Judge Fred Biery’s gavel fell on August 20th, 2025. Eleven Texas school districts wouldn’t have to display the Ten Commandments in their classrooms. Not yet, anyway.
Attorney General Ken Paxton fired back within hours. Every other district in the state would comply with the law regardless, requiring 16-by-20-inch posters declaring Christian religious law for children of all faiths.
This isn’t just another church-state skirmish. It’s a bold advance of Christian nationalism — a movement that doesn’t just want to influence government policy, but to explicitly ground American law and society in biblical principles and Christianity. Christian nationalism demands that the government actively promote Christian doctrine and prioritize the interests of Christian citizens.
And in Texas, Christian nationalism is growing like a weed, fertilized by Trump’s implementation of Project 2025 policies.
The men behind the curtain of this Christian nationalist surge are two West Texas oil billionaires who preach from Sunday pulpits and have spent $45 million since 2000 reshaping state government for their theological vision.
Standing against them is James Talarico, a 36-year-old seminary student and state representative from Austin who splits his time between fighting their bills at the Texas Capitol and studying scripture in the evenings. He earns $600 a month in his political role.
Talarico’s path to this theological battlefield runs through public school classrooms where he worked as a teacher in the educational system that Christian nationalists now target for transformation. His faith credentials run deep: his grandfather was a Baptist preacher in South Texas, he’s attended the same church since age two, and now pursues a Master’s of Divinity at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary while teaching Sunday school.
It’s an unlikely holy war. Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks versus James Talarico. Two sides that read the same Bible, attend the same type of churches, and claim the same savior, yet couldn’t disagree more about what it means to be Christian in America. Talarico opposes them not despite his faith, but because of it. Where they see a divine mandate for political control, he sees a betrayal of the Gospel. Where they demand government-enforced religion, he preaches Christianity that changes hearts, not laws.
This is what happens when billionaires decide they’re prophets. And when a seminary student refuses to let them hijack his religion.
The Goat Shed Prophet
Farris Wilks grew up surrounded by the scent of fresh mortar and limestone dust. In a converted goat shed east of Abilene, Texas, the future billionaire learned construction basics from his bricklayer father. More importantly, he absorbed a worldview that would reshape his understanding of how faith should rebuild society itself.
Fast-forward decades. The 72-year-old now stands behind the pulpit of Assembly of Yahweh, the church his family built stone by stone. He warns his congregation how “absorption in bounty makes us forgetful of the giver.”
They know him as their pastor. They might not realize he’s worth $3.5 billion.
Three hundred miles west in Midland, Tim Dunn delivers his own brand of pulpit politics. The two men couldn’t be more different in style. Wilks speaks softly, methodically. Dunn’s personality runs as sharp as a West Texas wind.
A British journalist once asked Dunn about his drilling operations. The “thin-faced, blue-jeaned Bush-backer” insisted his oil deposits had existed for only 4,000 years — Genesis time, not the 200 million years his own geologists acknowledged privately.
Both men share one conviction that separates them from typical wealthy conservatives. Most wealthy political donors want to limit government intervention. Dunn and Wilks want to Christianize it.
This distinction drove their transformation from successful businessmen into architects of America’s most stringent Christian nationalist political operation. Political action committees connected to billionaires can end careers overnight.
Republican activist Zachary Maxwell knows the Wilks family personally. He describes their goal without ambiguity: “They want to get Christians in office to change the ordinances, laws, rules, and regulations to fit the Bible.”
“The goal is to tear up, tear down public education to nothing and rebuild it,” says Dorothy Burton, a former GOP activist and religious scholar who toured with Wilks on the Christian speaking circuit, grasped the broader vision behind his ideology, and became disillusioned.
Wilks’ and Dunn’s ground-level strategy plays out in school board meetings across Texas, which they stack with candidates recruited, according to Republican Board Member Courtney Gore of Granbury, “to cause as much disruption and chaos as possible.” The chaos serves a purpose. It undermines public confidence in existing institutions to clear space for Christian alternatives.
