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INSIDE ZIKLAG, THE SECRET ORGANIZATION OF WEALTHY CHRISTIANS TRYING
TO SWAY THE ELECTION AND CHANGE THE COUNTRY  
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Andy Kroll, Propublica and Nick Surgey, Documented
July 13, 2024
Propublica
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_ 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. _

Ziklag, an 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., Nesma
Moharam, special to ProPublica

 

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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
[[link removed]].

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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“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.

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 [[link removed]] 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
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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
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he said during one of his livestreams in 2021. (Wallnau did not
respond to requests for comment.)

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
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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.”

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
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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
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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
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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.

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.

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.”

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