The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  The Blitzers understand at some level that their agenda will not command majorities of public opinion. Indeed, the premise of their work is that they can’t win in a fair and open debate. Increasingly, Christian nationalists have become comfortable embracing this kind of minority-led politics. As J. Randy Forbes, founder of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, put it, “Our studies and what we have seen is 10 percent of the people in any country in the world can change that country if they have the right strategies, if they persevere, and if they will just find a way to put their differences aside and come together. And that’s what we’re seeing happening across this country.”25 Referencing David Barton’s assertions about the American Revolution, Forbes claimed that “only 10 percent of the population ever did anything in the fight, just 10 percent, and that really hasn’t changed much today. Ten percent of the people in this country can change this country. We just have to find that 10 percent, get them together, get the right strategies, the right commitment, and watch how the Lord how he can change this country.”

  While Forbes directly referenced Barton’s work, his statement also likely alluded to the work of evangelical pollster George Barna. Barna, hailed in Christianity Today as “evangelicals’ most-quoted statistician,” is a prolific author and activist who founded the Barna Group, an evangelical market research firm based in Ventura, California, that focuses on cultural and religious trends. Barna identified a cohort of “SAGE Cons,” or “spiritually active, governance-engaged conservatives,” and introduced the term into movement leadership parlance in his 2017 book The Day Christians Changed America: How Christian Conservatives Put Trump in the White House and Redirected America’s Future. “The driving force behind their faith is that nine out of ten of them (90%) have developed a biblical worldview,” Barna writes. “That compares to just 1% of the rest of the U.S. adult population.”26 According to Barna, SAGE Cons number just 10 percent of the population but vote in highly disproportionate numbers and, more to the point, are motivated to persuade others to vote for their preferred candidates. It was the work of these SAGE Cons, Barna said, that put Trump over the top in the 2016 election.27

  On October 29, 2018, Forbes appeared on a broadcast from the Truth & Liberty Coalition and “7M Ventures,” the initiative cofounded by Barton, Lance Wallnau, Pastor Andrew Wommack, and other dominionist leaders. (“7M” would appear to be a reference to the Seven Mountains.) Forbes boasted that in addition to “100 members of Congress, both in the House and in the Senate” and “almost 1000 state officials” in “33 states,” their work has roped in government officials at the local level across the country, from “mayors to police chiefs to fire chiefs across the board.”

  “So now we have an entire division that is fighting nothing but getting ‘In God We Trust’ across the country,” he exulted. “We’ve got groups meeting to see what kind of strategies we can use in Hollywood. We have other groups that are looking at the laws we can get passed. Groups looking at how we protect and strengthen our judges.”28

  As far as the organizers of Project Blitz are concerned, things are going according to plan. In a 2017 conference call, Lea Carawan’s mood was notably upbeat: “We have this window of opportunity now; I think we’re all feeling it,” she said. Speaking of “a powerful momentum,” she declared, “there is more receptiveness at the administration than in over thirty years, and by working together in a unified strategy we’re going to be advancing religious protection in Congress, and in many states in the nation in 2017, but we believe this is just the beginning.”

  Carawan also appeared on the October 29, 2018, Truth & Liberty Coalition broadcast along with Forbes. Wearing a vivid blue dress and coordinating jacket, she spoke with fellow panelists Karen Conrad and Pastors Andrew Wommack and Richard Harris.

  “Faith Impact Network is something we’re very excited to tell you about. It’s also a component of what we’re doing with the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation,” Carawan said. “In a nutshell we’ve built the largest network of elected leaders, federal, state elected leaders who are united to make an impact for faith.” Carawan explained that “it started with the congressional members … We realized we need to go to where the battle is being waged, which is at the state and community levels, and so we built a network across states, now we have thirty-three states that are a part of this and many more will be joining.”29

  In a conference call for state legislators, there was a telling moment that got to the heart of the thinking behind Project Blitz. Former member of Michigan’s House of Representatives Ken Kurtz said, “You know one of my favorite songs is ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’ The one verse there that I really like, ‘Like a mighty army.’ And that’s what I began to believe the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation was, that army put together.”

  At this point, it would have been apparent to any listener that the agenda of Project Blitz had nothing to do with religious freedom in the proper sense of the term. The point of Kurtz’s Christian army was quite palpably to fight on behalf of conservative Christians who wish to discriminate against those who do not share their beliefs. By “religious freedom,” participants simply meant privilege for those with the right religion.

  CHAPTER 8

  Converting the Flock to Data

  By his own account, Bill Dallas grew up in an unhappy household.1 His mother had been sexually abused by her father. She had her first pregnancy at the age of seventeen. Dallas’s dad was an alcoholic and a depressive. He died at fifty-one. Bill was an intense, obsessive child, dogged by feelings of inadequacy. You could say he was wired for the bitter schema of sin-and-salvation religion.

  By the time he reached adolescence, Dallas’s self-doubts were all-consuming. He “began to pray constantly for forgiveness,” he later recalled, as many as “two to three hundred times each day.” Seeking affirmation, he joined Young Life, the Christian youth-focused evangelism outfit. Christianity soon “became the heaviest burden I had yet encountered.”

