By Douglas V. Gibbs
When Donald J. Trump emerged as a victor on the political scene, it sent a shockwave through the political establishment. He knew their secrets, he knew the game they were playing, and he was willing to dismantle it. Trump had operated with the elite as a businessman, and not only did he know what was under their skirt, as the old saying goes, he knows where the bodies are buried. So, the establishment went into high gear to attack Donald Trump. But, it seemed to backfire. So, they went after MAGA. That backfired, too. So, they went after the most vulnerable part of his base – a group they already hated and wished they could get rid of: Christians.
During all of that time, a game began being played – not that the hard left and their establishment allies weren’t playing it already. The war on Christianity in America by the establishment and their allies in places like academia and entertainment began long before any of us were born. Communist infiltration into the churches, and the separation of the church into a little compartment inside the four walls of the churches had already been battlefields. But, Trump was a special kind of enemy, and the Christians supporting him were unshakable. The “you can’t be a Christian and a Trump supporter” deception campaign had already failed. The Grand Conspiracy was having trouble landing punches. The “Trump’s a racist” gamble worked only so far. The Hollywood Production of the false January 6 “insurrectionist” claim was a dud. The Charlottesville “fine people on both sides” manufactured gambit was only gaining traction among the hard-left faithful. Somewhere, in between, after the IRS game against the Tea Party, and before the lawfare against Trump was in its highest gears, they decided the way to stop Christianity would be to close their bank accounts.
Over the last eight years, if you told a certain kind of person that your church’s bank account had been closed, that your ministry’s loan application had died in committee, or that the banks were denying services to Christians simply because of their principles and beliefs, you got the same weary look. Debanking? Sure, buddy. Right up there with the black helicopters.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, the outfit that the left decides which of us are hateful, published a memo last year explaining that all of this was a “conspiracy theory,” a bit of “conspiratorial” theater staged by Christian “dominionists“ and their lawyers at Alliance Defending Freedom. The claim that banks were quietly punishing Christians for their politics was, in the SPLC’s telling, a fiction cooked up by people with a persecution complex.
Then, in response to an executive order by President Trump, on October 14, 2026, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released a 47-page report built on 420,000 pages of bank documents and nearly 100,000 consumer complaints. The SPLC’s fingerprints were all over it.
The OCC (the Treasury bureau that supervises national banks) reviewed the nine largest banks in the country. It found that all nine, between 2020 and September 2025, had policies that could deny Americans financial services because of their political or religious beliefs.
And it found that four of them (JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, PNC, and TD Bank) cited the Southern Poverty Law Center by name when doing it.
At PNC, employees weighed a line of credit for a media company in late 2021 and noted that one owner’s foundation “has funded several Christian conservative groups, including several identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.” One employee’s verdict: “I’m in the camp of a hard no.” Why? Because the owners had “built very public personas around opinions very contrary to PNC’s beliefs/values.”
At JPMorgan, a payment subsidiary called WePay ran customer screening against a keyword list that included “MAGA,” “Make America Great,” and “America First.” It closed the account of a conservative legal group, then a conservative nonprofit, then a crowdfunding account raising money for a devout Christian’s lawsuit. Chase’s reputational risk officers recommended “an exit from this account.” Two years later, a bank employee went back into the system and quietly stripped the labels “right-wing” and “religious” from the file, replacing them with something that sounded normal: “a conservative education and research organization” promoting “traditional family values.”
Wells Fargo flagged a nonprofit’s views on same-sex marriage. TD Bank rated an immigration-enforcement group “high risk” because its statements about immigrants were “inconsistent with TD’s values.”
A crucial key here is the fact that at no point in any of these files did anyone discuss whether the customer could pay back the money.
The mechanism explains more than we wish would be truth. It is worth understanding because it is the whole scandal in miniature.
No bank wants to say “we denied this loan because we don’t like your politics.” That invites an argument. So instead, banks reach for a phrase with the ring of actuarial science: reputational risk.
Reputational risk sounds measurable. It is not. The OCC found that banks “largely lacked clear and measurable standards and objective risk-based criteria” for it. There is no formula. There is no threshold. There is only a vibe, and whoever supplies the vibe wins.
For a decade, the supplier of the vibe has been the SPLC: a private nonprofit in Montgomery, Alabama, with no rulemaking authority, no examination power, no appeals process, and no obligation of due process toward the people it grades. It is, and has been, functionally, a credit rating agency for ideology. Moody’s decides whether you’re solvent. The SPLC decides whether you’re respectable. And a bad mark on the second one can cost you the first.
