Lutheran minister running for Congress took part in wedding for satanists

Democratic House candidate Sarah Trone Garriott’s campaign is on the defensive after a resurfaced video in which she describes her role in the marriage of a pair of satanists while serving as a minister intern.

Trone Garriott, a Lutheran pastor who served in the battleground House district in November’s midterm elections, attended the wedding of a Satanist couple in 2006 while serving as an intern pastor in a district in West Virginia.

Nearly two decades later, in a speech for the Des Moines Storytellers Project, he said the marriage of two church Satanists offered a “spiritual lesson” about love.

Trone Garriott “He asked me to choose the scriptures” He said on stage in 2023: he refers to the senior pastor. “I got angry, so I looked through the Bible. Should I pick something with Satan in it to make them feel more comfortable?”

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“I finally bookmarked 1 Corinthians 13,” he continued. “If you’ve ever been to a Christian wedding, you’ve probably heard this verse. The only thing they were going to get from me was this: [a] basic Lutheran wedding.”

“When the Apostle Paul wrote these words, he certainly wasn’t thinking of a small town in West Virginia, two Satanists, and a Lutheran minister in training,” Trone Garriott writes. he said. “But Paul knew people, and people haven’t changed much over the centuries. Loving each other is hard. We need to be reminded often how to do it.”

Trone Garriott is running to unseat Rep. Zach Nunn, R-Iowa, for the congressional seat in the southwestern part of the state. He was criticized throughout the campaign for expressing beliefs that he argued were not in keeping with the Christian faith that Republicans represent.

“He made it clear that the values ​​that Iowa families live every day are the values ​​that he also opposes,” Nunn previously told Fox News Digital.

At her 2023 love-themed storytelling event, Trone Garriott chose to highlight her “first wedding” with the satanic duo.

He explained that the couple came out with the mistaken belief that they had to get married in church and began to question their Christian beliefs.

“These people could barely stand us. They didn’t believe in or really respect the things that were important to us,” Trone Garriott said.

The senior priest married them anyway, and Trone Garriott read over them the words “Love is patient; love is kind.”

Although Trone Garriott initially expressed concern about the wedding, by the end of the ceremony she spoke affectionately about the man with a pentagram tattoo on his face.

“Were the tears flowing?” Trone Garriott asked during his speech. “There was a lot of baggage between the two of them, but there was no denying the way they looked after each other.”

At no point in his speech did Trone Garriott say that he or the senior pastor asked the couple to reject satanism.

“So what happened to that couple? I have no idea,” Trone Garriott thought. “We never saw them again.”

Rep. Zach Nunn, a Republican from Iowa, speaks with members of the press as he leaves the Republican Caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, on October 12, 2023. (Anna Rose Layden/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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A spokesperson for Trone Garriott’s campaign told Fox News Digital when asked for comment: “As a minister in training, Sarah followed the instructions of her supervising pastor and had no control over who walked through the doors of the church – it was her duty to serve everyone, including people whose beliefs she did not share.

“Like many Iowa Christians, Sarah’s faith calls her to love your neighbor, and she follows Jesus’ example of embodying his grace for all,” the spokesperson added.

A source familiar with the campaign disputed that Trone Garriott helped the Satanist couple marry because he was not ordained until 2008.

But Trone Garriott’s words and actions during the ceremony seemed to confirm his active role in the wedding.

“This was going to be my first wedding,” Trone Garriott said in his remarks.

The resurfaced video comes at a time when Trone Garriott’s beliefs are under intense scrutiny in the rocking chair competition.

In a 2023 speech, he expressed discomfort with public displays of Christianity and, as a member of the state Senate, defended the search of non-Christian prayers at the statehouse.

Trone Garriott wrote an op-ed in 2025 calling out Christian MPs protesting a Wiccan-led prayer, arguing that “Jesus was engaged to pagans.”

The Rev. Sarah Trone Garriott, Lutheran pastor and Iowa state senator, greets congregants at Grace Lutheran Church on Sunday, March 15, 2026, in Des Moines, Iowa. (Krysta Fauria/AP Photo)

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The National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans, harshly criticized Trone Garriott’s past in a statement to Fox News Digital.

“His record shows a clear pattern of rhetoric and decisions at odds with his own beliefs, raising serious questions about his judgment and values,” NRCC spokeswoman Emily Tuttle said. he said. “If he is willing to blur those lines, Iowans cannot trust him to defend them.”