Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.

I read the op-ed Bob Vander Plaats wrote for the Des Moines Register last week. It’s glowingly referenced on the Facebook page of his organization, The FAMiLY Leader.

I remember Vander Plaats when he got his knickers in a twist because the Iowa Supreme Court decided the Iowa Constitution’s equal protection clause applied to gay and lesbian people. The court unanimously held in the Varnum v. Brien decision from 2009 that Iowa’s “Defense of Marriage Act” was unconstitutional. The ruling paved the way for same-sex couples to solemnize their relationships under Iowa’s marriage laws.

Vander Plaats reaped punishment on three justices who joined the marriage ruling by leading the charge against their retention in 2010. Iowa voters ousted all three, which started a train of biblical overreach and hate that continues even today.

That Christians are “grateful” Donald Trump won the presidency, as Vander Plaats wrote last week, is a puzzler. “There was no excuse,” writes George T. Conway III in The Atlantic. “We knew all we needed to know (on Election Day), even without the mendacious raging about Ohioans eating pets …” The man elected president, says Conway, “is a depraved and brazen pathological liar, a shameless con man, a sociopathic criminal, a man who has no moral or social conscience, empathy, or remorse.”

I side with Conway and recommend reading his article. His 21-year marriage to Trump-confidant Kellyanne Conway ended in 2023. So George may have an ax to grind. But he may also have the inside scoop. In 2019, he was a founding member of the Lincoln Project, where influential Republicans who feared Trump coalesced to oppose the president, eventually backing Joe Biden’s campaign.

After his gratuitous remark about Christians feeling “understandably grateful” that Trump was elected, Vander Plaats launched into an old-fashioned sermon scourging all Americans. Incongruously, the conservative leader wrote that we are “every bit in need of revival” because “this election did not unite America as one nation under God. It may have even made it worse.”

The “worse” part scares the bejesus out of me. It made me wonder about Vander Plaats‘ motives—and why he urged his people to pursue “worse” when “better” was on the table.

“And the ballot box doesn’t bring revival,” Vander Plaats went on. “God does. Repentance does. Prayer does.” A recurring theme in his writing and organizational literature is that God plays favorites, and for sure favors The FAMiLY Leader’s agenda.

That’s the brand of religion the early 20th Century evangelist Billy Sunday would have been pleased to hear. It’s Vander Plaats’ real schtick, and he’s good at it. It’s like the great 18th-Century preacher Jonathan Edwards who lit the fires of a colonial revival with his fiery sermon, “Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God.”

The mixture of old-fashioned religion and politics is another puzzler. Does Vander Plaats use politics to ignite a revival of repentance and prayer? Or does he use repentance and prayer to build a base of fidelity to Republicans like Trump, Governor Kim Reynolds, Senator Chuck Grassley, Senator Joni Ernst, or whomever the GOP offers up? Why no Democrats?

There’s a state-religion separation question in all of the Family Leader’s work. I also wonder about the non-profit status of his business, whose main purpose seems to be electing Republicans.

Maybe in his heart, Vander Plaats hopes Trump will outlaw same-sex marriage—and, for good measure, ban LBGTQ-affirming books nationwide and cast “bodily autonomy” voters and transgender persons into the fiery pits of hell.

Next time The Family Leader brings its show to Des Moines, I hope Vander Plaats doesn’t invite the blowhard Tucker Carlson again. “Repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth” isn’t Carlson’s strong suit, as he demonstrated on Fox News. Recently, Carlson claimed he had been attacked by demons: “In my bed at night. I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs and mauled, physically mauled.”

Prayer won’t affect the price of bread and eggs. Food prices would have gone up as much under Trump as they did under “Brandon.” It was the pandemic, dummy. And Trump won’t (can’t) make food cheap again, especially if he gives us new tariffs and deports farm workers to Mexico.

Go figure. 

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Top image: Bob Vander Plaats with Donald Trump at The FAMiLY Leader’s Family Leadership Summit in Ames on August 17, 2013. Photo originally published on the organization’s Facebook page.