State treasurers join Christian supremacist effort targeting public investments

Since 2023, the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF) has helped the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) translate a brand of Christian Reconstructionist theology called dominionism into concerns about financial risk. SFOF argues that billions of dollars in public funds in state pensions and retirement accounts should not be used to invest in publicly traded companies that do not comply with ADF’s worldview with respect to environmentalism, profit maximization and diversity.

According to the Center for Media and Democracy, the SFOF “connects Republican state treasurers and auditors in 28 states with industry and dark money groups in the same way that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) does for state legislators.” An October 2024 letter from 17 members of the group to Fortune 1000 companies claims that “DEI policies and programs … pose significant legal risk to corporations.”

As a basis for that legal risk, the SFOF cited a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court case that ruled against Harvard’s affirmative action policy, along with remarks the now-acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission made at the time suggesting companies scrutinize their DEI policies.

In a press release promoting the letter, ADF claimed the state financial officers managed over $65 billion in assets across 15 states.

The connection between Christian Reconstructionism and SFOF is ADF’s Viewpoint Diversity Score (VDS) program. As Hatewatch has previously reported, ADF uses the program to lobby against corporate diversity and environmental policies and pressure corporations to remove bans on hate speech, eliminate diversity programs and write new protections benefiting politically conservative Christians into corporate governance policies. VDS advisers include several prominent Christian Reconstructionists, and their work has been supplemented in recent months by OJ Oleka, a former deputy state treasurer for Kentucky and newly appointed CEO of SFOF.

‘Ways to push back and then roll back’

Following the 2024 presidential election, ADF sent a letter to executives at Fortune 1000 companies. The hate group encouraged executives to participate in the VDS program, warning, “It is now a liability for any institution to tout adherence to DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] ideology.” The letter states, “The incoming presidential administration will no doubt hone in on this trend to hasten the demise of DEI.”

The letter claims that DEI emerged from the public perception of a “moral vacuum” in the finance world and ignores the “proper functioning of capitalism.” The framework they lay out suggests corporations and their wealthy investors have an important role to play in defining morality. “Businesses don’t just exist to make a profit,” the letter states. “Business leaders and investors act out of a strong desire to improve peoples’ lives and better the human condition.” Diversity policies, they write, do not represent this virtue, and in fact present liabilities for companies.

The letter was signed by Oleka and Tim Wildmon, president of the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group American Family Association — a group that frequently encourages economic boycotts of companies that support LGBTQ+ rights. Several members of the VDS advisory board also signed the letter, including David Bahnsen and Jerry Bowyer — fellows at the dominionist Center for Cultural Leadership (CCL).

The ideology the letters communicate is consistent with a dominionist economic philosophy that considers corporations one of several key institutions that a select group of Christian fundamentalists must control to bring about a theocratic society governed primarily by Old Testament biblical law. An ADF press statement about the November 2024 letter quoted Oleka on diversity policies: “The American people are increasingly rejecting this morally bankrupt and discriminatory ideology, and it’s time American business leaders respond accordingly.”

The economic principles outlined by VDS advisers including Bowyer, Bahnsen and their forebears in the Christian Reconstructionist movement are used to justify both economic boycotts of corporations that enable “sin” and more strategic investment frameworks that encourage wealthy dominionists to help shape society in the image of theocracy by wielding influence over corporations. In combination with new laws written by ADF and pressure from public officials like state financial asset managers and attorneys general, the strategy appears to put corporations into the grip of a dominionist pincer. The result threatens corporations with legal penalties for offending sectarian religious beliefs but gives the appearance of a commitment to neutral free-market principles.

On the Oct. 25 episode of his podcast, Bowyer interviewed Oleka and described SFOF’s undermining of corporate environmental and diversity policies. Bowyer said: “Frankly, it’s accomplished an astonishing amount. It stopped ESG [environmental, social and governance policies] in its tracks.” Bowyer then suggested that the work was incomplete and pressed Oleka to describe the group’s plan for the future. “We have kind of stopped the momentum of ESG and DEI,” Bowyer said, “but that’s different than rolling it back.”

Oleka responded in the metaphorical language of warfare common to Christian supremacy: “In my mind, this is a battle. To me, this is a moral crisis in the country. We’re at a point of inflection.” Oleka described several strategies, including coordinated actions by conservative state financial officers that draw media attention to their work and lobbying for laws that restrict ESG and DEI policies. According to the SFOF website, the group encourages its members to “become better public servants by sharing best practices and hosting honest discussions with the financial industry and political leaders. That’s what we continue to do at our two annual national gatherings.”

He described a strategy that points to a partnership with legal groups like ADF. “I’ve had some fantastic conversations with some of the most brilliant legal minds in this movement about ways to push back and then roll back some of these things that have been done,” Oleka told Bowyer. According to Oleka, the conversations produced both lobbying strategies and a plan to litigate ESG and DEI out of corporate finance using the principle of fiduciary responsibility.

Hatewatch has previously reported that ADF successfully lobbied in Tennessee for a bill based on its “debanking” conspiracy theory in 2023. The “debanking” conspiracy theory asserts that government regulators are colluding with financial institutions to deny conservative Christians access to bank accounts. ADF has also assisted at least one member of its VDS advisory board in his appeal to the Securities and Exchange Commission to defend a proposal allowing shareholders to vote on an anti-DEI resolution.

