How Two Billionaire Preachers Remade Texas Politics
New York Times
By Ava Kofman
Oct. 2, 2024 Updated 11:39 a.m. ET
Last December, Sid Miller, the Texas commissioner of agriculture, posted a photo of himself brandishing a double-barrel shotgun on X and invited his followers to join him on a “RINO hunt.” Miller had taken to stumping in the March primary election against incumbents he deemed to be Republicans in Name Only. Not long after that, he received a text message from one of his targets, a state representative named Glenn Rogers. “You are a bought and paid for, pathetic narcissist,” it began. “If you had any honor, you would challenge me, or any of my Republican colleagues to a duel.”
Rogers, a 68-year-old rancher and grandfather of five, represents a rural district west of Fort Worth. He was proud to serve in a Legislature that, as he told me recently, “couldn’t be more conservative if it tried.” Since entering office in 2021, he co-authored legislation that allowed Texans to carry handguns without a permit, supported the Heartbeat Act that grants citizens the right to sue abortion providers and voted to give the police the power to arrest suspected undocumented migrants in schools and hospitals. In a Statehouse packed with debate-me agitators, he was comparatively soft-spoken — a former professor of veterinary medicine with an aversion to grandstanding. He was not in the habit of firing off salvos, as he had to Miller, that ended with “Kiss My Ass!”
But the viciousness of the primary season had been getting to him. Nearly a year before the March elections, ads began to appear in Rogers’s district castigating him not simply as a RINO but as a closet liberal who supported gun control and Shariah law. (Rogers was especially peeved by an ad that photoshopped his signature white cowboy hat onto a headshot of Joe Biden.) Some of the attacks originated from his challenger’s campaign, while others were sponsored by organizations with grassroots-sounding names, like Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, Texas Gun Rights and Texas Family Project. By the time voters headed to the polls, they could have been forgiven for thinking that Rogers had disappointed a suite of conservative groups.
In reality, Rogers had disappointed two men: Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, billionaires who have made their fortunes in the oil industry. Over the past decade, the pair have built the most powerful political machine in Texas — a network of think-tanks, media organizations, political-action committees and nonprofits that work in lock step to purge the Legislature of Republicans whose votes they can’t rely on. Cycle after cycle, their relentless maneuvering has pushed the Statehouse so far to the right that consultants like to joke that Karl Rove couldn’t win a local race these days. Brandon Darby, the editor of Breitbart Texas, is one of several conservatives who has compared Dunn and Wilks to Russian oligarchs. “They go into other communities and unseat people unwilling to do their bidding,” he says. “You kiss the ring or you’re out.”
Like the Koch brothers, the Mercer family and other conservative billionaires, Dunn and Wilks want to slash regulations and taxes. Their endgame, however, is more radical: not just to limit the government but also to steer it toward Christian rule. “It’s hard to think of other megafunders in the country as big on the theocratic end of the spectrum,” says Peter Montgomery, who oversees the Right Wing Watch project at People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group.
Texas, which has few limits on campaign spending, is home to a formidable army of donors. Lately Dunn has outspent them all. Since 2000, he and his wife have given more than $29 million to candidates and PACs in Texas. Wilks and his wife, who have donated to many of the same PACs as Dunn, have given $16 million. Last year, Dunn and his associated entities provided two thirds of the donations to the state Republican Party.
The duo’s ambitions extend beyond Texas. They’ve poured millions into “dark money” groups, which do not have to disclose contributors; conservative-media juggernauts (Wilks provided $4.7 million in seed capital to The Daily Wire, which hosts “The Ben Shapiro Show”); and federal races. Dunn’s $5 million gift to the Make America Great Again super PAC in December made him one of Donald Trump’s top supporters this election season, and he has quietly begun to invest in efforts to influence a possible second Trump administration, including several linked to Project 2025.
Rogers believes he provoked the ire of the Dunn and Wilks machine for two reasons. He refused to support a school-voucher bill that would funnel taxpayer dollars to private schools, and he voted to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton, one of the machine’s most powerful allies. (Paxton, who did not respond to requests for comment, was impeached in part for misusing his office to help a friend under federal investigation.)
Since neither of these issues particularly excited voters, many attacks focused on distorting Rogers’s record on immigration instead. When his wife joined a text group for the spouses of incumbents under siege (they called themselves the Badass Babes), she saw that her husband was not the only opponent of vouchers who had supposedly given Democrats “control of the Texas border.” The mailers sent across the state were identical, with only the names and faces swapped out.
