What The Hell America!

Anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has targeted the human rights of queer people in public and in private, in the U.S. and abroad. Now, it’s setting its sights on corporate initiatives for the environment and sustainability, along with diversity and equity.

The ADF’s Viewpoint Diversity Score (VDS) program, which it uses to malign these corporate programs (generally referred to as environmental, social and governance, or ESG, and diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI), reveals a lot about the rigid Christian theocracy underpinning these attacks. Multiple advisers listed on the group’s website have connections to Christian Reconstructionism, which holds that all aspects of society should be primarily governed by Old Testament biblical law, and an accompanying ideology known as dominionism that holds only a narrowly defined group of Christians have a right to rule the Earth.

The work of one ADF adviser, Jerry Bowyer, sheds light on contemporary hard-right Christian supremacists’ focus on corporate activism. Bowyer leads a proxy investing advisory firm that simultaneously claims its shareholder voting guides are not “designed to impose conservative politics on companies” but are dedicated to opposing environmental and diversity policies and supporting an ADF conspiracy theory called “debanking,” which claims government regulators and banks collude to intentionally discriminate against conservatives and Christians.

Since the early 1990s, Bowyer has been a fixture in the Christian Reconstructionist movement, having once led an organization dedicated to what he called “Christocracy, the rule of Christ over the nation.” Along with advising ADF, Bowyer is a fellow with the creationist Discovery Institute and the dominionist Center for Cultural Leadership (CCL), a group led by P. Andrew Sandlin, an anti-abortion extremist who also believes in a Reconstructionist vision of a “world-conquering” Christian theocracy.

Proxy research

In 1999, The Washington Post described Bowyer’s work with the National Reform Association, a Calvinist branch of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, as “crusading for creation of a ‘theocracy’ in America.”

Bowyer is a senior fellow at Sandlin’s CCL. In addition to his anti-abortion extremism, Sandlin is the former executive vice president of the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Chalcedon Foundation. CCL’s goal, according to Sandlin, is that “all areas of life and thought, in the end, will be Christian.”

Bowyer also runs a proxy investing advisory firm called Bowyer Research, which advises investors on shareholder elections that determine corporate governance.

“Our approach,” Bowyer’s firm notes, “is deeply skeptical regarding ESG [frameworks] and therefore goes beyond simply not supporting it and onto actively countering it when we believe it conflicts with rigorous definitions of pecuniary return to shareholders, which we think it quite commonly does.”

His business appears to be growing. In March 2024, Bowyer and several ADF advisers successfully pressured Institutional Shareholder Services, a major shareholder advisory firm, to offer a new set of materials for pension managers through Bowyer’s company. Bowyer told Reuters at the time, “This is an effort at de-politicization. This isn’t an effort to get companies to be more conservative, this is an effort to get companies out of the political process.”

With few overt references to dominionism on its website, the firm appears to stake out a neutral middle ground between conservative and liberal political activism. From a purely fiduciary perspective, Bowyer argues that using ESG frameworks is not consistent with the financial duty of proxy investors because they produce political risk that jeopardizes corporate profits.

Whereas ESG principles are too political, Bowyer argues, anti-ESG principles are not. The strategy is consistent with the long history of “stealth” activism deployed by Christian supremacists throughout much of the 1990s to 2000s, which sought to both disguise outreach to ultra-conservative religious voters during electoral campaigns and soften their theocratic rhetoric with more innocuous-sounding language.

According to Bowyer’s firm, ESG is too risky in part because it has become “politicized,” especially attracting opposition from the fossil fuel industry and other Christian Reconstructionists.

“The definition of what constitutes a fiduciary approach to proxy voting has become a highly contested space, with some arguing for ESG as an effective way to manage risk and others arguing that ESG is in origin, or at least has become, politicized,” according to the firm. The firm does not appear to disclose Bowyer’s advisory role with ADF on its website or how ADF is working to politicize ESG frameworks through its VDS program.

An illusion of neutrality

According to Bowyer, the so-called politicization of ESG and accompanying ginned-up risks to corporate profits means that corporate support for almost any idea Reconstructionists and political conservatives oppose places companies outside of a fiduciary responsibility to be neutral on political issues.

For example, Bowyer’s firm provides voting guidance on a diverse set of issues, from opposing policies that diminish the use of fossil fuels to “proposals pressuring companies to adopt numerical diversity targets, or pressure companies to defund conservative organizations which are not directly related to the pecuniary benefit of shareholders.” On the other hand, Bowyer’s guidance advocates a “vote for resolutions that discourage companies from publicly engaging on divisive social issues such as abortion policies, voter-ID laws and gender-identity controversies.” The firm also advises against corporate policies that could result in surveillance of gun owners.