  Despite this challenging start in life, Dallas had clear talents and attended Vanderbilt University, a private university in Nashville, Tennessee, known for its vast academic offerings, well-heeled student body, and vibrant Greek life. Dallas joined Sigma Nu and took business classes. But his heart was in the drama department, and he dreamed of making it big as an actor.

  After graduating with honors, he moved to San Francisco. Blessed with photogenic looks, he modeled for “a major retail chain.” “The money was good, but it was the clothing and attention that really appealed to me,” he writes. “Hugo Boss and Armani were my favorites. Throw in some exquisite Italian loafers and a brilliant designer tie, and with my hair gelled back, I was ready for action.”

  Soon Dallas was at the center of an energetic social whirl. “My party mates and I regularly rented stretch limos to weave through the streets in search of the hottest clubs,” he says. People gave him the nickname “Mr. GQ.” Men and women were drawn to him, and those connections started to yield fruit—and temptation.

  He found his way into the real estate business, and then the money began to pour in. Dallas moved his mother and stepfather out west. In his early twenties, he and a woman named Toni had a child, a boy named Dallas. Toni “didn’t put any pressure on me to support Dallas,” he writes, though “she did give me the option of being part of his life.” In those fast days and nights, however, he didn’t make much of an effort. His life was focused on being “the bad-boy party animal of the Bay Area” with the “latest and greatest toys a man could buy.”2

  Even as he accumulated outward signs of success, Dallas couldn’t shake the anxieties at his core. “I was completely empty, almost numb,” he wrote. And then things really fell apart.

  Dallas has publicly offered few details of the crimes he committed. What is known is that he was convicted of grand theft embezzlement and sentenced to prison. In addition, according to a 1995 article archived on SFGate.com, Dallas and his former company, Dallas Lucas, were fined a record $772,0
00 for having laundered campaign contributions to six Oakland City Council candidates.

  As Dallas tells the story, he spent time in Susanville and then San Quentin, moving into a cell on the fourth tier of North Block, where his mother and stepfather were able to visit him weekly. It was there, he writes, that his life began to turn around. In his book, Lessons from San Quentin: Everything I Needed to Know about Life I Learned in Prison, Dallas describes the prison experiences that launched him on a trajectory that would land him at the center of a network of thousands of pastors, on the steering committee of Project Blitz, and in the cockpit of Christian nationalism’s taxpayer-subsidized, data-driven voter turnout machine.

  As Dallas became acclimated to life in prison, he says, he found that he preferred the “lifers” to the “short-timers.” The latter tend to be younger, “self-absorbed,” and focused on life after prison—less prone to surrender completely to their faith. The lifers, on the other hand, are much more likely to come to Jesus. With the assistance and mentorship of some of these lifers, Dallas deepened his connection to his faith and calmed his thought processes. He was able to gain mastery over compulsive behaviors, such as “washing my hands twenty to thirty times a day, hoarding books and magazines, obsessing over everything.” After shifting his focus to God, “I quit the OCD behaviors cold turkey,” he says. He also got a job at the prison’s TV station, working his way up to producer and on-air host.

  When he left prison, he was “mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually fit—in the best shape of my life in each of those dimensions.” In his book Dallas claims to visit San Quentin monthly to check in with his old buddies, who seem “peaceful and relaxed” and “always more than happy to provide me with a good life check.”

  Dallas had served his time, but he still hadn’t paid his debts. He says that he owed “multiple fines, taxes, and other payments—one of the fines alone was $750,000.”3 He immediately looked for ways to make a living.

  He worked for a time with Young Life, then for a Christian TV video company, Television Associates, utilizing skills he’d acquired at San Quentin. He also recommitted himself to his son. Then, on March 11, 1998, he had a holy visitation. “I believed God was telling me to start a satellite network that would deliver ministry training programs to churches around the country,” he writes. In essence he conceived of the idea of building up a national network for communicating information and messaging to conservative evangelical pastors and through them to their congregations. As it turns out, this was exactly what the growing Christian nationalist movement needed.

  With the help of Silicon Valley businessmen including Ken Eldred and Reid Rutherford and venture capitalist John Mumford, Dallas’s Church Communication Network grew with exponential velocity. By the 2010s he was in regular contact with thousands of pastors, many leading movement figures, and “a variety of world-class business leaders.”

  But Dallas had a still bolder vision. Working with thousands of pastors allowed him to reach literally millions of congregants—which meant millions of potential voters. With the world of marketing and communications increasingly driven by data mining, he knew, there had to be a better way to mobilize the nation’s Christian voters.

  Dallas soon established a fruitful partnership with George Barna, the Ventura, California–based evangelical pollster and purveyor of nuanced analyses of Christian voter behavior in the aggregate. It was a match made in heaven. The two collaborated on a number of projects, including Dallas’s autobiography and a collection of interviews with “master leaders” in ministry, business, and politics. But their ambitions were greater still. Dallas realized that his vast network might not only deliver information but collect data, and then turn around and use it to create more effective and impactful messaging. And now he had the resources to make it happen.

