Lux Lucet

The SPLC’s Hate Map of Florida.

What do D. James Kennedy Ministries and the Nation of Islam have in common? Not much, you say? Well, think again. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), both are hate groups with located in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

This particular issue came to my attention as a result of a recent story in Christianity Today titled “D. James Kennedy Ministries Sues SPLC over Hate Map,” According to the article, D. James Kennedy Ministries (DJKM) received negative media coverage after the recent Charlottesville riots in which the organization was branded a hate group by the SPLC. The Christianity Today piece also notes that – mirabile dictu – local Florida news reports labeled DJKM as the No.1 hate group in the state.

Per the SPLC’s Hate Map, the Ft. Lauderdale group landed on the list due to its “Anti-LGBT” stance. Notes the SPLC, “Opposition to equal rights for LGBT people has been a central theme of Christian Right organizing and fundraising for the past three decades – a period that parallels the fundamentalist movement’s rise to political power.”

If one were to take the SPLC’s word for it, he’d come away with the distinct impression that opposition to homosexuality was some 1970’s-era novelty hatched by the Moral Majority rather than the teaching espoused by Christians for the past 2000 years. In fact, the Bible’s identification of homosexuality as a sin pre-dates the Christian era, going all the way back to the Book of Genesis, where God himself referred to “the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah” and their “very grave” sin, a reference to homosexuality. The Law of Moses calls homosexuality “an abomination.” In Romans, Paul teaches that homosexuality is a punishment from God on idolaters, “who did not like to retain God in their knowledge.” There are many other examples of the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality, and I do not intend to cite them all here so as not to belabor the obvious point the God considers homosexuality a sin, and a particularly heinous one at that.

The fact that the SPLC has labeled the DJKM’s a hate group for its “Anti-LGBT” stance is cause for alarm among all Bible-believing Americans for several reasons. First, the SPLC is very influential and is in a position to do great harm to groups in its crosshairs. One can’t go very long watching or reading the various MSM outlets before running across some reference to the SPLC. The group has an impressive list of corporate and large foundation donors, most recently Apple and J.P. Morgan joined the bandwagon, meaning it’s in tight with the leftist, corporatist, globalist establishment. International man of mystery, globalist ne’er do well and unrepentant Nazi collaborator George Soros – calling Soros an unrepentant Nazi collaborator is not hyperbole, but established fact; for proof, please see this 1997 60 Minutes episode starting at the 6:45 mark where Soros himself admits his involvement with the Nazis and that he has no regrets about working for them – has given his tithes and offerings. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood A-lister George Clooney has chipped in as well.

The second cause for alarm follows from the first. Because the SPLC is so well-connected to the corporatist establishment, the corporate MSM tends to treat is pronouncements as if they were the utterances of Moses himself descending, tablets in hand, from Mount Sinai. To put it another way, if an organization winds up on the SPLC’s Hate Map, all right thinking people, all movers and shakers, understand that they’ve been given carte blanch to engage in an Orwellian-style two-minutes-hate on everyone and everything associated with said group. This can, and likely does, have a financial impact on the targeted organization, as well as a loss of reputation for anyone associated with it. This being the case, DJKM is well within its rights to sue the SPLC over its slanderous identification of the organization as a hate group.

But on top of the deleterious effects of being put on the SPLC’s Hate Map that already have been mentioned, the digital age has brought with it a new form of ostracism: deplatforming. Deplatforming refers to, among other things, the removal of one’s social media accounts for holding opinions the socialist, globalist SJW crowd running many major tech firms finds heretical. In order to create their virtual safe space, many of the big name tech companies have made it difficult, if not impossible, for anyone who does not toe their line to get his opinions out on social media. Numerous YouTubers have had their videos demonetized – demonetization refers to YouTube’s declaration that a particular video’s content is not “advertiser friendly,” which means YouTube will not associate advertising with the video in question, thus depriving the content creator of the advertising revenue. search engines have been modified to bury so-called Fake News in the search results.

Others have had their Twitter and Facebook accounts suspended or deleted. And the pressure is mounting. More and more social media companies are cracking down on anyone whose work is not “narrative compliant,” and in an age where social media has become so influential, this is a big deal. Targeted groups are at a big disadvantage if they lose access to social media platforms, because they cannot get their message out as effectively as before. Of course, that’s the entire point: the Deep State and its corporate auxiliaries are trying to shove down the memory hole any idea that doesn’t fit their narrative.

A third reason to be alarmed by the SPLC’s labeling of DJKM as a hate group is what it implies about Bible-believing Christians. Quite obviously, if DJKM is a hate group because of its stand against the homosexual agenda, by good and necessary inference every single church, every single Christian school, every single Christian missionary organization that takes seriously what the Word of God says about homosexuality, is also a hate group. It is reasonable to conclude that the only reason the SPLC has not taken the step of labeling all Bible-believing Christian organizations as hate groups is that doing so is not politically feasible at this time. Simply put, the SPLC is afraid of the huge backlash such a declaration would create against them. So instead just going for it and labeling all Bible-believing Christians as haters, which upon pain of contradiction the fine folks at the SPLC must believe to be the case, they are taking the incremental approach, at least for now, of attempting to pick off a straggler organization here and there.

Worth noting is the SPLC’s definition of the term “hate group.” According to SPLC president Richard Cohen, “hate groups are, by our definition, those that vilify entire groups of people based on immutable characteristics such as race or ethnicity.” Such a definition implies that the SPLC also believes that homosexuality, like one’s race or ethnicity, is immutable. But how do they know this? Clearly they did not get this idea from Scripture, which means they have no sound basis for making this claim, it is merely their opinion, one in direct opposition to the Word of God. This can be seen from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Corinthian church, in which he enumerated the numerous notorious sins, including homosexuality, in which some of the church members had been involved. And what did Paul tell them? “And such were some of you” (1 Corinthians 6:11). Note well, the past tense, “such were some of you.” By God’s grace, these people were regenerated and saved from a life of sin, which in some cases included homosexual behavior. So it is not true that homosexuality is immutable, and therefore, by the SPLC’s definition of the term “hate group,” no organization that opposes the homosexual agenda should be included on its Hate Map.

No doubt, Richard Cohen and his SPLC colleagues disbelieve what the Bible has to say about homosexuality, not only that it is sinful, but also that it is a mutable behavior. But they ought to believe it, not only because it is the truth, but because they will face judgment for their rejection of the truth.

I would like to point out that my citing of Christianity Today should not be taken as an endorsement of that neo-evangelical publication. As John Robbins correctly noted, Christianity Today, “is a hotbed of feminism, heterodoxy, Arminianism, Pentecostalism, and liberalism” (The Church Irrational). Further, this post should not be seen as an endorsement of DJKM either. This author does not know enough about the organization to make a judgment one way or the other regarding its soundness. Of concern is the general reputation of D. James Kennedy for ecumenism, and it is not unreasonable to assume that this characteristic is also present in the DJKM organization. Caution is warranted.

That said, the SPLC’s labeling of DJKM as a Hate Group ought to give Christians pause. If the SPLC is able to get away with tagging an organization as a Hate Group simply for professing Biblical doctrine, what will their next target be? Is it a big stretch to think that the SPLC, for all its bravado about opposing hate, is actually engaged in hate itself? By attacking DJKM for opposing the homosexual agenda, the SPLC shows its hatred of the Word of God and for his people who believe it. In time, it just may turn out that the SPLC will be seen for what it truly is: the most well-funded, the most powerful hate group of them all.