The Freedom From Religion Foundation is denouncing the Department of Justice’s criminal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
For more than 50 years, the center has been a leading advocate for civil rights. Its research, of special interest to FFRF, has been indispensable to the nation’s understanding of the white Christian nationalist movement that fueled the Jan. 6 insurrection. The center’s annual “Year in Hate and Extremism” report named white Christian nationalism as the key ideology that inspired the attack on the U.S. Capitol, drawing directly on the February 2022 report co-published by the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
By elevating that work, the Southern Poverty Law Center helped to bring a clear warning about Christian nationalism to the American people, giving it the institutional weight of more than half a century of research on extremism. The center has continued to document how white Christian nationalism stokes anti-immigrant hate through false claims of “Christian persecution” and “white genocide,” and how the movement seeks to dominate American political and cultural life.
One year ago, FFRF, along with more than 100 other civil rights organizations, signed the Unity Pact, a commitment organized by The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The premise is simple: When any of our organizations is unjustly targeted, we will stand as a unified coalition. An attack on one is an attack on all. The Trump administration’s threatened prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center is precisely the kind of moment the Unity Pact was built for.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center has spent decades doing the work this administration would rather no one do: naming the people and movements that threaten equality and our democracy,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, Freedom From Religion Foundation co-president. “If you track and name extremists, now it seems you become the target. This administration pardoned the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and is now going after the organizations that warned the country about them.”
Late last year, the House Republicans held an unprecedented hearing focusing on the Southern Poverty Law Center, charging that it coordinated efforts with the Biden administration “to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association.” That was an absurd accusation. Now the Justice Department has lowered the boom, and it’s vital that anyone who cares about civil rights, free speech and saving our democracy condemns its move.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With nearly 42,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
