What The Hell America!

At a series of events in February 2024 at North Greenville University in South Carolina, a wealth manager named David Bahnsen talked about the relationship between Christianity and the financial market. Christians’ influence in the marketplace, he said, “is exponentially greater than in the political sphere,” according to an article on the small Baptist university’s website. “That doesn’t make the political sphere irrelevant,” he said, “but we are missing opportunities as Christians if we do not engage the marketplace.”

Bahnsen’s comments and connections to the institutions of Christian reconstructionism shed light on the role the Christian supremacist movement plays in Bahnsen’s and the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom’s (ADF’s) political advocacy. As Hatewatch previously reported, the ADF pushes laws to eliminate corporate environmental and diversity policies through conspiratorial claims of Christian victimhood called “debanking,” which it sees as collusion between government regulators and banks to deny Christians access to bank accounts.

Bahnsen’s firm manages around $3 billion in private assets. In addition to his position as managing partner and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group, he is an adviser to the ADF’s Viewpoint Diversity Score program, an instructor for the group’s secretive Blackstone Legal Fellowship and a senior fellow at the Christian reconstructionist Center for Cultural Leadership (CCL).

Bahnsen is also the son of the late Greg Bahnsen, a man with deep roots in Christian supremacy. He was a student of R.J. Rushdoony, the godfather of Christian Reconstruction, a major figure in the Christian supremacy movement and founder of the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965. Greg Bahnsen also collaborated with Gary North, Rushdoony’s son-in-law who was central in spreading Rushdoony’s ideas into the realm of economics. David Bahnsen’s own corporate shareholder activism through his wealth management business advances a theocratic philosophy pioneered by reconstructionist theologians including his late father, who died in 1995.

Dominionism

Dominionism is a political and theological movement that researcher Frederick Clarkson defines as “the theocratic idea that Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.” It is a form of Christian supremacy, where a small subset of Christians controls not only theological purity but also oversees all aspects of society, which are to be united and yoked to their claims of biblical law. Although originally a fringe movement in Christianity, it has influenced a great deal of modern thought on the religious right.

In a 2022 lecture describing his father’s influence on theology and economics, David Bahnsen said his father “had a tremendous understanding of God’s sovereignty around resources of the world and then an advocacy for private property that was rooted in a fundamental understanding of the world belonging to God, but under our stewardship by God’s design.”

In the legal-financial sense, Bahnsen said, his father described Christians as “trustees” of God’s resources on Earth and preached that economic theories divorced from the “truth claims of the Christian worldview” were “an atrocity.” This view — straight from the Christian supremacist playbook, one also found in newer supremacist movements including the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) — helps form the theological core of today’s Trump-aligned political movement.

David Bahnsen expressed a similar sentiment in an April 2024 interview, saying God gave mankind an elevated status “as the co-creators with God. … It was a mandate that we were to go make out of the things he had given us.” Bahnsen warned that Christians have ignored their duty to evangelize in the realm of economics. “The church has … begun to reengage in matters of the civic sphere and education, and over the years has seen various degrees of fruit and improvement from that. Not the marketplace, not in commerce, not in commercial society,” he said.

The elder Bahnsen kept close company with other Reconstructionists, notably Rushdoony. Rushdoony founded the Chalcedon Foundation, an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported in 2024 that in recent years, NAR has built on Rushdoony’s ideas and begun fervently operationalizing a so-called “Seven Mountains Mandate,” a rhetorical device that prompts Christian supremacists to advance control over society.

The CCL, a California nonprofit founded by P. Andrew Sandlin in 2001, says in an introductory video on the group’s website: “Creation is what God makes, and culture is what man makes.” “Christian culture,” Sandlin says, “means all areas of life are shaped by Christian truth, and that means the Bible and Christian orthodoxy,” reflecting the narrow boundaries of what the group considers Christian. The goal, he concludes, is that “all areas of life and thought, in the end, will be Christian.” Sandlin is also a former executive director of the Chalcedon Foundation.

According to Sandlin, making all areas of life Christian requires making all Christians politically conservative. “All biblical Christians (that is, true Christians) must be politically conservative (as we use that term today), and all true conservatives must be Christian. The evangelical Leftists might suffer cardiac arrest at that assertion, but it’s true,” Sandlin wrote for the Christian nationalist website Sovereign Nations in 2018 — a site that platforms extremist James Lindsay. “This also means that Christianity isn’t reconcilable with the Democratic Party,” he added. David Bahnsen has been a senior fellow of economics and finance for CCL since 2003.

Dominionism and economics

Bahnsen has articulated the view that Christians not only need to be more evangelical in the workplace, but they also need to transform how others view labor. “I believe that economics is essentially mankind acting out in creation as the protagonist of creation,” Bahnsen said in 2023 in an interview with Michael Thiessen, founder of Liberty Coalition Canada, a Christian reformationist group that has described LGBTQ+ people as “satanic” and a “godless death cult,” and claimed LGBTQ+ people were attempting to “brainwash children.”

