Biden’s Christian ‘persecution’? We review Trump’s recent claims.
Former President Donald J. Trump has repeatedly tried to appeal to Christian voters in recent weeks, accusing the Biden administration of criminalizing Americans because of their faith.
This month, Mr. Trump has claimed several times that President Biden has “persecuted” Catholics in particular. Mr Biden himself is Catholic.
“I don’t know what it is about Catholics,” Trump said said at a meeting in Coralville, Iowa. “They are going after Catholics in a violent and vicious manner.”
Mr. Trump repeated similar comments days later at another meeting, in Waterloo, and in a video posted before Christmas, he said that “Americans of faith are being persecuted like nothing this country has ever seen before.”
The message fits a larger theme for Mr. Trump, who — facing criminal charges related to his bid to take office after losing the 2020 election and criticism for praising strongmen — has tried to make Mr. Biden and portray the Democrats as the real threat to democracy.
Here’s a closer look at his claims.
WHAT WAS SAID
“Under Crooked Joe Biden, Christians and Americans of faith are being persecuted like nothing this country has ever seen before. Catholics in particular are being targeted and evangelical Christians are certainly on the watch list as well.”
– in a video about Truth Social this month
False. Experts say they are not aware of any data to support the idea that Catholics in the United States are being persecuted by the government for their faith — let alone at record levels.
“As far as the evidence goes, I find it quite difficult to support the idea that there is a concerted, clear increase in a certain type of Christian targeting,” said Jason Bruner, a professor of religious studies at Arizona State University and a historian. who studies the persecution of Christians.
Instead, Mr. Bruner said, it is highly likely that Mr. Trump is extrapolating from cases — for example, churches facing penalties for gathering during the Covid pandemic or anti-abortion activists charged with crimes — to create a systemic suggest a problem.
“There is a long history of discrimination against Catholics in the United States, from the beginning through the 1970s,” said Frank Ravitch, a professor of law and religion at Michigan State University. “And if anything, it’s probably better now in terms of non-discrimination than it’s ever, probably, ever been.”
Mr. Trump’s claims, Mr. Ravitch said, demonstrate “an incredible blindness to the history of anti-Catholicism in the United States.”
Advocates tracking Christians fleeing persecution around the world note that the Biden administration has also gradually increase the number of refugees admitted into the United States after numbers dropped dramatically during the Trump era. At the end of fiscal year 2023, the country will included About 31,000 Christian refugees arrived — about half of all refugees and the highest number since fiscal 2016. (Not everyone was necessarily fleeing persecution on religious grounds.)
“We are encouraged by that trajectory,” said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief, a Christian humanitarian organization that pushed the Biden administration to enact policies that welcome people who face faith-based discrimination.
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for the sources behind his claims.
WHAT WAS SAID
“For the past three years, the Biden administration has sent SWAT teams to arrest pro-life activists.”
– in a video about Truth Social this month
This is misleading. The Justice Department has launched an increasing number of criminal charges under a law that makes it an offense to interfere with reproductive health care by blocking access, using threats or damaging property. In at least one case it concerns the family of a suspect claimed he was arrested by a “SWAT” team, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation said this was not the case.
The law is called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act and was introduced in 1994. Federal prosecutors have used it to initiate 24 criminal cases involving 55 suspects since January 2021, according to the Justice Department.
Although most cases involved acts at facilities that provided abortion services, prosecutors have used them as well charge multiple people that supported access to abortion and targeted centers in Florida that offered pregnancy counseling and abortion alternatives.
Moreover, Mr. Trump omits to say that such arrests are not for “pro-life” activism but for specific actions, including violence, that prosecutors allege were attempts to block access to or disrupt reproductive health care services.
In one case, federal lawyers charged a man who allegedly used a slingshot to fire metal ball bearings at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Chicago. In another case, prosecutors said a New York man used locks and glue to prevent a clinic gate from opening. And those were three men accused of the bombing of a clinic in California; one recently pleaded guilty.
Mr. Trump’s claims about using “SWAT teams” may be a reference to the 2022 arrest of a Catholic activist in Pennsylvania. The defendant, Mark Houck, was charged pushing a volunteer at a Planned Parenthood center in Philadelphia in 2021. Mr. Houck’s defense to maintain that he responded to the volunteer’s insulting comments to his 12-year-old son. He was acquitted earlier this year.
Republican lawmakers have criticized Mr. Houck’s arrest by armed officers, but the FBI has rejected claims that it used a SWAT team, saying its tactics were in line with standard practices.
“Inaccurate claims are being made regarding the arrest of Mark Houck,” the FBI said in a statement. “There was no SWAT team or SWAT operators involved. FBI agents knocked on Mr. Houck’s front door, identified themselves as FBI agents and asked him to leave the home. He did so and was taken into custody on charges without incident.”
Christopher A. Wray, the FBI director, when asked about the circumstances of Mr. Houck’s arresthas said that such decisions are made at the local level, “by the career officers on the ground, who have the best understanding of the circumstances.”
WHAT WAS SAID
“The FBI has been caught profiling devout Catholics as possible domestic terrorists and plans to send undercover spies into Catholic churches, just like in the old days of the Soviet Union.”
– in a video about Truth Social this month
This needs context. Mr Trump was probably referring to a leaked document January memo prepared by the FBI’s field office in Richmond, Virginia, which warned of the potential for extremism for followers of a “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology. Republicans have been criticizing the memo for months.
But the memo was withdrawn and the country’s top law enforcement officials have repeatedly denounced it.
The memo warned of potential threats ahead of the 2024 elections and suggested gathering information and developing resources within churches to help identify suspicious activity. A distinction was also made between radicalized and non-radicalized people, saying that “radical-traditionalist Catholics” were a small minority.
Some researchers to believe there is some merit in these concerns, even if the memo was flawed. Mr. Ravitch, a professor at Michigan State University, said he believed officers had made a mistake by focusing on Catholicism. “What they’re really talking about is an extremely radical breed of Christian nationals,” he said, emphasizing that they are a small subgroup and not representative of the Roman Catholic Church or evangelicals.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said At a congressional hearing in September, he said he was “shocked” by the memo and that “Catholics are not extremists.” He called suggestions that the government was targeting Americans based on their faith “outrageous,” citing the fact that his own family Flee Europe to escape anti-Semitism before the Holocaust.
And earlier this month during a Senate hearingMr Wray said of the document: “That particular intelligence product is something that, as soon as I saw it, I was stunned. I let it soak in.”
In a statement this week, the FBI reiterated: “Any characterization that the FBI is targeting Catholics is false.”
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