Faith Under Fire: Feds Form Task Force to Tackle Anti-Christian Bias

Religious Freedom
Attorney General Pamela Bondi with members of the Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias Task Force at the U.S. Department of Justice

In April, U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi hosted the inaugural meeting of the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias in the federal government.

President Trump established the task force earlier this year via executive order. The task force’s purpose is to “protect the religious freedoms of Americans and end the anti-Christian weaponization of government.”

In recent years news outlets and congressional testimony have alleged that government policies and departments have been weaponized against conservative and Christian organizations.

The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released reports last year that found:

  • After the events of January 6, 2021, federal law enforcement officials from the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the FBI initiated multiple discussions with financial institutions to discuss ways financial institutions could share customer information with federal law enforcement outside of normal legal processes.
  • Law enforcement and private institutions shared intelligence through a web portal run by the Domestic Security Alliance Council — a partnership led by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
  • The U.S. Treasury Department gave banks and other financial institutions guiding “typologies” — patterns that could be used to identify suspicious people or activities — including search terms and patterns like “TRUMP” and “MAGA”, and encouraged financial institutions to comb through transactions for terms like, “Bass Pro Shops,” “Cabela’s,” and “Dick’s Sporting Goods” when looking for “Homegrown Violent Extremism.”
  • “Americans doing nothing other than shopping or exercising their Second Amendment rights were being tracked by financial institutions and federal law enforcement.”

Last year, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee saying the Biden administration “pressured” his teams to censor content related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

We have written before about how in 2021, Facebook disabled Family Council’s advertising account with virtually no notice or explanation, and our credit card processor abruptly terminated our account after designating us as “high risk.” In both cases, we were left to wonder if our conservative principles played a role in the cancellations.

We applaud the federal government for taking steps to prevent anti-Christian bias in the federal government. No one should face discrimination for their faith.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

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The Federal Government Colluded with Big Banks to Censor Americans: ADF

Religious Freedom,

Recently our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom discussed how official documents indicate the federal government colluded with big banks and other financial institutions to censor Americans.

Congressional investigations show that after the events of January 6, 2021, the U.S. Treasury Department gave banks and other financial institutions guiding “typologies” — patterns that could be used to identify suspicious people or activities — including search terms and patterns like “TRUMP” and “MAGA.”

The government also encouraged financial institutions to comb through transactions for terms like, “Bass Pro Shops,” “Cabela’s,” and “Dick’s Sporting Goods” when looking for “Homegrown Violent Extremism.”

In a recent video interview about this issue, ADF’s Senior Counsel and Senior Vice President of Corporate Engagement, Jeremy Tedesco, said,

You’re buying guns, you’re shopping at Bass Pro Shops, you’re buying religious texts, you’re giving to religious nonprofits. Under the Biden Administration, you could become [labelled] a domestic violence extremist.

Family Council has written repeatedly about how financial institutions may censor conservative Americans. In 2021 our credit card processor that helped handle our donations terminated our account after designating Family Council as “high risk.”

At 10:29 AM on Wednesday, July 7, 2021, our office received a terse email from our credit card processor — a company owned by JPMorgan Chase — saying, “Unfortunately, we can no longer support your business. We wish you all the luck in the future, and hope that you find a processor that better fits your payment processing needs.”

Within sixty seconds, our account was terminated and and Family Council could no longer accept donations online. All we can do is speculate that our conservative principles and our public policy work might have had something to do with the decision to close our account.

Unfortunately, other organizations have had similar experiences as well. In fact, corporate shareholders, state attorneys general, congressmen, and news outlets all have expressed concerns over conservatives being wrongly labeled as “high risk” or “hate groups” and subsequently debanked.

JPMorgan Chase recently took steps to prevent religiously-motivated debanking. That’s good, but our state and federal government need to make sure this sort of thing never happens to anyone again. After all, banks that are too big to fail are too big to discriminate.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

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