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Ziklag, an invitation-only
charity organization for rich Christians, aims to take dominion over
what it sees as the seven major spheres of public life, which it calls
“mountains”: business, science and technology, family, arts and media,
church, education and government.
Credit:
Nesma Moharam, special to ProPublica
Democracy
Inside Ziklag, the Secret Organization of Wealthy Christians Trying to Sway the Election and Change the Country
The little-known charity is backed by famous conservative
donors, including the families behind Hobby Lobby and Uline. It’s
spending millions to make a big political push for this election — but
it may be violating the law.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
A network of ultrawealthy
Christian donors is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize
Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the
rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of
former President Donald Trump.
These previously unreported
plans are the work of a group named Ziklag, a little-known charity
whose donors have included some of the wealthiest conservative Christian
families in the nation, including the billionaire Uihlein family, who
made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and
the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation. Recipients of
Ziklag’s largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the
Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the
national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of
right-of-center advocacy groups.
ProPublica and Documented
obtained thousands of Ziklag’s members-only email newsletters, internal
videos, strategy documents and fundraising pitches, none of which has
been previously made public. They reveal the group’s 2024 plans and its
long-term goal to underpin every major sphere of influence in American
society with Christianity. In the Bible, the city of Ziklag was where
David and his soldiers found refuge during their war with King Saul.
“We are in a spiritual
battle and locked in a terrible conflict with the powers of darkness,”
says a strategy document that lays out Ziklag’s 30-year vision to
“redirect the trajectory of American culture toward Christ by bringing
back Biblical structure, order and truth to our Nation.”
Ziklag’s 2024 agenda reads
like the work of a political organization. It plans to pour money into
mobilizing voters in Arizona who are “sympathetic to Republicans” in
order to secure “10,640 additional unique votes” — almost the exact
margin of President Joe Biden’s win there in 2020. The group also
intends to use controversial AI software to enable mass challenges to
the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in competitive
states.
In a recording of a 2023
internal strategy discussion, a Ziklag official stressed that the
objective was the same in other swing states. “The goal is to win,” the
official said. “If 75,000 people wins the White House, then how do we
get 150,000 people so we make sure we win?”
According to the Ziklag
files, the group has divided its 2024 activities into three different
operations targeting voters in battleground states: Checkmate, focused
on funding so-called election integrity groups; Steeplechase,
concentrated on using churches and pastors to get out the vote; and
Watchtower, aimed at galvanizing voters around the issues of “parental
rights” and opposition to transgender rights and policies supporting
health care for trans people.
In a member briefing
video, one of Ziklag’s spiritual advisers outlined a plan to “deliver
swing states” by using an anti-transgender message to motivate
conservative voters who are exhausted with Trump.
But Ziklag is not a
political organization: It is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity, the same
legal designation as the United Way or Boys and Girls Club. Such
organizations do not have to publicly disclose their funders, and
donations are tax deductible. In exchange, they are “absolutely
prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening
in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any
candidate for elective public office,” according to the IRS.
ProPublica and Documented
presented the findings of their investigation to six nonpartisan lawyers
and legal experts. All expressed concern that Ziklag was testing or
violating the law.
The reporting by
ProPublica and Documented “casts serious doubt on this organization’s
status as a 501(c)(3) organization,” said Roger Colinvaux, a professor
at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law.
“I think it’s across the line without a question,” said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a University of Notre Dame law professor.
Ziklag officials did not
respond to a detailed list of questions. Martin Nussbaum, an attorney
who said he was the group’s general counsel, said in a written response
that “some of the statements in your email are correct. Others are not,”
but he then did not respond to a request to specify what was erroneous.
The group is seeking to “align” the culture “with Biblical values and
the American constitution, and that they will serve the common good,” he
wrote. Using the official tax name
for Ziklag, he wrote that “USATransForm does not endorse candidates for
public office.” He declined to comment on the group’s members.
There are no bright lines
or magic words that the IRS might look for when it investigates a
charitable organization for engaging in political intervention, said
Mayer. Instead, the agency examines the facts and circumstances of a
group’s activities and makes a conclusion about whether the group
violated the law.
