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Jesus Didn’t Teach Hate, But the Group Behind the ‘He Gets Us’ Super Bowl Ads Funds It
Over the last five years the Servant Foundation has become the main identifiable source of funding for Alliance Defending Freedom, described as an anti-LGBTIQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Feb 13, 2024
A U.S. nonprofit that aired two ads during Sunday’s Super Bowl attempting to rebrand Jesus for Gen Z is also the main funder of a designated hate group opposing abortion and LGBTIQ rights, openDemocracy can reveal.
The Servant Foundation has plunged millions of dollars into its “He Gets Us” ads, which paint Jesus as an “influencer” who was “cancelled” for standing up for his beliefs. The controversial adverts were shown at the Super Bowl for the second year running and have been plastered across billboards in the United States over the last year.
But analysis of financial accounts by openDemocracy shows over the last five years the Servant Foundation has also grown to become the main identifiable source of funding for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), described as an anti-LGBTIQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)—an allegation it denies.
In total Servant gave the group $65.9 million from 2018 to 2021—an average of more than $16 million a year. As a result, ADF’s grant income rose from $55 million in 2017 to $96.8 million in 2021.
Servant’s boom coincides with its split from the National Christian Foundation (NCF), of which it was an affiliate from its launch in 2000 through to 2017. During this time, it would hand out an average $1.3 million a year and receive around $4 million. But after the split with NCF, Servant pocketed more than $1 billion in contributions—a large chunk of which actually came from the NCF.
NCF and Servant Foundation are among 12 DAF operators that from 2017 to 2020 gave $272 million to 36 American groups that work to restrict the rights of women and LGBTIQ people in the U.S. and abroad.
The NCF is considered the biggest U.S. charity for Christian causes and has been accused of channeling millions of dollars to hate groups. Almost immediately after the split with Servant, it gave the group $307 million, followed by another $11 million in 2019. It also received more than $222 million from Servant between 2018 and 2021, showing a mutual flow of money that, according to experts, “adds a layer of secrecy” to donations they make on behalf of clients.
This type of money transfer from one donor-advised fund (DAF) operator to another grew by 409% between 2015 and 2019, and hit $1 billion only in 2019, according to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies published in 2021. That study only focused on the biggest commercial DAF operatorsthose nonprofit branches of financial companies, thus excluding DAF operators like Servant and NCF.
“Wealthy people give to intermediaries, such as private foundations and DAF operators, which in 2021 received almost a third of all donations,” Chuck Collins, director for the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, told openDemocracy. “When these donor-controlled intermediaries pass money back and forth, they can add layers of secrecy so the public doesn’t know where the funds are ending up.”
Stephanie Peng, research manager with the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), which supports marginalized communities, told openDemocracy: “Anonymity is really dangerous, because you don’t know who is really behind all that money; who is controlling massive, massive amounts of money; and necessarily where that funding is going.”
The Servant Foundation was set up in Kansas by evangelical lawyer Bill High. Its partnership with the NCF included the NCF performing “accounting and other back-room tasks” for Servant. High ended the relationship in 2017, reportedly to offer lower fees to clients, and also changed Servant’s public-facing name to The Signatry.
Servant made headlines with its Super Bowl ads, which were part of the $300 million He Gets Us campaign hoping to fuel conservative evangelical goals.
NCF and Servant Foundation are among 12 DAF operators that from 2017 to 2020 gave $272 million to 36 American groups that work to restrict the rights of women and LGBTIQ people in the U.S. and abroad, an openDemocracy investigation revealed earlier this year. Servant donated a fifth of that sum and the NCF almost a half.
Hobby Lobby Money
By the time Servant split from the NCF, High had forged a crucial relationship with David Green, until then a substantial client of NCF whose retail giant Hobby Lobby plays a prominent role in battles against sexual and reproductive rights.
In 2014, Hobby Lobby won a big case when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could deny contraception coverage under their workers’ health insurance policies, if doing so would violate their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” The NCF had given millions of dollars to the law groups litigating this case—ADF and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a law firm that has represented the Greens since 2012.
High, who retired as Servant CEO in January, and Green have co-authored several books about Christian charitable giving. Green also appeared in a 2020 promotional video for Servant.