Bahnsen says God is productive and man was “built to produce.” Enhancing production and productive capacity of businesses appears to be central to Bahnsen’s philosophy. Part of extending dominion over the economic sphere, then, is instilling the belief that God sees value in economic productivity.

In an April 2024 interview with the Fund for American Studies, a group whose leadership has included representatives from Project 2025 coordinators The Heritage Foundation and the ADF, Bahnsen said creating opportunities for workplace evangelism is a “necessary but not sufficient part of a biblical understanding of faith and work integration.”

Bahnsen has argued that Christians need “to now go to the next step” in viewing labor as a service to God. Reforming attitudes about work to reflect dominionist theology, he argues, is important for fostering policy changes that deregulate production. Based on this philosophy, Bahnsen said that what he called “retirement culture,” i.e., people in their 50s and 60s ending their working lives and assuming more leisure time, was akin to hedonism.

“I believe recreation and leisure are important. I just do not believe that they’re the purpose of life. I think they’re a byproduct and an occasional reward that we can extract from life,” he said.

He has also criticized unions and child labor restrictions.

“I believe we must defend this idea that stakeholders in a transaction are the best ones to negotiate the terms of a transaction, not disinterested third parties. I apply that to labor as well. But the greatest example [of a negative relationship between public opinion and public policy] I could think of culturally, is the war on teenage unemployment,” he said.

In at least one other interview in 2023, Bahnsen argued against minimum wage laws, calling the minimum wage “an impossibility unless you’re going to have forced hiring.”

Bahnsen’s economic views are an extension of other dominionist interpretations of Christian Scripture, which sociologist Antony Alumkal notes often aligns the group with conservative business interests, especially around environmental policy. Dominionism often translates into extreme anti-environmentalism, characterized by science and climate change denialism and the belief that God granted men dominion over natural resources for the benefit of humans and men have a right to wield them accordingly.

The confluence of dominionist theology and anti-environmentalism produced the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation in 2005. The Cornwall Alliance was founded by E. Calvin Beisner, who was brought together with other dominionists through the activity of the Rev. Robert Sirico’s Acton Institute network in 2000. Beisner currently serves alongside Bahnsen as a senior fellow at the CCL, and Bahnsen is also on the board of directors of the Acton Institute.

In the 2010 DVD series “Resisting the Green Dragon,” the group likened the environmental movement to a satanic dragon “seducing your children in our classrooms and popular culture” and claimed that environmentalism, even evangelical Christian stewardship models, were “a tool of Satan and completely incompatible with authentic Christianity.”

Despite scientific consensus of humans’ responsibility for environmental catastrophes like man-made climate change, the group highlights its dominionist belief in Christians’ divinely mandated ownership of Earth and its resources for human production. “We affirm that one way of exercising godly dominion is by transforming raw materials into resources and using them to meet human needs,” the group said in 2013, whereas they “deny that leaving everything in the Earth in its natural state is proper Biblical stewardship.”

In 2025, the group and right-wing think tanks funded by fossil fuel industry giants like the Heartland Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute and well-known dominionist David Barton advocated for President Donald Trump and the Republican-dominated Congress to eliminate environmental grants in the Inflation Reduction Act, a 2022 law signed by then-President Joe Biden.

Theocratic libertarianism and the debanking conspiracy theory

Extending dominion over the economic sphere includes holding corporations to dominionists’ narrow view of what counts as biblical principles. Although Bahnsen’s economic philosophy is premised on a right-wing libertarian notion of unregulated private contracts, his shareholder activism advocates that private relationships should still be built upon biblical law. At times, that requires government intervention to enforce.

This element of economic dominionism frequently intersects with Christian supremacy on the metaphorical mountaintop of government. Bahnsen promotes the reconstructionist notion that supplanting public opinion with Christian conservatism will ensure compliance with biblical principles with little additional government regulation, an indirect theocratic model sometimes referred to as theocratic libertarianism.

However, Bahnsen’s shareholder activism shows he is willing to use federal regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to force a vote on his proposals to review environmental, sustainability and diversity policies and institute new protections against what he and the ADF characterize as discrimination against conservative Christians.

According to his social media, Bahnsen started his private wealth management firm, The Bahnsen Group, in 2015. Since 2022, SEC filings show Bahnsen has defended his proposals at the SEC at least seven times including proposals that some corporate boards allow shareholders to vote on policy recommendations based largely on the ADF’s Viewpoint Diversity Score program. In the cases of actions against JPMorgan Chase and PepsiCo Inc., the ADF has worked with Bahnsen through the regulatory appeals process.