As this diverse list of priorities suggests, applying the principles of dominionist theology to investing is not always as direct as advocating against investing in companies that promote “sin.” Instead, dominionist economic principles seem to allow Reconstructionists to embrace companies that would otherwise be deemed sinful, as long as their investment produces a lucrative return that can be used to encourage the development of a Christian theocracy.

“At the most basic level, Biblically Responsible Investing, A.K.A Christian Investing, means investing to get a return,” Bowyer wrote in a January 2020 blog post. “Truly Biblical investment strategies will start with that positive purpose of investment, as opposed to [finding] a Christian investment fund whose purpose focuses mainly on imposing a set of restrictions on which sin industries to block.”

In this context, it does not appear contradictory when Bowyer and his staff insist his firm doesn’t push conservative ideology onto companies and clients. The approach his firm advises is “non-political,” they say, and “focused narrowly on pecuniary benefit to investors. This is not an attempt to move companies to the right, but rather an attempt to move them to neutral.” In short, ESG skepticism is synonymous with neutrality while neutrality means profit that can be invested in building a godly society.

Bowyer Research notes it is not a coincidence that the policies it advocates intersect with conservative political aims. “The guidelines do tend to support proposals from conservative groups,” the firm writes, “but only when those proposals themselves are focused on getting companies away from politics.”

The sentiment belies an understanding among Reconstructionists, however, that true Christianity is politically conservative and “isn’t reconcilable” with either liberalism or the Democratic Party. Writing in 2018, CCL’s Sandlin claimed that “All biblical Christians (that is, true Christians) must be politically conservative (as we use that term today), and all true conservatives must be Christian.”

Changing strategies from private to public companies

Because the political goal of dominionism is a Christian theocracy, Bowyer’s investment strategies reflect the range of economic tools Reconstructionists use to achieve their goal. It also shows an expansion of their tactics to control both privately held companies and publicly traded corporations.

Some Christian-right investment firms, like Sovereign’s Capital and Inspire Investing — which are represented among ADF’s Viewpoint Diversity Score advisers — for years have directly invested money into select private companies based on Christian “screening” metrics that avoid sinful industries, according to the firms’ websites. Only recently have the firms expanded into public equity funds to advance ownership and policy change in publicly traded companies.

According to Bowyer, the lack of “engagement” between Christian investment firms and large corporations means the investment firms forfeit their ability to influence the companies.

“For the most part, those funds [Christian advisory firms] do not focus on voting their values but instead on excluding companies from the portfolio that do not share those values. The issue of screening is debatable, but what isn’t debatable is that every time a fund bans a company like Disney from the portfolio, it loses its authority to vote on Disney’s proxies,” Bowyer wrote in 2023.

On the other hand, investment firms that do not follow conservative principles result in Christians’ money being managed by firms that support “controversial issues,” Bowyer wrote, like “decarbonization, divestment from pro-life states and politicians, and resolutions pertaining to funding Planned Parenthood and similar groups.” For Bowyer, the answer seems to be direct shareholder engagement.

Bowyer has been crucial to modeling this kind of direct corporate advocacy in conjunction with ADF adviser David Bahnsen. In March 2025, ADF praised JPMorgan Chase for “adopt[ing] language that will protect against future instances of political and religious debanking in its Code of Conduct.” The policy change came after the two ADF advisers, Bowyer and Bahnsen, filed shareholder resolutions with the company targeting its commitments to ESG principles.

In a 2023 article about his partnership with Bahnsen and the direct impact on company policy his shareholder activism produces, Bowyer wrote, “Investors whose stake is large enough have the right to propose a resolution. In my experience, such proposals have always led to serious engagement about the issue with the company’s managers. For example, I’ve worked with David Bahnsen … He has formally proposed several resolutions, including ones already confirmed to appear on the Exxon and McDonald’s ballots this season. Every one of his proposals has led to extensive engagement with company management. It’s a powerful tool that only works when the investor has control. Resolutions help us move from the status quo in which we respond to their agenda and make them react to ours.”

As Hatewatch previously reported, Bahnsen withdrew his proposed resolution to JPMorgan Chase shareholders in May 2024. In a report on the resolution, Reuters quoted Bowyer, whom they characterized as a “fund consultant who represents David Bahnsen.” According to Reuters, Bowyer said the resolution was withdrawn because JPMorgan Chase changed policies related to its online payment processing service WePay.

Reuters wrote: “One factor, Bowyer said, was the bank’s decision to drop a requirement that merchants using its WePay service not accept payments tied to risks like allegations of racism or sexual harassment. He also cited a note that JPMorgan included in a recent climate report, stating it serves customers ‘regardless of political, social or religious viewpoints.’” Reuters also quoted ADF’s Jeremy Tedesco, who said, “These policies give people a foothold to demand banks cancel services. So eliminating that is not a small thing.”