‘Mama Bears Are Rising up’: Behind the Christian Influencer Mom Pushing for a Takeover of Local US Government

At a Los Angeles church in October 2023, Jenny Donnelly, a Christian entrepreneur and charismatic preacher, addressed a room full of women with a lofty idea.

“Why don’t we send a million women into the school boards?”

The audience had convened to hear Donnelly, a multi-level marketer-turned rising star on the Christian right, offer her vision for a conservative movement of moms determined to push back against policies like LGBTQ+ inclusion and abortion rights.

Such a movement, Donnelly proclaimed, would be rooted in the “billion soul harvest,” referring to a prophetic, end-time vision of mass revival introduced by US evangelists in the early 2000s.

In the year since, Donnelly has developed a sprawling network of moms through a strategic but largely under-the-radar organizing infrastructure made up of small groups across the country called “prayer hubs.” She has secured the backing of heavy-hitting rightwing Christian activists and donors and says her goal is to train women to run for office locally while establishing a national mass of parents ready to mobilize in the streets against LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion.

Donnelly has found a political and religious home among the leaders and church networks associated with the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a movement that seeks to install conservative Christians as leaders in governmental and cultural institutions.

NAR leaders such as Donnelly are “very good at what they do, and they have mastered the art of gaining mass followings that are not highly geographically concentrated,” said Matthew Taylor, a fellow at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish studies whose research focuses on charismatic Christian networks. “That gives them a great deal of political power, if, when and where they decide to deploy it.”

According to footage of Her Voice Movement meetings reviewed by the Guardian and Documented, Donnelly’s organization has in the last three years established more than 7,000 organizing hubs across the country. The group grew dramatically in the months ahead of the election with the support of financing from the secretive Christian donor network Ziklag – which sought to expand Her Voice Movement in key battleground states, according to internal Ziklag videos obtained by the Guardian and Documented.

Looking toward and beyond the 2024 election, leaders of Ziklag took notice of Her Voice Movement’s potential in the larger culture wars, promising that Donnelly would, in part, “ignite and fuel an epic movement.”

‘Girlboss mom engaged in a spiritual war’

In Donnelly’s telling, Her Voice Movement was born in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, forces that closed her church and traumatized her community.

Although it is unclear how a protest movement against police brutality would have impacted her church –and Donnelly did not return requests for comment – the idea of a movement on the left that was capable of amassing national attention proved extremely motivating.

“For over 180 days straight, my hometown, of Portland, Oregon, was dominated and destroyed by this group, simply because of this: They had a unified battle plan, with enough people executing it,” says Donnelly in a video promoting Her Voice Movement. “The church needs a unified battle plan.”

With the right amount of coordination, perhaps Christians – and in particular, Christian women – could garner support for a movement of their own, making demands around issues like abortion and transgender rights, which Donnelly opposes.

Donnelly already had experience with a certain kind of organizing – as a successful multi-level marketer who earned enough revenue to propel her family into affluence.

From 1999, when she joined the nutritional supplement company AdvoCare as a “distributor,” until the firm’s dissolution amid multiple lawsuits alleging it was an illegal pyramid scheme, Donnelly earned millions – an exhilarating venture. According to a 2017 lawsuit that named Donnelly and other early AdvoCare distributors as defendants, Donnelly described the experience as akin to “jumping in a new Lamborghini and with no speed limit on the freeway and you are just zipping as fast as you want to go because your foot’s on the gas pedal.”

Donnelly was later dropped as a defendant, but AdvoCare, which was sued by the Federal Trade Commission for allegedly defrauding its lower-level distributors, collapsed – and Donnelly poured her efforts into godlier places.

The Oregon marketer and her husband founded two groups: a church, called Collective Church, and a Christian nonprofit registered under the name Tetelestai Ministries. Through Tetelestai, Donnelly offers courses on relationships, wellness, healthy eating and even interpreting dreams. In 2021, the Donnellys “commissioned” another couple to lead Collective Church and stepped into an oversight role.

Donnelly’s church, and Tetelestai Ministries, form part of a rapidly-growing non-denominational Christian movement that embraces modern-day prophets and apostles and emphasizes direct encounters with God, faith healing, speaking in tongues and the belief in demons. Like Donnelly, many other prophets, apostles and preachers of the “neo-charismatic” and New Apostolic Reformation movements lean into popular culture and deploy social media fluently to connect with believers online.

