In late 2024, a group of ultra-wealthy Christians who call themselves Ziklag gathered to assess what their money had bought. Ziklag is a Christian nationalist, invitation-only network of donors, named after a biblical city, whose members must contribute at least $25 million to join. Its members include the Uihlein family (Uline office supplies), the Greens (Hobby Lobby), and the Wallers (Jockey International). In 2024, ProPublica and Documented obtained thousands of internal documents, strategy videos, and fundraising pitches that had never been made public. The documents showed $800,000 flowing to EagleAI, software designed to challenge voter registrations en masse across swing states. They showed Ziklag bankrolling the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the legal group whose litigation killed Roe v. Wade. And they spelled out the network’s mission in plain language: “take dominion over the Seven Mountains,” funding Christian projects or “installing devout Christians in leadership positions to reshape” every sphere of American life. At a private Ziklag gathering in 2023, Charlie Kirk told the assembled donors: “Ziklag is the place. Ziklag is the counter.”
Those seven mountains — religion, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business — come from a theology born in 1975 that has since moved from charismatic church basements into the West Wing. The man who wrote Project 2025’s chapter on executive power, Russell Vought, now runs the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Pete Hegseth runs the Pentagon. The man who calls the separation of church and state a “misnomer,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, spent years as a lawyer for ADF before entering Congress. Kevin Roberts controls $387 million at Heritage. By the end of 2025, roughly half of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint had been implemented. Eight governors had signed deals to place Turning Point USA (TPUSA) chapters in public high schools. What was fringe theology a decade ago is federal policy now.
From Theology to Takeover
In 1975, Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ and Loren Cunningham of Youth With a Mission — who ran the two largest parachurch organizations in the country and moved in the same evangelical circles — sat down over dinner in a borrowed cabin in the Colorado Rockies and compared lists of societal “spheres” they believed God wanted Christians to target. Cunningham called Bright “a dear brother”; the meeting was no accident. But their lists differed — Bright had nine “zones,” Cunningham six “classrooms” — and neither man published anything about the encounter for more than a decade. As the story got retold, the two lists became “exactly the same,” and Francis Schaeffer — a Calvinist theologian whose training had steeped him in the idea for years — got grafted onto the origin story as a third recipient of divine revelation. For nearly four decades, the idea circulated through charismatic prayer networks and prophetic conferences without breaking into the evangelical mainstream. Then, in 2013, Lance Wallnau, a Texas-based preacher who describes himself as a practitioner of “strategic-level spiritual warfare,” co-wrote a book with Bethel Church pastor Bill Johnson called Invading Babylon. Wallnau published it through a small charismatic press, and the book turned the Seven Mountain idea from a prayer request into a political program, a plan for taking control of government, education, media, and the rest.
By 2024, Denison’s Data for Political Research found 41 percent of American Christians agreed with the Seven Mountain Mandate. PRRI, the nonpartisan research institute, placed 30 percent of all Americans in the Christian nationalist camp, meaning they believe the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation and that God has called Christians to exercise dominion over public life. A single verse, Genesis 1:28, supplied the theological warrant. “Have dominion.” The people who took that literally now hold federal office. What follows is a mountain-by-mountain accounting of how far they have gotten.
Government
Trump signed the executive order creating the White House Faith Office on February 7, 2025. Unlike its predecessors under Bush, Obama, and Biden, which were housed in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building or across the street from the White House, this one was housed inside the West Wing itself, reporting directly to the Domestic Policy Council. Trump named televangelist Paula White-Cain, his longtime personal spiritual advisor and a prominent figure in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) who speaks in tongues and once commanded “all satanic pregnancies to miscarry” during a prayer broadcast, as senior advisor. The office then installed designated “Centers for Faith” with faith directors or faith liaisons inside every federal department and agency, embedding religious infrastructure across the executive branch.
