One of the largest Catholic advocacy groups in the U.S. is applauding President Donald Trump for his efforts to combat anti-Christian bias, citing the hundreds of attacks on churches in recent years.

CatholicVote’s Tommy Valentine told The Daily Wire that Trump’s executive order addressing anti-Christian discrimination marks a significant shift after four years of church attacks that were largely ignored by President Joe Biden.

Valentine, who has tracked these incidents over the past several years, criticized both Biden and the legacy media for failing to acknowledge or address the growing trend of anti-Christian violence.

“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 attacks have ranged from vandalism to arson, with Valentine tracking incidents that appeared to have a “political or spiritual motive.” According to his data—excluding petty vandalism—there were 78 attacks on Catholic churches in 2021, 141 in 2022, 108 in 2023, and 84 in 2024.

One notable case involved a man 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 the leaked draft of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in May 2022, a period that saw a surge 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 legally protected under the FACE Act, but the law has been disproportionately enforced against pro-life activists.

Under the Biden Justice Department, peaceful protesters who demonstrated outside abortion clinics were successfully prosecuted under the statute, while attacks on churches often went unaddressed, the Daily Wire noted.

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 suggested that the Trump administration consider providing support to local law enforcement in their efforts to investigate, arrest, and prosecute those responsible for attacks on churches. He noted that many of these cases remain 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.