Like the Koch brothers, the Mercer family and other conservative billionaires, Dunn and Wilks want to slash regulations and taxes. Their endgame, however, is more radical: not just to limit the government but also to steer it toward Christian rule. "It's hard to think of other megafunders in the country as big on the theocratic end of the spectrum," says Peter Montgomery, who oversees the Right Wing Watch project at People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group.

Unlike most billionaires, Dunn and Wilks are also pastors. Friends and critics alike described the pair as conspicuously down-home and devout. "They love God, they serve God," said Jerry Maston, an evangelical pastor and Wilks' brother-in-law. Dunn, who is 68, has served on the "pulpit team" of a nondenominational church in Midland. Wilks, who is four years older, practices a form of Christianity that hews closely to the Old Testament at the Assembly of Yahweh, a church his family founded outside of Cisco, a town in Central Texas. When I saw him preach there earlier this year, he warned his followers that "absorption in bounty makes us forgetful of the giver." The two men may differ on certain points of doctrine — Wilks doesn't celebrate Christmas, considering it a pagan holiday — but they share the same vision of a radically transformed America.