The onslaught worked. Rogers lost his seat by 27 percentage points, and more than two dozen Statehouse candidates backed by the two billionaires prevailed this spring. These challengers received considerable support from Dunn-and-Wilks-backed allies like Miller, the agricultural commissioner, as well as from G.O.P. heavyweights like Gov. Greg Abbott. “You cannot overstate the absolute earthquake that was the March 5 primary,” says Matt Mackowiak, a political consultant and chairman of the Travis County G.O.P.
The morning after his routing at the polls, Rogers published an editorial in The Weatherford Democrat. Commendably short on self-pity, it argued that the real loser in his race was representative democracy. “History will prove,” he wrote, “that our current state government is the most corrupt ever and is ‘bought’ by a few radical dominionist billionaires seeking to destroy public education, privatize our public schools and create a theocracy.”
Dunn and Wilks are often described as Christian Nationalists, supporters of a political movement that seeks to erode, if not eliminate, the distinction between church and state. Dunn and Wilks, however, do not describe themselves as such. (Dunn, for his part, has rejected the term as a “made-up label that conflicts with biblical teaching.”) Instead, like most Christian Nationalists, the two men speak about protecting Judeo-Christian values and promoting a biblical worldview. These vague expressions often serve as a shorthand for the movement’s central mythology: that America, founded as a Christian nation, has lost touch with its religious heritage, which must now be reclaimed.
Exactly what this reclamation would look like is up for debate. Some Christian Nationalists advocate for more religious iconography in public life, while others harbor grander visions of Christianizing America’s political institutions. Those on the extreme end of this spectrum are sometimes called Dominionists, after the passage in Genesis in which man is given “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
David Brockman, a nonresident scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, has extensively reviewed the speeches and donations of Dunn and Wilks and believes the two men to be thoroughgoing Dominionists. Zachary Maxwell, a Republican activist who knows the Wilks family personally and used to work for Texas Scorecard, a media group associated with Dunn and Wilks, agrees. “They want to get Christians in office to change the ordinances, laws, rules and regulations to fit the Bible,” he told me. According to Texas Monthly, Dunn once told Joe Straus, the first Jewish speaker of the Texas House since statehood, that only Christians should hold leadership positions. (Dunn has denied the remark.)
Wilks did not respond to detailed lists of questions. In an email, Dunn directed me to his previous public statements. In one of them, he explained that every Christian should avoid the label “Christian Nationalist” because “it makes ‘Christian’ an adjective — in other words, subjugated to something else.” A self-proclaimed proponent of limited government, he has also rejected the way in which the label, a “smear,” suggests that Christians would replace “God as King with earthly kings who claimed God’s authority.”
Unlike most billionaires, Dunn and Wilks are also pastors. Friends and critics alike described the pair as conspicuously down-home and devout. “They love God, they serve God,” said Jerry Maston, an evangelical pastor and Wilks’s brother-in-law. Dunn, who is 68, has served on the “pulpit team” of a nondenominational church in Midland. Wilks, who is four years older, practices a form of Christianity that hews closely to the Old Testament at the Assembly of Yahweh, a church his family founded outside of Cisco, a town in Central Texas. When I saw him preach there earlier this year, he warned his followers that “absorption in bounty makes us forgetful of the giver.” The two men may differ on certain points of doctrine — Wilks doesn’t celebrate Christmas, considering it a pagan holiday — but they share the same vision of a radically transformed America.
Many of their ideas have been shaped by David Barton, a former teacher in Aledo, Texas, and the closest the Christian Nationalist movement has to an in-house intellectual. Barton has been advancing the same revisionist thesis for decades: The founders intended for the barrier between church and state to protect Christianity from the government, not vice versa. “‘Separation of church and state’ currently means almost exactly the opposite of what it originally meant,” explains the website for WallBuilders, Barton’s advocacy group, to which Wilks has donated more than $3 million.
This view, dismissed by historians but increasingly common among white evangelicals, has been encouraged by recent Supreme Court decisions reinterpreting the establishment clause and embraced by prominent Republicans, most notably the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Johnson lauded Barton at a 2021 WallBuilders event, citing his “profound influence on me and my work and my life and everything I do.” The day after Johnson was elected Speaker, Barton said on a podcast, “We have some tools at our disposal now we haven’t had in a long time.”
