"Here are a few key facts about the NCF:
The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that in 2013, the NCF was the twelfth largest philanthropy in America that raises funds from private sources.
The NCF gave away approximately $670,000,000 in grants in 2013 and $601,401,875 in 2012.
From 2001-2012, the National Christian Foundation gave $163,384,998 to leading anti-LGBT organizations. These include Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, the Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly Alliance Defense Fund), Campus Crusade for Christ (aka CRU), the National Organization for Marriage, and the Alliance for Marriage.
From 2001-2012, the NCF gave grants totaling $24,822,793 to at least ten organizations listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups.
From 2001-2012, the NCF offered $7,525,701 in grants to organizations promoting creationism and “intelligent design.”
From 2001-2012, NCF gave $144,916,675 to organizations that deny climate change, some of which depict efforts to combat global warming as part of a satanic conspiracy aimed at creating a one-world government." -- from The Gathering: The Religious Right's Cash Cow
Since the mid-1980s they've met - a hard-right, theocratic-leaning community of nonprofit foundations that dole out upwards of $1 billion dollars a year - funding which drives America's culture wars and finances the ongoing effort to spread a right wing, religious supremacist, anti-LGBT gospel to the ends of the Earth.
It's called The Gathering, the subject of a new report from Truth Wins Out's Center Against Religious Extremism.
This report launches what will be an ongoing series of investigative reports from the Center Against Religious Extremism into what has for decades been the best-kept secret in American politics [note: I have express permission to post the extended excerpts, below, from the TWO report].
Excerpts from report:
In the mid-1980s, far-right Christian strategists birthed a yearly conference of like-minded, immensely wealthy, Protestant evangelical activists with extensive ties both to the Republican Party and the overtly theocratic Christian Reconstructionism movement.
The goal was to pool their fortunes to roll back objectionable aspects of modernity – especially women’s rights, gay rights, the teaching of evolution and environmentalism in schools, and return America to its alleged biblical foundations. They also envisioned a bold new era of muscular ‘biblical capitalism’ and a strategic partnership between churches, corporations, and the state.
Their event – which each year brings pious billionaire donors together with “idea men” who have bold plans to remake America and the world – became known as “The Gathering”. In 2012, foundations associated with The Gathering gave away almost $1 billion dollars in grants." -- from The Gathering: The Religious Right's Cash Cow
[...]
As will be covered in detail in this new series of investigative reports, The Gathering’s foundations have had a remarkable, global influence on culture and public policy.
They have bankrolled, from Uganda to Russia, the mounting international war on LGBT rights; evangelical opposition to healthcare reform and action to curb climate change; the promotion of young-earth creationism and Intelligent Design; ministries training African leaders in the “biblical worldview”; legal efforts that have fought against same-sex marriage and LGBT rights in the United States, and have forced anti-gay fundamentalist bible clubs into thousands of U.S. public schools and allowed religious supremacist churches to rent out public school facilities on the weekends; ministries that conducted the mass-moral indoctrination of public school children in Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1990s; a constellation of ministries whose leaders advocate rebuilding America and the world upon biblical principles and biblical law; and American networks of crisis pregnancy centers as well as fundamentalist private colleges and K-12 schools now receiving public funding.
Its foundation heads are plaintiffs in a legal challenge to healthcare reform now before the U.S. Supreme Court and they are leading efforts to attack organized labor and defund public schools.
[...]
The colossus of The Gathering is the National Christian Foundation, which gave out an estimated $670 million dollars in grants in 2013 and has rocketed, in just two years, from spot 34 to number 12 on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s “Philanthropy 400” list.
Since its founding in 1982, the NCF has given out over $4 billion in grant money, and almost 2.5$ billion of that has gone out in the last five years, from 2009-2013.
While the NCF funds a wide array of non-controversial charities — The Boys and Girls Clubs, Habitat For Humanity, United Way, Amnesty International, etc. — the bulk of NCF funding builds, within the U.S., far-right evangelical movement infrastructure – flagship organizations driving the “culture war”, churches, schools, and think tanks; and outside the U.S., NCF funding bankrolls a staggeringly ambitious, multi-decade program to evangelize the world.
[...]
In the wake of the Soviet Union’s breakup, American evangelical groups, funded, in part, by the National Christian Foundation and The Gathering, flooded into Russia at the invitation of Russia’s Ministry of Education. From 1992 to 1997 they indoctrinated an entire generation of Russian public school children in Christian morals and ethics.
That indoctrination effort, called The CoMission, included the teaching that Christian societies have fewer social problems than secular societies, and the premise that the Bible is literally true and presents an accurate account of history.