Richard DeVos Sr.

Richard DeVos Sr. was the co-founder of Amway Corporation and a member of the Christian Reformed Church whose family fortune built one of the most durable and comprehensive Religious Right funding networks in American history. His significance is partly individual and partly dynastic: the DeVos family's cumulative political giving over four decades — estimated in excess of $200 million — made them among the most consequential private funders of the conservative and religious-right political project. DeVos Sr. fused evangelical Christianity with a distinctive American theology of entrepreneurial success. Amway's multi-level marketing model was itself a kind of applied prosperity gospel — the belief that righteous effort under capitalism produces material reward — and DeVos promoted this fusion explicitly in books like 'Believe!' (1975) and 'Compassionate Capitalism' (1993). This ideological blend made him a natural figure in the Religious Right coalition: he brought the language of faith and the resources of a business empire. His institutional giving was systematic and wide-ranging. He funded the Republican National Committee and served on its finance committee. He funded the Council for National Policy, the secretive umbrella organization where Religious Right leaders coordinated strategy. He was a major donor to Focus on the Family and other Dobson operations. His family funded dozens of organizations promoting Christian conservatism in education, politics, and culture. The school voucher movement was perhaps the DeVos family's most concentrated investment. Richard Sr. and his son Dick DeVos Jr. combined to be the single largest private funders of voucher advocacy in America, pouring tens of millions into state ballot campaigns and advocacy organizations. The logic was explicitly theocratic: vouchers would allow Christian schools to receive public funding, thereby subsidizing the parallel educational system that the Religious Right had built since the 1960s to escape integration and, later, to instill religious values. The family's influence extended into the Trump administration through Betsy DeVos, Dick's wife and Richard Sr.'s daughter-in-law, who served as Secretary of Education from 2017 to 2021 and used that office to aggressively promote school vouchers, charter schools, and the rollback of federal civil rights enforcement in education. What the DeVos family had funded as an outside advocacy project for four decades, Betsy DeVos implemented as federal policy — a direct line from donor strategy to executive power.

Documented themes

• Christian Nationalism
• Political Strategy
• Anti-Democratic

Connections from Richard DeVos Sr.

• funded → Council for National Policy (1981) — Richard DeVos Sr. funded the Council for National Policy as part of his systematic investment in Religious Right coordination infrastructure. The CNP served as the meeting ground where DeVos's financial capacity intersected with the political and theological leadership of the movement — the organization where major donors, politicians, and evangelical leaders could align strategy without public disclosure. DeVos's CNP involvement was consistent with his broader pattern of funding organizations that combined Christian conservative values with practical political organizing, including Focus on the Family, the school voucher movement, and the Republican National Committee.
• funded → Focus on the Family (1980) — The DeVos family were among Focus on the Family's largest donors across multiple decades, part of a broader pattern of DeVos funding of the Religious Right cultural infrastructure. Richard DeVos Sr.'s support for Dobson's organization reflected the alignment between prosperity-gospel capitalism and the social conservatism Focus on the Family promoted: both projects were premised on the idea that Christian family structure was the foundation of a properly ordered society. DeVos's philanthropy treated Focus on the Family as a cultural complement to his political investments in Republican institutions.
• influenced → The School Voucher / School Choice Movement (1990) — Richard DeVos Sr. and the broader DeVos family were the single largest private funders of the school voucher movement, contributing tens of millions to voucher advocacy organizations and ballot campaigns across multiple states. The DeVos family funded voucher ballot initiatives in Michigan and other states, contributed to the American Federation for Children (which Dick DeVos Jr. helped found), and maintained relationships with every major voucher advocacy organization in the country. Their investment in vouchers was inseparable from their Christian school agenda: vouchers would allow public money to flow to the network of Christian schools that the Religious Right had built as an alternative to secular public education.
• influenced → Betsy DeVos (2017) — The school voucher strategy that Richard DeVos Sr. and his son Dick DeVos Jr. had funded for four decades as an outside advocacy project was implemented as federal executive policy when Betsy DeVos — Dick's wife and Richard Sr.'s daughter-in-law — became Secretary of Education in the Trump administration in 2017. What the family had invested in through Michigan ballot campaigns, national advocacy organizations, and state legislative lobbying, Betsy DeVos pursued through the Department of Education: expanding school choice programs, promoting charter schools, rolling back public school protections, and redirecting federal education funding toward private and religious institutions. The trajectory from DeVos Sr.'s donor strategy to Betsy's cabinet position illustrated how sustained private funding of political infrastructure eventually produces direct institutional power.

Sources

• The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism — Katherine Stewart (2020)
• Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right — Jane Mayer (2016)