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  • Christian group and family raise outcry over detention of another 'house church' elder in China

    Christian group and family raise outcry over detention of another 'house church' elder in China

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    BANGKOK — Ding Zhongfu was awakened by loud pounding on his door. Five policemen greeted Ding, an elder in a Chinese church.

    The officers pinned him to the wall that Thursday morning in November and interrogated him while searching the apartment he shared with his wife, Ge Yunxia, and their 6-year old daughter.

    Ding’s family now pleads for his release after he was taken from his home in China‘s central Anhui province on suspicion of fraud. In their first public comments on the case, the family denies that Ding committed any fraud.

    Instead, they told The Associated Press in an interview, it is part of a wider crackdown on religious freedoms in China.

    Four others were detained, all senior members of the Ganquan church, a name that means “Sweet Spring,” according to the family. All were taken on suspicion of fraud, according to a bulletin from the church.

    “Under the fabricated charge of ‘fraud,’ many Christians faced harsh persecution,” said Bob Fu, the founder of a U.S.-based Christian rights group, ChinaAid, who is advocating for Ding’s release.

    Police have started using fraud charges in recent years against leaders of what are known as house churches, or informal churches not registered with the government in China.

    While China allows the practice of Christianity, it can only legally be done at churches registered with the state. Many who choose to worship in house churches say that joining a state church means worshiping the supremacy of the government and Communist Party over God, which they reject.

    Beijing in the past several years has increased the pressure on house churches. In 2018, Chinese leader Xi Jinping issued a five year-plan to “Sinicize” all the nation’s officially allowed religions, from Islam to Christianity to Buddhism, by infusing them with “Chinese characteristics” such as loyalty to the Communist Party. Heeding the call, local governments started shutting down house churches through evictions, police interrogations and arrests.

    In 2022, pastor Hao Zhiwei in central Hubei province was sentenced to eight years in prison after being charged with fraud, according to Fu. That same year, preachers Han Xiaodong and Li Jie and church worker Wang Qiang were also arrested on suspicion of committing fraud.

    On Dec. 1 police called Ding Zhongfu’s wife into the station saying that her husband was being criminally detained on suspicion of fraud. They declined to give her a copy of any paperwork they had her sign which acknowledged they were investigating him.

    A police officer at the Shushan branch’s criminal division who answered the phone Tuesday declined to answer questions, saying he could not verify the identity of The Associated Press journalist calling.

    The family had been preparing to move to the United States in December to join Ding’s daughter from a previous marriage.

    “I wasn’t necessarily a proponent of him moving to the U.S.,” said the daughter, Wanlin Ding, because it would be such a drastic uprooting. “It wasn’t until this event that I realized how serious it was.”

    She had wanted him to be part of her wedding in the spring.

    Ding’s Ganquan house church had been forced to move multiple times in the past decade, Ge said. The congregation pooled money to buy property so they could use it as a place of worship. Because the churches aren’t recognized by the government, the deeds were put in the names of Ding and two other church members.

    Still, police forbid them from using the property to worship, showing up ahead of services to bar people from entering.

    In recent years, Ding’s wife said, the church had been meeting at more random locations to avoid police. The church has about 400-500 worshipers from all levels of society.

    Ding, in addition to managing the church’s finances, served as an elder in the community, someone people could come to with their problems.

    One friend called Ding a “gentle” person in a handwritten testimony for the pastor’s case as part of the public plea for his release: “He was always proactively helping those in society who needed to be helped.”

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  • How The GOP Speaker Sneakily Worked To Put Creationism Back In Public Schools

    How The GOP Speaker Sneakily Worked To Put Creationism Back In Public Schools

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    Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) elevation to the heights of the U.S. House of Representatives marked one of the most significant achievements of the religious right since its splash onto the political scene in the late 20th century. It had successfully placed a true believer who worked inside its movement into one of the most important political offices in the country.

    And with him, he brought the bona fides of a record of advancing one of the movement’s most important goals: putting Christianity back into every facet of public life.

    Johnson has a long history of supporting and promoting creationist causes, acting as a lawyer for the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter in Kentucky where dinosaurs are seen as passengers on a re-creation of Noah’s Ark, as previously reported by HuffPost. But perhaps most important is his key role as a lawyer for the religious-right forces in Louisiana, which successfully passed legislation enabling teachers to inject creationism into public school classrooms and aided his rise to become speaker of the House.