The biggest risk for
charities that intervene in political campaigns, Mayer said, is loss of
their tax-exempt status. Donors’ ability to deduct their donations can
be a major sell, not to mention it can create “a halo effect” for the
group, Mayer added.
“They may be able to get more money this way,” he said, adding, “It boils down to tax evasion at the end of the day.”
“Dominion Over the Seven Mountains”
Ziklag has largely escaped
scrutiny until now. The group describes itself as a “private,
confidential, invitation-only community of high-net-worth Christian
families.”
According to internal
documents, it boasts more than 125 members that include business
executives, pastors, media leaders and other prominent conservative
Christians. Potential new members, one document says, should have a
“concern for culture” demonstrated by past donations to faith-based or
political causes, as well as a net worth of $25 million or more. None of
the donors responded to requests for comment.
Tax records show rapid
growth in the group’s finances in recent years. Its annual revenue
climbed from $1.3 million in 2018 to $6 million in 2019 and nearly $12
million in 2022, which is the latest filing available.
The group’s spending is
not on the scale of major conservative funders such as Miriam Adelson or
Barre Seid, the electronics magnate who gave $1.6 billion to a group led by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo.
But its funding and strategy represent one of the clearest links yet
between the Christian right and the “election integrity” movement fueled
by Trump’s baseless claims about voting fraud. Even several million
dollars funding mass challenges to voters in swing counties can make an
impact, legal and election experts say.
Ziklag was the brainchild
of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Ken Eldred. It emerged from a
previous organization founded by Eldred called United In Purpose, which
aimed to get more Christians active in the civic arena, according to
Bill Dallas, the group’s former director. United In Purpose generated
attention in June 2016 when it organized a major meeting between then-candidate Trump and hundreds of evangelical leaders.
After Trump was elected in
2016, Eldred had an idea, according to Dallas. “He says, ‘I want all
the wealthy Christian people to come together,’” Dallas recalled in an
interview. Eldred told Dallas that he wanted to create a donor network
like the one created by Charles and David Koch but for Christians. He
proposed naming it David’s Mighty Men, Dallas said. Female members
balked. Dallas found the passage in Chronicles that references David’s
soldiers and read that they met in the city of Ziklag, and so they chose
the name Ziklag.
The group’s stature grew
after Trump took office. Vice President Mike Pence appeared at a Ziklag
event, as did former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson,
Sen. Ted Cruz, then-Rep. Mark Meadows and other members of Congress. In
its private newsletter, Ziklag claims that a coalition of groups it
assembled played “a hugely significant role in the selection, hearings
and confirmation process” of Amy Coney Barrett for a Supreme Court seat
in late 2020.
Confidential donor
networks regularly invest hundreds of millions of dollars into political
and charitable groups, from the liberal Democracy Alliance to the
Koch-affiliated Stand Together organization on the right. But unlike
Ziklag, neither of those organizations is legally set up as a true
charity.
Ziklag appears to be the
first coordinated effort to get wealthy donors to fund an overtly
Christian nationalist agenda, according to historians, legal experts and
other people familiar with the group. “It shows that this idea isn’t
being dismissed as fringe in the way that it might have been in the
past,” said Mary Ziegler, a legal historian and University of
California, Davis law professor.
The Christian nationalism movement has a variety of aims and tenets, according to the Public Religion Research Institute:
that the U.S. government “should declare America a Christian nation”;
that American laws “should be based on Christian values”; that the U.S.
will cease to exist as a nation if it “moves away from our Christian
foundations”; that being Christian is essential to being American; and
that God has “called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of
American society.”
One theology promoted by
Christian nationalist leaders is the Seven Mountain Mandate. Each
mountain represents a major industry or a sphere of public life: arts
and media, business, church, education, family, government, and science
and technology. Ziklag’s goal, the documents say, is to “take dominion
over the Seven Mountains,” funding Christian projects or installing
devout Christians in leadership positions to reshape each mountain in a
godly way.
To address their concerns
about education, Ziklag’s leaders and allies have focused on the
public-school system. In a 2021 Ziklag meeting, Ziklag’s education
mountain chair, Peter Bohlinger, said that Ziklag’s goal
“is to take down the education system as we know it today.” The
producers of the film “Sound of Freedom,” featuring Jim Caviezel as an
anti-sex-trafficking activist, screened an early cut of the film at a
Ziklag conference and asked for funds, according to Dallas.