Much of Donnelly’s social media content is aspirational: glamorous photos of Donnelly, who is blonde and immaculately put together, an image of her children showing off Her Voice Movement swag, a grateful post dedicated to her husband for gifting her an enormous painting of Jesus to decorate the wall above her “prayer chair.”

In the Pentecostal and charismatic movements, “there’s a long tradition of glamorous women using mass media to do political activism and to do revival meetings,” said Leah Payne, an associate professor of religious history at Portland Seminary. “As a Charismatic, [Donnelly] is culturally very familiar with how to use new media and new media platforms.”

When she’s preaching to the Christian moms who form the core of her followers, Donnelly talks about relationship struggles, lends a voice to the pressures of parenting and offers testimony about her own trauma and salvation.

“I got to be about twenty years old and then everything caved in, I found myself wanting to take my own life,” said Donnelly at a Pentecostal church event in Colorado this summer. An encounter with Jesus, she testified, helped her heal from the lingering pain of her parents’ divorce and the feeling that her father had abandoned her.

“What’s really compelling about what she does is that she interweaves activism into her status as a mother, and her status as a woman – so she’s combining this ‘girl boss’ feminism with our culture’s enthusiasm for very attentive parenting,” said Payne. “She’s a girlboss mom who is engaged in a spiritual war for her children, and not just her children – all children.”

Donnelly frequently sermonizes about what she believes form the most serious dilemmas for American children: anxiety, depression and pornography – but also cultural affirmation of LGBTQ+ identities, which Donnelly claims are the product of demonic possession.

At the center of Donnelly’s organization are “prayer hubs,” groups of two to ten people who agree to gather on a monthly basis to pray, working from Donnelly’s prayer guides and chatting on the organization’s app, which functions as a clearinghouse for news, meetings and events. Convening under the nickname “mama bears,” the prayer hub activists position themselves as devout but aggrieved protectors of children.

“This nation is headed in a direction that is a direct threat to our freedom, especially for our children and our grandchildren,” Donnelly says in a video promoting the prayer hubs. “We are inviting you to join us in a strategy that has the devil running scared. Because when this works, our nation will turn back to God and our freedoms will be preserved.”

With goals that lofty, the mama bears would need powerful allies.

‘A bunch of frothing females’

Donnelly’s network quickly became a topic of conversation among the leaders of Ziklag, a secretive and influential Christian donor network that has spent millions on ultraconservative causes. As the group developed a strategy to drive evangelical turnout in the 2024 election to help elect Trump, Ziklag leaders turned to Donnelly’s network of women as a political organizing tool.

Donnelly, who had incorporated Her Voice Action, Inc. in June 2024 as the political wing of the women’s network, was well positioned to take on such partisan work. On the first Her Voice Action call in July, Donnelly explained how the group would allow the network to get into more overtly political activism, with the goal of “educating, equipping and activating as many men and women as possible.”

“Maybe it’s the school board, maybe it’s city council. Maybe you’re going to go to the library and start booking some story reading hours,” said Donnelly. “We’ve got to get on offense and have our voices carried all over America.”

In an internal video promoting its projects to donors, Ziklag proposed to “support and repurpose these hubs for frontline organizing,” a project the group internally referred to as the “Mama Bear” initiative. Ziklag pledged $400,000 for this initiative, though it is not immediately clear how much went directly to Donnelly’s group, understanding that the network of conservative moms had influence and could impact get-out-the-vote efforts in key swing states.

Leaders of Ziklag praised Donnelly’s tenacity and ability to organize women, suggesting their donations could “pour fuel” on the work Donnelly had started.

Drew Hiss, executive director of Ziklag, put it bluntly.

“We’ve got a bunch of frothing females who are all about Don’t Mess with My Kids,” said Hiss, during a strategy call. “And we wanna help.”

In addition to Ziklag, Her Voice Movement has formed alliances with influential Christian power-building hubs, activists and pastors.

An internal video produced by Ziklag and reviewed by The Guardian and Documented proposed training Donnelly’s prayer hub activists alongside the Trump-allied organizations America First Policy institute and America First Works, and John Amanchukwu, a school board activist who has fought for book bans in schools across the country. Amanchukwu appeared in the July Her Voice Action strategy call, encouraging the women to quit playing the role of “nice Christians” and reclaim schools and communities through confrontation.

