Salt and light at shareholder meetings

If politics is downstream from culture and many of the most important culture-makers in America are publicly traded companies, then annual shareholder elections are as important as the political elections that get all the public attention. Private corporations have created the postmodern sacred calendar, with its obeisance to Gaia on “earth week” and to the sexual revolution all June. Corporations decided that the death of George Floyd was a good reason to give $99 billion to a movement founded by people who care nothing about racial equality but a great deal about abolishing monogamy.

Corporations, through the threat of divestment, have pressured politicians to scuttle state versions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and laws that would protect women’s locker rooms from the intrusion of male genitalia. Social media corporations told us that in pronoun usage, grammatically correct was not politically correct, and that we needn’t be troubled with the burden of hearing from top-notch epidemiologists who contradicted the opinions of Dr. Fauci. Investment corporations decided that environmental and social causes (the E and the S of ESG) belonged on the same level as sound corporate governance practices, and that corporate managers no longer owed full responsibility to the owners of the companies they worked for, and would be able to shift back and forth in allegiance to whichever “stakeholder” they preferred.

Corporations tell employees which old words are now verboten and which new words are now required, which religious and ethnic groups are privileged (and therefore in need of demotion) and which are historically disadvantaged, and how their intersection creates a new hierarchy of moral authority.

This all happened because anything to which salt is not actively applied immediately begins to rot, and Christian conservatives have simply not been applying the culture-preserving salt to corporations. The business sector’s allegiance was taken for granted and therefore neglected. Then there was a series of increasingly painful wakeup calls. Salesforce and others scuttled Indiana’s RFRA bill. Disney fought for sexual identity agitprop in kindergarten and in kid-targeted entertainment. Target invited men into the ladies room and later Satanism-chic into its design team. A beer company made a prancing man into a mascot. Blackrock declared the need to “force certain behaviors,” such as abandoning the hydrocarbons. Box offices receipts dropped as did beer sales. Gas prices rose.

But all that is changing now. Historically, annual shareholder meetings have been dominated by resolutions placed on the ballots by left-wing activists, while resolutions from conservative groups could be counted on one hand. But last year, there were something like 70 proposals countering the left and, so far this year, I am personally aware of over 100 such proposals working their way through the pipeline. Historically, expert but underfunded groups such as the National Center for Public Policy and the National Legal Policy Center carried almost all of the weight. But recently a new powerful constellation of organizations has stepped up. Red State treasurers (represented by the State Financial Officers Foundation), the Alliance Defending Freedom (with an unmatched history of litigation victories before the Supreme Court), and financial professionals such as David Bahnsen, Inspire Investing, Patron Partners, Strive Asset Management and American Conservative Values Fund and others are setting the agenda. And that list is growing on a weekly basis. The media ministry American Family Association (AFA), including their radio show FaithFi with Rob West, has made corporate engagement a major programming theme.

Here’s what to look for this year. Last year Bahnsen led the fight against debanking on the ballot of JPMorgan Chase, America’s largest bank, due to its cancellation of a religious freedom group founded by Ambassador Sam Brownback. Bahnsen will continue to engage with Chase this year on the issue of religious and viewpoint freedom for employees. Another investor is taking up the debanking issue with Bank of America, over its debanking of a ministry to Ugandan widows and orphans. AFA is actively engaging with Apple over the issue of deplatforming religious content and with Amazon over similar concerns. Companies that leapt to announce an abortion employee health care benefit on the heels of Dobbs are going to be challenged about discrimination. Giving a woman a check contingent on her not being pregnant certainly appears to be pregnancy discrimination. And companies that pledged to cover sexual transition costs for minors are going to be challenged about their discriminatory refusal to cover detransition treatment.

Christian investors and institutions (churches, seminaries, foundations, ministries) represent trillions of dollars in wealth. As stockholders and owners, they have authority that they have almost entirely failed to use. If they step up this year, the tide will turn.