How 'Christian' Billionaires Captured the Courts
They Preached Morality, Bought Power, and Hijacked the Justice System While the Rest of Us Slept
In late August 2019, while the U.S. was dealing with the aftermath of the Walmart shooting in El Paso and the Dayton, Ohio, attack, something very different was unfolding across the Atlantic. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson asked Queen Elizabeth II to prorogue Parliament during the most critical weeks before the Brexit deadline. The government insisted it was routine. The opposition immediately called it what it was: a way to dodge scrutiny and shut down debate.
The entire dispute quickly landed in the UK Supreme Court — and with no mechanism to “reverse” a Queen’s decision, everyone watched, wondering what the judges could possibly do.
A month later, the President of the Supreme Court, Lady Brenda Hale, delivered the ruling in a televised statement. She explained that the Prime Minister’s advice to the Queen had been unconstitutional. The court didn’t overturn the Queen — it invalidated the advice that led to her action. And once that advice was declared unlawful, everything that followed collapsed with it. Legally speaking, the court wasn’t reopening Parliament — because, in the eyes of the law, the Prime Minister had effectively gone to the Queen with an empty piece of paper, meaning Parliament had never been prorogued in the first place.
For most Brits, this was shocking on several levels. Not just because the Queen had been asked to sign off on something clearly unconstitutional, placing her in the middle of day-to-day politics, but because almost no one had ever heard a Supreme Court judge mentioned individually on the news before — let alone seen its President reading out a judgment on live TV. People were like, “Lady Brenda who?” That moment sparked a debate about whether the Supreme Court should become more visible to the public, as it is in the US. The answer came quickly: absolutely not. Doing so would politicise the court, and that goes against the very spirit of the UK’s judicial system.
What mattered was the institution, not the individuals — because in the UK, the institution defines the role and limits of the judges. It’s not unelected individuals acting on personal political or religious views and having the power to override elected governments, all while claiming legitimacy from presidents and Senates that disappeared with elections long ago.
How It Started — and Why It Worked
To understand what’s happening in the US courts today, we have to go back to the 1980s, when the Christian right realised it was losing the culture war in schools, media, and science. Evolution was accepted as fact, women had rights, and gay people were no longer invisible. Preaching from pulpits wasn’t enough anymore. They needed power that couldn’t be voted out every four years.
So they turned to the courts — the one branch that doesn’t answer to voters. Judges are the priests of the legal world: they interpret the sacred texts (the Constitution), and once they’re appointed, they’re almost impossible to remove.
The billionaires funding the Christian right understood this perfectly. They shifted their money from the pews to the law.
They built an entire network of legal factories like the Federalist Society, backed by rich families such as the Kochs, the Scaifes, and the Bradleys — and more quietly by Christian billionaires like the DeVos family, the Wilks brothers, and the Greens of Hobby Lobby fame.
The Federalist Factory
If you’ve ever wondered why so many Supreme Court justices sound like they came from the same conservative cloning lab — well, they did. It’s called the Federalist Society.
It started as a bunch of conservative law students whining that Harvard and Yale were “too liberal.” But behind the whines came big money. Billionaires loved the idea of grooming young lawyers who’d see capitalism and Christianity as holy partners.
Soon, the Society wasn’t just a club. It was a conveyor belt. Law students joined, impressed the right people, got internships at Christian-funded think tanks, clerked for conservative judges, and eventually became those judges.
And who funded the conveyor belt? The same Christian billionaires who pretend to hate “elites” but built their own Ivy League pipeline.
By the time Trump took office, this machine was so well-oiled that he didn’t even pick his own judges — he outsourced it. His Supreme Court picks were handpicked by the Federalist Society, funded and blessed by billionaires who believe God wrote the Constitution.
Meet the Money Behind the Robes
The DeVos Family
Amway money turned into religious influence. The DeVos clan doesn’t just push school vouchers — they also fund Christian legal networks that aim to erode the separation between church and state. They’ve bankrolled groups like the Acton Institute and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), both pushing the idea that Christian business owners should be exempt from “ungodly” laws — like serving gay customers or covering birth control.
The Wilks Brothers
Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, the Texas oil barons who already poured millions into hard-right politics, also put their money into reshaping the judiciary. Their donations flow through groups that fund judicial elections, conservative media, and legal advocacy to make Christian supremacy sound like religious liberty.
The Green Family (Hobby Lobby)
They turned a craft store into a crusade. After winning their Supreme Court case in 2014 — allowing corporations to deny birth control coverage based on “religious beliefs” — they proved money and faith could rewrite federal law. Now, they bankroll Christian law schools and biblical “museums” that blend history with holy spin.
The Koch-Linked Christian Billionaires
While not all Koch donors are overtly religious, many of their network’s top funders overlap with Christian billionaires who treat deregulation as a divine mission. To them, stripping government power isn’t about freedom — it’s about making sure no one stops their “moral capitalism.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom - God’s Law Firm
If the Federalist Society grooms judges, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) supplies the ammunition. It’s the legal arm of the Christian right — a multimillion-dollar law machine backed by billionaires, churches, and donors who think LGBTQ equality and women’s autonomy are the devil’s work.