“Faithful Christians realize that we are living in the last and evil days and Satan has the family in his crosshairs,” said Amanchukwu.

Donnelly and her team have also developed a relationship with Christians Engaged, a conservative Christian nonprofit that produces voter guides and offers candidate training programs. Ahead of the 2024 elections, Bunni Pounds, the director of Christians Engaged, appeared as a guest on the Her Voice Action to strategize get-out-the-vote initiatives. To encourage members to get to the polls, Her Voice Movement coordinated with Christians Engage to promote a voting pledge prominently on the group’s app.

Lance Wallnau, a self-proclaimed prophet who has been funded by Ziklag, was an early supporter of Donnelly. “We better pay attention to this because the mama bears are rising up,” said Wallnau during a Ziklag strategy call.

‘We can’t sit back’

Her Voice Movement has had a meteoric rise. Since 2020, Tetelestai Ministries, the Her Voice Movement umbrella group, has increased its funding by more than 250 percent, pulling in more than $2.2 million in 2023. As the organization grows, Donnelly has directed the group toward explicitly political aims, turning her prayer hubs into political organizing hubs.

“Just like we have the air game, we also have a ground game,” said Donnelly during the July 2024 Zoom call. The “air game” – prayer – would be bolstered by a political effort mobilizing members through the newly-founded political wing of the group.

Her Voice Movement is modeled after a push by charismatic and evangelical pastors in Peru called “No te metas con mis hijos,” or “Don’t mess with my kids” – a nod to the myth that LGBTQ+ activists covertly attempt to turn children trans and gay through the public school system. Donnelly has described her efforts as “copy-pasting” the tactics of the Peruvian movement, and has coordinated closely with Christian Rosas, a conservative Peruvian political operative who was involved with the movement there.

Her Voice Movement’s first national action took place on 13 April, with members holding simultaneous rallies at the state capitols. The actions, which had been coordinated with the anti-LGBTQ+ parental rights group Moms for Liberty, drew only modest attendance but offered the group an opportunity to test its ability to mobilize politically.

For at least a year, Donnelly planned a mass rally on the national mall for October 2024 – coordinating with some of the movement’s most influential leaders, including the notorious anti-LGBTQ+ pastor, Lou Engle, to draw “a million women” to DC. Che Ahn, a California-based pastor and the leader of a sprawling and massive network of churches and ministries spanning more than 60 countries, would play a prominent role at the rally as well.

With Ahn’s sprawling international network, Engle’s experience summoning mass prayer gatherings and Donnelly’s own growing spiritual network, the Christian moms movement pulled off a major day-long rally. They may not have convened “a million women” – police estimates placed the event at closer to 50,000 – but the group was able to hold down a long stretch of the mall for an event that drew a diverse and even international group.

On a December Her Voice Action call, Donnelly highlighted that since March, the organization has doubled the number of prayer hubs around the country, jumping from 3500 to 7000. If Donnelly’s figures are correct, Her Voice Movement could, in its infancy, already retain tens of thousands of members. Pointing to an influx in funding, Donnelly hired state directors in swing states to create “super hubs” and grow the existing infrastructure.

Donnelly played up Her Voice Movement’s impact on the election during the call.

“We look at the elections, and we look at every battleground state went red – I am telling you right now, we know why that happened. Not just because of Her Voice Movement, I would never be that ignorant to think it was just Her Voice Movement, but I can tell you that we had a large, large piece to play. Because why? Committed prayer hubs and lots of them.”

Between the success of the rally and Trump’s win, Donnelly had proof of concept.

The group has planned anti-trans “Don’t Mess with Our Kids” marches in Miami, Houston, New York, Seattle and Los Angeles in early 2025. Donnelly also urged members of the group to “double down” on efforts before the midterms and 2028 elections.

In the meantime, they would build out a public-facing campaign against LGBTQ+ inclusion, mimicking the kind of direct action tactics that LGBTQ+ people have employed for decades.

“When the Pride community wanted their own month of June, a proclamation across America, they did not silently hope this was going to happen – they went into the streets. They started parades. They got permits. They did all the things that are actually available to us,” said Donnelly. “We can’t sit back and just kind of hope that they give up.”