In May 2025, Trump created the Religious Liberty Commission, chaired by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who would later write a $1 million check to Turning Point USA’s Phoenix headquarters. The commission’s membership consisted exclusively of Christians except for a single Orthodox Jewish rabbi, which prompted Interfaith Alliance and other multi-faith groups to file suit alleging violations of the Federal Advisory Committee Act in February 2026. Faith leaders who did not align with the administration’s cultural agenda described a “closed door” policy. Doug Pagitt, executive director of the progressive Christian group Vote Common Good, told Axios the office claimed to be too consumed with planning the National Prayer Breakfast to take meetings about a clergy petition regarding ICE enforcement, which was signed by thousands of faith leaders opposing raids that had driven church attendance down 30 to 50 percent in Latino congregations nationwide.
Russell Vought wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the Executive Office of the President. When undercover reporters from the Centre for Climate Reporting posed as potential donors in 2024, Vought told them he wanted to “rehabilitate Christian nationalism” as a governing philosophy and that he opposed abortion exceptions even when the mother’s life was at risk. Vought also helms the Center for Renewing America, whose stated mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts described his own job as “institutionalizing Trumpism.” On a podcast that July, he went further: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
House Speaker Johnson flies the “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside his Capitol Hill office — a banner the NAR claims as its own. At the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in June 2025, he told the crowd God deserved credit for the party’s congressional maps and quoted Matthew: “The kingdom of God has been advancing at the hand of forceful men, and forceful men take hold of it.” Trump instructed the Faith Office to “forget about” the separation of church and state and, at the National Prayer Breakfast, threatened to revoke the tax-exempt status of churches whose leaders “say something bad about” him. At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hosted working-hours prayer services led by the pastor of his Tennessee church, which is part of Christian nationalist Doug Wilson’s denomination.
Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on September 10, 2025, at a campus event in Utah. His memorial service at a Phoenix megachurch a few days later drew Trump, Vice President Vance, Speaker Johnson, and a sizable share of the Cabinet. (GPAHE’s reporting on Kirk’s assassination and the Christian nationalist mobilization that followed covered the event in detail.)
Trump called it “an old-time revival,” and he wasn’t wrong. The crowd sang praise music. Speakers quoted scripture. At the service, Christian nationalist podcaster Benny Johnson pointed down at the Cabinet secretaries in the front rows and told the audience that God had “given them power over our nation and our land.” Nobody flinched. A few weeks later, the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office, headed by Dan Scavino, Trump’s former golf caddie who now handles hiring across the federal government, quietly announced that federal employees could now promote their religious beliefs to colleagues at work.
The OPM memo invoked Title VII and the First Amendment, listing mezuzahs alongside crosses among the items employees could display. But it grew out of Trump’s February 2025 executive order on “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias,” and the Religious Liberty Commission that followed it only directly referenced Christianity in its fact sheet. At the commission’s launch, Trump asked the Rose Garden crowd: “Separation? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I’m not sure.”
And the movement has long traveled beyond Washington, using states as testing grounds for increasingly theocratic policies. Under then-school superintendent Ryan Walters, Oklahoma served as Heritage’s state-level proving ground: 2,509 documents obtained through a public records request by Fox 25 revealed the Heritage Foundation drafting legislation summaries for Oklahoma lawmakers, vetting candidates for the state education department’s general counsel and communications director, and scheduling regular policy meetings with Walters, who tapped Kevin Roberts himself to lead the committee rewriting Oklahoma’s social studies standards. Heritage invited Walters onto its Advisory Council on Education Reform. Texas, Florida, and more than a dozen other states have since replicated portions of the model.
Education
Walters bragged that his new Oklahoma standards “mention the Bible and its historical impact over 40 times” and tried to spend $3 million in public money on Trump-endorsed Bibles for classrooms. Each Bible came bundled with the Constitution — or a version of it. Amendments 11 through 27 were missing: That would be the one that abolished slavery, the one that guarantees equal protection, the one that bars racial discrimination in voting, and the one that gave women the vote.
