Over the past twenty years, transnational movements against women’s rights and gender equality have grown in strength across Europe. Investigations by openDemocracy show that this backlash is well-organized and extensively funded by transnational actors, especially from the United States.
Since 2017, the Tracking the Backlash team of feminist investigative journalists at openDemocracy—has undertaken several investigations into the global movement against women’s rights and gender equality, revealing new evidence about how foreign “dark money” is spent around the world and the tactics that are used. This shows that the backlash in Europe is extensively funded by transnational actors, notably U.S. Christian conservatives. This is not an uncoordinated phenomenon. Anti-rights groups have organized networks, carefully planned strategies, large funds, and ambitious goals to block or roll back rights by exerting influence on elections, courts, education and health systems, policymakers, and the public.
In 2017, openDemocracy created the largest dataset of how U.S. Christian right-wing groups that oppose sexual and reproductive rights spend their money in Europe. These groups are quite open about their goal to abolish universal human rights. They explicitly state their opposition to LGBTIQ rights, including same-sex marriage, and that “conversion therapy” should not be banned.
Many of these groups are linked to former U.S. president Donald Trump and his close circle. Several are also connected to the World Congress of Families, a global network of ultra-conservative activists and organizations with links to far-right politicians and movements in a number of European countries, including Hungary, Italyf, Poland, Serbia, and Spain. The key organizations are the Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Center for Law and Justice, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Family Watch International, Focus on the Family, Human Rights International, Human Life International, and the Leadership Institute.
Hundreds of pages of financial data from such U.S. anti-rights groups show that most of their spending was in Europe. Between 2007 and 2019, they spent more than $98 million there, mainly on campaigns against women’s and LGBTIQ rights, sex education, and abortion. However, this amount does not reflect the full level of spending by such groups because some are registered as churches in the United States and therefore are under no obligation to disclose their financial data.
Top Spenders and their Strategies
The global arm of Alliance Defending Freedom, ADF International, is involved in dozens of court cases around the world against reproductive rights and marriage equality. The group opened its London office in 2017 and has invested hundreds of thousands of pounds on lobbying in the United Kingdom.
Likewise, the European offices of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) have presented amicus briefs in numerous court cases against sexual and reproductive rights. When Poland’s constitutional court voted to ban abortion in cases of fetal defects in 2020, the ACLJ had submitted arguments in favor of the new restrictions, which were condemned by the Council of Europe as a grave “human rights violation.”
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is well known for its anti-abortion stance and is a major international spender, disbursing $96 million between 2007 and 2014, according to its financial filings. It has not had to disclose its foreign spending since changing its registration in the United States from that of a nonprofit organization to that of a church in 2014. In 2020, it sued numerous U.K. venues and city councils that had cancelled its events because of homophobic and Islamophobic comments made by its president, Franklin Graham.
openDemocracy has identified a wide range of strategies these organizations use. They target women with misinformation about their health and rights; they send teams of lobbyists to Brussels to influence EU officials; they support campaigns against LGBTIQ rights; they fund a network of “grassroots” anti-abortion campaigns; and they host major meetings in Europe, attended by hundreds of religious-right activists and far-right politicians.
New Revelations
These groups do not reveal the sources of their funding, but openDemocracy has revealed that two U.S. charities—the National Christian Foundation (NCF) and Fidelity Charitable—gave them $93 million between 2016 and 2020, placing them among their top funders. The bulk of this money, $85 million, has come from the NCF, which is a far-right evangelical charity. The main recipient at $48.9 million was the ADF, with the NCF accounting for 73 percent of all the grants it received. The NCF also provided 54 percent of the grants received by Focus on the Family ($23 million), 25 percent of those received by the Family Research Council ($10.6 million), and smaller amounts to other organizations.
The NCF is a donor-advised fund that allows givers to choose which organizations receive grants and also to remain anonymous. It is considered “the single biggest source of money [for] pro-life and anti-LGBT movements over the past 15 years.” The NCF has also reportedly given money to groups involved in anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant activities. In a written response to openDemocracy, it stated: “NCF does not develop or implement strategies about which charities or causes to support. All grants are initiated by the recommendations of our givers.”
Fidelity Charitable, which is the philanthropic arm of the financial giant Fidelity Investments and was the largest U.S. charity in terms of fundraising revenue in 2016, gives out hundreds of small grants. Since 2016, it has given $7.9 million to several of these conservative organizations, most of it to Focus on the Family ($3 million) and the ADF ($2 million) via 831 and 407 different grants respectively. Fidelity Charitable has been criticized for helping donors to fund several far-right platforms. These include the New Century Foundation, a white-supremacy group that fabricated the claim that Black people are more prone to violent crime than white people, and the VDARE Foundation, whose leader has said that “Hispanics do specialize in rape, particularly of children.” Responding to openDemocracy, Fidelity Charitable stated that it is “a cause-neutral public charity […] completely independent of Fidelity Investments, and its grants do not reflect the views of, or represent an endorsement by, Fidelity Charitable or Fidelity Investments.”
What Comes Next?
The data collected and the analysis by openDemocracy show that anti-gender movements are interested in long-term wins. Ultra-conservatives focus their efforts on Europe and the infrastructure they have built up is not going to disappear. According to Neil Datta, the secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, our findings “further demonstrate the growing trend of religious extremists forging cross-border alliances to advance ... pseudo-legal arguments and engaging in formal legal processes aiming to unstitch the fabric of human rights protection.”
For Sophie in ‘t Veld, a member of the European Parliament, “Europeans are too naive in thinking that achievements in women’s rights and sexual and reproductive health are irreversible. The anti-choice movement does not only have a lot of money, they also have a plan and the determination. As she concludes, “Europe should wake up, and it should wake up fast.”
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/peter-brimelow
Communication with openDemocracy.
Tatev Hovhannisyan is Europe and Eurasia editor at openDemocracy’s Tracking the Backlash project. She was Emma Goldman Fellow at the IWM in 2023.