    When the law faced challenges to its implementation and schools faced lawsuits for teaching creationism, Johnson, who worked as a senior litigator for the Alliance Defending Freedom and sat on the Louisiana Family Forum’s attorneys resources council, was the one to swoop in with legal memos, letters threatening lawsuits, and prayer rallies on behalf of the religious-right groups opposed to secular education. Johnson did not reply to HuffPost’s request for comment on this story.

    “Johnson was always their legal go-to guy,” said Barbara Forrest, a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University who helped lead the opposition to creationism in schools in the state and clashed with the Louisiana Family Forum. “They knew that they could call on him.”

    Rep. Mike Johnson is sworn in as House speaker at the Capitol in Washington on Oct. 25.

    TOM BRENNER via Getty Images

    Johnson’s role defending creationism in Louisiana public schools emerged in the late 2000s. Louisiana, one of the most religious states in the country, had long been a focal point in fights over creationism when, in 2008, the state passed the Louisiana Science Education Act, which enabled teachers to use supplemental materials to counter evolution with creationist theories in science classes. It was part of a larger strategy built over years of public back-and-forth about how much religion was to be permitted in schools; the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1987 decision in Edwards v. Aguillard had ruled that it was unconstitutional to require schools to teach creationism alongside evolution.

    The decision led creationists to pivot their focus, from young-Earth theories designed around the Biblical story of creation to injecting “intelligent design,” the idea that evolution is a process directed by God, into public school science classes. This was formalized in the 1990s as a “wedge” strategy aimed at getting God back into the classroom through “teaching the controversy” over evolution via intelligent design. But then in 2005’s Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a federal district court judge in Pennsylvania rejected such an intelligent design scheme as an impermissible injection of religion.

    Down in Louisiana, though, Johnson’s allies were finding a new way to get creationism into public schools — by, as Johnson would do, stripping out any language that they believed could be perceived as connected to religion.

    The Louisiana Science Education Act was largely written by Johnson’s close allies in the Louisiana Family Forum, founded in 2002 by the Rev. Gene Mills and Tony Perkins as a local offshoot of the religious-right group Focus on the Family, and promoted by retired Baton Rouge Judge Darrell White, the state’s most fervent creationism advocate. The law took its inspiration from a 2004 science curriculum proposal drawn up by White that asserted not creationism, but a goal to “help students review, analyze, and critique the scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories.” The actual intent was clear: White is an ardent creationist prone to attacking “Darwinists” and “secular humanists” while claiming, like Johnson, that school shootings result from the teaching of evolution.

    An initial draft of the guidance on how schools should implement the Science Education Act — put together by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, or BESE — included a line designed to comply with the Supreme Court’s Edwards ruling. “Materials that teach creationism or intelligent design or that advance the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind shall be prohibited for use in science classes,” the guidance’s original language stated.

    Former President Donald Trump (left) shakes hands with Tony Perkins, who helped found the Louisiana Family Forum. Mike Johnson acted as a lawyer for the Louisiana Family Forum as it pushed creationism in state public schools.
    Former President Donald Trump (left) shakes hands with Tony Perkins, who helped found the Louisiana Family Forum. Mike Johnson acted as a lawyer for the Louisiana Family Forum as it pushed creationism in state public schools.

    Jose Luis Magana via Associated Press

    That’s when the Louisiana Family Forum went into action, deploying Johnson in a key role as the voice of the well-financed and resourced Alliance Defending Freedom to threaten lawsuits if the language wasn’t changed.

    “Johnson was very involved in it,” said Glenn Branch, a deputy director for the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit that actively opposed the enactment of the Louisiana Science Education Act. “He’s been described as one of Mills’ closest allies.”

    “BESE was subjected to considerable pressure to implement that policy in a way that favored creationism,” Forrest said. Mills, who is the group’s leader, and one of the law’s sponsors, then-state Sen. Ben Nevers, a Democrat, met with BESE staff members behind closed doors to pressure them to remove the language, and summoned pro-creationist teachers and lawyers with the Alliance Defending Freedom to testify before the board.

    Ahead of the final board vote to approve the implementing language, the forum presented the board with a letter from Johnson, threatening a First Amendment religious discrimination lawsuit if the language wasn’t removed.

