Organizations We’re Tracking

Young-earth creationist ministry operating the Creation Museum (opened May 2007, Petersburg, KY) and Ark Encounter.

Documented direct tie to this research: Ken Ham personally invited Homeschooling Today’s then-owners — the Howard and Murphy families — to the Creation Museum roughly a month after its 2007 opening, specifically so they could write about it for the magazine. That’s a dated, institutional link between Answers in Genesis and the homeschool-publishing world this project tracks, independent of any personal friendship.

Regional homeschool association serving the Austin, TX area; hosts an annual conference on the wider Vision Forum/HSLDA speaker circuit.

Confirmed as an early, direct entry point into this network’s Texas wing, and part of a documented 2003 co-location: Vision Forum, ATI/IBLP, Patrick Henry College, HSLDA, and Homeschooling Today all exhibited at the same Texas Home School Book Fair that year — five major network institutions under one roof, independent of any single personal connection.

Reformed church denomination. Governs St. Peter Presbyterian Church (Bristol/Abingdon, VA) through its Augustine Presbytery, as well as Doug Wilson’s Christ Church in Moscow, ID.

St. Peter Presbyterian moved to the CREC at a date not yet established, following its 2006 discipline by a different denomination (see the St. Peter Presbyterian Church entry). As of September 2025, the CREC’s Augustine Presbytery is engaged in an active, unexplained oversight action at that church — voting to install a “pastoral advisory commission” to “assist the session,” with no reason given in the presbytery’s own minutes. This is a live, unresolved thread in the research, not a historical one.

Radio ministry and conference circuit hosted by Kevin Swanson, a recurring figure across this network’s media world — he separately interviewed Jim Bob Howard and Steve and Kara Murphy of Homeschooling Today in 2008.

At Swanson’s own National Religious Liberties Conference (Des Moines, Nov. 2015), he called for “the death penalty for homosexuals,” citing Leviticus 20:13, in a session attended in person by three sitting Republican presidential candidates — Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal — one of the clearest documented bridges anywhere in this research between ground-level fundamentalist rhetoric and national campaign-level political power. Cruz later called sharing that platform “a mistake.” As of 2026, Generations continues to run an active conference and speaking circuit.

Study center founded by R.C. Sproul Jr. in Meadowview/Mendota, VA, the same year he planted Saint Peter Presbyterian Church nearby in Bristol.

Confirmed as an official vendor at Vision Forum’s SAICFF in both 2005 and 2006 — a direct institutional link between the two organizations, independent of any personal relationship between Sproul Jr. and Doug Phillips. Notably absent from Sproul Jr.’s own current, self-authored biography (LinkedIn, his personal website), which describes his present work only as freelance writing and a more recent teaching fellowship — third-party records retain the history in full even where his own current self-description omits it.

National Christian homeschool magazine.

Its 2006–2016 ownership era — during which it changed hands from the McDonald family to a joint purchase by the Murphy and Howard families — has since been erased from the magazine’s own public “About”/“Our Story” narrative. The current owner’s public account now presents her as simply inheriting the family business from the magazine’s original founders, with no mention anywhere of the McDonalds, Murphys, or Howards. This project documents it, via archived Wayback Machine snapshots, as a clean, dated case study of an institution retroactively rewriting its own leadership history.

National legal-advocacy organization for homeschooling families, and one of the most direct, documented institutional bridges in this research between the ground-level homeschool movement and elite legal/policy networks.

Doug Phillips worked six years as an HSLDA staff attorney before founding Vision Forum Ministries in 1998 — a direct institutional bridge, not merely a personal one. Michael Farris later publicly criticized Phillips’s teachings on women as oppressive, after quietly declining to invite him to HSLDA’s national conference for years beforehand. Farris later also led Alliance Defending Freedom.

Bible-teaching institute built around Gothard’s “umbrella of authority” doctrine — that obedience to hierarchical authority (God to husband to wife to child) provides spiritual protection. ATI is its homeschool curriculum, built around Bible memorization, large families, and debt avoidance.