Among other beneficiaries of money channeled through Servant are at least seven U.S. organizations well-known for their attacks against equal rights: ADF, the Fellowship Foundation, Focus on the Family, American Center for Law and Justice, Family Research Council, Heartbeat International, and the Heritage Foundation.
Analysis of donation flows suggests cash from Green that once moved through the NCF could now be getting channeled through Servant. Since 2018, Servant has given big money to two groups focused on international evangelism and distribution of Christian literature that are also listed on the Hobby Lobby donation webpage. They rank second and third in money received from Servant from 2018 to 2021—Every Home for Christ ($181 million) and OneHope ($107 million). Meanwhile, the NCF, which had given $47 million to Every Home for Christ and $25 million to OneHope in 2017, has drastically reduced its contributions to these organizations since then. Green was also reportedly a major donor for the He Gets Us campaign. Both Hobby Lobby and Green did not respond to questions about whether they had stopped donating cash via the NCF and instead donated it via Servant.
The Museum of the Bible, founded by the Green family in 2017 at a cost of $500 million—and marred by scandals for buying looted and smuggled archaeological artifacts and exhibiting “modern forgeries” of Dead Sea Scroll fragments—is another big grantee of the Servant Foundation. It was given more than $3.2 million between 2018 and 2021 and before that had received hundreds of millions from the NCF since 2013.
Funding Hate and Misinformation
Among other beneficiaries of money channeled through Servant are at least seven U.S. organizations well-known for their attacks against equal rights: ADF, the Fellowship Foundation, Focus on the Family, American Center for Law and Justice, Family Research Council, Heartbeat International, and the Heritage Foundation.
ADF won a Supreme Court case this year that allows businesses to discriminate against gay couples on free speech grounds, and was one of the groups that masterminded the strategy to overturn the constitutionally protected right to abortion in the U.S. It has defended the sterilization of trans people in Europe and fought the decriminalization of gay sex in Belize. It also launched efforts to ban transgender students’ access to bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity.
Also a SPLC-designated hate group, Family Research Council makes false claims about LGBTIQ people, and has been involved in funding and promoting harmful conversion therapies against LGBTIQ people, as well as opposing U.S. local bans to these activities.
The exchange of money between DAF operators as Servant and NCF is a model extending internationally.
In 2021, openDemocracyrevealed how Focus on the Family, another organization funded by Servant, had platforms for the provision of conversion therapies in the U.S. and Costa Rica.
openDemocracy requested interviews with all the organizations and individuals named in this investigation. Only the NCF answered through a short written statement signed by its communications vice president, Steve Chapman.
“The NCF does not develop or implement strategies about which charities or causes to support [and] does not rely on third-party designations or labels in our grantmaking process,” Chapman said. “All grants are initiated by the recommendations of our givers.”
In the statement, the DAF operator claimed to serve “over 25,000 givers that use Giving Funds [donor-advised funds] to individually support their favorite causes and charities,” and to have given more than $14 billion since 1982 to more than 70,000 charities that “are providing clean water to the thirsty, rescuing victims of human trafficking, translating the Bible into new languages, and much more.”
A Global Model
The exchange of money between DAF operators as Servant and NCF is a model extending internationally. The NCF, for example, partnered with TrustBridge Global, a charitable giving vehicle that declares itself as the first truly global DAF operator. Registered in 2016 in Florida and Switzerland, its CEO is a former NCF employee. TrustBridge has set up affiliate foundations around the world and claims to have 70,000 nonprofits vetted to receive DAFs. The list includes the ADF branch in the U.K. TrustBridge has also received millions of dollars from Servant.
Servant presents itself as a “global community” that has given $4 billion in “transformational grants for nonprofits around the world,” and supports projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The fund also claims to have given $2 million in 150 grants for emergency relief in Ukraine, and over $1 million “for supporting missionaries around the globe, fueling the spread of the gospel in at least 43 countries,” especially in Africa.
Its website says it gave out over $470 million in grants in 2021, while receiving $899 million in contributions. As a DAF operator, it is able to accept other assets beyond cash, such as property, cryptocurrency, stocks, and mutual funds, as well as life insurance payouts.
“We want donors to be accountable to who they’re giving money to.”