Conservative credentials provide no protection from theological purges. Joe Strauss served as the Republican speaker of the Texas House. When the billionaire preachers declared he lacked the right to lead, party loyalty meant nothing. His conservative voting record proved irrelevant.
His disqualification? Strauss is Jewish. “They don’t think anybody who’s not a Christian should serve in elected office,” explains Talarico.
The Christian Nationalist Brain Trust
David Barton lurks behind Dunn’s and Wilks’ evolution from oil tycoons to theocratic kingmakers. A former math teacher and author of evangelical books, operating out of Aledo, Texas, a town with a population of 5,000, Barton is also a fervent Christian nationalist who has been well rewarded for his guidance.
Wilks has funneled over $3 million into Barton’s WallBuilders organization. In return, Barton supplies the theological framework that transformed two wealthy oilmen into Christian nationalist revolutionaries. His central thesis — that church-state separation represents a fabrication by forces seeking to obscure America’s Christian heritage — gives the billionaires moral permission to use government power for religious ends.
The operation functions as a bill mill through Project Blitz, drafting Christian nationalist legislation designed for replication nationwide. This year, nearly identical Ten Commandments bills surfaced from Louisiana to Nebraska. The language could’ve been photocopied.
Barton’s reach extends to the highest levels of power. House Speaker Mike Johnson credits Barton’s “profound influence on me and my work and my life and everything I do.” Professional historians dismiss Barton’s work as revisionist fantasy. But his ideas have captured white evangelicals nationwide — including billionaire preachers who see themselves as instruments of divine will.
Together, this trio — Barton providing ideas, Dunn and Wilks supplying money and political muscle — has shown how focused billionaires armed with religious conviction can reshape American democracy from the ground up.
Faith and Resistance
James Talarico’s war against Christian nationalism doesn’t spring from secular skepticism. It comes from Christian conviction. This theological grounding gives his opposition particular power in a state where religious arguments carry more weight than constitutional abstractions.
“If we have to force people to put up a poster, to me that means we have a dead religion,” he argues. “A religion that no longer moves people, a religion that no longer speaks to people’s hearts.”
His TikTok presence has exploded to 1.2 million followers. In his most viral critique, which reached 18 million viewers, Talarico delivered a devastating assessment: “Christian nationalists walk around with a mouthful of scripture and a heartful of hate. Forcing our religion onto Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and atheist students is not love.”
When Republicans brought the Ten Commandments mandate to the legislative floor, Talarico’s speech went viral on TikTok, as he schooled audiences on the Constitutional and authentic Christian teaching. The platform allows him to reach young Americans who believe Christianity requires them to choose between faith and their values. His content explains Jesus’s conflicts with religious authorities — how Christ rejected legalism for love.
“Jesus regularly got into conflicts with the religious authorities of his time because he was rejecting legalism and embracing the spirit of the law,” Talarico explains. “In our modern context, that should mean loving our gay neighbors as ourselves.”
This theological approach creates discomfort across political lines. Some progressive activists question his emphasis on faith. Christian conservatives object when he makes theological arguments for universal healthcare and anti-poverty programs during Bible studies with Republican colleagues.
Talarico sees the discomfort as necessary. “There’s always gonna be progressive Christians and conservative Christians,” he acknowledges. “But in this country, Christianity has become synonymous with right-wing politics. So much so that when people hear I’m a Christian politician, they just assume I’m a Republican.”
His analysis of Christian nationalism cuts to its core motivation: total control. “Christian nationalists are trying to control what we read, who we love, who we marry, when we have children, what we do with our own bodies, where we travel,” Talarico observes. “This disturbing desire to control other people is rooted in fear. And it actually shows that there’s a lack of faith, because the opposite of faith is not doubt — doubt is a healthy part of any faith. The opposite of faith is control. And that’s kind of at the heart of this Christian nationalist movement.”
The damage extends beyond politics into the church itself. Talarico frequently receives messages from people “who have been hurt by organized religion, in particular the American Christian Church” — women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color “who have really been targeted by Christian nationalists and those who are perverting the gospel to consolidate their own social and economic and political power.”
He argues that “this MAGA Christianity has really repelled young people away from the church. And if we’re gonna save our faith tradition and save our church for generations to come, we have got to get back in touch with the roots of our religion, which is love, peace, and justice.”
