ProPublica published an article about the two Texas billionaires who are spending freely to achieve their goal. They want to turn America into a Christian nation. Never mind that the U.S. was never a Christian nation.

Of course, one of their most potent goals is get Texas to adopt vouchers so as many students as possible attend religious schools. They are close to Governor Greg Abbott, who is happy to take their money and lead the fight for vouchers.

The two are Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. They made their fortunes in the oil industry. They are both preachers. Together they have created the most powerful political machine in Texas. They have used their money to run far-right Republicans against moderate Republicans, knocking them off until there is no one left in the Legislature who questions their goals.

In the party primaries in the spring, candidates funded by Dunn and Wilks defeated long-time members of the Legislsture from rural districts who had defeated vouchers because their communities didn’t want them. Abbott had decided that this was the year he would finally get vouchers approved but those pesky Republican moderates blocked him, as they had in prior sessions.

The so-called “moderates” were not really moderate. In fact, they were fully conservative. One of them, rancher Glen Rogers, had first been elected in 2021; since then, he had sponsored “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.” But the pro-voucher forces labeled him a RINO (Republican in name only) and distributed flyers calling him ” a closet liberal who supported gun control and Shariah law.” He was attacked by shell groups with names like “Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, Texas Gun Rights and Texas Family Project.”

Glen Rogers and other Republicans who opposed vouchers were defeated in the Republican primaries. The money to beat them came from Dunn and Wilks, and also Betsy DeVos and Jeff Yass (the richest man in Pennsylvania.

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 GOP heavyweights like Gov. Greg Abbott. “You cannot overstate the absolute earthquake that was the March 5 primary,” says Matt Mackowiak, a political consultant and chair of the Travis County GOP.

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.”

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….

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.)…

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’ 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.”

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 ACLU, 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….”

At first glance, what’s most striking about Dunn and Wilks’ political giving, apart from its unprecedented scale, is its low rate of return. For more than a decade, their PACs and the lawmakers they supported won a handful of proxy wars — obstructing legislation, forcing retirements, generating scandals — but they were snubbed by the establishment Republicans who controlled the statehouse. In 2022, according to The Texas Tribune, 18 out of the 19 candidates backed by the group lost their races.

Political strategists have attributed this poor showing to the group’s uncompromising approach. Luke Macias, a longtime consultant to Dunn-and-Wilks-backed campaigns, has refused to work with candidates who support exceptions for abortion bans. (Macias did not respond to a request for comment). “My job is to communicate a candidate’s beliefs to a broader audience,” a consultant who worked with Macias on an Empower Texans-funded campaign told me. “His job is to find people who believe exactly what they believe and try to get them elected. From a financial perspective, Luke is the worst possible investment you can make, because he doesn’t seem to make decisions based on the facts, polls or strength of the opposition, but that right there tells you something about the strength of Tim Dunn’s ideology: Loyalty and fidelity are more important to him than short-term outcomes like winning.”

Dunn and Wilks, however, are focused on the long term. Gerrymandering has meant that most Republicans in Texas only fear for their seat if they’re challenged in a primary election — the Texas equivalent of term limits, Dunn has said. The tactical brilliance of Empower Texans has been to transform the political climate of Austin into a perpetual primary season. A dark money subsidiary, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, warns legislators about how upcoming votes will affect their conservative rankings on its index, while a separate media arm, Texas Scorecard, publishes editorials, podcasts and documentaries to hound incumbents it disapproves of out of office. “The irony is that most of the incumbents they attack agree with them on 95% of the issues,” Jon Taylor, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said of Dunn and Wilks. “I’m not sure how to explain the purity test they demand, except that it comes down to wanting people they can completely control.”

Some donors might hesitate to back a losing candidate, but Dunn and Wilks’ PACs often resurrect their challengers as though they are fighters in an arcade game. “They find candidates with an exceptionally high pain tolerance,” said a Texas House staff member who has worked for an incumbent opposed by Empower Texans. “They might not beat you on the first go, but they slowly chip away at your support and keep you under a microscope by hammering you with the same guy 52 weeks a year.” Shelley Luther, a beautician who was jailed for refusing to close her hair salon in Dallas during the pandemic, won the primary for a House seat this March after two failed campaigns supported by Dunn and Wilks. For Bryan Slaton, a former youth pastor and Empower Texans-backed candidate, the third time was the charm, though he was later unanimously expelled from the House after an internal investigation found that he got a 19-year-old aide drunk and had sex with her.

The political muscle of Christian nationalism is driving a growing share of attacks on Republicans across the country. Since 2010, a historically high number of Republicans have been defeated by primary challengers in the most evangelical House districts, according to an analysis posted on Substack by Michael Podhorzer, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. The former Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently expressed his concerns about the internecine warfare consuming the state party. “If we continue down this path pointing our guns inside the tent,” he told The Texas Tribune earlier this year, “that is the definition of suicide.”

David Pepper, the author of “Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind the Lines” and the former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, calls this trend the Texas Lesson. “It’s a tragic case study in how statehouses have flipped from serving the public interest to serving the far-right interests of private donors,” he told me. “These billionaires have been relentless and systematic about punishing moderates — ” Pepper paused and corrected himself. “Actually, I wouldn’t even call these lawmakers ‘moderate.’ These are simply officials who maybe, on one occasion, will stand up for the best interest of their district.”

Dunn and Wilks have accumulated power by supporting winning candidates and by striking fear into others who might be challenged in the future if they stray from white Christian nationalist ideas. The Legislature has passed permitless carry of guns, banned abortion, restricted LGBT RIGHTS, and kowtowed to the Wilks-Dunn agenda.

What’s left?

The most far-reaching of these efforts to consolidate power may be the Convention of States Project. A highly controversial effort, partly funded by Dunn, it represents one of the best hopes for Christian nationalists, among other interested parties, who want to transform the laws of the land in one fell swoop. “When we started the Convention of States — and I was there at the beginning — I knew we had to have a spiritual revival, a Great Awakening and a political restoration for our country to come back to its roots,” Dunn said at a 2019 summit for the group, where he spoke alongside Barton. “What I did not expect is that the Convention of States would be an organization that would trigger that Great Awakening.”

The Convention of States Project takes its cues from Article V of the Constitution, which proposes two paths for constitutional amendments. The familiar path — a two-thirds vote in each chamber of Congress to be ratified by three-fourths of states — has been deployed successfully 27 times. The other path, which involves two-thirds of states passing resolutions to call for a constitutional convention, is rarely discussed and has never been used.

Wilks and Dunn have supported the goal of rewriting the Constitution. A horrifying thought. Imagine it: No Thomas Jefferson. No Benjamin Franklin. No James Madison.

A convention dominated by delegates selected by two Texas billionaires.