How America’s biggest Christian charity donates millions to subsidize hate

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If you’ve ever wondered why Christian hate groups are able to throw seemingly endless amounts of money into spewing vitriolic dogma, here’s your answer, thanks to Friendly Atheist’s Hemant Mehta.

It turns out that more than a few of these organizations have one big benefactor: The National Christian Organization. This group has given out $56.1 million in just three years to nearly two dozen anti-LGBTQ and anti-Muslim groups, Sludge’s Alex Kotch reports. The groups include the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, and the Liberty Council are just a few of the hate groups that benefit from the NCO’s largesse.

And one group, in particular, may be the worst, having received the brunt of the funding.

“By far the biggest recipient of the NCF donations is Alliance Defending Freedom, a large network of Christian extremist lawyers who have supported criminalizing homosexuality, sterilizing transgender people, and claimed that gay men are pedophiles,” Koch writes. “The group recently came out against congressional Democrats’ Equality Act, which would ban discrimination against LGBTQ Americans.”

In that three-year period, ADF received $50 million from the NCF, approximately one-third of that group’s total income.

But, Mehta notes, that begs the question: Where does the NCF get the money to do this? While we don’t have a complete list of donors to the NCF at least some of that we do know of are not necessarily all that shocking.

There’s David Green, founder of Hobby Lobby, for instance. There are donors like the Maclellan Foundation, which has contributed $100 million to the NCF (with $4.6 million given to the organization in 2017 alone). Next in line is the Bolthouse Foundation, which donated $9.6 million in 2017. And the family foundation of GOP megadonor Foster Friess kicked in $2.5 million in the 2017 fiscal year.

Other organizations that also donate to hate include:

  • The Free Family Foundation, based in Florida. The organization has contributed millions to the NCF over the years, including nearly $1.5 million in 2017.
  • The JSC Foundation, run by the heirs of the Coors Beer foundation. The organization took in $1.5 million in 2015 but donated $2 million to the NCF that year.
  • Lastly, there’s the APF Foundation. This organization, also based in Florida, donated $145,000 in fiscal year 2017.

It seems many of these organizations will stop at nothing to spread their hate, and nothing helps them spread it quite as well as the NCF.

“In terms of aggressively pushing an anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion, ‘pro-family’ agenda, it makes sense to me that [NCF] would invest heavily in Alliance Defending Freedom,” said writer and former evangelical Christian Chris Stroop, in an interview with Kotch. “Those outfits are at the very heart of the Christian Right lobby; they’re well-connected, well-heeled, and effective.”

So all this money fuels hate, even at a time when 67 percent of Americans support marriage equality and 75 percent support relationships for same-sex couples.

And this is why the disconnect between Americans who support LGBTQ rights and the so-called Christian organizations that aim to suppress them.

“When that many Christian hate groups have that much money to throw around in support of their bigotry, popular support won’t change their plans, Mehta writes. A handful of very rich Christians are will to spend their money to make sure other people suffer.”

This is where we’re at, thanks to those who prefer to spread hate instead of love. Which doesn’t seem the least bit Christian at all.

Featured image by martingreffe via Flickr license attribution 2.0