A “SACR Membership Criteria & Recruiting Guide” obtained via TPM’s public records requests shows questions that the group puts to prospective members.

What are your thoughts on the Republican Party?

What are your thoughts on “Christian Nationalism”?

Comment on the Trump presidency and what it entails for the future.

Describe the dynamic of your household in terms of your role and that of your wife.

Describe your church community and your and your family’s involvement there

Other criteria for membership include #faithfulness (“adherence to traditional Christian sexual ethics”),
#virtue (“restraint and self-denial; household management; leadership and orderliness”),
and #alignment, defined as: “deference to and acceptance of the wisdom of our American and European Christian forebears in the political realm, a traditional understanding of patriarchal leadership in the household, and an acceptance of traditional Natural Law in ethics more broadly.”

Finally, members are asked to possess one of these three qualities:
#influence,
#capability (“any skill conducive to the technical work of productive #entrepreneurship;
#lawfare;
#cybersecurity”),
or #wealth.

Who is excluded, in some sense, reveals more about SACR than who is allowed in.

The group bans anyone who is not Christian:
Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and others.

But it goes further than that and bars “non-trinitarian” Christians;
Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and others cannot be SACR members.

Williams said that the religious exclusivity came from the “long and robust tradition of the intersection between #Trinitarian #Christianity in a broad sort of ecumenical sense and American civic leadership and statesmanship.”

“Too much ecumenism is sometimes counterproductive in these sorts of ventures,” he added.

“Which is not to say that we don’t of course have nothing but toleration in the great American tradition for all faiths as long as they’re genuinely
— as long as they are not hostile to American principles and notions of natural rights and constitutionalism.”

#Women are not allowed in SACR, whatever their faith.

The group emphasizes a traditional role for the man in the household, a robust and muscular exercise of temporal authority by men, and the forceful application of male dominion in civic affairs.

Yenor, the Boise State professor, told TPM in a text that the group’s exclusivity was a way “to bring men together for real community and fraternity,” allowing members to “build each other up and encourage responsibility” in public and private life.

Under Williams’ leadership, Claremont has become well-known for a vision of America in which the country as we know it is all but lost, set to be replaced by a “regime” that its leaders hope to craft to come after the current, “cold civil war” concludes.

While introducing another podcast discussion between Haywood and Anton, Williams called Haywood a “friend of recent years” who was willing to discuss the country’s “decaying republic.”

“The phrase #cold #civil #war is chosen deliberately,” Williams told TPM. “I hope it remains cold indefinitely.”

It’s not only about the republic. Internal SACR messages show that the group envisions itself as stewards of a hard brand of Christianity.

Yenor, in one message that he planned to use for recruitment, summed it up:
“Our belief is that the country’s track is unsustainable, and the only way to secure a future for Christian families is to keep and take back space now closed to Christians.”

On the blog where he explains these ideas, Haywood refers to himself as “#maximum #leader.”

In October 2022, Haywood appeared on a podcast with with former Trump official and “Flight 93” essay #Michael #Anton and others for a discussion about #caesarism
— the idea that a strongman is needed to solve America’s problems.

After referring to an unspecified “secret event” that brought the group together, Haywood said that he “wholeheartedly” endorsed “#national #divorce” as a solution to the country’s problems.

Since selling his shampoo manufacturing firm in September 2020, Haywood has mobilized. His nonprofit, the
"Howdy Doody Good Times Foundation", began to contribute to the Claremont Institute.

Howdy Doody has contributed money to SACR as well. Over the following year, a chapter in Dallas, Texas, and three in Idaho were founded.

Haywood has said that additional chapters exist; Williams put the total number at beneath one dozen.

Among the emails obtained by TPM are ones that show the organization’s reach.

In one January 2023 exchange, Haywood cc’ed a group of people while asking for a board meeting to discuss SACR finances.
The men on the exchange do not appear to be down on their luck.