Teachers received them shortly before Walters resigned live on Fox News at 10:40 pm on September 24, 2025, vowing to “destroy the teachers’ unions.” He left behind a state education system ranked 50th in the nation and moved on to become CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, an anti-union operation of the Freedom Foundation funded by Charles Koch, the Bradley Foundation, and Ed Uihlein, the same Uihlein family that bankrolls Ziklag. The state Supreme Court struck down the Bible curriculum. But by then, other states had already copied his approach, using templates composed by Christian nationalist David Barton.
The Christian school, Hillsdale College, now runs 88 charter and private schools across 28 states, teaching the revisionist “1776 Curriculum” that grew out of Trump’s 1776 Commission.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s “Dear Colleague” letter — a federal guidance document that carries the force of an ultimatum even though it isn’t law — gave universities the same choice K-12 schools got: dismantle DEI or forfeit federal funding. A federal judge struck it down, and the administration abandoned the appeal in January 2026 — only to circumvent the ruling weeks later through the General Services Administration (GSA), which controls the registration system every entity must use to receive federal grants. The GSA proposed requiring any school that wanted federal dollars to first certify that it ran no diversity programs of any kind. The certification rule hadn’t even been finalized before schools started gutting themselves. Arizona’s three public universities renamed offices, consolidated resource centers, and quietly scrubbed their websites of any trace of DEI without so much as notifying students or faculty that anything had changed. Duke University eliminated 700 positions and closed its diversity offices. In February 2026, the Fourth Circuit cleared the way, ruling Trump could order agencies to defund equity-related projects “to the maximum extent allowed by law.”
PEN America has documented thousands of book removals from public school libraries, driven by organized campaigns targeting titles that deal with race, sexuality, or gender identity.
Vouchers are accelerating the shift. The first federal school voucher program became law in July 2025, buried in the “big, beautiful bill” that Trump signed that summer. It created tax-credit scholarships that route public dollars to private and religious schools. By the 2026–27 school year, FutureEd, a nonpartisan think tank at Georgetown University, estimates that half of all U.S. students will qualify for some form of voucher. Ohio went universal, and the results are stark: close to $1 billion in taxpayer money now flows to private schools there, most of them Catholic and evangelical. ProPublica found the voucher movement began in the 1990s as a concealed effort to finance urban parochial schools before expanding into a national initiative. Texas committed $1 billion over two years after Gov. Greg Abbott defeated nearly a dozen anti-voucher Republicans in state legislative primaries in 2024, with $10 million in backing from Pennsylvania hedge-fund billionaire Jeff Yass, a former professional gambler and trade magnate.
Michael Farris founded the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) in 1983, later ran anti-LGBTQ+ legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), and has spent four decades wiring together the legal and political apparatus that made the current moment possible, in the United States and abroad. He ghost-wrote the Supreme Court brief that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed in an effort to overturn the 2020 election results. In his book The Joshua Generation, Farris declared that the movement — rooted in the same dominionist theology as the Seven Mountain Mandate —“will succeed when our children, the Joshua Generation, engage wholeheartedly in the battle to take the land.” On private calls with Christian millionaires, he pushed a strategy to siphon billions of tax dollars from public schools.
Project 2025 calls for abolishing the Department of Education entirely. Heritage published a 2026 report targeting Plyler v. Doe, the 1982 case that guarantees undocumented children the right to attend public school, offering model legislation requiring proof of legal residency at enrollment, designed to generate lawsuits that land before a Supreme Court Heritage believes will overturn Plyler using the same strategy that worked with Roe. Eight governors have formalized partnerships with TPUSA for “Club America” chapters in public high schools. None of those chapters existed before Kirk was assassinated in September 2025. Ziklag’s education chair stated what all of it is for: “to take down the education system as we know it today.”
Religion
Fewer Americans go to church than at any point in modern polling. Only about 20 percent show up on any given Sunday, down from close to a third two decades ago. Mainline Protestant denominations hemorrhaged roughly 40 percent of their members between 2000 and 2015. The congregants who remain skew younger. And what they hear from the pulpit sounds less like theology and more like a political party platform. Barna Group, an evangelical Christian research firm, found that Gen Z now attends church more frequently than any other adult generation, averaging 1.9 weekends per month. Men now attend at higher rates than women — a reversal of a pattern that held for decades.