    Johnson’s letter explained that his organization had the resources — “1,200 attorneys” — and experience litigating such cases “throughout Louisiana, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and beyond” to bring a pricey lawsuit against the board. He suggested that the language banning creationism would “likely subject the Board to a costly legal challenge,” and offered his own services to defend the board pro bono if it did what he wanted and removed the language.

    “It was a threat,” Forrest said. “I saw it as a threat.”

    BESE caved. It went on to remove the language, clearing the way for teachers to bring supplemental materials teaching creationism in the state’s public schools.

    “[BESE] is to be commended, and Louisiana is open for business,” Mills said in a statement afterward.

    Since the law only allowed the optional introduction of supplementary materials challenging evolution with creationist theories, it has been hard to track the law’s usage in the decade-plus since its enactment.

    “The same reason that makes it difficult to challenge the constitutionality of the Louisiana Science Education Act is the same reason that no one knows how effective [the law] is,” Branch said.

    Retired Judge Darrell White provides constitutional guidance written by Mike Johnson as he pushes Louisiana school boards to teach creationism.
    Retired Judge Darrell White provides constitutional guidance written by Mike Johnson as he pushes Louisiana school boards to teach creationism.

    Emails obtained by Zack Kopplin

    The most ready evidence comes from Zack Kopplin, a journalist and activist who first launched a campaign to overturn the law as part of his senior high school project in 2010, and which he continued into college. Kopplin, acting as a reporter, interviewed students and filed Freedom of Information requests revealing multiple school districts where creationism was being taught with the law used as justification.

    After BESE approved the implementing language pushed by Johnson, White and Mills, Johnson went to work to protect teachers and school administrators teaching creationism.

    In his continued efforts to get more parish districts to adopt his proposal endorsing the teaching of creationism, White employed Johnson’s legal counsel.

    The two appeared at a prayer rally together in 2011, and when White reached out to teachers and school boards to get them to teach creationism in 2012, he came armed with a memo written and signed by Johnson providing “constitutional sufficiency” in support of putting creationist materials in classrooms, according to emails obtained by Kopplin.

    Johnson was also listed as a recipient in one email White sent to his allies coordinating the effort to get more school districts to teach creationism alongside creationist proponents like an assistant principal named Danny Pennington and the Louisiana Family Forum’s Mills and Lennie Ditoro.

    White, on a religious-right podcast in 2023, described Johnson’s views as hewing closely to his own.

    “He opposes, as do I, secularism — secular humanism — that is to say, a religion, and it is a religion, that [says] the universe was not created but rather just emerged,” White said.

    As Johnson worked with White in Louisiana, he also signed on as the lawyer for another creationist cause up north in Kentucky: the Creation Museum, which opened in 2016. The museum is owned by Ken Ham, the head of the fundamentalist group Answers in Genesis and one of the most well-known public faces of young-Earth creationism, and it features the Ark Encounter, a “full-scale” re-creation of Noah’s Ark that shows dinosaurs riding alongside humans. Johnson helped Ham sue the state after the government withdrew tourism subsidies for the Ark Encounter project.

    The two remained close afterward, with Johnson hosting Ham on multiple podcasts while praising the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum as “one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”

    Children look into a cage containing model baby dinosaurs inside a replica Noah's Ark at the Ark Encounter theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky.
    Children look into a cage containing model baby dinosaurs inside a replica Noah’s Ark at the Ark Encounter theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky.

    John Minchillo via Associated Press

    Back in Louisiana, Johnson emerged again in 2015 to defend the Bossier Parish school district after the American Civil Liberties Union’s state affiliate sent a letter to the school board about allegations that teachers and administrators were promoting Christianity at Airline High School, including teaching creationism. Johnson, then in the state Legislature, helped organize a large prayer rally at the school that received national coverage on Fox News and across conservative media.

    Students at the school told Kopplin, then writing for Slate, that teachers would go on “religious rants,” try “to convert everyone in class” and make “students read Bible passages in class.”

    “[One] of our science teachers got in trouble last year for teaching evolution as a fact,” a student told Kopplin.

    The ACLU ultimately did not sue, but Americans United for Separation of Church and State did sue the school district in 2018, and won a consent decree in 2019 preventing administrators and teachers from proselytizing and teaching creationism.

    Kopplin, who is now an investigative reporter at the Government Accountability Project, met Johnson at the Airline High School rally.

    “He’s an operator,” Kopplin summed up. “He’s very polite, very eager to have me write about it.”

