FOR DECADES, McLean Bible Church has served as the place of worship for many of DC’s Republican elite. The sprawling evangelical megachurch in Vienna, Virginia, boasts a roster of former parishioners that includes everyone from Ken Starr to Mike Pence. Donald Trump once dropped in after a round of golf.
McLean Bible is also where, in 2017, a senior pastor named Dale Sutherland formed a nonprofit called Act2Impact, described in state records as an “auxiliary” of the church that would “preach the gospel” and “conduct evangelistic and humanitarian outreach.”
That mission was short-lived.
Two years later, Sutherland—once an undercover narcotics officer in DC—left McLean Bible and filed papers to rename Act2Impact. It became the Constitutional Defense Fund (CDF), which would “promote and secure” constitutional rights. “We aim to defend and strengthen those rights through methods that will include litigation and other means,” the filing stated.
Around this time, Sutherland also leaned into a new persona: the Undercover Pastor. “Buying cocaine and preaching Jesus. A weird combo,” notes his website, which touted a newsletter—“get biblical wisdom delivered to your inbox”—and YouTube channel. “I used to lock people up,” he likes to say. “Now I’m trying to set people free.”
Sutherland is much less forthcoming about CDF, which since its rechristening has been at the center of a far-reaching, multimillion-dollar legal campaign to dismantle America’s gun laws. From 2020 to 2022, CDF funneled nearly $10 million to the DC law firm Cooper & Kirk and a constellation of gun rights groups, which together have helped file at least 21 lawsuits challenging gun restrictions.
These suits, aimed at getting an eventual Supreme Court hearing, concern bans on semiautomatic assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, as well as restrictions on young adults buying and carrying handguns. In October, the court heard one of the cases, a challenge to the government’s ability to regulate home-assembled, unserialized “ghost guns.”
Most of the money that CDF spent on this vast effort came via Donors Trust, a pass-through fund founded in 1999 with the aim of “safeguarding the intent of libertarian and conservative” philanthropists who seek to channel their wealth into right-wing causes. The trust has more than $1 billion in assets and is not required to identify its donors.
In short, anonymous funders are bankrolling a legal attack aimed at giving the Supreme Court’s conservative majority an opportunity to rewrite firearms laws. It’s akin to the Christian right’s abortion playbook—but for guns.
The Firm
In August 2019, before stepping on a podium in Colonial Williamsburg, Charles Cooper was introduced as a