Three theological streams have merged into a single political operation. The most volatile of the three is the NAR, which functions as Christian nationalism’s apocalyptic wing. NAR adherents believe they are living in the End Times, that Trump was divinely anointed, and that Christians must seize control of society to hasten Christ’s return. Lance Wallnau, whom scholar Matthew Taylor has called “the most important evangelical political theologian of the twenty-first century so far,” serves as Ziklag’s “visionary and advisor” and broadcasts from Dallas to an audience of millions. Cindy Jacobs, one of the NAR’s most celebrated prophets, secured a permit for a sound system on the east front of the Capitol on January 6, where she and other NAR figures prayed and prophesied as the mob broke in. Dutch Sheets, another NAR apostle, sat in a two-hour White House meeting with Trump administration officials on December 29, 2020—eight days before the Capitol was breached. Members of his team walked out talking about “strategy” from “people in the know” and urging followers to “get your sword bloody in the spirit of God.” Paula White-Cain, who called down divine intervention at the Stop the Steal rally to destroy “every demonic network” opposing Trump, now occupies an office in the West Wing.
Doug Wilson, who co-founded the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a network that PBS has called “archconservative,” works a different lane. Wilson has written that giving women the right to vote was a mistake, told CNN he would like the United States to be a Christian theocracy, and that homosexuality should be made illegal. His Moscow, Idaho-based publishing house released Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism in 2022, which sold 40,000 copies in its first year. Defense Secretary Hegseth worships at a church in Wilson’s network, and when Wilson responded to Kirk’s assassination by quoting Ecclesiastes — “This is not the time for love and peace” — the words carried weight. Vance Boelter, the man who killed Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, had studied at an NAR-linked Bible school.
Until July 2025, the Johnson Amendment meant that a church endorsing a candidate could lose its tax exemption. The IRS walked away from that. A megachurch pastor can now endorse a candidate on Sunday morning. The church keeps its tax-exempt status. The sermon goes out on a livestream to tens of thousands of viewers. Robert Jeffress, lead pastor of the 14,000-member First Baptist Dallas and a fixture on Trump’s Evangelical Executive Advisory Board, personally thanked the president. Texas, home to more than 200 megachurches, is expected to be the proving ground. In Fort Worth, Mercy Culture Church, an NAR charismatic megachurch and school founded in 2019 by Pastors Landon and Heather Schott, treats the Seven Mountain Mandate as an operational blueprint. Through its political nonprofit, For Liberty & Justice, the church endorses candidates from the pulpit, claims to have helped elect more than 100 in Texas, and runs Campaign University, an online course that trains conservative Christians to run for office.
State Rep. Nate Schatzline (R-TX) pastors at Mercy Culture and teaches the course. During his time in the legislature, Schatzline authored drag-show restriction bills and led worship sessions in the Capitol rotunda. In October 2025, he left Austin to join Trump’s National Faith Advisory Board, with plans to export Mercy Culture’s playbook nationwide. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has warned that the IRS move would turn houses of worship into political action committees, “flooding our elections with even more dark money.”
Family
Kevin Roberts wrote in Project 2025’s foreword that “family breakdown and rampant abortion tears at the soul of our country,” and the document’s 920 pages back it up. It rescinds Biden-era Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act guidance, clearing the way for hospitals to turn away patients in obstetric emergencies.
The 1873 Comstock Act, a Victorian-era obscenity statute that criminalizes mailing any drug or instrument “for producing abortion,” sits on the books like a loaded weapon; if the DOJ reverses a Biden-era memo and enforces it, medication abortion — now more than 60 percent of all U.S. abortions — could be shut down in every state without Congress voting on a single bill. The blueprint writes fetal personhood into federal regulations wherever the language allows. And it creates a “Special Representative for Domestic Women’s Health” to coordinate anti-abortion enforcement across agencies.