    While Kopplin said that Johnson’s allies at the Louisiana Family Forum were “incredibly personally nasty to me,” including by writing articles attacking his parents for how they raised him, Johnson was not.

    “Let me say this: There’s a reason he’s speaker of the House and not those guys,” Kopplin said. “But he’s from the same world, from the same goals.”

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  • Lebanon's Christians feel the heat of climate change in its sacred forest and valley

    Lebanon's Christians feel the heat of climate change in its sacred forest and valley

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    BCHARRE, Lebanon — Majestic cedar trees towered over dozens of Lebanese Christians gathered outside a small mid-19th century chapel hidden in a mountain forest to celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration, the miracle where Jesus Christ, on a mountaintop, shined with light before his disciples.

    The sunset’s yellow light coming through the cedar branches bathed the leader of Lebanon’s Maronite Church, Patriarch Beshara al-Rai, as he stood at a wooden podium and delivered a sermon. Then the gathering sang hymns in Arabic and the Aramaic language.

    For Lebanon’s Christians, the cedars are sacred, these tough evergreen trees that survive the mountain’s harsh snowy winters. They point out with pride that Lebanon’s cedars are mentioned 103 times in the Bible. The trees are a symbol of Lebanon, pictured at the center of the national flag.

    The iconic trees in the country’s north are far from the clashes between Hezbollah militants and Israeli troops along the Lebanon-Israel border in recent weeks against the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas war. The Lebanese government says Israel’s use of white phosphorus and other incendiary weapons has burned tens of thousands of olive trees and other crops in the border area, and impoverished Lebanese farmers fear the shells have contaminated their soil.

    But the long-term survival of the cedar forests is in doubt for another reason, as rising temperatures due to climate change threaten to wipe out biodiversity and scar one of the country’s most iconic heritage sites for its Christians.

    The lush Cedars of God Forest, some 2000 meters (6,560 feet) above sea level near the northern town of Bcharre, is part of a landscape cherished by Christians. The preserve overlooks the Kadisha Valley — Aramaic for “sacred” – where many Christians took refuge from persecution over Lebanon’s tumultuous history. One of the world’s largest collections of monasteries remains hidden among the thick trees, caves and rocky outcroppings along the deep, 35-kilometer (22-mile) valley.

    The United Nations’ culture agency UNESCO in 1998 listed both the cedar forest and the valley as World Heritage Sites. They’ve become popular destinations for hikers and environmentalists from around the world. A growing number of Lebanese of all faiths visit as well, seeking fresh air away from the cities.

    “People from all religions visit here, not just Christians … even Muslims and atheists,” said Hani Tawk, a Maronite Christian priest, as he showed a crowd of tourists around the Saint Elisha monastery. “But we as Christians, this reminds us of all the saints who lived here, and we come to experience being in this sacred dimension.”

    Environmentalists and residents say the effects of climate change, exacerbated by government mismanagement, pose a threat to the ecosystem of the valley and the cedar forest.

    “Thirty or 40 years from now, it’s quite possible to see the Kadisha Valley’s biodiversity, which is one of the richest worldwide, become much poorer,” Charbel Tawk, an environmental engineer and activist in Bcharre – unrelated to Hani Tawk — told The Associated Press

    Lebanon for years has felt the heat of climate change, with farmers decrying lack of rain, and forest fires wreaking havoc on pine forests north of the country, similar to blazes that scorched forests in neighboring Syria and nearby Greece. Residents across much of the country, struggling with rampant electricity cuts, could barely handle the summer’s soaring heat.

    Temperatures have been above 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) in Bcharre, not uncommon along Lebanon’s coastal cities but unusual for the mountainous northern town.

    Nuns in the medieval Qannoubin Monastery, perched on the side of a hill in the Kadisha Valley, fanned themselves and drank water in the shade of the monastery’s courtyard. They reminisced about when they could sleep comfortably on summer nights without needing much electricity.

    Already, there are worrying signs of the impact on the cedars and Kadisha.

    Warmer temperatures have brought larger colonies of aphids that feed on the bark of cedar trees and leave a secretion that can cause mold, Charbel Tawk said. Bees normally remove the secretion, but they have become less active. Aphids and other pests also are lasting longer in the season and reach higher altitudes because of warmer weather.

    Such pests threaten to stunt or damage cedar growth.

    Tawk worries that if temperatures continue to change like this, cedars at lower altitudes might not be able to survive. Fires are becoming more of a potential danger.

