Yes, the SPLC is anti-Christian

What does it mean to be anti-Christian? Do works of charity absolve an organization if it systematically demonizes those who hold to traditional Christian beliefs?

In June, prominent Democrats and activists defended the Southern Poverty Law Center, aiming to counter my accusation that the SPLC is anti-Christian. One of them played a video in which clergy members praised the SPLC.

“Hearing that there are people who think the SPLC is anti-Christian, and I really don’t know what Bible they’re reading because my experience of the SPLC is that they help churches feed hungry families,” a woman identified as Rev. Kristen Williams says in the video.

“The values of the SPLC in these more than four to five decades exemplify the values of the gospel: inclusion, solidarity, concern for the least among us, and a zeal for justice,” Father Manuel Williams, pastor of Resurrection Catholic Church in Montgomery, Ala., says in the video.

Feeding the hungry and pursuing justice are core Christian values, but they do not answer the charge. The question is not whether the SPLC does good works, but whether it targets Christian beliefs as “hate.”

The SPLC gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy. Today, it publishes a “hate map” that plots mainstream conservative and Christian organizations alongside Klan chapters. It says the map reveals the “infrastructure upholding white supremacy.”

This map suggests that conservatives are driven by the same kind of hatred that inspired cross-burnings and lynchings, but many groups on the map have nothing to do with racism, violence, or hate of any kind.

Take, for example, Alliance Defending Freedom, which has represented Christian professionals at the Supreme Court. Or consider the Family Research Council, which champions socially conservative policy on Capitol Hill.

The SPLC maintains that these conservative Christian groups “vilify” people who identify as LGBTQ, but their real sin is upholding Christian doctrine.

SPLC interim CEO Bryan Fair told Congress, “We don’t target any group because of its religion. … We target groups and label groups because of what they say about others.”

This often amounts to a distinction without a difference.

When the SPLC justified placing the Ruth Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to helping the victims of the Sexual Revolution, on the “hate map,” it cited as evidence of “hate” a direct quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

“The church is very clear that same-sex sexual acts are intrinsically disordered and can never be morally acceptable,” Ruth Institute Founder Jennifer Roback Morse said in 2012.

Morse’s words weren’t an aberration—they came directly from the Catechism, the binding faith document for 1 billion Catholics across the world. If that qualifies as “hate,” then every Catholic church that upholds the church’s official teaching belongs on the map.

The SPLC website maintains a page of answers to “frequently asked questions about hate groups.” For years, that page included a response to the “major misconception” that the SPLC is anti-Christian.

The SPLC called this claim “false,” noting that “there are many organizations, such as Focus on the Family, that oppose same-sex marriage or oppose homosexuality on strictly Biblical grounds that the SPLC does not list as hate groups.”

That language no longer appears on the SPLC website. Why? Well, because the SPLC added Focus on the Family to the “hate map” last year.

In doing so, the SPLC eliminated its own primary piece of evidence that it isn’t anti-Christian.

The SPLC didn’t just add Focus on the Family—one of the oldest and most well-established of conservative Christian nonprofits—to the “hate map.” SPLC analyst R.G. Cravens justified the move by demonizing traditional Christian beliefs about sexuality.

He said that Focus on the Family sows “division and ideas that tear families apart by perpetuating political notions that LGBTQ people can’t be, for example, truly Christian unless they deny who they are, and that’s, one, just patently false, and, two, it’s really dangerous, because it sets families against one another.”

Cravens’ argument relies on the conflation of someone who feels same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria and someone who places their personal identity in those feelings.

The gospel message clearly applies to all people—all of us are sinners—but true Christians repent of sin and turn to follow Jesus. We do not identify with our sinful desires.

This is not a “political notion”—it’s a central aspect of the gospel.

The plain teaching of scripture and Christian tradition is that homosexual activity is sinful and that God made humans male and female, and that confusing creation order leads to disaster. The gospel promises forgiveness and redemption from sinful lifestyles, not “pride” in embracing them.

If an organization defines biblical Christian beliefs as “hate,” it is itself anti-Christian, regardless of any good works it may perform.

The fact that some Christians embarrass themselves by sticking up for such groups is utterly irrelevant.