With its high concentration of movement leaders, conservative pastors and far-right mega-donors, Texas has become the country’s foremost laboratory for Christian Nationalist policy, and many of its experiments have been bankrolled by Dunn and Wilks. Several of the lawmakers they’ve funded have introduced bills linked to Project Blitz, a coalition of religious groups, including Barton’s WallBuilders, that drafted model legislation to advance Christianity’s role in civic life. One bill directs educators to hang posters of the Ten Commandments “in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.” Another, now law, requires schools to display “In God We Trust” placards.
“You can look here to see what’s coming to other states soon,” said Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit legal advocacy group. After Texas passed a law allowing the work of licensed mental-health counselors in public schools to be done by unlicensed chaplains — representatives of “God in government,” one of the bill’s sponsors called them — a dozen other states introduced similar bills. That includes Louisiana, which became the first state to sign a bill into law this June requiring schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. (Trump celebrated on Truth Social: “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER.”)
It is no accident that Dunn and Wilks have concentrated their energies on infusing Christianity into education. Many far-right Christians trace the country’s moral decline to Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s and early 1970s that ended mandated prayer and Bible reading in public schools. Texas recently proposed an overhauled reading curriculum that strongly emphasizes the Bible “in ways that verge on proselytizing,” according to Brockman, the scholar at the Baker Institute; The 74, a nonprofit newsroom, reported that the state’s educational consultants contracted with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, whose board Dunn has served on since 1998. Wilks and his brother, Dan, have given around $3 million to PragerU, a video platform co-founded by Dennis Prager, the conservative radio host. It is not an accredited university; instead it provides “a free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media and education.” Public-school leaders in Arizona, Florida , Louisiana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and South Carolina have recently approved PragerU’s teaching materials. One lesson shows an animated Frederick Douglass explaining that slavery was a compromise the founding fathers made to “achieve something great.”
Predictably, these attempts to control what happens in the classroom trigger local culture wars, which, in turn, lead Christian Nationalists to contend that religious values are under siege. “They’re going to be things that people yell at, but they will help move the ball down the court,” Barton said in a 2016 conference call with state legislators that was later made public. The ultimate aim of these skirmishes is to end up with a religious liberty case before an increasingly conservative Supreme Court.
Last year, researchers at the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that more than half of Republicans support Christian Nationalist beliefs, including that “being a Christian is an important part of being truly American,” that the government should declare the United States a Christian nation and that “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” They have also found that Christian nationalists were roughly twice as likely as other Americans to believe that political violence may be justified. Those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 with wooden crosses and Christian flags did not see themselves as insurrectionists overturning democracy but as patriots defending the will of God. They had been spurred on by years of rhetoric that recast political debates as spiritual battles with apocalyptic stakes.
In 2016, Trump received a higher share of the white evangelical vote than any presidential candidate since 2004, but the sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry have found that Christian Nationalist beliefs were an even better predictor of support for his candidacy than religious affiliation. The slogan Make America Great Again can be interpreted, not unreasonably, as a dog-whistle to make it Christian Again, too. During the same speech in which he boasted that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue without losing voters, Trump warned that Christianity was “under tremendous siege” and pledged that when he was president, “Christianity will have power.” This June, he promised a Christian coalition “a comeback like just about no other group,” and in July, he encouraged Christians to vote “just this time” because in four years “you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
Dunn has placed himself in a favorable position to guide a second Trump administration — and transform the nature of the federal government. He helps fund America First Legal, a conservative law firm headed by the former Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller that represents itself as the MAGA movement’s answer to the A.C.L.U., as well as the Center for Renewing America, a far-right policy group led by the former Trump budget director Russell Vought. According to documents obtained by Politico, the Center for Renewing America has explicitly listed “Christian Nationalism” as one of its top priorities. Both groups have played a role in shaping Project 2025, an extreme policy agenda, published by the Heritage Foundation, that proposes consolidating executive power and remaking the federal bureaucracy, agency by agency.
“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said in a video captured in August by undercover reporters from the Centre for Climate Reporting. “I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation.” Vought has publicly defended the Christian Nationalist label as “a rather benign and useful description for those who believe in both preserving our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage and making public-policy decisions that are best for this country.”