    Cedar trees usually grow at an altitude from 700 up to 1,800 meters above sea level. Tawk’s organization has planted some 200,000 cedars over the years at higher altitudes and in areas where they were not present. Some 180,000 survived.

    “Is it climate change or whatever it is happening in nature that these cedars are able to survive at 2,100 to 2,400 meters?” Tawk asked, while checking on a grove of cedars on a remote hilltop.

    Local priests and environmental activists have urged Lebanon’s government to work with universities to do a wide-ranging study on temperature changes and the impact on biodiversity.

    But Lebanon has been in the throes of a crippling economic crisis for years. State coffers are dried up, and many of the country’s top experts are rapidly seeking work opportunities abroad.

    “There is nothing today called the state … The relevant ministries, even with the best intentions, don’t have the financial capabilities anymore,” Bcharre Mayor Freddy Keyrouz said. He said he and mayors of nearby towns have asked residents to help with conservation initiatives and Lebanese diaspora abroad to help with funding.

    The Maronite Church has strict rules to protect the Cedars of God forest, including keeping development out of it. Kiosks, tourist shops and a large parking lot have been set far away from the forest.

    “We don’t allow anything that is combustible to be brought into the sacred forest,” said Charbel Makhlouf, a priest at Bcharre’s Saint Saba Cathedral.

    The Friends of the Cedar Forest Committee, to which Tawk belongs, has been looking after the cedar trees for almost three decades, with the church’s support. It has installed sensors on cedar trees to measure temperature, wind, and humidity, watching for worsening conditions that could risk forest fires.

    Below the forest in the Kadisha Valley, Tawk points to other concerns.

    In particular, the spread of cypress trees threatens to crowd out other species, “breaking this equilibrium that we had in the valley,” he said.

    “We’ve seen them increase and tower over other species, whether it’s taking sunlight, wind, or expanding their roots,” he said. “It will impact other plants, birds, insects, and all the reptile species down there.”

    Steps to protect the valley have actually hurt its biodiversity by removing human practices that had been beneficial, Tawk said.

    In the past, herders grazing their goats and other livestock in the valley helped prevent the spread of invasive species. Their grazing also reduced fire hazards, as did local families collecting deadwood to burn in the winter.

    But residents left the valley when it became a heritage site and the Lebanese government implemented strict regulations. Few live there now other than a handful of priests and nuns.

    “Trees have overtaken places where people lived and farmed,” Tawk said. “Now a fire could move from one end of the valley to the other.”

    Sitting in a cave near the Qannoubine Monastery, Father Hani Tawk listened to the variety of birds chirping in the valley. He said he believes in the community’s faith and awareness of nature, engrained since their ancestors took refuge here.

    “When you violate that tree, you’re intruding on a long history, and possibly the future of your children,” he said.

    ___

    Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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  • AP PHOTOS: Rosalynn Carter's farewell tracing her 96 years from Plains to the world and back

    AP PHOTOS: Rosalynn Carter's farewell tracing her 96 years from Plains to the world and back

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    PLAINS, Ga. — Former U.S. first lady Rosalynn Carter was memorialized this week with three days of public ceremonies and tributes that spanned the breadth of her long life, from her roots in Plains, Georgia, to the White House and across the world through four decades of work as a global humanitarian.

    Associated Press photojournalists documented the tributes along the way.

    They captured the pageantry that comes with funerals for a White House occupant, as well as the hometown adoration for a first lady who lived more than 80 of her 96 years in the same town where she was born. They captured the services that reflected her deeply held Christian faith, which her minister said she always “took outside the walls” of the church. And they reflected the grief of her 99-year-old husband, Jimmy Carter. The 39th president left home hospice care to attend public remembrances in Atlanta and Plains, visibly diminished and frail but determined to lead the nation in saying goodbye to his wife of more than 77 years.

    Tributes began Monday in Americus, Georgia, with a wreath-laying ceremony on the campus of Georgia Southwestern State University. That’s where Rosalynn Carter graduated in 1946 and, after her tenure as first lady, founded the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers to advocate for millions of Americans taking care of family members and others without adequate support.

    She lay in repose Monday at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, a reflection of their term in Washington from 1977 to 1981, when she established herself as the most politically active first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt. Her husband spent the night steps away at The Carter Center, which they co-founded in 1982 to advocate for democracy, resolve conflict and eradicate disease in the developing nations — and for her to continue what became a half-century of advocating for better mental health treatment in America.

