EXCLUSIVE: Conservative Christian Leader Calls Out SPLC's Incoming CEO Over 'Disingenuous' Attack
Ryan Haygood claims he's a Christian but he's taking over an organization that attacks the Bible's teaching.
FIRST ON THE WOKETOPUS—A conservative Christian leader is challenging the Southern Poverty Law Center’s incoming CEO to debate about whether Christian organizations that follow the Bible’s teachings on sexuality are “hate groups” that belong on a map along chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.
Ryan Haygood, who serves as president and CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, will formally join the SPLC in August. Haygood’s LinkedIn profile references Micah 6:8 and describes him as “saved by God’s grace,” also citing 2 Timothy 1:7. The SPLC’s selection may represent an attempt to counter accusations that the center is anti-Christian because it condemns biblical Christian doctrine as a form of “hate.”
“It’s really ironic he’s calling himself a Christian and yet he goes out of his way to attack benevolent, loving Christian organizations because of their Christian beliefs and Christian worldview,” Brad Dacus, founder of the Pacific Justice Institute, told The Woketopus in an interview Thursday.
“You can’t declare yourself Christian on Sunday morning and go to church and then on Monday, be the enemy of Christians, Christian organizations and ministries, because of their biblical worldview,” Dacus explained.
“It’s not real. It’s fake. It’s disingenuous,” he argued.
Dacus is sending the SPLC an open letter, inviting Haygood to “have an open, raw, unedited interview.”
“If they have a case against Pacific Justice Institute, bring it on,” the conservative leader said.
The SPLC gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy, but it now weaponizes that reputation by putting mainstream conservative and Christian organizations on a “hate map” with Klan chapters—a map the SPLC claims reveals the “infrastructure of white supremacy.”
Condemning Christian Doctrine
The SPLC claims it puts groups like PJI on the "hate map” because they vilify people who identify as LGBTQ, but the center also advocates LGBTQ causes and has repeatedly condemned traditional Christian doctrine.
When the SPLC justified placing the Ruth Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to helping victims of the Sexual Revolution, on the “hate map,” it cited as evidence of “hate” a direct quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
“The church is very clear that same-sex sexual acts are intrinsically disordered and can never be morally acceptable,” Ruth Institute Founder Jennifer Roback Morse said in 2012.
Morse’s words weren’t an aberration; they came directly from the Catechism, the binding faith document for 1 billion Catholics across the world. If that qualifies as “hate,” then every small-o orthodox Catholic church belongs on the map.
The SPLC website maintains a page of answers to “frequently asked questions about hate groups.” For years, that page included a response to the “major misconception” that the SPLC is anti-Christian.
The SPLC called this claim “false,” noting that “there are many organizations, such as Focus on the Family, that oppose same-sex marriage or oppose homosexuality on strictly Biblical grounds that the SPLC does not list as hate groups.”
That language no longer appears on the SPLC website, because the SPLC added Focus on the Family to the “hate map” last year.
In doing so, the SPLC eliminated its own primary piece of evidence that it isn’t anti-Christian.
The SPLC didn’t just add Focus on the Family—the oldest and most well-established of conservative Christian nonprofits—to the “hate map.” SPLC analyst R.G. Cravens justified the move by demonizing traditional Christian beliefs about sexuality.
He said that Focus on the Family sows “division and ideas that tear families apart by perpetuating political notions that LGBTQ people can’t be, for example, truly Christian unless they deny who they are, and that’s, one, just patently false, and, two, it’s really dangerous, because it sets families against one another.”
Cravens’ argument relies on conflating someone who feels same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria and someone who places their identity in those feelings. Conservative Christians like Dacus don’t say you can’t be Christian if you experience these feelings, but they do hold to the traditional view that same-sex activity and transgender identity are sinful, and therefore true Christians cannot take “pride” in them.
A Hate ‘Racket’
Dacus didn’t just invite Haygood to debate; he also condemned the SPLC for exaggerating “hate.”
“The bottom line is, this organization, Tyler, as you well know, is a racket,” the PJI leader said. “It’s a money-making racket and what they sell is hate and division.”
In April, a federal grand jury indicted the SPLC on 11 counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to conceal money laundering. According to the indictment, the SPLC directed donor dollars it raised in the name of fighting the Klan to Klan members in a scheme to prop up the very hate the SPLC claims it exists to oppose.
The SPLC claims it was funding informants who would bring down the Klan from within, but the indictment says the SPLC directed the racist posts of a 2017 Charlottesville organizer and paid for Klan hoods and cross-burning materials.
The accusations come after years of criticism that the SPLC exaggerates hate by highlighting “groups” that barely exist and smearing mainstream conservative groups. In 2023, I analyzed the map and found that it exaggerated hate by at least 267%.
“The fact that they’re willing to actually take money out of their own coffers ... to create this image that they can raise money from, is so unethical,” Dacus said.
“They create new enemies, vilify new groups, and their goal is not just to silence but also to vilify and destroy,” Dacus said.
He was referring to a 2007 speech in which former SPLC spokesman Mark Potok said the SPLC’s “aim in life” is to “destroy these groups,” referring to the groups on the “hate map.” Potok later clarified that he did not mean law enforcement would destroy the groups, but that the SPLC would so “mortally embarrass” the groups that they would be destroyed.
Dacus previously invited the SPLC’s outgoing CEO, Bryan Fair, to debate him, but received no response.