One of the largest Catholic advocacy groups in America is praising President Donald Trump for his efforts to crack down on anti-Christian bias, pointing to the hundreds of attacks on churches over the last four years.
CatholicVote’s Tommy Valentine told The Daily Wire that Trump’s executive order on combatting anti-Christian bias was a welcome change after four years of attacks on churches that largely went ignored by President Joe Biden. Valentine has tracked the consistent attacks on churches over the last few years, saying that the incidents were ignored both by Biden and the legacy media.
“We’ve had nearly 500 of these attacks on Catholics churches alone, and hundreds of attacks on non-Catholic churches, and that just gets waived away,” he told The Daily Wire. “It’s really frustrating, it’s really demoralizing.”
The kind of attacks range from vandalism to arson and Valentine said he tracked incidents which appeared to have a “political or spiritual motive.” Excluding acts of petty vandalism, there were 78 attacks on Catholic churches in 2021, 141 in 2022, 108 in 2023, and 84 in 2024, according to data collected by Valentine.
In one instance, one man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for burning down West Virginia’s historic Saint Colman Catholic Church in June 2022. That attack occurred just one month after a draft of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked in May 2022, causing a spike in violence.
Valentine said that the Biden administration “turned a blind eye” to the attacks.
“Our second Catholic president should have known better and yet he was so thoroughly captured by leftwing ideology that he put ideology above his own religion and allowed our churches to be burned down,” Valentine said.
Churches are supposed to be protected under the FACE Act, but the law has been disproportionately used against pro-life activists. The Biden Justice Department successfully prosecuted peaceful protesters who sat outside of abortion facilities across the country under FACE.
Trump’s executive order creates a task force, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, to “eradicate” bias against Christians and cites the attacks on churches.
“In this atmosphere of anti-Christian government, hostility and vandalism against Christian churches and places of worship surged, with the number of such identified acts in 2023 exceeding by more than eight times the number from 2018,” the order says. “Catholic churches and institutions have been aggressively targeted with hundreds of acts of hostility, violence, and vandalism.”
Valentine said the Trump administration should consider aiding local enforcement in their efforts to make arrests and prosecute the attacks on churches. Many of the cases have gone unsolved with no arrests made.
“It wouldn’t take much of a federal response to send a message to people around the country who are thinking of doing this that if you do this, you will be prosecuted federally and could face serious jail time and I think that really would lead to a decrease in these attacks,” Valentine said.
Trump’s task force will have two years to conduct its work and must produce a report within 120 days on what it has accomplished so far.