Gothard resigned in 2014 after 34 women accused him of sexual harassment and molestation. Starting in 2016, at least ten women sued Gothard and IBLP alleging rape and abuse, and alleged the organization’s ALERT Academy functioned to “groom girls to be available to sexual assault”; that suit was later dismissed on statute-of-limitations grounds. Separate, active litigation — Merritt v. IBLP — continues, with the Texas Supreme Court allowing a civil-conspiracy claim to proceed in 2024–25. The Duggar family is documented as dually affiliated with IBLP/ATI and Vision Forum.

Family-integrated-church movement, formerly the National Center for Family-Integrated Churches, rebranded Church and Family Life; lists roughly 800 affiliated churches nationally.

Scott Brown also served on Vision Forum Ministries’ board. His daughter, Kelly Brown, married Peter Bradrick — documented elsewhere in this research as both a Vision Forum-to-Highlands Study Center personnel pipeline figure and one of the men who confronted Doug Phillips in 2013. Kelly Brown’s own published account states, “My father fell in love with Peter before I did.”

Publisher of To Train Up a Child, the child-discipline manual documented in this research as the direct source of the corporal-punishment method used in the household this project’s founder grew up in — a method independently documented, outside this project, as linked to at least three child deaths from punishment-related injuries in unrelated families.

Per testimony gathered for this project, the book was actively recommended and endorsed by name by Bill Gothard, Doug Phillips, R.C. Sproul Jr., and James Dobson. Independent documentary sourcing for those specific endorsements — sermons, newsletters, or radio segments naming the book — remains an open research item.

Church founded by R.C. Sproul Jr. in Bristol/Abingdon, VA.

In January 2006, Sproul Jr. and the church’s session (elders) were defrocked and deposed by the Reformed Presbyterian Church General Assembly, following findings that included abuse of authority, illegal tax ID use, and unauthorized church planting. The church later moved to the CREC denomination, at a date not yet established by this research. As of September 2025, its CREC Augustine Presbytery voted to install a “pastoral advisory commission” over the church’s session — with no reason stated anywhere in the presbytery’s own minutes. This is a live, unresolved thread.

Statewide Texas homeschool advocacy and lobbying organization.

Documented as part of the same Texas homeschool network as CHEACT and Homeschooling Today magazine, sharing speakers, conference circuits, and the network’s broader biblical-patriarchy theology — not, per this research, a separate or softer wing of that world.

The central homeschool-patriarchy ministry documented in this research. Promoted biblical patriarchy, young-earth creationism, and a militarized, agrarian vision of Christian masculinity through catalogs, conferences (the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival), and curricula.

Phillips resigned in October 2013 after acknowledging an “inappropriately affectionate and romantic” relationship with a woman in his household; Vision Forum’s board discontinued operations weeks later, citing “serious sins.” A former nanny’s April 2014 lawsuit alleging years of sexual abuse beginning when she was fifteen was later settled. Phillips was excommunicated from his own church in November 2014, and has since built an entirely new public identity as a war-journalism filmmaker, largely disconnected from this history in the platforms where his current audience encounters him.

Christian worldview training camp for teenagers, part of the same institutional pipeline this research documents alongside IBLP’s ALERT Academy and Vision Forum’s Father-Daughter Retreat — youth programming designed to carry the movement’s formation model across generations, from childhood curriculum into young-adult political and cultural engagement.

Christian legal-advocacy organization and litigation network. ADF drafted the Mississippi law behind Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, and argued United States v. Skrmetti (2025) on gender-affirming care for minors.

Co-founded in 1993–94 by six evangelical figures, including James Dobson (Focus on the Family) and Alan Sears, who co-authored The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today (2003) — a book the Southern Poverty Law Center characterizes as linking homosexuality to pedophilia and “disordered sexual behavior.” Michael Farris, HSLDA’s co-founder, later served as ADF’s president, one of several documented leadership links between the homeschool-legal world and this litigation network.

Secretive coordinating body linking leadership across Heritage, Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, and other religious-right and political organizations. Confirmed membership, drawn from leaked 2014, 2020, and 2022 directories, includes Kevin Roberts, James Dobson, Marjorie Dannenfelser, Michael Farris, and Charlie Kirk, among others.

