Lutheran minister, congressional candidate performed satanist wedding, defended Wiccan prayer

An Iowa state senator and Lutheran minister running for Congress is drawing renewed attention over a resurfaced speech recounting how she helped officiate the wedding of a satanist couple 20 years ago.

Sarah Trone Garriott, a Democrat who has served in the Iowa Senate since 2020, told an audience at a 2023 event with the Des Moines Storytellers Project that her first wedding as an intern pastor in West Virginia was in 2006 and involved a man with a pentagram tattooed on his face, Fox News reported Monday.

RNC Research, an X account managed by the Republican National Committee, posted a clip earlier this week of Trone Garriott’s remarks.

WATCH: Iowa Democrat congressional candidate Sarah Trone Garriott — a Christian minister — gushes about officiating a Satanist wedding: https://t.co/YSmudHCdfMpic.twitter.com/V5E9bXpS1M

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 20, 2026

“[The senior pastor] asked me to pick the Scriptures,” Trone Garriott was quoted as saying. “Irritated, I flipped through the Bible. Should I pick something with Satan in it to make them feel more at home?”

Trone Garriott, who received her Master of Divinity from the ELCA’s Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, said she ultimately chose the Apostle Paul’s well-known passage on love from 1 Corinthians 13.

“If you have ever been to a Christian wedding, you’ve probably heard this Scripture. All they would get from me was [a] basic Lutheran wedding,” she said.

“When the Apostle Paul wrote these words, he certainly never had in mind a small town in West Virginia, two satanists and a Lutheran pastor in training,” she continued. “But Paul knew people, and people haven’t changed that much over the centuries. It is hard to love one another. We often need to be reminded how.”

Trone Garriott said the man with the satanic face tattoo appeared to grow emotional during the ceremony.

“Was he getting teary?” she asked. “They had a lot of baggage between the two of them, but there was no denying how they were looking at each other.”

A spokesperson for Trone Garriott’s campaign told Fox News that she was in training at the time of the 2006 wedding and was following the direction of her supervising pastor while seeking to model Jesus Christ.

The campaign said Trone Garriott “had no control over who walked through the church’s doors — it was her job to minister to everyone, including people she does not share beliefs with.”

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

Trone Garriott, who is running in a contested congressional district to unseat Rep. Zach Nunn, R-Iowa, has also drawn scrutiny for defending an invocation by a Wiccan priestess at the Iowa State Capitol in 2015.

In an op-ed for The Des Moines Register, Trone Garriott criticized Christians who were outraged by the prayer, writing, “Christians specifically should be aware that Jesus engaged with pagans multiple times throughout the New Testament and always from a place of kindness and compassion.”

A spokesperson for Trone Garriott doubled down on her 2015 op-ed, telling Fox News that “her faith in God calls her to follow Jesus’ example of loving one’s neighbor and spreading His grace to everyone, including those whose belief systems are fundamentally different from her own Christianity.”

“Scripture teaches Jesus’ unconditional grace, and that’s the belief that grounds Sarah’s life and ministry,” the spokesperson added.

According to footage shared Wednesday by the X account of the National Republican Congressional Committee, an arm of House Republicans, Trone Garriott declined to answer questions about her views on occultism when approached while she was locked out of a church.

“Senator, as a woke pastor, do you believe in ghosts? Do you believe in black magick?” she was asked. “What other occult rituals do you endorse, senator? Do you have a response to the question, senator?”

Do you believe in ghosts?

Black magic?

Iowa Democrat & Woke Pastor Sarah Trone Garriott defended a Wiccan prayer ("witchcraft and rituals") and officiated a Satanic Wedding

But now, she doesn't want to talk about it pic.twitter.com/AJzjOv3ZV5

— NRCC (@NRCC) April 22, 2026

Trone Garriott and the woman with her ignored the questions until someone arrived to let her into the church.

The controversy is not the first occult-related issue to emerge from the Iowa Legislature. In 2023, the Iowa State Capitol became a cultural battleground when a satanic display, erected by a local chapter of The Satanic Temple near a Nativity scene, prompted a firestorm of debate among lawmakers regarding the limits of the First Amendment.

Michael Cassidy, a former U.S. Navy officer and Mississippi congressional candidate, was charged after he toppled the demonic statue of Baphomet and threw its silver ram’s head in the trash. He later pleaded guilty to criminal mischief in exchange for having a felony hate crime charge dropped.