“I think a lot of Gen Z, a lot of my fellow millennials, when they hear me talking about my faith and how it informs my public service, they’re like, ‘I’ve never heard of this kind of Christianity,'” he reflects. “They were told that if you wanted to be a Christian, you had to hate gay people. If you wanted to be a Christian, you had to want to control women. If you wanted to be a Christian, you had to reject science.” By forcing that assumption into the open, Talarico challenges the Christian nationalist claim to exclusive religious legitimacy. His very existence as a progressive Christian politician undermines their narrative that faithful Americans must choose their political vision.
The Testing Ground Reality
For Talarico, the Christian nationalist agenda isn’t a distant threat — it’s his daily reality at the Texas Capitol. The human cost appears starkest in Texas’s abortion restrictions. “The most extreme abortion ban in the country, no exceptions for rape or incest or threats to the mother’s health. 26,000 Texas women since that Trump abortion ban went into place in our state, have been forced to give birth to their rapist’s baby. Infant and maternal mortality have spiked. Pregnant women with life-threatening complications are being told to wait in emergency room parking lots until they go into sepsis. So this has never been about life. This has always been about controlling women,” Talarico states.
Educational policy reveals similar extremism. Texas mandates “forcing public school teachers to display the 10 Commandments, replacing school counselors with untrained, unsupervised religious chaplains, teaching Bible stories to elementary school students in public schools as historical fact,” he laments.
Talarico positions himself as an early warning system for the nation. “I hope I can be a canary in the coal mine for the rest of the country and urge my fellow Texans and my fellow Americans to avoid this path because it only leads to death and despair,” he warns. “The forces behind these dangerous policies are now promising to take them nationwide. They’re testing these ideas here in Texas before they take them across the country.”
The Network of Influence
The billionaire preachers’ influence stretches far beyond Texas through what Talarico describes as “a sprawling network of think tanks, advocacy organizations, media outlets.”
Conservative news and opinion website The Daily Wire has received millions in funding from Wilks, who helped launch the far-right media outlet and remains an owner of the company. Nearly every Republican in the Texas legislature depends on their financial support. Wilks has donated $3 million to Project 2025 supporter PragerU, a non-accredited, far-right education outlet whose conservative Christian content promotes a far-right agenda and celebrates a biased version of American history that minimizes the impact of slavery, promotes Islamophobia, denigrates the LGBTQ+ community, and pushes other bigoted beliefs. Donations like Wilks’ have helped put PragerU content in multiple states’ public school curricula.
Tim Dunn’s position as a board member of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) has proven particularly significant. The organization spawned Kevin Roberts, who left TPPF to head up the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025. It also provided Trump with Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins. Meanwhile, Wilks funds the Center for Renewing America, whose leader, Russell Vought, is currently director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and lists “Christian Nationalism” as a priority for Trump’s second term.
Even scandal hasn’t slowed their progress. It’s simply forced tactical adjustments. When their Defend Texas Liberty PAC hosted white supremacist Nick Fuentes, creating negative headlines, they didn’t retreat. They rebranded. Two million dollars flowed into “Texans United for a Conservative Majority.” The new logo replaced the Texas Capitol’s Goddess of Liberty statue with a cross.
The Theological Battlefield
The problem isn’t the lack of religion in public life, Talarico argues. It’s corrupted religion. His alternative theology suggests faithful Christians can embrace both religious convictions and progressive political positions. But only by rejecting the Christian nationalist synthesis that’s dominated evangelical politics for decades.
But it is a steep, uphill battle. Other states are already adopting the Texas approach as the divide between politics and religion disintegrates. Public Religion Research Institute polling shows 30 percent of Americans support or sympathize with Christian nationalism.
For these preacher-billionaires, political control merely prepares the ground for Christian governance until Christ returns, an apocalyptic timeline that gives their work ultimate urgency while justifying almost any tactical compromise in service of eternal goals.
Whether authentic Christianity can resist its weaponized version remains unresolved. James Talarico is staking his career — and his calling — on that possibility.