HHS itself would be rebranded as the “Department of Life.” The blueprint strips emergency contraception from the Affordable Care Act. Religious exemptions would expand so far that any employer could refuse to cover birth control. The Center for American Progress estimates 48 million women would lose no-cost emergency contraception. Title X, the federal family planning program that has served low-income patients since 1970, faces its own reckoning: the administration has moved to strip contraception funding and redirect grants toward organizations that emphasize “fertility awareness” over clinical contraception.
Then there is Planned Parenthood. The “One Big, Beautiful Bill” that Trump signed in 2025 severed the organization’s Medicaid reimbursements for a full year, a cash line worth more than half a billion dollars annually. Close to 50 clinics have shut down since the start of 2025. In February 2026, Planned Parenthood abandoned its lawsuit to restore the money. HHS is separately drafting a restored “Protect Life Rule” that would bar Title X grants from going to any organization that performs abortions; during Trump’s first term, the same rule forced Planned Parenthood to forfeit nearly $60 million rather than stop providing the procedure. In April 2026, HHS released new Title X guidelines that prohibit grantees from spending awards on abortion or abortion-related services, steering applicants instead toward “body literacy” and “family formation.” Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget goes the rest of the way: it requests that Title X be defunded entirely.
In January 2026, a coalition of 47 conservative organizations launched the Greater Than campaign. The goal is to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges and end marriage equality. The coalition includes the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, the American Family Association, and the Colson Center. The coalition frames everything around children’s welfare. Katy Faust, the campaign’s spokeswoman and founder of anti-LGBTQ+ group Them Before Us, called same-sex parenting “a destructive state-sanctioned gaslighting experiment on children.” The coalition’s stated goal is to rewrite marriage law around biological parenthood and generate enough state-level litigation to put a new case before the Supreme Court, following the model that produced the Dobbs decision overturning Roe. Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota have already introduced resolutions urging the Supreme Court to take up a new case, and Justices Thomas and Alito have both signaled they would welcome one.
Project 2025’s family chapter declares that “all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them” — language that targets surrogacy, IVF, and same-sex adoption simultaneously. At least 17 Heritage partner organizations have published anti-surrogacy arguments, several of them opposing the practice specifically because it allows LGBTQ+ couples to become parents. Heritage Senior Research Associate Emma Waters called surrogacy and IVF “a form of commercialized and contractual baby selling” and cited Genesis to argue that “such actions produce pain, hardship, and sin.” In March 2026, the Administration for Children and Families rescinded a Biden-era rule that had required foster homes to affirm LGBTQ+ youth. Trump’s “Fostering the Future” executive order, signed the previous November, funneled placements toward faith-based agencies and wrote “biological truths” into the policy framework — a phrase that child welfare groups read as a quiet mechanism for screening LGBTQ+ families out of the foster system.
The push to redefine family has another dimension that, even five years ago, would have sounded absurd. In April 2026, the New York Times reported that ultraconservatives are pushing to repeal the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, in favor of “household voting,” a system in which a single ballot would be cast by the male head of household on behalf of his entire family. Arizona pastor Dale Partridge announced a forthcoming book, 19 Reasons to Repeal the 19th Amendment, and declared in a video that “the majority of women are not capable of responsible voting.” Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon, a contributing author on The Statement on Christian Nationalism & The Gospel, told his podcast audience that his wife had returned his “stolen” vote as “restitution.” Hegseth reposted a CNN segment featuring Wilson, his own pastor, who has written that giving women the vote was a mistake.
White nationalist sympathizer Paul Ingrassia, now Acting General Counsel at the General Services Administration after senators forced the withdrawal of his nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel, said he has “a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it,” in a group chat with Republican operatives, called Martin Luther King Jr. the “1960s George Floyd” whose holiday belongs in “the seventh circle of hell,” told the chat “never trust a Chinaman or Indian,” and wrote that “we need competent white men in positions of leadership” because “the founding fathers were wrong that all men are created equal.” When Ingrassia appeared on a podcast where the host said his own wife believes women should not vote, Ingrassia responded, “She’s very based,” far-right slang for admirably extreme.