Since 2021, Dunn has also been a founding board member of the America First Policy Institute, yet another group assembled by Trump loyalists to prepare for his possible return to the White House. One of its papers, “Ten Pillars for Restoring a Nation Under God,” discusses how America was “founded as a self-governing nation on biblical principles” — a favored Dunn talking point. Brooke Rollins, a former domestic policy adviser in the Trump administration who worked with Dunn at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, recruited him to the institute. “We wanted to create a national organization similar to what we built in Texas,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “This is a 100-year play.”
“I am by nature a tightwad,” Dunn writes in “Yellow Balloons,” a book he self-published in 2018. His mother once told him that as a child, he needed to be turned upside down to shake a nickel out of his pocket for the church collection basket. The youngest of four boys, Dunn grew up modestly in Big Spring, Texas. In the 1980s, he settled with his wife and six children in Midland, the seat of the Permian Basin, to become the chief financial officer at an oil company before founding his own in 1996. When the British writer Peter Stothard traveled to Midland for The Times of London during the 2004 presidential election, he spoke to Dunn, a “thin-faced, blue-jeaned Bush-backer” who was “convinced that his oil has existed for only 4,000 years, the time decreed by Genesis, not 200 million years as his geologists know.”
CrownQuest Operating, as Dunn’s company is called today, keeps most of its operations within Texas to limit interactions with the federal government. It ranks among the Top 10 biggest oil producers in the state and has made Dunn one of the wealthiest people in Texas. But for many years, when it came time to pick up the check at lunch with colleagues, Dunn writes, he found himself with “alligator arms.” It wasn’t until he came to better understand the parable of the unjust steward, a cryptic story from the Gospel of Luke, that he discovered his charitable side. Its moral, according to Dunn, is that when we get to heaven, “part of our reward will be being invited into people’s homes to reciprocate for things we did for them in this life, and we’re supposed to make that part of our investment calculation.”
In the meantime, many of Dunn’s investments have brought him treasures here on Earth. In 2007, he started his own PAC, Empower Texans, to fight a tax on oil wells financed through investors. Dunn has donated a majority of its funds, lending it the air of a special-interest group of one. Around a decade later, when one of Dunn’s political advisers connected him to Farris Wilks, Empower Texans became an
By Ava Kofman
Oct. 2, 2024 Updated 11:39 a.m. ET
Last December, Sid Miller, the Texas commissioner of agriculture, posted a photo of himself brandishing a double-barrel shotgun on X and invited his followers to join him on a “RINO hunt.” Miller had taken to stumping in the March primary election against incumbents he deemed to be Republicans in Name Only. Not long after that, he received a text message from one of his targets, a state representative named Glenn Rogers. “You are a bought and paid for, pathetic narcissist,” it began. “If you had any honor, you would challenge me, or any of my Republican colleagues to a duel.”
Rogers, a 68-year-old rancher and grandfather of five, represents a rural district west of Fort Worth. He was proud to serve in a Legislature that, as he told me recently, “couldn’t be more conservative if it tried.” Since entering office in 2021, he co-authored legislation that allowed Texans to carry handguns without a permit, supported the Heartbeat Act that grants citizens the right to sue abortion providers and voted to give the police the power to arrest suspected undocumented migrants in schools and hospitals. In a Statehouse packed with debate-me agitators, he was comparatively soft-spoken — a former professor of veterinary medicine with an aversion to grandstanding. He was not in the habit of firing off salvos, as he had to Miller, that ended with “Kiss My Ass!”
But the viciousness of the primary season had been getting to him. Nearly a year before the March elections, ads began to appear in Rogers’s district castigating him not simply as a RINO but as a closet liberal who supported gun control and Shariah law. (Rogers was especially peeved by an ad that photoshopped his signature white cowboy hat onto a headshot of Joe Biden.) Some of the attacks originated from his challenger’s campaign, while others were sponsored by organizations with grassroots-sounding names, like Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, Texas Gun Rights and Texas Family Project. By the time voters headed to the polls, they could have been forgiven for thinking that Rogers had disappointed a suite of conservative groups.
