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Friend,
Over the last five decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center has researched, documented and tracked far-right extremist groups that espouse white supremacy, antisemitism, anti-LGBTQ+ hate and other often-intersecting ideologies.
During that time, there have been ebbs and flows in the number of groups spouting virulent philosophies and hate. Old trends repeat, new faces appear, but the underlying harm remains the same.
The just-released, annual Year in Hate and Extremism report from the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, in addition to updating the activities of known hate and anti-government groups, highlights several organizations of another kind: those working to counter the rise of white Christian nationalism. The ideology – intertwining strong antigovernment leanings with antisemitism, white supremacy, American exceptionalism, and a disdain of gun control legislation – found new life in the American “Christian patriot” movement and associated militia groups in the 1990s and is now surging again.
The report is a culmination of the previous year’s research and analysis, designed in a way to both document the evolving threats of violent extremism as well as make recommendations to resist those forces and empower communities to fight back through education and organizing at a grassroots level.
“Research is important in that it can serve members of the community as they work to be resilient, to resist and to respond when necessary to the hate and antigovernment extremist groups that we are providing research on,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas, deputy director of research, reporting and analysis for the SPLC’s Intelligence Project. “The other piece of that is that our research at SPLC for 50 years really has always been a result of the input of the communities that are directly impacted.”
A long, bloody trail
The roots of white Christian nationalism are long, and the seeds of the ideology have been embedded on American soil for more than a century.
“We have been working on issues of religious freedom for all and separation of church and state for 87 years,” said Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit whose focus is defending religious freedom for all people. “I would say for the last few decades, part of our consistent work has been debunking the myth of the United States as a quote-unquote ‘Christian’ nation. This idea that the country was founded by Christians to privilege Christianity and that Judeo-Christian values should be legislated into law and policy and that Christians should enjoy privilege in our society – these ideas strike at the very heart of the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom for all and the way that our country is ordered to maintain the institutional separation of church and state.”
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
P.S. Don’t miss our virtual Year in Hate and Extremism briefing on Wednesday, June 14, at 11 a.m. ET. — RSVP here!
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