When clients “give” assets other than money to these funds, they can write off the total amount the gifts are worth. This way, donors can bypass capital gains taxes from these gifts, which they would have to pay if they converted them into cash holdings.
Some DAF operators even have estate-planning options to bypass estate taxes and continue charitable giving after a donor dies.
For the NCRP, this is troubling.
“We want donors to be accountable to who they’re giving money to. So if donors are putting all of this money into a DAF, but that money sits there for years and years, and there are no beneficiaries, if the donor made a commitment and that commitment doesn’t make its way down to the recipient organisation, then that’s a problem,” NCRP’s Stephanie Peng said.
Legislative efforts to establish “reasonable timeframes” for paying out assets have so far failed.
High, Servant’s founder, has argued against any effort to make DAFs more accountable. “A hallmark of American charity has always been a right to privacy. We should not take away that privacy right. On the contrary, donor-advised funds have done much to democratize giving, as witnessed by their rapid rise,” he wrote in a Forbes article.
His foundation continues to court new donors. Its website even has a calculator for prospective customers to see how much in taxes they could save by donating.
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House Committee to Investigate Alito Leak, Right-Wing Lobbying at Supreme Court
"It's clear that some of these justices are simply incapable of behaving ethically or putting the law before politics, and the court is unwilling or unable to police itself," said one court watchdog.
Dec 02, 2022
U.S. Supreme Court watchdogs on Thursday applauded the House Judiciary Committee for announcing it will hold a hearing next week regarding allegations that Justice Samuel Alito leaked at least one of the court's rulings to right-wing activists--and called on the Senate to follow suit in the next Congress.
"The people of the country deserve real answers from justices we trust to wield the power of the highest court in the country."
The committee, which is led by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and will be handed over to Republicans after they take control of the House on January 3, is set to open its investigation into the allegations on December 8.
The news of the hearing follows a bombshell New York Timesreport last month, in which Rev. Rob Schenck, the former head of religious right-wing group Faith & Action, said he had led a lobbying campaign targeting Supreme Court justices.
After Schenck directed his associates to donate to the Supreme Court Historical Society and attend events with the justices, Alito allegedly told two of them that the court would rule in favor of craft retailer Hobby Lobby in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby several weeks before the ruling was officially announced.
"House Judiciary is right to move quickly to investigate, and Senate Democrats should plan to take up the mantle in the new year," Brian Fallon, president of court reform group Demand Justice, toldHuffPost Thursday.
\u201cNEWS: The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing about Operation Higher Court and Politicking at SCOTUS, following a bombshell NYT report about ethical issues at SCOTUS.\n\nWe have been calling for congressional investigations and applaud this move.\nhttps://t.co/0LkjoEEKwc\u201d— Demand Justice (@Demand Justice) 1669922838
After the Times report was published last month, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)--who chair the House and Senate Judiciary committees' panels on the courts, respectively--wrote to the Supreme Court's legal counsel asking a number of questions about ethics at the high court, which unlike other federal courts does not abide by a binding ethics code.
The legal counsel denied any wrongdoing by Alito but did not answer the lawmakers' questions, prompting more than 60 progressive groups including Demand Justice to demand congressional hearings, including testimony by Schenck.
Whitehouse and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and will maintain his position after the new year, have not yet announced their own investigation.
"We will continue to pursue oversight, including oversight into these latest troubling allegations," Whitehouse said on the Senate floor Wednesday. "The people of the country deserve real answers from justices we trust to wield the power of the highest court in the country."
Sarah Lipton-Lubet, executive director of Take Back the Court Action Fund, called the House hearings "a good first step" in demanding accountability from the court.
"We applaud the House Judiciary Committee for holding a hearing on the rampant collusion between the Republican Supreme Court justices and right-wing special interests," said Lipton-Lubet. "It's clear that some of these justices are simply incapable of behaving ethically or putting the law before politics, and the court is unwilling or unable to police itself."
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It's Time to End Religious Exemptions During Public Health Emergencies
There is no moral or theological basis for people to opt out of their civic duty.
Sep 03, 2021
Just as many other universities have been doing, in August, the University of Virginia announced that it was disenrolling 238 students for the autumn semester. They could reenroll provided they showed proof of vaccination against COVID-19 or obtained medical or religious exemptions by a date certain. And therein lies a problem.
