By Sydney Bauer and Diana Carboni / openDemocracy
US non-profit 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 this year’s Super Bowl 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 Centre (SPLC) – an allegation it denies.
In total Servant gave the group $65.9m from 2018 to 2021 – an average of more than $16m a year. As a result, ADF’s grant income rose from $55m in 2017 to $96.8m 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 $1.3m a year and receive around $4m. But after the split with NCF, Servant pocketed more than $1bn in contributions – a large chunk of which actually came from the NCF.
The NCF is considered the biggest US charity for Christian causes and has been accused of channelling millions of dollars to hate groups. Almost immediately after the split with Servant, it gave the group $307m, followed by another $11m in 2019. It also received more than $222m 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.
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What is a DAF?
Both Servant and the NCF are operators of so-called ‘donor-advised funds’ (DAF), which enable typically wealthy customers to take advantage of tax breaks associated with charitable giving by handing over cash to be distributed on their behalf. A client can suggest where their DAF operators should distribute their money, but the operator has the final say on where the cash goes, and it may be passed between different funds before actually being donated. Clients that donate through DAF can remain anonymous, even to their beneficiaries and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Unlike for private foundations, there is no legal requirement for DAFs to give out a percentage of the donations they receive to charity.
This type of money transfer from one DAF operator to another grew by 409% between 2015 and 2019, and hit $1bn 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 operators – those 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 marginalised 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 $300m 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 $272m to 36 American groups that work to restrict the rights of women and LGBTIQ people in the US and abroad, an openDemocracy investigation revealed earlier this year. Servant donated a fifth of that sum and the NCF almost a half.
Sydney Bauer
Sydney Bauer is a transgender journalist based in Atlanta, US. She covers sports, politics and major events through the lens of identity and gender. After coming out as transgender in 2019 she has followed closely legislation at the state level that seeks to curtail the rights of transgender Americans.
Diana Cariboni
Diana is based in Uruguay and started writing for Tracking the Backlash in 2018. She is now our Latin America editor, coordinating our investigative reporting in the region. She was previously co-editor-in-chief of the IPS news agency and led its Latin America desk for more than ten years. She wrote the book ‘Guantánamo Entre Nosotros’ (2017) and won Uruguay’s national press award in 2018. Follow her on Twitter (@diana_cariboni). Contact her at diana.cariboni@opendemocracy.netwith tips for new stories in Latin America.