Notably, Bahnsen serves as an adviser to the ADF’s Viewpoint Diversity Score project but does not appear to disclose his affiliation with the ADF in his shareholder proposals. For example, in 2022, Bahnsen filed a shareholder resolution demanding JPMorgan Chase — a corporation he invests in through his wealth management company — commission a report evaluating “how it oversees risks related to discrimination against individuals based on their race, color, religion (including religious views), sex, national origin, or political views, and whether such discrimination may impact individuals’ exercise of their constitutionally protected civil rights.”

In a supporting statement, Bahnsen claimed shareholders he represents are
“particularly concerned with recent evidence of religious and political discrimination by companies in the financial services industry,” and referenced a “Statement on Debanking and Free Speech” document organized by state attorneys general allied with the ADF as well as the Viewpoint Diversity Score website.

David Bahnsen did not respond to a request for comment submitted through his website.

In an April 2023 Wall Street Journal editorial, that has since been removed from the Journal’s website, titled “My Bid to Make JPMorgan Less Woke,” Bahnsen claims his activism is in opposition to “left-wing activists” who distract corporate America from their profit-seeking missions with “demands for more diversity and inclusion.” Seemingly abandoning libertarianism for the activism of dominionism, Bahnsen asks, “Why not take a page out of the left’s playbook and drag companies back to the political middle?”

Bahnsen made a similar claim in October 2023 on “The Dr J. Show,” a podcast hosted by Jennifer Roback Morse of the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Ruth Institute. “I think that there’s a conscious trade-off, that they [companies] are essentially doing an atonement for the most, the other evil thing you can do in the far left, and that is the profit motive,” Bahnsen told Morse.

Companies, he said, are criticized by liberals for producing profits and are forced to placate them by supporting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. “The far-left Harvard faculty lounge, Bernie Sanders, the think tanks of the left, they’re against all of it [i.e., the profit motive]. So, the trade-off will be, we’re going to buy penance by being woke, by deferring to our 26-year-olds about racial policy, sexuality, transgender, all of these things. The culture war is an easy box for them to check, as long as they can keep their profiteering.”

Bahnsen and the ADF eventually defended the proposal at the SEC. The SEC declined to accept JPMorgan Chase’s decision to exclude the proposal from a shareholder vote. Bahnsen withdrew the proposal in May 2024, according to Reuters.

In a March 2025 press release, the ADF wrote that after Bahnsen’s proposal was submitted its attorneys “actively engaged with Chase representatives to explore additional ways the bank can improve its respect for free speech and religious freedom. In these meetings, ADF attorneys have consistently pushed for Chase to implement protections for the political and religious viewpoints of both employees and customers,” the group wrote.

After months of negotiations, JPMorgan Chase announced a policy change on March 5, 2025, that bans discrimination against “religious views” in addition to religious identity. Between November 2024 and January 2025, other companies previously targeted by Bahnsen’s activism like Walmart and McDonald’s voluntarily rolled back some diversity policies that expressed commitments to racial equality and diversity in staff and management.

Spokespeople for McDonald’s and Walmart responded via phone to Hatewatch’s emailed questions but declined to comment. Walmart subsequently followed up by email directing Hatewatch to its April 2024 proxy statement opposing a Bahnsen proposal.

In response to Bahnsen’s proposal that cited ADF’s Viewpoint Diversity scorecard and called for Walmart to report on how its “policies and practices impact employees and prospective employees based on their religion (including religious views) or political views, and the risks those impacts present to the Company’s business,” the company wrote, “We respect the dignity of every individual and values [sic] their unique skills. Having a workforce of associates from diverse backgrounds makes Walmart a better company and promotes creativity, innovation and achievement.”

JPMorgan Chase did not respond to Hatewatch’s emailed request for comment.

This kind of corporate activism has been key to the ADF’s work since at least 2022. As the SPLC previously reported, the group promotes a “debanking” conspiracy theory that claims banks are closing accounts of conservative Christians whose beliefs primarily align with the ADF, like Arkansas Family Council and former U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback’s National Committee for Religious Freedom. As the SPLC reported, the banks in the ADF’s limited examples deny the accusations, and religious discrimination in banking is already illegal under federal law.

Based on this conspiracy theory, the ADF, its lobbyists and its Viewpoint Diversity Score program have pushed laws that critics say skirt money-laundering regulations, open the door to cryptocurrency manipulation, undermine prohibitions against racial and LGBTQ+ discrimination and weaken corporate commitments to environmental sustainability.

The “debanking” conspiracy theory also minimizes the history of racist redlining practices and barriers to banking like high account and overdraft fees, minimum deposit requirements and the existence of banking deserts, which drive impoverished communities to pay exorbitant interest rates for payday lending and prevent many communities from accessing federally insured financial institutions.

Hatewatch previously reported that the ADF uses white nationalist tropes to promote its model corporate policies through the Viewpoint Diversity Score program, claiming that white Christian men are most threatened by corporate diversity policies.

Illustration by the SPLC.