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An excerpt from Ziklag’s
“Declaration and 30-Year Vision for the Mountains of Influence.” The
document outlines Ziklag’s mission to reshape each major aspect of
American society so that it operates according to a biblical worldview.
Credit:
Obtained by ProPublica and Documented
The Seven Mountains
theology signals a break from Christian fundamentalists such as Jerry
Falwell Sr. and Pat Robertson. In the 1980s and ’90s, Falwell’s Moral
Majority focused on working within the democratic process to mobilize
evangelical voters and elect politicians with a Christian worldview.
The Seven Mountains
theology embraces a different, less democratic approach to gaining
power. “If the Moral Majority is about galvanizing the voters, the Seven
Mountains is a revolutionary model: You need to conquer these mountains
and let change flow down from the top,” said Matthew Taylor, a senior
scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies and an expert on Christian nationalism. “It’s an outlined program for Christian supremacy.”
“The Amorphous, Tumultuous Wild West”
The Christian right has
had compelling spokespeople and fierce commitment to its causes, whether
they were ending abortion rights, allowing prayer in schools or
displaying the Ten Commandments outside of public buildings. What the
movement has often lacked, its leaders argue, is sufficient funding.
“If you look at the right,
especially the Christian right, there were always complaints about
money,” said legal historian Ziegler. “There’s a perceived gap of ‘We
aren’t getting the support from big-name, big-dollar donors that we
deserve and want and need.’”
That’s where Ziklag comes in.
Speaking late last year to
an invitation-only gathering of Ziklaggers, as members are known,
Charlie Kirk, who leads the pro-Trump Turning Point USA organization,
named left-leaning philanthropists who were, in his view, funding the
destruction of the nation: MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder
Jeff Bezos; billionaire investor and liberal philanthropist George
Soros; and the two founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
“Why are secular people
giving more generously than Christians?” Kirk asked, according to a
recording of his remarks. “It would be a tragedy,” he added, “if people
who hate life, hate our country, hate beauty and hate God wanted it more
than us.”
“Ziklag is the place,” Kirk told the donors. “Ziklag is the counter.”
Similarly, Pence, in a
2021 appearance at a private Ziklag event, praised the group for its
role in “changing lives, and it’s advanced the cause, it’s advanced the
kingdom.”
A driving force behind
Ziklag’s efforts is Lance Wallnau, a prominent Christian evangelist and
influencer based in Texas who is described by Ziklag as a “Seven
Mountains visionary & advisor.” The fiery preacher is one of the
most influential figures on the Christian right, experts say, a bridge
between Christian nationalism and Trump. He was one of the earliest
evangelical leaders to endorse
Trump in 2015 and later published a book titled “God’s Chaos Candidate:
Donald J. Trump and the American Unraveling.” More than 1 million
people follow him on Facebook. He doesn’t try to hide his views: “Yes, I am a Christian nationalist,” he said during one of his livestreams in 2021. (Wallnau did not respond to requests for comment.)
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Donald Trump shakes hands with Lance Wallnau, a self-described Christian nationalist.
Credit:
Lancewallnau.com
Wallnau has remained a
Trump ally. He called Trump’s time in office a “spiritual warfare
presidency” and popularized the idea that Trump was a “modern-day
Cyrus,” referring to the Persian king who defeated the Babylonians and
allowed the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem. Wallnau has visited
with Trump at the White House and Trump Tower; last November, he livestreamed from a black-tie gala at Mar-a-Lago where Trump spoke.
Wallnau did not come up
with the notion that Christians should try to take control of key areas
of American society. But he improved on the idea by introducing the
concept of the seven mountains and urged Christians to set about
conquering them. The concept caught on, said Taylor, because it
empowered Christians with a sense of purpose in every sphere of life.
As a preacher in the
independent charismatic tradition, a fast-growing offshoot of
Pentecostalism that is unaffiliated with any major denomination, Wallnau
and his acolytes believe that God speaks to and through modern-day
apostles and prophets — a version of Christianity that Taylor, in his
forthcoming book “The Violent Take It By Force,” describes as “the
amorphous, tumultuous Wild West of the modern church.” Wallnau and his
ideas lingered at the fringes of American Christianity for years, until
the boost from the Trump presidency.