#Fischer, a venture capitalist who leads the group’s Dallas chapter, graduated from Harvard Law. Fischer has described leading a private equity career investing in apartment complexes distressed after the 2008 financial crisis.

Also cc-ed was #Williams, the Claremont president. Williams confirmed his involvement in the group on Friday on Twitter, writing, “may 1,000 chapters bloom and flourish.”

Claremont came into national consciousness in 2021 because it was where Trump co-defendant and co-conspirator #John #Eastman, the attorney who played a key role in the 2020 election subversion effort, works as a senior fellow.

What sets SACR apart is that its members come from and are recruited from the upper crust of American society.

They are wealthy — independent wealth is a requirement for membership, per documents TPM obtained. And they are credentialed.

SACR offers a redoubt for powerful people who take the culture war extremely seriously and believe in their bones that hemorrhaging church membership, the Obergefell decision on same-sex marriage, and the ebbing status of Christian men in American society are an existential threat to their vision for America, and who have the means to build a society on a different path.

Organized as a 501(c)10, Williams described SACR as analogous in structure to the Masons or Moose lodges
— a national superstructure with chapters around the country, some public and some not.

Its members are, as a rule, secret. But those members who have incorporated chapters, as TPM discovered, end up identified in public records.

In an interview, Williams told TPM that SACR emerged from conversations between himself, self-described “industrialist” #Charles #Haywood, and others around Claremont in 2020.

Skyler Kressin, an Idaho accountant, and Fischer, also participated.

The idea, Williams said, came about amid conversations about “civic projects and constitutionalism and the state of America.”

“Part of the scholarly project of the Claremont Institute has been to lament the rise, really since the late 19th century, of a certain different way of thinking about politics and how to do government outside, we would argue, the American constitutional tradition,” he said.

Haywood, a University of Chicago-educated attorney, incorporated SACR and sits on its board. He did not respond to requests for comment from TPM.

Haywood has laid out an elaborate cosmology of America’s place in time, and his own place in America, through hundreds of blog posts he’s written on his website,
The Worthy House.

To Haywood, American government is a house of cards waiting to be blown over
— run by a cabal that he describes as the “brawndo tyranny,” referring to the energy drink from the 2006 cult classic movie Idiocracy.

Haywood says he can see what will likely come next:
a new #feudalism,
an archipelago of local “#armed #patronage networks,”
a vision inspired by the groups white settler farmers formed in South Africa as Blacks struggled for majority rule.

Nate Fischer, a SACR member in Texas, posted a tweet Thursday evening warning of an imminent story from The Guardian and outing himself as a member.

Fischer said that SACR’s previous practice of secrecy was due to “the environment of 2020-21” when the group was first being organized.

The prospect of impending news stories — and Fischer’s tweet — spurred other group members to also reveal themselves on Twitter into Friday.

That included Ryan P. #Williams, president of the Claremont Institute and a SACR board member, and Andrew #Beck, a brand consultant.

In a Friday phone call with TPM, Williams denied that the group was “some cabal with the aim of taking over the federal establishment” and said that it only sought to create a “common citizenship” of the “#Americanized and #assimilated as the best recipe for a large, multiracial, multi-ethnic republic.”

When asked why SACR documents show that it aims to staff an “aligned future regime” with members, Williams said that the new regime would be a “U.S. Constitutional order brought much closer to its origins after about a century of what we regard as its corruption and undermining by progressivism, which I regard as anti-constitutionalist in its roots and its evolution.”

“This shouldn’t be regarded as anything radical or new,” Williams said. “It’s in a long line of tradition of American civic organizations of like-minded men worried about the direction of their country.”

“Certainly the activity of any members of SACR or any chapters are always meant to be well within the law and constitutional norms of American politics,” he added.

“There’s nothing subversive about it. It shouldn’t be regarded that way.”

The self-outing by key figures in SACR did not make public all of the materials that TPM obtained through its reporting, including the trove of Yenor emails and certain internal organizational documents. What follows is what TPM learned from that reporting, and interviews with some of the SACR figures who appeared in the documents