Thank you for coming to Dallas.

I want to welcome you to our 2019 conference.

The rest of the week, we're going to hear from people who've demonstrated valor in different circumstances.

This is a man named Josh Kwan.

He leads a conference called The Gathering.

I found it while trying to understand the people and money behind the anti-trans hate machine.

Now, I know that The Gathering sounds like something out of a Stephen King novel,

but it's actually an annual convening where there are panels and fancy dinners.

But unlike other conferences, to be here, you need to be someone who gives

a couple hundred thousand dollars a year to Christian causes. But that's not a surprise. That's

because the gathering is the Davos of the Christian right, coming together of billionaires and

millionaires with an extreme religious ideology. Walt is not new, obviously. Charity's not new, but the idea of using private wealth

imaginatively, constructively, and systematically to attack fundamental problems of mankind is new.

And that's what I would call impact investing at this point.

As I was watching videos on their website, it struck me that everyone at the gathering

looks like they could be at any wealthy country club in America.

But at this club, religious extremism is on the menu.

The gathering is a concentrated group of high-capacity, kingdom-driven individuals, that the gathering

enables me to connect with those folks to share best practices and ideas and to be there as friends and to build real authentic relationships.

Kingdom driven. That's a phrase that keeps coming up at the gathering and more broadly in my

research on the far Christian right. It's everywhere. Kingdom-driven basically means rich people trying to

infuse Christian fundamentalist values through every aspect of our society. And the people at this

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