In reality, Rogers had disappointed two men: Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, billionaires who have made their fortunes in the oil industry. Over the past decade, the pair have built the most powerful political machine in Texas — a network of think-tanks, media organizations, political-action committees and nonprofits that work in lock step to purge the Legislature of Republicans whose votes they can’t rely on. Cycle after cycle, their relentless maneuvering has pushed the Statehouse so far to the right that consultants like to joke that Karl Rove couldn’t win a local race these days. Brandon Darby, the editor of Breitbart Texas, is one of several conservatives who has compared Dunn and Wilks to Russian oligarchs. “They go into other communities and unseat people unwilling to do their bidding,” he says. “You kiss the ring or you’re out.”
Like the Koch brothers, the Mercer family and other conservative billionaires, Dunn and Wilks want to slash regulations and taxes. Their endgame, however, is more radical: not just to limit the government but also to steer it toward Christian rule. “It’s hard to think of other megafunders in the country as big on the theocratic end of the spectrum,” says Peter Montgomery, who oversees the Right Wing Watch project at People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group.
Texas, which has few limits on campaign spending, is home to a formidable army of donors. Lately Dunn has outspent them all. Since 2000, he and his wife have given more than $29 million to candidates and PACs in Texas. Wilks and his wife, who have donated to many of the same PACs as Dunn, have given $16 million. Last year, Dunn and his associated entities provided two thirds of the donations to the state Republican Party.
The duo’s ambitions extend beyond Texas. They’ve poured millions into “dark money” groups, which do not have to disclose contributors; conservative-media juggernauts (Wilks provided $4.7 million in seed capital to The Daily Wire, which hosts “The Ben Shapiro Show”); and federal races. Dunn’s $5 million gift to the Make America Great Again super PAC in December made him one of Donald Trump’s top supporters this election season, and he has quietly begun to invest in efforts to influence a possible second Trump administration, including several linked to Project 2025.
Rogers believes he provoked the ire of the Dunn and Wilks machine for two reasons. He refused to support a school-voucher bill that would funnel taxpayer dollars to private schools, and he voted to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton, one of the machine’s most powerful allies. (Paxton, who did not respond to requests for comment, was impeached in part for misusing his office to help a friend under federal investigation.)
Since neither of these issues particularly excited voters, many attacks focused on distorting Rogers’s record on immigration instead. When his wife joined a text group for the spouses of incumbents under siege (they called themselves the Badass Babes), she saw that her husband was not the only opponent of vouchers who had supposedly given Democrats “control of the Texas border.” The mailers sent across the state were identical, with only the names and faces swapped out.
The onslaught worked. Rogers lost his seat by 27 percentage points, and more than two dozen Statehouse candidates backed by the two billionaires prevailed this spring. These challengers received considerable support from Dunn-and-Wilks-backed allies like Miller, the agricultural commissioner, as well as from G.O.P. heavyweights like Gov. Greg Abbott. “You cannot overstate the absolute earthquake that was the March 5 primary,” says Matt Mackowiak, a political consultant and chairman of the Travis County G.O.P.
The morning after his routing at the polls, Rogers published an editorial in The Weatherford Democrat. Commendably short on self-pity, it argued that the real loser in his race was representative democracy. “History will prove,” he wrote, “that our current state government is the most corrupt ever and is ‘bought’ by a few radical dominionist billionaires seeking to destroy public education, privatize our public schools and create a theocracy.”
Dunn and Wilks are often described as Christian Nationalists, supporters of a political movement that seeks to erode, if not eliminate, the distinction between church and state. Dunn and Wilks, however, do not describe themselves as such. (Dunn, for his part, has rejected the term as a “made-up label that conflicts with biblical teaching.”) Instead, like most Christian Nationalists, the two men speak about protecting Judeo-Christian values and promoting a biblical worldview. These vague expressions often serve as a shorthand for the movement’s central mythology: that America, founded as a Christian nation, has lost touch with its religious heritage, which must now be reclaimed.
Exactly what this reclamation would look like is up for debate. Some Christian Nationalists advocate for more religious iconography in public life, while others harbor grander visions of Christianizing America’s political institutions. Those on the extreme end of this spectrum are sometimes called Dominionists, after the passage in Genesis in which man is given “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
David Brockman, a nonresident scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, has extensively reviewed the speeches and donations of Dunn and Wilks and believes the two men to be thoroughgoing Dominionists. Zachary Maxwell, a Republican activist who knows the Wilks family personally and used to work for Texas Scorecard, a media group associated with Dunn and Wilks, agrees. “They want to get Christians in office to change the ordinances, laws, rules and regulations to fit the Bible,” he told me. According to Texas Monthly, Dunn once told Joe Straus, the first Jewish speaker of the Texas House since statehood, that only Christians should hold leadership positions. (Dunn has denied the remark.)