Per Anne Nelson’s Shadow Network (2019), documented CNP member/staff proximity to the January 6, 2021 rally runs through named individuals: Ali Alexander (“Stop the Steal” organizer), Ginni Thomas, Turning Point Action (funded buses), Liberty Counsel Action (organized additional buses), Cleta Mitchell (participated in a call pressuring Georgia’s Secretary of State), and Jenny Beth Martin (spoke at the rally). Nelson’s own conclusion: “What is irrefutable is that members of the Council for National Policy exerted their influence and manipulated their followers to support Trump’s lies concerning electoral fraud.”

The CNP’s founding executive director, Woody Jenkins, stated the organization’s ambition on record: it was “modeled after the Council on Foreign Relations,” and he predicted it would become “so influential that no President … will be able to ignore us.”

Conservative and libertarian legal organization functioning as the primary pipeline for federal judicial nominations. Eighty-six percent of Trump’s first-term judicial nominees were Federalist Society members, including a Supreme Court shortlist curated by Leonard Leo.

In June 2025, Trump publicly attacked Leo — calling him a “sleazebag” who “probably hates America” — after a string of judicial losses despite a bench stacked with his own appointees. The research reads this less as a doctrinal dispute than as a demonstration that the alliance between this movement’s institutional carriers and the political power they helped build was never symmetrical.

Family-values media and advocacy organization founded by James Dobson, who authored the corporal-punishment-advocating bestseller Dare to Discipline (1970) and ran the “Love Won Out” conversion-therapy conference series from 1998 to 2009.

Focus on the Family spun off Family Research Council (1981) and was one of six organizations that incorporated Alliance Defending Freedom (1993–94). Dobson is a confirmed Council for National Policy member. Per testimony gathered for this project, he is one of four named figures (with Bill Gothard, Doug Phillips, and R.C. Sproul Jr.) who actively recommended and endorsed the corporal-punishment manual To Train Up a Child — independent documentary sourcing for that specific endorsement remains an open research item. Dobson died August 21, 2025, at age 89.

Texas-based constitutional and civics training organization, running legislative-internship and “Constitution Alive” curriculum programs aimed at training young activists for political and legislative work.

This entry is included on the tracking list per the project’s ongoing institutional-pipeline mapping (camps and youth programs, alongside IBLP’s ALERT Academy, Vision Forum’s Father-Daughter Retreat, Turning Point USA’s youth programming, and Worldview Academy). A dedicated sourcing pass on Patriot Academy’s specific documented ties into this network — beyond its place in that broader pipeline category — has not yet been done, and this entry will be expanded as that research develops.

Washington, D.C. policy institute. Organized Project 2025, whose “Mandate for Leadership” became, in granular executive-order-by-executive-order detail, the governing text behind large parts of the 2025–26 federal administration’s policy on gender-affirming care, Title IX, immigration enforcement, and federal civil-service restructuring.

Kevin Roberts stated in July 2024: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Heritage faced a real internal crisis in late 2025 after Roberts’s handling of the Tucker Carlson/Nick Fuentes interview controversy produced board and staff resignations — documented here alongside the rest of the record, not smoothed over.

Youth political-organizing network, now extending into K–12 education through Turning Point Academy, a charter/private school network built explicitly on the same “train worldview before persuasion” formation model this research documents in Vision Forum’s home-based approach.

Charlie Kirk’s public record runs from misgendering content and sports-exclusion advocacy (2020) through calling transgender people “a throbbing middle finger to God” (Sept. 2023) and demanding “a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor” (April 2024). Turning Point Action funded buses to the January 6, 2021 rally. In July 2026, Erika Kirk instructed a chapter-leadership summit to be “happy warriors” against “a trans, if it’s a gender-confused person, if it’s a Muslim.”

Minor political party founded by Howard Phillips, who ran for president in 1992, 1996, and 2000.

Howard Phillips is Doug Phillips’s father, and called R.J. Rushdoony — Christian Reconstructionism’s founding theologian — his “spiritual father,” raising his own children, including Doug, on Rushdoony’s taped lectures. That’s a direct, three-generation transmission line: from Rushdoony’s theology of biblical law governing civil society, through Howard Phillips’s political organizing, to Doug Phillips’s homeschool-patriarchy ministry.