  Bill Dallas and his team set up United in Purpose, or UiP, with the goal of creating a database to guide conservative Christian voter registration and voter turnout operations.4 As Barna tells the story, UiP also played a vital role in fostering evangelical and conservative Christian unity. By November 2016, he writes, “there were roughly 75 faith-oriented non-profit organizations, along with a few thousand conservative churches in the nation, who strategically cultivated support for a variety of pro-life, pro-family, limited government candidates in swing states.” UiP, Barna says, pulled them together. “The glue that bound together the entities in the United in Purpose partnership was their faith in Jesus Christ, their conservative Bible-based theology, and the shared notion that politics was one of the life spheres in which their faith should have influence.”5

  The initiative would prove so valuable to the movement that it catapulted Dallas into the upper echelons of power. His name appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s leaked 2014 membership list for the Council for National Policy. When Donald Trump met privately with evangelical leaders in June of 2016, Bill Dallas organized the event, telling then Time magazine (now New York Times) reporter Elizabeth Dias, “We are trying to seek mutual understanding.”6 In advance of the meeting, billed as a “conversation,” Fox News host Todd Starnes reported “rumblings” that “evangelical leaders are trying to turn Tuesday’s meeting with Trump into a coronation.”

  In addition to Dallas, Barna, and Eldred, the organization’s inner circle included some other familiar names. According to the 2016 and 2017 Form 990s for United in Purpose, which are publicly available through Candid, a collaboration between Guidestar and the Foundation Center Archive, David Barton acts as a “director,” or consultant of some sort, contributing two hours per week to the cause but drawing no salary. Jim Garlow, the politically connected preacher with strong connections to the rising “global conservative movement,” is another “director,” according to the 2016 form 990 for United in Purpose Education, a division of UiP. According to the documents, Garlow volunteered a couple hours a week of his time to the cause. The UiP forms also show the seasoned Republican operative Robert D. McEwen—commonly known as “Bob”—contributing two hours a week in 2017 for a salary of $18,000, and eight hours per week in 2016 drawing a salary of $60,000.

  It’s not surprising to see David Barton’s name pop up in this type of initiative: he’s the Where’s Waldo of the Christian nationalist movement. Garlow, too, is a recognizable figure in California’s right-wing political scene; he was a key force behind the passage of the state’s 2008 anti–marriage equality amendment, Proposition 8. Prior to the presidential election in 2016, Garlow warned his followers that Christians were close to the point when they would be compelled to “participate in very active civil disobedience” against an “anti-godly government.” “Under no condition,” he said, “do we have to follow laws that violate the word of God.”7

  Bob McEwen is a telling addition. After serving a dozen years as a member of Ohio’s House of Representatives, McEwen, along with some associates, set up an investment bank and a lobbying and consulting firm in the D.C. area. His work as a lobbyist has put him on the payroll or in the company of a number of international political figures. McEwen also has longstanding ties to the Fellowship Foundation, also known as “the Family,” whose fundamental mission is to create a ruling consortium of Christ-centered political and community leaders. The Fellowship Foundation is the organization behind the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual gathering of about 4,000 participants, hosted by members of Congress. The National Prayer Breakfast has long served as “a backdoor to American power,” according to Jeff Sharlet, who has authored two books on The Family and executive produced a Netflix documentary on the topic. “Using the National Prayer Breakfast, they dispatch representatives to build relationships with foreign leaders,” he explains, adding, “The more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have.”

  McEwen also serves as executive director for the Council for National Policy.8 This puts him in the driver’s seat of the apparatus connecting “the doers and the donors,” as Rich DeVos put it, of t
he Christian nationalist and conservative political machine.9 Trump represents the change they have long been working toward. McEwen also has a decades-long history of experience in Russia and the former Soviet Union. In June 2019, just back from a visit to the Ukraine, McEwen joined the Conservative Book Club Podcast for an interview about his role at the CNP. “I have never been more optimistic about the future of my country than I am at this moment,” he said.10

  In 2015, Chris Vickery, an information technology specialist who at the time hunted for data breaches as a hobby, was sifting through the cyber universe when he came upon a massive file on 191 million U.S. citizens. The database, which Vickery downloaded and copied, contained data fragments offering bits of information belonging to registered voters, from cell phone numbers to evidence of gun ownership, all there for the taking. Pretty soon Vickery discovered a second breach involving 18 million Americans, this time with even more detailed information, including occupation and income levels, as well as lifestyle details such as religious views and affiliation, an interest in hunting or fishing, and whether the person was a fan of NASCAR or had a “Bible lifestyle.”11

  Vickery assumed that the second find either came out of or was in the process of enriching the 191 million file with additional data. “The table names were the same, and the usernames were the same for the database administrators,” he told me.12

  After some sleuthing, Vickery thought he had a clear idea of where it all came from. It linked, he said, to Pioneer Solutions Incorporated, which was run by Bill Dallas. Vickery pointed to other connections, too, including links between the data and a campaign titled “Champion the Vote,” which, Vickery pointed out, was “run by United in Purpose.”13