The Pattern
Ziklag describes itself, in its own recruitment materials, as a “private, confidential, invitation-only community of high-net-worth Christian families.” Membership requires a net worth of $25 million or more and what the group calls a “concern for culture,” measured by past giving to religious or political causes. According to thousands of internal documents obtained by ProPublica and Documented (member newsletters, strategy memos, internal videos, and fundraising pitches, none of it previously public), the charity spent the years after its 2018 founding building toward something more specific than “culture”: a coordinated, multimillion-dollar campaign aimed at a presidential election and, beyond it, at the leadership of the country’s major institutions.
The Seven Mountains goal
Ziklag’s stated long-term objective, per the documents reviewed by ProPublica and Documented, is to “take dominion over the Seven Mountains.” That is a dominionist framework (the belief that Christians are called to hold authority over society’s institutions) dividing American public life into seven spheres: arts and media, business, church, education, family, government, and science and technology. The strategy, as the reporting describes it, calls for funding Christian projects and moving Christians into leadership positions across each sphere, reshaping each one, in the investigation’s phrase, “in a godly way.”
The education “mountain” shows what that looks like in practice. At a 2021 meeting, Peter Bohlinger, who chairs Ziklag’s education portfolio, told members the group’s goal there “is to take down the education system as we know it today,” according to the reporting.
The money
Ziklag’s revenue grew from $1.3 million in 2018 to $6 million in 2019 to nearly $12 million by 2022, the most recent tax filing available at the time of the investigation. Its donors, per the reporting, have included the Uihlein family (office-supply fortune), the Green family (Hobby Lobby), and the Waller family (Jockey apparel), three of the best-known names in conservative Christian philanthropy. Because Ziklag is organized as a 501(c)(3) (the tax-code category for charities, churches, and schools, which makes donations tax-deductible but legally bars campaign politics) rather than a political committee, it is not legally required to disclose its donor list, and gifts to it are tax-deductible.
In a separate figure that happens to land near the first, the group budgeted close to $12 million for 2024 election-cycle activity specifically, according to the documents. Named recipients in the reporting include $600,000 to the Conservative Partnership Institute, which helped fund election attorney Cleta Mitchell’s “election integrity” infrastructure in Florida, North Carolina, and Wisconsin; roughly $800,000 toward the voter-roll-challenge software EagleAI; about $700,000 budgeted for a touring series of pastor rallies called the Courage Tour; and additional money to Alliance Defending Freedom, Turning Point USA, and other advocacy groups, per ProPublica and Documented’s review of the internal records.
Three operations
The documents show Ziklag split its 2024 election work into three internally named programs. Operation Steeplechase worked through pastors and churches to raise turnout among conservative Christian voters, including pastor summits and coordinated church messaging. Operation Watchtower treated transgender rights as a mobilizing issue. According to Wallnau, Ziklag planned to help fund ballot initiatives in seven states (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, and Ohio) targeting what Wallnau called “genital mutilation,” a term critics of gender-affirming care commonly apply to care involving minors, though the documents as reported do not themselves specify an age group. Operation Checkmate funded “election integrity” groups pursuing mass challenges to voter registrations; internal targets reviewed by the reporters called for removing up to 1 million ineligible registrations and roughly 280,000 ineligible voters across Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Wisconsin, and securing 10,640 additional votes in Arizona, a figure the documents tied to Biden’s 2020 Arizona margin of victory, 10,447 votes. Those are the group’s own internal targets, as reported, not confirmed outcomes.
The voter-roll network
Checkmate’s money moved into an existing ecosystem of registration-challenge groups. Cleta Mitchell, the election attorney who advised efforts to contest the 2020 election and has since built a network of state-level “election integrity” coalitions, received Ziklag funding channeled through the Conservative Partnership Institute, according to the documents. Separately, Ziklag put roughly $800,000 into EagleAI, software marketed as a way to automate mass challenges to voter eligibility using public records.
That tool has already been used in the field, and the results were lopsided. In Forsyth County, Georgia, election officials in June 2024 dismissed 742 of 787 voter-eligibility challenges built from EagleAI data for lack of supporting evidence, over 94%, and upheld only the 45 that included documentation beyond the software’s own output, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. “Anybody can create a spreadsheet,” Democratic board member Anita Tucker told the paper. “It has not been vetted by anyone that I know of.” EagleAI’s chief executive, Rick Richards, defended the underlying data, telling the AJC that people who had moved “are no longer eligible voters” and “should be removed immediately.” Neither comment documents wrongdoing by Ziklag, which was not a party to the Forsyth County dispute; the county’s review shows how the tool Ziklag funded performs once it reaches an actual election board.