The obsession with “competent white men” and women who don’t vote is not separable from what the administration is doing to everyone else. The National Institutes of Health, meanwhile, had canceled more than $800 million in LGBTQ+ health research grants by early May 2025, gutting cancer studies and HIV prevention trials in the process. The forward of the Project 2025 blueprint equates “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology” with pornography, then proposes that educators and librarians who purvey such material be registered as sex offenders. At a Heritage natalism conference in April 2025, Project 2025 contributor Roger Severino warned that the country risked “losing American culture in two generations” if birth rates did not recover. White nationalists have been using the same phrase for years.
Media
Congress voted along party lines in July 2025 to claw back $1.1 billion in public broadcasting funding. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which had distributed federal money to local stations since 1967, announced the following month that it would shut down. More than 400 employees lost their jobs, PBS cut 15 percent of its workforce, New Jersey PBS announced plans to shut down entirely, and rural stations in South Dakota gutted their newsrooms from 11 journalists to four, canceling programs that had served farming communities for decades. Trump and his congressional allies called public media biased and a waste of taxpayer money, though many of the stations hardest hit were broadcasting in deep-red districts where local newspapers had already closed.
Defunding was only part of it. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, a Project 2025 contributor, invoked license review authority against CBS, ABC, and “The View.” Reporters Without Borders ranked the United States 57th out of 180 countries for press freedom in 2025, the lowest score in the index’s 23-year history.
Then there is the Ellison family. David Ellison is assembling a portfolio that would give one family enormous leverage over what Americans see and hear. His Paramount already controls CBS, where he installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of the news division and canceled Stephen Colbert’s late-night show. His $111 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery would add CNN, HBO, and Comedy Central to that portfolio. That vote is scheduled for April 23, 2026. Larry Ellison, David’s father, Oracle’s founder, and one of the richest people alive, has reportedly promised Trump that CNN hosts the president dislikes would be fired.
That concentration is the Seven Mountain Mandate’s vision for the Media mountain made regulatory fact. Carr is shredding the ownership limits alongside it. Federal law caps any single company from controlling TV stations that reach more than 39 percent of American households. On March 19, 2026, the FCC’s Media Bureau waived that cap to allow Nexstar, already the country’s largest local TV station owner, to swallow Tegna, a rival group that operates 64 stations in 51 markets, for $6.2 billion. The combined company now runs 265 stations in 44 states and reaches 54.5 percent of U.S. television households. Eight state attorneys general sued to block the deal. The FCC closed it on the same day. Anna Gomez, the commission’s lone Democrat, called the approval a backroom job: “no open process, no full Commission vote, and no transparency for the consumers and communities who will bear the consequences.”
The Christian nationalist media ecosystem keeps growing, and at this point, it operates as a closed loop. PRRI found that two-thirds of Americans who trust far-right outlets like One America News and Newsmax qualify as Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers, a viewer base simultaneously served by Trinity Broadcasting Network, the world’s largest religious broadcaster, and the Christian Broadcasting Network’s 700 Club, which airs in 97 percent of American markets. Real America’s Voice, which gained White House press credentials in 2025, carries former Trump adviser and felon Steve Bannon’s “War Room” alongside Wallnau’s “Firewall” and Jentezen Franklin’s “Free Chapel.” Franklin, who declared “you can call me a Christian nationalist” at a 2024 Trump rally, has prayed over the president in the Oval Office.
Then there’s Salem Media Group, the fifth-largest U.S. radio broadcaster, which owns 117 stations reaching top markets nationwide, syndicates programming to roughly 2,900 affiliates through hosts including Charlie Kirk and his successors at TPUSA, Sebastian Gorka, and Eric Metaxas, runs the conservative news sites Townhall, RedState, Hot Air, and PJ Media, operates the Salem News Channel, and publishes through Regnery. In 2025, the company bought a 30 percent stake in Donald Trump Jr.’s news aggregation app MxM and signed a distribution deal with Lara Trump.