Oleka says SFOF also plans to use existing laws to pressure corporations to abandon their environmental and diversity commitments. “States already have laws on the books that say you can’t make a financial decision that is divorced from your fiduciary responsibility,” Oleka told Bowyer. “What we want to do is develop clear strategies around that, and we’ve already begun to put some of those in place. So, you’re going to see those over the next little bit as we develop them and roll them out, state by state.”

The day before Bowyer’s podcast aired, SFOF members sent their own letter to Fortune 1000 companies suggesting they faced legal risks for having DEI policies. The language foreshadowed the Trump administration’s targeting of DEI policies with executive orders. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said these executive orders “challenge the programs of publicly traded corporations, large nonprofits, philanthropic foundations, professional associations, and institutions of higher education that are designed to advance equity, including by threatening legal action, with the obvious goal of chilling their programs.”

Firms like Bowyer’s attempt to communicate in nonpartisan, even secular, language, relying on a framework that criticizes environmental and diversity policies as a threat to corporate profitability. The strategy is standard fare for Christian supremacist politics. Journalists Nina Easton and Dan Gilgoff have both, in books on the subject of the Christian right, quoted Ralph Reed — who led the Christian Coalition beginning in 1989 — describing this stealth strategy. Reed said: “You appeal to where the demographic is. You say, ‘We’re concerned about children, we’re trying to strengthen the family, we’re trying to reverse the coarsening of the culture’ … That’s a totally different kind of marketing than saying, ‘We’re evangelicals and we’re here to take over.’”

The strategy was successfully employed between 2023 and 2024 to pressure the proxy investment advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) to incorporate Bowyer’s own research into its offerings to proxy investors who disapprove of ESG. The strategy belies both the reconstructionist economic theory that profit maximization is a requisite vehicle for funding future endeavors to Christianize society and the dominionist belief that true Christianity is politically conservative and “isn’t reconcilable” with either liberalism or the Democratic Party, according to CCL’s founder, P. Andrew Sandlin.

Oleka’s comments exemplified this rhetorical sleight of hand when he told Bowyer: “It’s not ideological in the sense that if you’re a Democrat, you should be for ESG; you shouldn’t be. It’s not ideological that if you’re a Democrat, you should be for DEI; you shouldn’t be. It’s that if you believe in a pension, or if you believe in an asset being delivered in a way that can best bring about the returns for the people that it’s meant to, then you should not be supporting ESG and DEI funds and making decisions that way.”

Using conspiracy theories to pressure firms

In January, Oleka amplified ADF’s “debanking” conspiracy theory in a post on the social media site X. “Americans are being debanked for their political and religious views,” Oleka wrote. The post included a video in which Oleka claimed “viewpoint discrimination” in the form of “debanking” represents a “significant threat to the American way of life.” The term “viewpoint discrimination” is a byword that has replaced “political correctness” in the conservative lexicon. ADF and its allies use the term in reference to supposed discrimination against conservatives who oppose anti-racist and LGBTQ+-inclusive policies.

This reductionist view ignores how white people have claimed and maintain power through wealth sanctioned by racist banking practices like redlining and environmental exploitation of Black and Brown people. ESG and DEI policies are often implemented to disrupt these historic and institutional patterns.

Oleka’s comments in the video highlight the connection between SFOF and ADF and are consistent with the strategy Oleka shared with Bowyer, an ADF adviser. In November, a different VDS adviser, Robert Netzly, CEO of Inspire Investing, praised Oleka for their joint letter to Fortune 1000 companies. On Facebook, Inspire Investing wrote, “Companies need to ditch DEI” and tagged ADF, Bowyer, Oleka and Bahnsen.

In May 2023 and October 2023, SFOF members sent letters to advisory firms ISS and Glass Lewis perpetuating ADF’s “debanking” conspiracy theory. The October 2023 letter cited ADF’s VDS report and repeated the group’s false claim that financial companies have “unbridled discretion to cancel accounts or other services for arbitrary or biased reasons,” particularly accounts belonging to conservatives and Christians.

The letter also repeated a disputed story ADF has shared about Indigenous Advance and its for-profit Ugandan debt collection center to claim financial institutions were “debanking poor widows and orphans.” The letter claimed ISS’ proxy investing recommendations “are clearly intended to defund State Financial Officers Foundation based on political animus.”

“Such debanking incidents create very real legal exposure for financial institutions,” the SFOF members warned. The financial officers demanded the firms be transparent in their risk management policies and not yield to “the type of activist demands that ultimately jeopardize a business’s profit models and erode shareholder trust.”

As Hatewatch previously reported,the October 2023 letter to ISS and Glass Lewis was joined by a letter from VDS advisers including Bowyer and Netzly. In March 2024, Netzly’s Inspire Investing blog described the firm’s participation as a “multi-pronged engagement strategy” in concert with conservative members of Congress, members of SFOF, and ADF-allied state attorneys general to pressure ISS and Glass Lewis to offer new advisory materials and eventually “support more ‘non-ESG’ resolutions.” That month, ISS announced it would use ADF adviser Bowyer’s firm to provide anti-ESG proxy investor research.