The Courage Tour and the legal question
Ziklag’s clearest legal exposure traces to a single event. On September 28, 2024, then-vice-presidential nominee JD Vance appeared in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, at a stop on the Courage Tour, a series of prayer-and-politics rallies organized by Christian broadcaster Lance Wallnau, who also advises Ziklag. Ziklag funds the tour (budgeting roughly $700,000 for it in 2024, according to the documents), and the tour is formally a project of the tax-exempt Lance Wallnau Ministries Inc.
Federal tax law bars 501(c)(3) organizations 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,” in the IRS’s own language. ProPublica and Documented brought their findings to six nonpartisan tax lawyers and nonprofit-law specialists. All six said they saw grounds for concern. Roger Colinvaux said the reporting “casts serious doubt on this organization’s status as a 501(c)(3).” Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer called the activity “across the line without a question.” Marcus Owens was blunter still: “They’re planning an election effort. That’s not a 501(c)(3) activity.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation filed a formal complaint asking the IRS to investigate both Ziklag and Lance Wallnau Ministries over the Vance appearance, naming them as examples of religious organizations that, in FFRF’s words, “knowingly violat[e] the statute by openly endorsing and supporting political candidates running for public office” while retaining tax-exempt status. No public resolution of that complaint had been reported as of this writing.
What Ziklag said
Ziklag did not respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica and Documented ahead of their original investigation. An attorney identifying himself as the group’s general counsel, Martin Nussbaum, replied in writing that “some of the statements in your email are correct. Others are not,” but did not specify which when asked to clarify. Nussbaum added that USATransForm (Ziklag’s formal IRS registration name) “does not endorse candidates for public office,” and declined to comment on the group’s membership. In the reporters’ follow-up story on the Vance appearance, Ziklag, Wallnau, and the Vance campaign all declined to comment.
The network’s documents kept surfacing after the election. In October 2025, The Guardian reported on additional leaked material showing Ziklag had solicited $400,000 to $500,000 from members in 2022 to fund pilot episodes of a conservative late-night talk show hosted by author Eric Metaxas. That was an attempt, in the group’s pitch to donors, to contest the “arts and media” mountain directly. The pilots did not find a network buyer.
The architecture
Set side by side, what the documents describe is not one deceptive claim but a structure. A 501(c)(3) charity is a legal form built for education, religion, and relief of the poor. Ziklag’s version funds a chain of separately branded organizations: a policy institute, a software vendor, a ministry’s touring arm, a talk-show production budget. Each link in that chain can describe itself in nonpolitical terms. Ziklag’s own internal numbers, including vote targets, registration-challenge counts, and state-by-state budgets for a single election cycle, tell the same story. The tax lawyers consulted by the original reporters reached the same conclusion: the sum of the parts looks like a campaign operation organized inside the paperwork of a charity. That gap, between legal form and internal target-setting, is what the six lawyers flagged, and it is what the FFRF complaint is built on.
None of this is a claim about Christianity itself. The overwhelming majority of the country’s Christians have no connection to Ziklag, do not meet its $25 million entry requirement, and are not represented by its choices. The subject of this piece is a specific, named funding network and the legal question its own internal targets raise, not the faith its members share with people who have never heard of it.
Verdict: Documented network. Ziklag has not been charged with, or found by any court or regulator to have committed, a legal violation, and its general counsel disputed unspecified parts of the reporting without saying which parts. What is on the record, drawn from internal documents obtained by ProPublica and Documented and assessed by six tax-law specialists (three of them quoted above by name), is a tax-exempt charity that budgeted millions of dollars toward explicit vote and voter-registration-challenge targets in a single election cycle, funded by donor families under no legal obligation to be disclosed, organized around a doctrine that names government itself as territory to be taken.
Ziklag, its general counsel, and its named donor families were not separately contacted for this piece. The reporting above is drawn from the ProPublica/Documented investigation and the subsequent journalism cited below, not from independent outreach by Deceit.