Arts and Entertainment
In March 2026, Pixar’s chief creative officer Pete Docter admitted to the Wall Street Journal that he had ordered the removal of LGBTQ+ themes from the studio’s 2025 film Elio, originally directed by Adrian Molina, an openly gay filmmaker who had based the story on his own childhood. Molina’s scenes — the 11-year-old protagonist imagining raising a child with a male crush, riding a pink bike, staging a trash-fashion show in a pink tank top — were all cut. “We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy,” Docter said. Pixar had previously removed a transgender storyline from its Disney+ series Win or Lose, a Northern California studio that had embraced LGBTQ+ representation when it was culturally fashionable, throwing it overboard the moment the political winds shifted in December 2024.
Capturing the Entertainment mountain does not require winning over Pixar. It requires building a parallel Pixar. Ziklag set an explicit content target: 80 percent of G or PG movies “with a moral story.” Angel Studios’ Sound of Freedom grossed $250 million after producers screened an early cut at a Ziklag conference, and Angel, the Utah-based distributor whose stated mission is to “amplify light” through faith and family content, has since released The Chosen, Cabrini, Bonhoeffer, and Tuttle Twins, an animated series that teaches libertarian economics to children.
Pure Flix, now known as Pinnacle Peak Pictures, which partners with the conservative lifestyle network Great American Media on the Great American Pure Flix streaming service, built its empire on God’s Not Dead, which earned $64 million at the box office on a $2 million budget and has been followed by four sequels which have starred Kevin Sorbo, Scott Baio, Dean Cain, and current Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. The franchise’s most recent installment was timed to turn out Christian-right voters in the 2024 election.
Where Pure Flix built a corporate machine, others have built personal empires. Christian nationalist bro and musician Sean Feucht carved out his own corner of the market by staging outdoor worship concerts that doubled as recruiting drives for Seven Mountain ideology. His nonprofit, Hold the Line, brought in $5.3 million in 2020 alone, then restructured as a church to dodge the financial disclosure rules that apply to larger nonprofits. MinistryWatch, a Christian nonprofit accountability organization, gave him an F for transparency and urged donors to withhold giving. Feucht’s finances have drawn attention beyond the watchdog sector. In June 2025, nine people who worked inside his organizations signed a public statement accusing him of spiritual abuse, embezzlement, and wire fraud. One former bookkeeper told the Associated Press he watched ministry money and personal expenses get mixed together from the day he started.
Steve Bray owns a California generator company. He says he gave $250,000 to bankroll Feucht’s tour stops. In March 2026, Bray sued Feucht in federal court, alleging the money went to personal real estate instead. Feucht is now partnering with the White House Faith Office on a 20-city “Roots of Revival” tour for the America 250 celebrations, with worship events scheduled at national landmarks from Valley Forge to Mount Rushmore. “We have come into an agreement with them to partner together, to collaborate together,” Feucht said of the Faith Office. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) called it “Christian nationalism on the taxpayer dime.”
Business
Robby Starbuck made a name for himself in 2024 by threatening to “cancel” Harley-Davidson as conservatives did with Bud Light, and the company caved before he even started his campaign. John Deere and Tractor Supply followed. The Heritage Foundation worked a quieter angle through Jerry Bowyer, a Pennsylvania investor who buys a handful of shares in major corporations and then files shareholder proposals demanding they defund diversity programs. When votes are actually counted, Bowyer loses badly. Disney rejected his TPUSA funding measure 99 to 1, and Costco beat back an anti-DEI proposal with 98 percent opposition. But 22 similar proposals were quietly withdrawn in 2025 after companies negotiated settlements rather than face public votes. Salesforce dropped its hate-group monitoring program. Companies began pulling out of the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.
