Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

We’re in the Christian season of Lent—the 40 days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday—a time for self-reflection and repentance. This year, however, Lent is also marked by enough ironies to fuel endless debates about the separation of religion and politics.

Consider:

President Donald Trump has said of the attempt to assassinate him last July, “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Further, Trump has likened his May 2024 felony conviction to the persecution suffered by Jesus Christ. He also likened those he pardoned for their roles in the January 6, 2021 insurrection to Christian martyrs—“persecuted Christians” was Trump’s phrase.

On the other hand, a recent survey by the well-respected Pew Research Center suggests a marked decline in Iowans identifying themselves as Christian. Pew’s Landscape Study also indicates that Iowa is no longer more Christian than the rest of the nation.

Yet, despite the controversies created by Trump’s executive orders upon his return to the White House and the findings of the Pew survey, the Iowa legislature continues to follow an agenda mapped out by Trump’s MAGA and Christian nationalism.

ON “THANK GOD FOR TRUMP”

Trump is not the only one to claim God saved his life for America’s sake. At the president’s inauguration on January 20, the Rev. Franklin Graham (the late Billy Graham’s son) declared, “Mr. President, the last four years, there are times I’m sure you thought it was pretty dark, but look what God has done.”

Graham then offered a prayer thanking God: “When Donald Trump’s enemies thought he was down and out, you and you alone saved his life and raised him up with strength and power.”

You don’t have to be an unbeliever to wonder: if God saved Trump for the nation’s benefit, then why was divine intervention not forthcoming on April 14, 1865, when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, or on November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was killed, or on April 4, 1968, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down, or on so many other national and personal tragedies?

Surely many of those crises would have warranted divine intervention.

A Trump/MAGA acolyte, however, would say we are not “privy” to God’s designs for us.

Or, for that matter, privy to designs for Corey Comperatore, the 50-year-old firefighter fatally shot during the attempt on Trump’s life as he shielded his family from rifle bullets.

However, at a prayer service the day after Trump’s inauguration, the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC, took the president at his word. Addressing him in the congregation, she accepted Trump’s view of his being saved: “You have felt the providential hand of a loving God.”

Then the Right Rev. Budde directed a heresy to Trump and his theology:

The heresy: “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”

“Those people” needing mercy, the Bishop said, include the LGBTQ+ community and migrant workers in the nation illegally.

The Associated Press reported, “After he returned to the White House,” Trump characterized the bishop as a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater.” Further, “in an overnight post on his social media site, he sharply criticized the ‘so-called Bishop’…She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.”

So while the religious right and advocates of Christian nationalism seek to influence legislative agendas across the nation, an unrepentant Trump finds Bishop Budde to be “nasty” and “ungracious” in bringing “her church into the World of politics.” 

Imagine that! In a worship service, a bishop of the Episcopal Church dared to plea for mercy and compassion—paraphrasing a beatitude from Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” (Matthew 5:7)

Some ten days later, Trump issued still another executive order; this one to have the U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi head a task force to counter what he calls “anti-Christian bias” in the federal government. 

National Public Radio reported, “the order lists some specific instances of what it calls this anti-Christian targeting under the Biden administration. Among them, the Department of Justice prosecuting people who blocked access to reproductive health clinics and the Department of Education guidance about campus groups that discriminate against LGBTQ people.”

CHURCH ATTENDANCE IS DOWN, BUT IS INFLUENCE UP?

Given the religious fervor and news media coverage attached to the MAGA agenda and the work by Republican-controlled state legislatures to advance that agenda, you might think Pentecostal and mainline Christian churches are thriving these days. 

Perhaps some are. However, Pew Research Center’s “religious landscape” study suggests otherwise.

That survey shows a decline in Christian identity, which does not square with the influence the religious/conservative right wields in Iowa’s state government and legislature.

Pew conducted similar “religious landscape” studies in 2007 and 2014.

Alan Cooperman, Director of Religion Research at the Pew Center, said the survey conducted in 2023 and 2024 found a “broad-based social change. We’ve had rising shares of people who don’t identify with any religion — so called ‘nones’— and declining shares who identify as Christian, in all parts of the country, in all parts of the population, by ethnicity and race, among both men and women and among all people at all levels of the educational spectrum.”

The Iowa findings, for example, showed that 82 percent of the Iowans surveyed identified themselves as Christians in 2007. About 77 percent did so in 2014. That percentage dropped to 62 percent in the 2023/2024 survey.

Nationwide, the corresponding figures for Christians as a percentage of the U.S. adult population were 78 percent in 2007, 71 percent in 2014 and 62 percent in 2023/2024. For the first time in 2024, Iowa was not above the national average on this metric.

Here are the approximate percentages of Iowans identifying themselves as Christian in four categories in the three surveys.

Christian self-identification                2007  2014  2024

Evangelical Protestant                       24%   28%   21%

Mainline Protestant                           30%   30%   25%

Roman Catholic                               25%   18%   15%

Historically Black Protestant              1%    2%    1%

In Pew’s most recent survey, 31 percent of Iowans described themselves as religiously unaffiliated with any faith. The national average was 29 percent.

Those concerned about the influence of the religious right on legislation and other state government action may take comfort in the declines the Pew survey reports—that so-called “evangelical” Christians have not overtaken mainstream Christian churches.

Although the “Evangelical Protestant” decreased in numbers, they don’t seem to have decreased in legislative influence. 

ARE WE DEALING WITH FEAR OR FAITH?

The combination of such faith and fear threatens our democracy. On almost a daily basis, the news brings more evidence of cowardice from Iowa leaders. A few examples:

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, who has severely damaged public education in Iowa, proclaimed “It was an honor” to be on hand when President Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.

There was no word as to whether Reynolds asked Trump to reverse ill-founded steps to end federal funding in support of non-profits like Lutheran Services in Iowa to aid legal immigrants and refugees coming to the U.S.

On a previous visit to Washington, Reynolds had ducked opportunities to speak out for Lutheran Services. She belatedly did so upon return to safe harbor in Iowa.

U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst still have not spoken out in support of their colleague, Democratic Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, after Elon Musk called him a “traitor.” Why? Because Kelly visited Ukraine and supported its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Despite Trump’s repeated attacks upon the nation’s judiciary, Senate Judiciary Committee chair Grassley still maintains, “we have a president that has taken an oath to follow the law. And I assume he’s going to do that.”

As noted above, Trump called Episcopal bishop Budde “nasty” and “ungracious” for her sermon comments with him in a pew. Her “nasty” sermon included a plea to “pray for unity as a people and a nation—not for agreement, political or otherwise — but for the kind of unity that fosters community across diversity and division…Unity is not partisan.”   

I will close with some contrasting instances of courage, which we need today:

In July 1975, Iowa Governor Robert D. Ray became the first of a few governors to heed President Gerald Ford’s request to welcome almost 1,400 Tai Dam refugees fleeing war torn Vietnam and Laos.

Twenty one years earlier, on June 9, 1954, another Iowan, attorney Joseph Welch, spurred the national rebuke of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy. Fed up with the senator’s attacks upon honorable citizens he accused of supporting Communism, Welch asked him at the historic Army-McCarthy hearings, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

That’s a question worth asking some public servants today.

Joseph Welch at the McCarthy hearings on June 9, 1954 (photo from National Archives)

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Top photo is a screenshot from the C-SPAN video of the National Prayer Service at the National Cathedral on January 21, 2025.