounded like it came from the parsonage.’ Well, I broke into a run, ran over the asphalt to the parsonage, and there I discovered my wife and daughter, dead on the floor.

The police forensics showed that my wife had shot my daughter, and then shot herself, killed herself. Murder-suicide.”

Mary Lee Sooter, Tom Sooter’s first wife, Jennifer’s mother, did not just shoot her daughter dead by firing a bullet into her daughter’s brain. Mary Lee Sooter took a gun that Tom Sooter kept in their home, and she fired several bullets into her daughter’s skull. She fired that gun multiple times, to make sure that Jennifer Sooter was dead. Then she killed herself with just one bullet.

In the sermon that Tom Sooter gave down in Alabama last year, telling this story, he never explained the motive he thinks his wife might have had for murdering their daughter. About a year after the crime, however, Tom Sooter said that his wife’s motivation for killing their daughter was “motherly instinct”.

Actually, we know what Mary Lee Sooter’s motive for murder was. We know because police found messages written in Mary Lee Sooter’s own hand. Those messages included Bible verses about how children who disobey their children must be killed by their parents.

You don’t get more direct evidence of a motive than that.

The day Jennifer Sooter died, she wrote a letter that police found, along with some boxes packed with Jennifer’s things. In this letter, she told her parents she was going to leave home, and she was going to leave the church, and she was going to live on her own. She was going to have her own life.

That day, after finding out that her 24 year-old daughter wanted to stop being treated like a child, Mary Lee Sooter became enraged and murdered her.

A few years after the death of Jennifer Sooter, Aaron Hartzler, the young man who had grown up fundamentalist Christian alongside Jennifer, had something to say about the murder. Describing Tom Sooter’s church, he said, “far more concerned with haircuts and hemlines, the state of one’s soul was touted as the ultimate focus when in reality it was of much less value than the outward legalistic conservatism that one projected via clothing that adhered strictly to the dress codes.”

Hartzler continued:

“Mary Lee Sooter did not take her eyes off of God and then shoot her daughter. Her eyes were so full of God that she was blinded to the difference between shooting her daughter with a gun in North Kansas City in the year 2000 AD and the ancient Levitical law that ordered rebellious sons and daughters to be stoned to death at the gates of the city. I weep for you, Jenny Sooter, not only for your death, but also for your life.

I sat with you in those same pews. I heard those same sermons. I shook in the same fear of a vindictive God who would send me to an eternal punishment for renting the wrong movie, wearing the wrong clothes, listening to the wrong music, or sleeping with the wrong gender. And finally, I too saw the holes in the logic of the violent dogma we were brainwashed by. And I made an escape.”

All Jennifer Sooter wanted to do was to live in freedom, to make her own decisions, to not have to go through these exorcisms of prayer over and over again. Tom Sooter never allowed her to have that freedom.

What Tom Sooter brings to the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition is this vindictive God, this violent dogma that crushed his daughter. Donald Trump has welcomed that contribution.

This crushing kind of Christian Nationalism is what Donald Trump is referring to when he talks about faith leadership and promises to restore the rightful place of Christian values in America.

I don’t know about you, but I do not want to have to live my life in the way that Jennifer Sooter did.