The Delta variant of the virus is extremely transmissible - more so than the common cold - and it can occasionally break through and infect a vaccinated person. Thus, even one unvaccinated student in a classroom greatly heightens the risk to an educational institution. Obviously, no blame for not being vaccinated attaches to those who for valid medical reasons cannot be vaccinated. But what about those who claim an exemption for religious reasons?
It is difficult for a layman to find an excuse for such an exception. A majority of Americans professing a faith adhere to Christianity, and is it not an injunction of Jesus in the Gospel according to Matthew to "love thy neighbor as thyself?" In a situation in which communicating a lethal virus to a frail or immune-compromised person might be a death sentence, due regard for one's neighbor ought to the overriding consideration for any believing Christian.
The Catholic Church agrees, and Pope Francis is emphatic:
I believe that morally everyone must take the vaccine. It is the moral choice because it is about your life but also the lives of others.
The other major Christian denominations take the same line. Even Christian Science is unambiguous:
For more than a century, our denomination has counseled respect for public health authorities and conscientious obedience to the laws of the land, including those requiring vaccination.
The other global religions espouse similar views, including Islam. The notorious exception is Islam as perversely interpreted by the Taliban, who incidentally make rather role curious models for American Christians to be emulating.
Still, we see such spectacles as megachurch pastors issuing exemption letters en masse, and a Catholic cleric, Cardinal Raymond Burke, defying his own faith's hierarchy and strongly denouncing vaccine and social distancing. He even criticized fellow Catholics for not believing Jesus would protect them from the virus; it is somewhat inconvenient for his argument that he has been hospitalized with COVID-19.
Clearly, renegade clerics handing out exemptions or publicly advocating against vaccination are not speaking on behalf of the religious doctrine into which they were ordained, so there is no reason to assume their sincerity. Rather, they are taking a partisan political stand on a medical matter while exploiting the near-universal American deference to claims for special treatment based on faith. This conclusion is bolstered by the evidence that adherence to a political party is a better indicator of a person's position on vaccine than religion or any other belief.
The fact that organized religions support vaccination renders the notion that government or business must automatically recognize faith-based exemptions rather shaky to begin with. But there is a more fundamental, constitutional objection to religious exemptions: why is religion privileged above other constitutional rights in a public health emergency that has taken over 640,000 lives? Why should a religious claim allow someone to opt out of an obligation binding on everyone else?
The Constitution recognizes many freedoms, such as freedom of speech, expression, and association, as well as the freedom of religious belief, but also of non-belief. It is the chief business of law and jurisprudence in a free, pluralistic society to balance those competing claims, never letting one presumptive right run roughshod over the others. They must do this while observing the preeminent duty of government: to protect the lives of its citizens.
It should be obvious to even a first-year law student that a government worker cannot claim a conscience-based exemption from a federal government vaccine mandate with the declared reason of his membership in a political party, or belief in UFOs, or because he thinks Bill Gates uses vaccines to implant microchips in people.
Accordingly, the vaccine refusal of someone who, like Cardinal Burke, thinks that Jesus will protect him, begins to sound equally as undeserving of special privilege as our hypothetical examples.
The reason for the differing treatment of constitutional claims is painfully clear, Justice Stephen Breyer's recent high-minded pronouncements about the independence of the courts to the contrary. In recent years, federal courts have increasingly become partisan instruments, and Republican-appointed judges have steadily expanded the controlling authority of religious doctrines over people who may want nothing to do with those doctrines.
The Hobby Lobby case is a notorious example. In that decision, the Supreme Court ruled that an employer may, on religious grounds, deny certain types of health insurance to certain employees, in this case, insurance coverage for contraceptives or abortion services. The court not only decided it was permissible for employers to impose their religious views on employees, but also that a religious claim was sufficiently privileged that it overrode the fact that the decision would have a blatantly disparate and discriminatory impact upon women.
The country already has endured almost a half century of bitter controversy over Roe v. Wade, in which one side of the argument bases its demands on religious claims which, they assert, are so extraordinary that a women's presumptive right of free choice must be prohibited by law to preserve unborn life. Now, ironically, as the culture war extends to vaccines, masks, and social distancing, extraordinary religious claims are brandished to support the dogma that free choice is so paramount that it supersedes the very right to life of innocent third parties.
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