Consider what that means. A group or individual can be entirely mainstream, believe what the Baptist church down the street believes about marriage, give to a pregnancy center, send a check to a legal fund, and find itself on the same spreadsheet as Klansmen. A junior compliance officer in Charlotte sees the designation, sees the words “hate group,” and has no reason to dig further. She has 400 other files. Deny it and move on. Nobody gets fired for turning away a family-values nonprofit.
This whole thing is not a conspiracy theory, or even a conspiracy. It’s something worse and more mundane: an entire industry outsourcing judgment to a list it never audited, produced by an organization it never elected.
The “conspiracy theory” label wasn’t just wrong. It was convenient.
While the SPLC’s Hatewatch desk was telling reporters that debanking was a right-wing fantasy, its own corporate-engagement operation was actively lobbying financial institutions to drop the very groups it was accused of hurting – Alliance Defending Freedom and Family Research Council among them. ADF’s Jeremy Tedesco put it plainly: “one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing over at SPLC headquarters.”
The SPLC’s fallback argument is that religious discrimination in banking is already illegal, so there’s nothing new to see. Fine. A right that exists on paper and cannot be enforced is not a right. Ask the Tennessee ministry that banked with Bank of America for eight years before being told, without explanation, that its account was gone while it was funneling food money to Uganda, where people live meal to meal, not paycheck to paycheck.
And if you want the full measure of the SPLC’s credibility as a grader of other institutions, consider this: in April, a federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the organization on eleven counts. Wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, conspiracy to commit money laundering – alleging it secretly moved more than $3 million in donor money through shell entities with names like “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse” to pay informants.
The SPLC allegedly lied to a bank. That same organization spent years telling the rest of us how banks should treat us.
This is not purely a MAGA, or Christianity problem. Capital One, per the same report, turned away groups supporting abortion rights, a public-education outfit whose political arm endorsed Democrats, and a gun-rights organization. Good. That’s the point, the standard should be viewpoint neutrality, not a thumb on the scale in their favor.
This is not to say that anti-money-laundering rules aren’t real, and that banks shouldn’t genuinely vet customers. The OCC conceded as much, then added the sentence that should be taped to every compliance desk in America: banks can also use compliance concerns as a “pretext” for turning away customers for unrelated reasons.
The OCC admits it can’t quantify how many Americans got hurt. So what? Nobody can quantify the number of contracts never signed by people who didn’t bother applying. The documented cases are the visible sediment of a much larger invisible flow.
Should Congress should do anything about it? This is a commerce dispute that crosses state lines, so Constitutionally there is a responsibility for the federal government to step in. But, does the current band of legislators have the internal fortitude to do something? Talk is cheap. Here is the test of whether Republicans mean any of this.
- Kill reputational risk as a supervisory category. The OCC has already stopped counting it in exams. Make that durable, not discretionary.
- Require written reasons. A denial of credit or termination of an account should come with a specific, factual explanation. Not “business-type disagreement.”
- Disclose third-party designations. If a decision was driven by an outside list, say which one and which designation. Then let the customer contest the underlying designation with the bank, and let the bank contest it with the listmaker.
- Create a real appeal. Right now a customer can be de-banked and have no forum, no record, and no recourse. That’s not banking. That’s a tribunal.
- Put sunlight on the listmakers. Any organization whose designations move credit decisions should publish its criteria, its evidence, and its corrections history.
Representative James Comer’s Oversight Committee is already digging, and his line is the right one: “No American should be locked out of the banking system for being conservative or Christian.”
The debanking story is a case study in something those who are not far-left has been slow to name: the outsourcing of governing to NGOs. Congress passes a statute. An agency writes a rule. A nonprofit with a political agenda writes the list that determines how the rule lands on your desk. Nobody voted for the last step, and the last step is the one that matters.
Which is why the “conspiracy theory” label deserves its own postmortem. It is the cheapest way to end an argument you’re losing. It doesn’t require evidence, only confidence. And, it buys about eighteen months, which is enough time for the people raising the alarm to look unhinged and for everyone else to stop listening.
Conservatives and Christians were right. We were right in 2023, we were right in 2024 when the SPLC published its memo, and we’re right now that the federal government has put it on paper. Remember who told you otherwise, and remember what they were doing while they told you.
Banks exist to lend money to people who can pay it back. PNC’s own employee said the quiet part out loud: it’s “really difficult to justify aligning ourselves” with people whose opinions are “contrary to PNC’s beliefs/values.”
Difficulty isn’t the standard. It’s a bank. Align with the balance sheet.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
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