The Ziklag files detail
not only what Christians should do to conquer all seven mountains, but
also what their goals will be once they’ve taken the summit. For the
government mountain, one key document says that “the biblical role of
government is to promote good and punish evil” and that “the word of God
and prayer play a significant role in policy decisions.”
For the arts and
entertainment mountain, goals include that 80% of the movies produced be
rated G or PG “with a moral story,” and that many people who work in
the industry “operate under a biblical/moral worldview.” The education
section says that homeschooling should be a “fundamental right” and the
government “must not favor one form of education over another.”
Other internal Ziklag
documents voice strong opposition to same-sex marriage and transgender
rights. One reads: “transgender acceptance = Final sign before imminent
collapse.”
Heading into the 2024
election year, Ziklag executive director Drew Hiss warned members in an
internal video that “looming above and beyond those seven mountains is
this evil force that’s been manifesting itself.” He described it as “a
controlling, evil, diabolical presence, really, with tyranny in mind.”
That presence was concentrated in the government mountain, he said. If
Ziklaggers wanted to save their country from “the powers of darkness,”
they needed to focus their energies on that government mountain or else
none of their work in any other area would succeed.
“Operation Checkmate”
In the fall of 2023,
Wallnau sat in a gray armchair in his TV studio. A large TV screen
behind him flashed a single word: “ZIKLAG.”
“You almost hate to put it
out this clearly,” he said as he detailed Ziklag’s electoral strategy,
“because if somebody else gets ahold of this, they’ll freak out.”
He was joined on set by
Hiss, who had just become the group’s new day-to-day leader. The two men
were there to record a special message to Ziklag members that laid out
the group’s ambitious plans for the upcoming election year.
The forces arrayed against
Christians were many, according to the confidential video. They were
locked in a “spiritual battle,” Hiss said, against Democrats who were a
“radical left Marxist force.” Biden, Wallnau said, was a senile old man
and “an empty suit with an agenda that’s written and managed by somebody
else.”
Wallnau speaks with Drew Hiss, Ziklag’s executive director, about the group’s goals for political engagement.
Credit:
Obtained by ProPublica and Documented
In the files, Ziklag says
it plans to give out nearly $12 million to a constellation of groups
working on the ground to shift the 2024 electorate in favor of Trump and
other Republicans.
A prominent conservative getting money from Ziklag is Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer and Trump ally who joined the January 2021 phone call when then-President Trump asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to flip Georgia in Trump’s favor.
Mitchell now leads a network of “election integrity” coalitions
in swing states that have spent the last three years advocating for
changes to voting rules and how elections are run. According to one
internal newsletter, Ziklag was an early funder of Mitchell’s post-2020
“election integrity” activism, which voting-rights experts have
criticized for stoking unfounded fears about voter fraud and seeking to
unfairly remove people from voting rolls. In 2022, Ziklag donated $600,000 to the Conservative Partnership Institute,
which in turn funds Mitchell’s election-integrity work. Internal Ziklag
documents show that it provided funding to enable Mitchell to set up
election integrity infrastructure in Florida, North Carolina and
Wisconsin.
Now Mitchell is promoting a
tool called EagleAI, which has claimed to use artificial intelligence
to automate and speed up the process of challenging ineligible voters.
EagleAI is already being used to mount mass challenges to the
eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in competitive states,
and, with Ziklag’s help, the group plans to ramp up those efforts.
According to an internal
video, Ziklag plans to invest $800,000 in “EagleAI’s clean the rolls
project,” which would be one of the largest known donations to the
group.
![]()
Conservative lawyer Cleta
Mitchell, seen speaking at an event with then-President Donald Trump,
received funding from Ziklag for her efforts to overturn the 2020
election results.
Credit:
Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Ziklag lists two key
objectives for Operation Checkmate: “Secure 10,640 additional unique
votes in Arizona (mirroring the 2020 margin of 10,447 votes), and remove
up to one million ineligible registrations and around 280,000
ineligible voters in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Wisconsin.”
