Under President Donald Trump, the FBI recently made the decision to sever ties with the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a self-described anti-hate group that has long placed mainstream conservative and Christian organizations and institutions on a par with groups like the Ku Klux Klan. “The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” FBI Director Kash Patel told The Daily Signal. “Their so-called hate map has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence,” he added, referring to a 2012 attack on Family Research Council’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “That disgraceful record makes them unfit for any FBI partnership.”
[T]he SPLC’s “hate group” designation inspired a domestic terror attack against the Family Research Council in 2012.
The FBI’s decision is a welcome one, particularly as the SPLC has long targeted American Catholics and other Christians. The SPLC’s “Hate Map” currently lists 1,371 supposed hate groups across the country. Under the ideologies it considers hateful, the SPLC lists “Christian Identity,” “Christian Supremacy,” and “Radical Traditional Catholicism.”
The SPLC defines “Christian Identity” as “an antisemitic, racist theology that gained a foothold during the Civil Rights Era and reached a prominent position within the racist right by the 1980s.” According to the SPLC, “Christian Identity” has managed to “exert influence among more mainstream Christian nationalist … circles.” The “anti-hate” group observed, “As the Christian nationalist movement grows, it increasingly reflects CID-inspired themes, even if many followers may be unaware of their origins in one of the most racist and antisemitic interpretations of Scripture.”
“Christian Supremacy” is defined as “the idea that Christians have the God-given right or duty to rule, govern, and control society, culture, and politics.” This idea is espoused by most faithful Christians, particularly given the Christian moral foundation of the United States, but the SPLC attempts to tie the “ideology” to violence, particularly citing the “insurrection” of January 6, 2021. “Christians who do not agree with supremacist claims are often cast as part of the larger ‘enemy,’ against which Christian supremacy directs its ire,” the SPLC commented. “This ‘enemy,’ often described in terms of ‘communists,’ ‘Marxists,’ ‘godless,’ and even ‘demonic,’ is broad enough to include not only other Christians but liberals, progressives, and marginalized groups.”
“For ‘radical traditionalist’ Catholics, antisemitism is an inextricable part of their theology,” the SPLC wrote of American Catholics devoted to the Tridentine or Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) and the perennial moral and social teachings of the Catholic Church. “Adherents of radical traditional Catholicism routinely pillory Jews as “the perpetual enemy of Christ,” condemn the Vatican’s outreach to other Christian denominations and faiths, and sometimes assert that recent popes have all been illegitimate,” the SPLC claimed. It currently lists 12 organizations as “Radical Traditionalist Catholic” hate groups.
Notably, the FBI, under the tenure of then-president Joe Biden and then-director Christopher Wray, relied on information from the SPLC to craft a strategy for illegally infiltrating and spying on American Catholic parishes and apostolates labeled “radical traditionalist Catholics.” Based largely on the SPLC’s claims, the FBI smeared traditionalist American Catholics as potential “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.” A congressional investigation revealed that the FBI’s Richmond field office, which produced the controversial memo, liaised with other FBI field offices across the country and even deceptively interviewed a Catholic priest and a choir director in order to craft the memo.
The anti-Catholic memo, which was approved by senior FBI officials and attorneys in Richmond, was intended for circulation nationwide and was reportedly distributed to at least 1,000 FBI agents in field offices across the country. Furthermore, although FBI leadership claimed that the memo, leaked in early 2023, was merely a one-off product from the Richmond field office alone, the FBI was in the process of drafting a second, agency-wide intelligence product based on the Richmond memo, but scrapped the plans when the memo was revealed to the public. That second intelligence document targeting American Catholics was to be managed by the FBI’s counterterrorism division.
The SPLC has also demonized numerous other Christian organizations under the banner of “Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate Groups.” Alliance Defending Freedom, American Family Association, Center for Christian Virtue, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, Turning Point USA, and many others have all been deemed “hate groups” by the SPLC. As noted, the SPLC’s “hate group” designation inspired a domestic terror attack against the Family Research Council in 2012. A shooter used the “Hate Map” to find the offices of the Family Research Council and intended to murder everyone in the building and rub Chick-Fil-A sandwiches in the faces of the dead. He was stopped from carrying out his attack but did grievously injure a Family Research Council employee. Yet the SPLC still lists Family Research Council on its “hate map.”
Organizations like the SPLC and other “anti-hate” organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League, do not prevent hate but direct it, ensuring that the segment of the American population deranged and deluded enough to surgically mutilate children’s sex organs and call it “care” or butcher unborn children in their mothers’ wombs and call it a “right” direct their increasingly unhinged hatred against Christians and Christian organizations.
Catholics and Protestants alike have been targeted by the SPLC simply for promoting the teachings of Christ. While the FBI’s latest steps are to be commended, the damage done by the SPLC and other similar groups over the decades is a sobering reminder of the words of Christ Himself, “If the world hate you, know ye, that it hath hated me before you. If you had been of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you” (John 15:18).
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