Bowyer got his proxy voting guidelines adopted by Institutional Shareholder Services, Glass Lewis, Broadridge, and Egan-Jones, the four platforms that advise pension funds on how to vote their shares. Texas, Louisiana, and Wyoming moved their state pension money onto those guidelines. Then, on December 11, 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing the SEC, the FTC, and the Labor Department to ratchet up oversight of firms.
At the national level, the movement is rewriting the rules of existing institutions. At the local level, it is building its own. Patriot Mobile started as a wireless reseller in Grapevine, Texas, marketing itself as “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider” before getting into politics. In 2022, the company’s PAC spent more than $500,000 on 11 school board candidates in the Dallas suburbs, hired the same political consultants who run campaigns for Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis, and won all 11 elections. Steve Bannon hosted Patriot Mobile’s president on “War Room” and declared, “The school boards are the key that picks the lock.” Five of those trustees lost their 2025 reelection bids, but by that point, the model had already spread to other states.
PublicSq. bills itself as an “anti-woke” Amazon alternative. Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle invested, and the company went public in July 2023, claiming 65,000 businesses and 1.4 million users. PublicSq. sells EveryLife diapers on the promise that the company “will never donate your hard-earned money to organizations that destroy innocent life” and Faith Friends Dolls, marketed as a “Christian alternative” to American Girl. The stock cratered 90 percent from its IPO; the company burned $44 million against $16 million in revenue through September 2024. It has since migrated its marketplace to the social media video platform, Rumble’s, cloud infrastructure.
Then there are the contracts. On his second day in office, Trump revoked Executive Order 11246, the 1965 directive that had required federal contractors to maintain affirmative action programs for six decades. His replacement, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” required every contractor and grant recipient to certify that it does not operate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, made those certifications enforceable under the False Claims Act, and told federal agencies to go after private-sector DEI practices. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance, the Labor Department shop that had policed those requirements since the Johnson administration, was gutted. A second order followed on March 26, 2026. When Trump signed the second order, it wrote the prohibition into the contracts themselves. Every federal deal with a contractor or subcontractor now carries a clause banning “racially discriminatory DEI activities.” Noncompliance can kill a contract. The Justice Department was directed to bring False Claims Act suits against firms that refuse to comply.
Resistance
Rev. Dr. John Dorhauer, the former General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ, does not mince the threat. “They don’t wanna humiliate us. They don’t wanna convert us. They want to destroy us.” Christians Against Christian Nationalism, a coalition of thousands of clergy with local chapters across the country, has called the movement “a distortion of the gospel of Jesus and a threat to American democracy.” In February 2026, nearly 400 reverends, bishops, and theologians signed an Ash Wednesday letter accusing the White House of promoting “a Christian faith corrupted by the heretical ideology of white Christian nationalism.” “Our faith is being tested,” they wrote. “Christians cannot pretend otherwise and must make a decision to act.”
Courts have blocked some of it. A federal judge in Louisiana ruled the state’s Ten Commandments classroom mandate “plainly unconstitutional” in December 2024. Oklahoma’s Supreme Court struck down the Walters Bible curriculum eight months later. Gallup found in May 2025 that 68 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. PRRI data shows two-thirds of Americans reject Christian nationalism. None of that stopped the Faith Office from moving into the West Wing, or the IRS from walking away from the Johnson Amendment, or Carr from waiving the ownership cap for Nexstar. Public opinion and federal policy are moving in opposite directions.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a Calvin University historian whose book, Jesus and John Wayne, traced how white evangelicals traded the gospel for a theology of power, warns what the endgame looks like: “There will be no meaningful religious liberty. There will be essentially a two-tier society between the ‘real Americans’ — those who buy into this, or pretend to — and then the rest of Americans. The laws will be rewritten across the board.”
Matthew Boedy, author of The Seven Mountains Mandate, puts it flatly: “With Project 2025 policies in motion, the seven mountains movement is closer than ever to its goal of turning America into a Christian nationalist state.” The billionaires who gathered in late 2024 to take stock of their investments would not dispute a word of it. They wrote the checks to make it happen.