In a recording of an
internal Zoom call, Ziklag’s Mark Bourgeois stressed the electoral value
of targeting Arizona. “I care about Maricopa County,” Bourgeois said at
one point, referring to Arizona’s largest county, which Biden won four
years ago. “That’s how we win.”
For Operation Watchtower,
Wallnau explained in a members-only video that transgender policy was a
“wedge issue” that could be decisive in turning out voters tired of
hearing about Trump.
The left had won the
battle over the “homosexual issue,” Wallnau said. “But on
transgenderism, there’s a problem and they know it.” He continued:
“They’re gonna wanna talk about Trump, Trump, Trump. … Meanwhile, if we
talk about ‘It’s not about Trump. It’s about parents and their children,
and the state is a threat,’” that could be the “target on the forehead
of Goliath.”
The Ziklag files describe
tactics the group plans to use around parental rights — policies that
make it easier for parents to control what’s taught in public schools —
to turn out conservative voters. In a fundraising video, the group says
it plans to underwrite a “messaging and data lab” focused on parental
rights that will supply “winning messaging to all our partner groups to
create unified focus among all on the right.” The goal, the video says,
is to make parental rights “the difference-maker in the 2024 election.”
According to Wallnau,
Ziklag also plans to fund ballot initiatives in seven key states
— Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Montana, Nevada and Ohio — that
take aim at the transgender community by seeking to ban “genital
mutilation.” The seven states targeted are either presidential
battlegrounds or have competitive U.S. Senate races. None of the
initiatives is on a state ballot yet.
“People that are lethargic
about the election or, worse yet, they’re gonna be all
Trump-traumatized with the news cycle — this issue will get people to
come out and vote,” Wallnau said. “That ballot initiative can deliver
swing states.”
The last prong of Ziklag’s
2024 strategy is Operation Steeplechase, which urges conservative
pastors to mobilize their congregants to vote in this year’s election.
This project will work in coordination with several prominent
conservative groups that support former president Trump’s reelection,
such as Turning Point USA’s faith-based group, the Faith and Freedom
Coalition run by conservative operative Ralph Reed and the America First
Policy Institute, one of several groups closely allied with Trump.
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Ziklag’s website outlines its three major operations and which mountains each one targets.
Credit:
Screenshot by ProPublica
Ziklag says in a 2023
internal video that it and its allies will “coordinate extensive pastor
and church outreach through pastor summits, church-focused messaging and
events and the creation of pastor resources.” As preacher and activist
John Amanchukwu said at a Ziklag event, “We need a church that’s willing
to do anything and everything to get to the point where we reclaim that
which was stolen from us.”
Six tax experts reviewed
the election-related strategy discussions and tactics reported in this
story. All of them said the activities tested or ran afoul of the law
governing 501(c)(3) charities. The IRS and the Texas attorney general,
which would oversee the Southlake, Texas, charity, did not respond to
questions.
While not all of its
political efforts appeared to be clear-cut violations, the experts said,
others may be: The stated plan to mobilize voters “sympathetic to
Republicans,” Ziklag officials openly discussing the goal to win the
election, and Wallnau’s call to fund ballot initiatives that would
“deliver swing states” while at the same time voicing explicit criticism
of Biden all raised red flags, the experts said.
“I am troubled about a
tax-exempt charitable organization that’s set up and its main operation
seems to be to get people to win office,” said Phil Hackney, a professor
of law at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on tax-exempt
organizations.
“They’re planning an
election effort,” said Marcus Owens, a tax lawyer at Loeb and Loeb and a
former director of the IRS’ exempt organizations division. “That’s not a
501(c)(3) activity.”
you have any information about Ziklag or
the Christian right’s plans for 2024 that we should know? Andy Kroll can
be reached by email at
andy.kroll@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 202-215-6203.
![Portrait of Andy Kroll]()
Andy Kroll
Andy Kroll is a ProPublica reporter covering voting, elections and other democracy issues.
Ziklag, an invitation-only
charity organization for rich Christians, aims to take dominion over
what it sees as the seven major spheres of public life, which it calls
“mountains”: business, science and technology, family, arts and media,
church, education and government.
Credit:
Nesma Moharam, special to ProPublica