Beware: The effort to get woke activism out of investing is really a secret plot to force Christian supremacy and theocracy on the nation!
Don’t believe me? Just ask the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The SPLC has a knack for finding the secret racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-immigrant motive behind anything, and its reporter is on the case.
This time, the intrepid R.G. Cravens has uncovered a conspiracy so deep, it seems utterly incomprehensible to the uninitiated.
You see, the Christian conservative law firm Alliance Defending Freedom has launched an initiative called the Viewpoint Diversity Score, working with Christian investment manager Jerry Bowyer. Bowyer’s firm, Bowyer Research, says it is “nonpolitical” and advises companies to focus “narrowly on pecuniary benefit to investors.”
In recent years, left-leaning firms have prioritized environmental, social, and governance standards for investing, and Alliance Defending Freedom and Bowyer say they want to move investing back to neutral. Their statements, actions, and guidelines seem to promote neutrality, encouraging companies to prioritize profits and returns on investments rather than activist causes.
Yet Cravens has discovered their secret. Bowyer, you see, has ties to the underground Christian world of dominionism, which seeks to impose Christian theocracy on America. Whatever he says, he’s really a nefarious Christian absolutist!
Thus, Cravens works hard to decipher the hidden messages in Bowyer’s words. Or, as Cravens puts it, he deciphers the “‘stealth’ activism deployed by Christian supremacists [aiming to] soften their theocratic rhetoric with more innocuous-sounding language.”
For instance, when Bowyer wrote that “Biblically Responsible Investing, aka Christian Investing, means investing to get a return,” Cravens insists he really means he wants investment to produce “a lucrative return that can be used to encourage the development of a Christian theocracy.”
When Bowyer says he wants to engage with publicly traded companies to ensure they aren’t debanking conservatives (when financial institutions refuse to do business with people or businesses because of their political or other viewpoints), Cravens says he’s really just making companies “vehicles … to alter the broader culture to make it easier for theocracy to take hold.”
Cravens’ evidence for this? It may seem tenuous at first.
Bowyer, you see, is a fellow at the Center for Cultural Leadership, and the leader of that center is P. Andrew Sandlin, who once served as executive vice president at “the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Chalcedon Foundation.” A frequent reader of the SPLC‘s work will know that the Chalcedon Foundation is a bastion of dominionism and “Christian supremacy.”
OK, I’ll Level With You Now
If you can’t tell by now, I find Cravens’ article (available here in all of its glory) an impressively insane piece of leftist propaganda. Alliance Defending Freedom and Jerry Bowyer truly are fighting for neutrality in investing, not some secret “Christian supremacist” plot. (By the way, don’t you love how the SPLC makes Christian activism sound nefarious by comparing it to white supremacy? Very fitting for a group that scares its donors into ponying up cash by comparing mainstream conservative Christian groups to the KKK.)
Unlike Cravens, I reached out to Bowyer for comment.
Bowyer found it curious that Cravens described him as “a fixture in the Christian Reconstructionist movement” “since the early 1990s,” because, Bowyer said, “As far as I know, there isn’t a Reconstructionist movement.”
Like a dog returning to its vomit, the SPLC repeatedly brings up the Chalcedon Foundation as supposed evidence of this widespread Christian cabal, but Bowyer says, “Chalcedon seems to be a shell of what they were when [founder] R.J. Rushdoony was alive. I’m not seeing any influence.” He says Rushdoony had influence in the 1980s, but even with Sandlin at the helm, the influence had long faded.
“It kind of went moribund after the death of its founder,” he noted.
That accords with my experience. I grew up in conservative Christian circles, attending Promise Keepers rallies, and I never heard of the Chalcedon Foundation until I started researching the SPLC. I have repeatedly reached out to the Chalcedon Foundation for comment and have gotten no response.
Bowyer had read some of Rushdoony’s work when he was a teenager, but he has long since rejected the notion that Christians are supposed to apply the whole Old Testament law in modern America, as Rushdoony advocated.
“I processed all that and came to the conclusion that the Constitution and the Founders had things right—that’s where I’ve been for 35 years,” he said.
Ironically, Bowyer is fighting against a far-right Christian movement, Christian Nationalism, which he says would use the power of the government to convert people.
“They’re trying to associate me with the hard coercive Right when on social media, I’m very active fighting that—straining relationships by fighting against it,” he said. “The SPLC maybe ought to say, ‘Thank you.’”
“They’re attributing beliefs to me that I not only don’t hold but that I’ve actively fought, going back decades,” Bowyer told The Daily Signal. “This is super sloppy work.”
I would expect nothing less from the SPLC. As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC trades on its history in bankrupting the Ku Klux Klan to smear mainstream conservatives and Christians, suggesting they are driven by a KKK-style hatred. The SPLC uses this narrative to scare donors into ponying up cash and to silence opposition to its hard-left agenda.
