A Lutheran minister looking for a promotion to Congress once claimed that challenges to the traditional definitions of men and women are “very threatening” to white men and downplayed concerns about the dangers of transgender ideology for women.
Sarah Trone Garriott, a Democrat candidate for Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, claimed that Evangelical Christians oppose “GLBTQ” ideology not because of theology, but racial angst, according to an October 2023 speech uncovered by The Daily Wire. Trone Garriott, a former state senator and minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, hopes to unseat incumbent Republican Rep. Zach Nunn.
During her speech on “Christian Nationalism” at Ames First United Methodist Church, Trone Garriott argued that Evangelical Christians needed “threats” to react against to maintain their identity.
“A new threat that we see today is the GLBTQ movement,” she said. “It’s a challenging of that status quo, of the way that things have been, of who’s a man and who’s woman and how relationships are. It’s very threatening to the idea of the white male, powerful figure, because it muddies the waters and makes things ambiguous and confusing.”
Credit: Iowa Conference United Methodist Church
“We see all kinds of responses happening in legislation and in community conflicts … a lot more emphasis on, you know, really funding and supporting the separation, the private schools, the parents’ rights,” she said. “And within that, the parents’ rights piece is used to enact book bans, sports bans about who can play and who can compete,” she said.
Trone Garriott then suggested that laws to keep males out of female sports or protect kids from sexually explicit books were motivated by a misguided belief that “white men” are “responsible” for protecting women.
“It’s really couched in the language of there’s a threat against women and white men are responsible to protect women from threats. So a lot of the legislation is about we’re going to protect these feminine, fragile, weak women and girls from a threat to their bodies, their persons, their identity in this way.”
During her time in the State Senate, Trone Garriott voted against a bill to keep boys out of girls’ sports and opposed a bill shielding children from transgender procedures.
Republican spokesman Zach Kraft told The Daily Wire that Trone Garriott’s positions were out of step with Iowans.
“Sarah Trone Garriott is a preacher of the woke gospel,” he said. “It is sickening to see her twist Christianity as a justification to force sex changes on young children. That may have been popular with her friends at Harvard, but Iowa voters will reject this radical lunatic.”
Trone Garriott spent much of her speech attacking “white Christian men” and “white evangelical leaders,” an aggressive strategy in a state where white evangelicals compose a major voting bloc. She even attacked famed evangelist Billy Graham for having an “attractive, strong, macho guy persona.”
She also challenged traditional Evangelical Christian understandings of Jesus Christ and the Bible. Her denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is much more liberal than its counterpart, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.
“There’s a lot of different ways to think about what Christ did on the cross,” she said during the speech. “There’s not just one way. It makes us wonder, well, who is this Christ?”
Trone Garriott said the Evangelical understanding of the Gospel was tainted by the “white patriarchy.”
“What we see more and more is that the good news that a specific variety of Christianity is professing in the world is white patriarchy,” she said. “So white masculine power, violence, dominance, over and against.”
She also downplayed biblical writings of the Apostle Paul, calling him a “great guy and all” but “a product of his time.”
