DAILY TRIFECTA: The Christians Making It Rain On The Election
It's the land of milking it, honey.
TITLE: Inside Ziklag, the Secret Organization of Wealthy Christians Trying to Sway the Election and Change the Country
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-ziklag-secret-christian-charity-2024-election
EXCERPT: 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.
TITLE: Two evangelical political action groups merge with hopes to reach 1 million voters
https://baptistnews.com/article/two-evangelical-political-action-groups-merge-with-hopes-to-reach-1-million-voters/
EXCERPT: Family Policy Alliance Foundation and Christians Engaged, two conservative Christian groups focused on political activism, have merged so they can “sign up 1 million Christians to engage in the upcoming U.S. presidential election and local elections across the country for years to come.”
The July 1 announcement said the two nonprofit groups hope to “help shape the future landscape of America” through “an expanded network capable of driving cultural and legislative change to advance biblical values.”
The Colorado Springs-based Family Policy Alliance Foundation is a sister organization to Family Policy Alliance, which is the least familiar of the three activist organizations James Dobson founded at Focus on the Family in his “battle for righteousness” through politics and law, not ministry through the church. The others are the D.C.-based Family Research Council and the powerhouse legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which Dobson founded with others.
The Alliance, which was founded within Focus in the 1980s and is based on the Focus campus, oversees a network of nearly 40 allied state groups that have led the charge to pass laws in nearly two dozen states that restrict the activities of transgender athletes and restrict gender transition medical care. The Alliance also says it battles Satan through laws restricting drag shows, access to online porn, abortion and IVF.
Together, the Family Policy Alliance and its Foundation have income of less than $4 million, but their national network has revenue of more than $50 million, employs more than 350 people and claims to reach a network of 50,000 churches.
The merger announcement comes weeks before the Alliance hosts its second annual SoConCon gathering in D.C. for social conservatives, including dozens of groups involved in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 for the next Republican president.
Christians Engaged was founded in Texas in 2019 by Bunni Pounds, a former political consultant who raised more than $10 million for Republican congressional candidates and made her own unsuccessful run for a U.S. House seat. Christians Engaged had revenue of $692,121 in 2022.
Pounds portrayed the merger as a fulfillment of Christ’s prayer that his disciples “all may be one.”
TITLE: God intervened to save Donald Trump, and He says vote Republican
https://www.thetimes.com/world/us-world/article/god-intervened-to-save-donald-trump-and-he-says-vote-republican-fxp6q2dhq
EXCERPT: There is a tendency sometimes to regard American evangelical Christians as a rather compromised bunch. Why did they become so interested in abortion after never giving it much of a thought until the 1970s? Why do they like Donald Trump who has plainly not lived the kind of life the Bible exhorts us to? Aren’t many pastors often caught with their pants down, or their hands in the church till?
What’s more, Americans Christians are facing a future where they are no longer in the majority. The non-partisan Pew Research Center says America’s Christian majority has been shrinking for years and if trends continue, Christians could make up less than half the US population within a few decades. In 2022 Pew found that Christians accounted for about 90 per cent of the population 50 years ago but by the beginning of the decade that figure had fallen to about 64 per cent.
But along with that decline and the other troubles — perhaps in part because of them — the sense of identity, the sense of threat from the changing world, has grown. This has led to a political polarisation of white Protestants: a gathering of the faithful around the Republican flag. And a belief that God notices them and is keen to see them survive and prosper.
The impact of this on the presidential race is clear. A significant number of evangelical voters, in the state where the shooting took place, might now regard themselves as bound by religious duty to take part in the election.
That state is Pennsylvania, one of the so-called swing states where the election will be won or lost. Many Republicans will believe that, in sparing Trump from the assassin’s bullet, God intervened – and they must answer His call.