Open for business

Christian conservatives and corporate America have spent a rough several years going through a messy divorce. Maybe it started when Salesforce lived up to its name by forcing Indiana Gov. Mike Pence to abandon support for a state-level version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Maybe it was Target’s decision to engage in a same-sex affair with activist groups whose demands started with bathroom privileges, moved on to book banning, and eventually to merch partnerships with a trans Satanist. And then there’s Disney and Bud Light. Even Tractor Supply and John Deere flirted with pronoun mandates and toxic HR struggle sessions. Let’s be honest: It sure looked like the once happy couple, conservatives and corporate America, betrothed in the Reagan coalition, had developed irreconcilable differences.

But then again, maybe it wasn’t a divorce. Maybe it was just a trial separation.

As a case in point, consider JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the world. In 2022, Chase closed the account of former U.S. ambassador Sam Brownback after he founded the National Committee for Religious Freedom. Brownback then received inconsistent/incorrect answers when he requested an explanation. Brownback refused to accept the bank’s action. His experience became part of a broader investigation into the reasons behind banks shutting down the accounts of conservative/religious clients. The list of debanking victims includes organizations like Indigenous Advance (debanked by Bank of America in 2023), and even Melania and Barron Trump, with Melania mentioning their account closures in her memoir and prompting an inquiry by the House Committee on Oversight. Throughout this wave of debanking, JPMorgan Chase, because of its sheer size, stood out as a key player. Chase apologized for the debanking but argued (eventually) that it was a good faith error, not a policy. The facts of the matter are murky.

More recently, banks have begun to argue that federal regulations have raised the risk of certain banking customers, especially those with international elements. Whether banks had their arms twisted into becoming the instruments of cancel culture or whether this provided a ready excuse to impose elite culture norms on the rest of us is not clear. Either way, this is clearly an opportunity for conservatives and banks to team up again and roll-back the regulatory state.

This issue might have gone ignored if we’d chosen to let it go (exactly the inaction that led to many of the problems we’re having with corporate activists). Fortunately, influential figures from conservative legal, financial, and government circles have now taken action. Calls for greater transparency and a commitment to abandon malleable “social risk” policies that could result in political debanking came swiftly, from legal organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom, prominent financial professionals, and several treasurers, auditors, comptrollers, and commissioners of the State Financial Officers Foundation and attorneys general. Simultaneously, shareholders applied pressure to corporate American from within, fueled by groups such as my own Bowyer Research and investors like financial advisor David Bahnsen, who spent years placing proposals and pushing Chase to clarify its stance on politicized debanking. This season, Julie Nimmons, a Tennessee-based shareholder and full-time volunteer, worked with us to place a proposal on the ballot of JPMorgan Chase. Her financial advisor from Blue Trust introduced us, and she stepped up. That led to in-depth negotiations and a healthy process of reasoning together.

After literal years, the long game—and the persistent coalition of the willing—paid off.

In 2023, JPMorgan had already removed a “social risk” clause from its payment processing policies, putting an end to using vague terms like “intolerance” and “hate” to determine whether a customer could be debanked. The most significant breakthrough came just a few days ago when Chase agreed to implement a policy change that explicitly protects both customers and employees from discrimination based on their religious or political beliefs. Put simply, this is the work of years to lock in an actual policy change, negotiated in good faith, as opposed to public statements cast from a safe distance.

What we’ve seen is that progress comes from talking to companies rather than talking about them. Political outrage machines are more about fundraising and brand building than they are about being salt and light. Of course, engagement doesn’t always work. Conversations with Bank of America show some banks are just not ready to listen to half the country. Some CEOs are true believers in using shareholder money for social causes, but others are true believers in shareholder capitalism. JPMorgan Chase’s CEO seems to be among the latter.

But it’s important to remember that shareholder capitalism requires shareholder engagement. Shareholders have power. One citizen and her financial advisor showed us that. Will they have imitators? I, for one, believe that the marriage between business and conservatives can be saved, but like with any marriage, it takes work.