Wilks did not respond to detailed lists of questions. In an email, Dunn directed me to his previous public statements. In one of them, he explained that every Christian should avoid the label “Christian Nationalist” because “it makes ‘Christian’ an adjective — in other words, subjugated to something else.” A self-proclaimed proponent of limited government, he has also rejected the way in which the label, a “smear,” suggests that Christians would replace “God as King with earthly kings who claimed God’s authority.”
Unlike most billionaires, Dunn and Wilks are also pastors. Friends and critics alike described the pair as conspicuously down-home and devout. “They love God, they serve God,” said Jerry Maston, an evangelical pastor and Wilks’s brother-in-law. Dunn, who is 68, has served on the “pulpit team” of a nondenominational church in Midland. Wilks, who is four years older, practices a form of Christianity that hews closely to the Old Testament at the Assembly of Yahweh, a church his family founded outside of Cisco, a town in Central Texas. When I saw him preach there earlier this year, he warned his followers that “absorption in bounty makes us forgetful of the giver.” The two men may differ on certain points of doctrine — Wilks doesn’t celebrate Christmas, considering it a pagan holiday — but they share the same vision of a radically transformed America.
Many of their ideas have been shaped by David Barton, a former teacher in Aledo, Texas, and the closest the Christian Nationalist movement has to an in-house intellectual. Barton has been advancing the same revisionist thesis for decades: The founders intended for the barrier between church and state to protect Christianity from the government, not vice versa. “‘Separation of church and state’ currently means almost exactly the opposite of what it originally meant,” explains the website for WallBuilders, Barton’s advocacy group, to which Wilks has donated more than $3 million.
This view, dismissed by historians but increasingly common among white evangelicals, has been encouraged by recent Supreme Court decisions reinterpreting the establishment clause and embraced by prominent Republicans, most notably the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Johnson lauded Barton at a 2021 WallBuilders event, citing his “profound influence on me and my work and my life and everything I do.” The day after Johnson was elected Speaker, Barton said on a podcast, “We have some tools at our disposal now we haven’t had in a long time.”
With its high concentration of movement leaders, conservative pastors and far-right mega-donors, Texas has become the country’s foremost laboratory for Christian Nationalist policy, and many of its experiments have been bankrolled by Dunn and Wilks. Several of the lawmakers they’ve funded have introduced bills linked to Project Blitz, a coalition of religious groups, including Barton’s WallBuilders, that drafted model legislation to advance Christianity’s role in civic life. One bill directs educators to hang posters of the Ten Commandments “in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.” Another, now law, requires schools to display “In God We Trust” placards.
“You can look here to see what’s coming to other states soon,” said Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit legal advocacy group. After Texas passed a law allowing the work of licensed mental-health counselors in public schools to be done by unlicensed chaplains — representatives of “God in government,” one of the bill’s sponsors called them — a dozen other states introduced similar bills. That includes Louisiana, which became the first state to sign a bill into law this June requiring schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. (Trump celebrated on Truth Social: “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER.”)
It is no accident that Dunn and Wilks have concentrated their energies on infusing Christianity into education. Many far-right Christians trace the country’s moral decline to Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s and early 1970s that ended mandated prayer and Bible reading in public schools. Texas recently proposed an overhauled reading curriculum that strongly emphasizes the Bible “in ways that verge on proselytizing,” according to Brockman, the scholar at the Baker Institute; The 74, a nonprofit newsroom, reported that the state’s educational consultants contracted with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, whose board Dunn has served on since 1998. Wilks and his brother, Dan, have given around $3 million to PragerU, a video platform co-founded by Dennis Prager, the conservative radio host. It is not an accredited university; instead it provides “a free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media and education.” Public-school leaders in Arizona, Florida , Louisiana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and South Carolina have recently approved PragerU’s teaching materials. One lesson shows an animated Frederick Douglass explaining that slavery was a compromise the founding fathers made to “achieve something great.”
Predictably, these attempts to control what happens in the classroom trigger local culture wars, which, in turn, lead Christian Nationalists to contend that religious values are under siege. “They’re going to be things that people yell at, but they will help move the ball down the court,” Barton said in a 2016 conference call with state legislators that was later made public. The ultimate aim of these skirmishes is to end up with a religious liberty case before an increasingly conservative Supreme Court.