ADF writes the laws, trains the lawyers, and argues the cases that chip away at modern rights. They’re behind the anti-abortion laws, the “religious freedom” cases, and the ongoing crusade to turn churches into political donors.
You don’t see ADF ads on TV. That’s the point. They operate in the shadows, and they’re loaded.
Their donors include the DeVos family, the National Christian Foundation, and anonymous funds that keep their hands clean. Their alumni sit in Congress, in think tanks, and even on the bench.
Capturing the Supreme Court
The Christian billionaire project reached its peak with the Supreme Court takeover.
Trump didn’t need to understand theology — he just needed to sign the papers. With the Federalist Society feeding him names and billionaire money greasing the process, he put three hard-right justices on the bench: Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.
These weren’t random picks. They were products of the Christian legal machine. All three had ties to Christian or corporate legal groups, and all three came with the promise of rolling back abortion rights, weakening LGBTQ protections, and expanding “religious liberty.”
And when the Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturned Roe v. Wade, it was the Christian billionaire's dream come true — a legal earthquake decades in the making, funded by men who never set foot in a courtroom.
They don’t need to scream about morality anymore. The law now does it for them.
How the Lower Courts Fell Too
The billionaires didn’t stop at the Supreme Court. They went for the whole system.
They poured money into judicial elections — especially in red states — to replace moderates with hardline Christian conservatives. They funded “family policy councils” and “constitutional sheriffs” who pressure local courts to interpret laws through a biblical lens.
And through groups like the Judicial Crisis Network, they spent hundreds of millions promoting or attacking judges depending on how obedient they were to the Christian-right agenda.
That’s how you end up with federal judges ruling that corporations can have religious rights — or that states can force women to give birth against their will.
The billionaires don’t need to win elections anymore. They’ve hardwired their beliefs into the court system.
The Scam of “Religious Liberty”
“Religious liberty” has never been about what they’re fighting for. They already have that. They can pray, preach, and live however they want.
What they want is religious privilege — the legal right to impose their religion on everyone else.
They want laws that say your boss can fire you for being gay, your pharmacist can refuse your prescription, and your kid’s school can teach creationism with taxpayer money.
They call that freedom. But it’s only freedom for them — and control for everyone else.
It’s the same old trick: frame domination as faith, oppression as virtue, and tyranny as tradition.
How the World Sees This Madness
To the rest of the world, it’s baffling — almost comedic — that the most powerful country on Earth lets judges shape national policy through their personal worldviews.
In Europe, judges apply the law; in America, they interpret it through theology, ideology, and whatever God whispered in their ear that week. In Canada, you’d get laughed out of court for citing scripture in a ruling. In the U.K., a judge using “biblical morality” as legal reasoning would be forced to resign before lunch.
Yet in the United States, this is treated as usual.
Supreme Court justices attend prayer rallies, quote religious texts in their opinions, and take luxury trips funded by billionaires — and it’s all perfectly legal. Think about that: the country that markets itself as the world’s model of democracy is increasingly run by unelected preachers in robes.
Foreign observers don’t see “religious liberty.” They see religious capture — a democracy infected by faith-based favoritism and billionaire meddling. From Paris to Tokyo, journalists describe the American judiciary as a theocratic circus where God, money, and politics sit on the same bench.
To outsiders, the idea that life-and-death rulings depend on one judge’s “faith” isn’t freedom — it’s insanity.
You’d expect the separation of religion and state to start with the Supreme Court, especially since its decisions can override those of elected governments. In the rest of the West, judges go out of their way to avoid any association with a particular religion or political party, because it would put the neutrality of their decisions into question. In the US, judges are chosen because of those associations.
The Joke That Calls Itself Democracy
Even funnier — or sadder, depending on your tolerance for absurdity — is how Americans defend all this as “democracy.”
They claim judges are “legitimate” because presidents appoint them and senators confirm them. But that isn’t democracy — that’s aristocracy with extra paperwork. It’s like saying the pope is democratic because at some point someone once voted for the cardinal who chose him.
If the consequences of an election from 20 or 30 years ago are still steering the country today, then what’s the point? We might as well skip elections entirely, hand out presidents-for-life, still call it democracy, and save billions on holding elections along the way.
The Supreme Court is packed with people chosen by presidents who lost the popular vote and confirmed by senators who represent a minority of the population. Yet these judges make decisions that shape the lives of 330 million people for decades.
The excuse goes: “It’s democratic because elected officials picked them.” Okay. Then by that logic, when the politics of the country shift, the judges should shift too. Every government comes with its judges. But they don’t. They stay there for life — even if the world, the public, and basic reality have completely changed.
It’s like freezing the country in 1950 and expecting it to work in 2050.
If judges are going to rule according to ideology — not neutral law — then they should step aside when the ideology changes. Because what exactly is democratic about unelected priests-for-life overriding the will of an entire generation?
The system America calls “checks and balances” has turned into “lock and load.” Once a judge is in, they can outlive presidents, parliaments, movements, and public opinion.
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