    On Tuesday, she was honored in Atlanta at a ceremony that brought together every living U.S. first lady, President Joe Biden and former President Bill Clinton. They joined the Carter family, dozens of Secret Service agents and 1,000-plus other mourners for a service replete with a symphony chorus, honor guards and a grand organ.

    In Plains, her intimate hometown funeral was held Wednesday at her beloved Maranatha Baptist Church, which the Carters joined when they returned to Georgia after his 1980 presidential defeat. Her family, including Jimmy, wore leis. It was a tribute to how she adored her time in Hawaii during her husband’s Navy years and how she loved learning to hula dance while there; her Secret Service code name was “Dancer.”

    In a slow-moving motorcade, she was escorted one final time through Plains, past the high school where she was valedictorian during World War II, through the commercial district where she became Jimmy Carter’s indispensable partner in the peanut business, past the old train depot where she helped run his 1976 presidential campaign.

    She was buried in a private ceremony on the family property, in view of the front porch of the home they built before Carter’s first political campaign in 1962.

    — Associated Press national politics reporter Bill Barrow

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  • Donald Trump accuses key evangelical leader of “scamming”

    Donald Trump accuses key evangelical leader of “scamming”

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    Former President Donald Trump called evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats a “scammer” on Saturday after he announced his endorsement of Ron DeSantis, noting payments the leader had received from the Florida governor’s 2024 presidential campaign and its associates.

    Vander Plaats is an influential evangelical leader among Republican voters in Iowa, the first state to hold a race in the GOP primary cycle and a key target for aspiring candidates. On Tuesday, Vander Plaats became the latest notable Iowa public figure to endorse DeSantis for president over Trump, though the impact of the decision has been debated.

    While DeSantis has long been Trump’s closest rival in the 2024 race for the GOP nomination, the former president has regularly secured 50 percent support in national polls, while DeSantis has lingered in the low double-digits.

    In August, Reuters reported on the lengths DeSantis and his associates went in attempting to secure Vander Plaats’s endorsement, finding that the campaign, a political action committee (PAC) affiliated with it, and a nonprofit backing the governor’s candidacy had collectively donated $95,000 to the Family Leader Foundation, a nonprofit organization Vander Plaats operates. For the money, DeSantis secured “three pages of advertisements in a booklet distributed at the July [presidential candidate] forum attended by 2,000 Christian conservatives,” Reuters noted.

    Iowa evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats is seen. Donald Trump on Saturday decried Vander Plaats as a “scammer” after he endorsed Ron DeSantis for president in 2024.
    Jim Vondruska/Getty Images

    Following the announcement of Vander Plaats’ endorsement of DeSantis, Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, on Saturday to decry the evangelical leader as a “scammer” backing “a candidate who is going nowhere.”

    “Bob Vander Plaats, the former High School Accountant from Iowa, will do anything to win, something which he hasn’t done in many years,” Trump wrote in the post. “He’s more known for scamming Candidates than he is for Victory, but now he’s going around using Disinformation from the Champions of that Art, the Democrats. I don’t believe anything Bob Vander Plaats says. Anyone who would take $95,000, and then endorse a Candidate who is going nowhere, is not what Elections are all about!”

    During a recent Fox News interview, Vander Plaats confirmed the donations, but said his endorsement “has never been and never will be for sale.” He added that he supported DeSantis because he thought he would win the election and had the requisite experience for the role.

    In an X post on Tuesday, DeSantis thanked Vander Plaats for his endorsement.

    “As I’ve made my way through 98 of Iowa’s 99 counties, Iowans have shared what a critical role @bobvanderplaats plays in engaging Iowa’s faith community in the key battles that matter. His support tells Iowans they can trust me to fight and win for them,” he wrote.

    Newsweek reached out to the Family Leader Foundation and the DeSantis campaign via email for comment.

    Speaking with The Des Moines Register after endorsing DeSantis, Vander Plaats acknowledged that such support can only go so far in terms of influencing voters, but nonetheless expressed optimism. DeSantis has also received the endorsement of the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds.

    “Endorsements only go so far,” he said. “I hope I can influence others, but there’s no guarantee on that. But I do believe, with Gov. Reynolds, with my endorsement, and with some of the others that I’ve talked about—all the legislators and county chairs that he has—I think he’s tailor-made to win Iowa.”