Last year, researchers at the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that more than half of Republicans support Christian Nationalist beliefs, including that “being a Christian is an important part of being truly American,” that the government should declare the United States a Christian nation and that “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” They have also found that Christian nationalists were roughly twice as likely as other Americans to believe that political violence may be justified. Those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 with wooden crosses and Christian flags did not see themselves as insurrectionists overturning democracy but as patriots defending the will of God. They had been spurred on by years of rhetoric that recast political debates as spiritual battles with apocalyptic stakes.
In 2016, Trump received a higher share of the white evangelical vote than any presidential candidate since 2004, but the sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry have found that Christian Nationalist beliefs were an even better predictor of support for his candidacy than religious affiliation. The slogan Make America Great Again can be interpreted, not unreasonably, as a dog-whistle to make it Christian Again, too. During the same speech in which he boasted that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue without losing voters, Trump warned that Christianity was “under tremendous siege” and pledged that when he was president, “Christianity will have power.” This June, he promised a Christian coalition “a comeback like just about no other group,” and in July, he encouraged Christians to vote “just this time” because in four years “you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
Dunn has placed himself in a favorable position to guide a second Trump administration — and transform the nature of the federal government. He helps fund America First Legal, a conservative law firm headed by the former Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller that represents itself as the MAGA movement’s answer to the A.C.L.U., as well as the Center for Renewing America, a far-right policy group led by the former Trump budget director Russell Vought. According to documents obtained by Politico, the Center for Renewing America has explicitly listed “Christian Nationalism” as one of its top priorities. Both groups have played a role in shaping Project 2025, an extreme policy agenda, published by the Heritage Foundation, that proposes consolidating executive power and remaking the federal bureaucracy, agency by agency.
“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said in a video captured in August by undercover reporters from the Centre for Climate Reporting. “I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation.” Vought has publicly defended the Christian Nationalist label as “a rather benign and useful description for those who believe in both preserving our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage and making public-policy decisions that are best for this country.”
Since 2021, Dunn has also been a founding board member of the America First Policy Institute, yet another group assembled by Trump loyalists to prepare for his possible return to the White House. One of its papers, “Ten Pillars for Restoring a Nation Under God,” discusses how America was “founded as a self-governing nation on biblical principles” — a favored Dunn talking point. Brooke Rollins, a former domestic policy adviser in the Trump administration who worked with Dunn at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, recruited him to the institute. “We wanted to create a national organization similar to what we built in Texas,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “This is a 100-year play.”
“I am by nature a tightwad,” Dunn writes in “Yellow Balloons,” a book he self-published in 2018. His mother once told him that as a child, he needed to be turned upside down to shake a nickel out of his pocket for the church collection basket. The youngest of four boys, Dunn grew up modestly in Big Spring, Texas. In the 1980s, he settled with his wife and six children in Midland, the seat of the Permian Basin, to become the chief financial officer at an oil company before founding his own in 1996. When the British writer Peter Stothard traveled to Midland for The Times of London during the 2004 presidential election, he spoke to Dunn, a “thin-faced, blue-jeaned Bush-backer” who was “convinced that his oil has existed for only 4,000 years, the time decreed by Genesis, not 200 million years as his geologists know.”
CrownQuest Operating, as Dunn’s company is called today, keeps most of its operations within Texas to limit interactions with the federal government. It ranks among the Top 10 biggest oil producers in the state and has made Dunn one of the wealthiest people in Texas. But for many years, when it came time to pick up the check at lunch with colleagues, Dunn writes, he found himself with “alligator arms.” It wasn’t until he came to better understand the parable of the unjust steward, a cryptic story from the Gospel of Luke, that he discovered his charitable side. Its moral, according to Dunn, is that when we get to heaven, “part of our reward will be being invited into people’s homes to reciprocate for things we did for them in this life, and we’re supposed to make that part of our investment calculation.”
In the meantime, many of Dunn’s investments have brought him treasures here on Earth. In 2007, he started his own PAC, Empower Texans, to fight a tax on oil wells financed through investors. Dunn has donated a majority of its funds, lending it the air of a special-interest group of one. Around a decade later, when one of Dunn’s political advisers connected him to Farris Wilks, Empower Texans became an