Peter Montgomery has a story about Farris and Dan Wilks, a sort of theocratic version of the Koch brothers (who aren’t all that interested in religious matters), who made their fortune in fracking and are using it to support a broadly dominionist agenda.
Brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, who reaped a fortune off the fracking gold rush and cashed in their Texas-based company a few years ago for more than $3 billion. In addition to buying up vast swaths of land in the West, they’re “using the riches that the Lord has blessed them with to back specific goals,” as Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody puts it.
What are those goals? They’ve embraced both the anti-government politics of the Koch brothers and the religious right’s anti-gay, anti-choice cultural warfare. The Wilks brothers belong to Pastors and Pews, an organization connected to Christian-nation extremist David Lane, who wants to make the Bible a primary public school textbook.
Dan Wilks told Brody that we need to “bring the Bible back into the school, and start teaching our kids at a younger age.” Adds brother Farris: “They’re being taught the other ideas, the gay agenda, every day out in the world so we have to stand up and explain to them that that’s not real, that’s not proper, it’s not right.”
The brothers and their wives have followed in the footsteps of other far-right funders and set up foundations. Together they’ve funded them to the tune of more than $200 million. In 2011 and 2012 they gave away millions, both to churches and to culture-war political groups…
Another $4 million or so funded leading organizations in the religious right political movement, Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council. Another big chunk — more than $4 million — enriched anti-abortion groups. The brothers support a network of “pregnancy centers” that refuse to talk to single women about contraception and require married women to check with their husbands and pastors before discussing birth control…The brothers’ worldview seems to draw heavily on the teachings of a church founded by their father, which combines Biblical literalism with a heavy emphasis on the Old Testament. According to church doctrine, abortion is “murder,” including when it ends pregnancies resulting from rape and incest. And homosexuality is “a serious crime — a very grievous sin.”
They aren’t content to teach their own kids that Christianity is true, they want to teach your kids as well. Good thing that pesky constitution prevents them from doing that.