# American Family Association The **American Family Association (AFA)** is a Tupelo, Mississippi-based [[Religious Right]] pressure group. [[Donald Wildmon]], a Methodist minister, founded it in 1977 as the National Federation for Decency and renamed it in 1988. His son Tim Wildmon now leads it. Its lasting contribution to American politics is the **industrialized outrage boycott**: identify a corporate or cultural target, mail a decontextualized description of the offense to a huge list of supporters, and turn the response into both corporate pressure and fundraising. ## The boycott machine - **The art wars (1989–90).** Wildmon's mailing about Andres Serrano's *Piss Christ* helped ignite the [[NEA Culture Wars]] (see [[Piss Christ Controversy]]). The AFA lost a case to [[David Wojnarowicz]], who sued over its misleading cropping of his images. - **Entertainment.** Campaigns against television programming and *The Last Temptation of Christ* (1988). - **Disney (1996–2005)**, over benefits for same-sex domestic partners. - **Ford (2005–08)**, over advertising in gay publications. - **Target (2016–25)**, over its transgender restroom policy. The AFA ended this boycott in February 2025, after Target retreated from its diversity initiatives. The Target outcome shows the tactic's modern payoff: in the anti-DEI climate, corporate retreat can be counted as a win whether or not the boycott caused it. ## Media and personnel The AFA owns roughly 200 radio stations in more than 30 states as **American Family Radio**. It also runs the OneNewsNow news service. That infrastructure makes it a broadcaster as much as an advocacy group. Its most notorious voice has been Bryan Fischer, its longtime director of issue analysis. His claims that homosexuality caused the Holocaust and that the First Amendment protects only Christianity got him removed as spokesman in 2015, though he kept his radio show. ## The hate-group designation The Southern Poverty Law Center designated the AFA an anti-LGBTQ hate group in November 2010, citing its "propagation of known falsehoods" and "demonizing propaganda." The designation became a standing grievance in the right's long campaign against the [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] itself. ## Why it matters The AFA is a through-line from the Moral Majority era to the anti-DEI campaigns of the 2020s. It shows how a single Mississippi mailing operation made culture-war pressure a permanent, fundable business model. It also shows how the boycott, long treated as a left-wing tactic, was run at scale from the right for four decades. ## See also - [[Donald Wildmon]] · [[NEA Culture Wars]] · [[Piss Christ Controversy]] · [[National Endowment for the Arts]] - [[Religious Right]] · [[Culture War]] · [[AIDS Crisis Timeline]]