The latest episode of the Stop Christian Nationalism podcast reframes the 2024 presidential election through the lens of Donald Trump’s enthusiastic announcement of an endorsement from fundamentalist preacher Tom Sooter. However, Trump omitted a significant detail: the tragic story of Tom Sooter’s daughter, Jennifer Sooter.
As a child, Jennifer Sooter was only allowed to spend one night away from her controlling father’s home, staying at her grandparents’ house. According to Tom Sooter, that single night of freedom exposed Jennifer to evil temptations. He convinced his wife, Mary Lee Sooter, that their daughter was possessed by demons—literal evil spirits from Hell, not merely figurative moral failings. Supposedly to protect her from demons and Satanic cultists, Tom and Mary Lee Sooter kept Jennifer in their home even into adulthood, only permitting her to leave for church or to accompany her father in door-to-door efforts to convert people to Christianity.
Finally, when Jenny Sooter was 24 years old, she had enough. She wrote a letter to her parents saying that she was leaving their church and their home in the church parsonage. At last, Jennifer Sooter would live alone as an independent young woman. She was not possessed by demons. She would no longer be a prop for her parents’ religious extremism. She would make decisions about her own life for herself.
Tom Sooter’s wife could not tolerate such a display of individuality from her daughter. She read the Bible, and wrote down the Christian book’s command to parents to batter their disobedient children with stones to the point of death. Then, Mary Lee Sooter took a gun that Tom Sooter kept in the church parsonage, and shot Jennifer Sooter in the head. The mother fired multiple bullets through her daughter’s skull, then shot and killed herself.
Now, Tom Sooter travels the country as a traveling preacher, telling church congregations the same lie that he told Mary Lee Sooter: That his daughter was not fully human, because she was possessed by demons.
Tom Sooter is a top Christian ally of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, working as a member of Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.
The story is recounted, often using in Tom Sooter’s own voice, in the latest episode of the Stop Christian Nationalism podcast. It is also explored in greater depth in the new book Donald Trump’s Army of God.