Business · Nationwide · October 14, 2026
Federal Report: Major Banks Debanked Christian, Pro-Life Groups Under Biden
What Alinsky tactic is being used
3 of the thirteen rules are in play here — campaigns rarely run just one.
Rule 13
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
The mechanism in this story is a single named organization being put on a list and then cut off: the OCC review describes WePay, owned by JPMorgan, closing a religious organization's account after the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled it an 'extremist hate group,' and Wells Fargo pressing a payment processor to drop a religious nonprofit over its position on same-sex marriage. The designation does the freezing, the bank does the isolating, and the group is left arguing with a vendor rather than with its actual critics. One entity at a time is the point — a hundred ministries are never named, so none of them object.
Counter-Rule 13 · Radical Solidarity
Stand publicly with whoever has been singled out. Isolation is the whole mechanism; refusing it disarms the tactic.
If a ministry you know is named on such a list or loses a processor, say so publicly under your own name and keep banking with, donating to, or publicly listing that organization. Ask your church board this month to put in writing that it will not quietly drop a partner ministry because a third-party advocacy list named it. Offer the targeted group a concrete thing — a fiscal sponsorship conversation, a referral to your own bank, a signature on a joint letter to the bank's compliance office.
Rule 3
“Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.”
The fight moved onto ground where churches and pro-life groups have no competence at all. A ministry can argue theology and even constitutional law, but the decision here was made inside vendor-risk committees and payment-processor underwriting, under an internal category called 'reputation risk' that the customer never sees and cannot cross-examine. The OCC itself had to stop examining for that category — it announced in Bulletin 2025-4 on March 20, 2025 that it was removing reputation-risk references from the Comptroller's Handbook — which tells you how unanchored the standard was.
Counter-Rule 3 · Preparation and Width
Prepare the unfamiliar ground before you are dragged onto it. "I don't know, I'll find out and come back" beats an improvised answer.
Prepare the unfamiliar ground before you are standing on it. This month, have your treasurer obtain the written account-opening and account-termination policy that governs your account, with its policy number and date, and find out who your bank's primary federal regulator is. Read the OCC's March 2025 bulletin on reputation risk so you can cite it accurately, and open a second operating account at a community bank or credit union before you need one — a dormant backup account is the whole answer to a thirty-day closure notice.
Rule 1
“Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”
'Reputation risk' is a perception category by definition: the bank is not measuring losses, it is guessing what some watching audience will think. The SPLC designation worked the same way — it projects an authority no statute gives it, and banks acted on the label without anyone checking what was behind it. Even the OCC conceded it could not comprehensively quantify the debanking or its cost, which shows how much of this ran on impression rather than count.
Counter-Rule 1 · Reality Over Perception
Count the actual numbers. The phantom army depends on nobody checking whether it exists.
Count what is actually there. When your bank or a donor repeats a 'hate group' designation, ask in writing who made it, on what published criteria, and whether the bank independently verified it — and write down the answer or the refusal to answer. Use the OCC's own figures when you talk about this publicly (roughly 100,000 complaints and hundreds of thousands of pages of bank documents from nine named banks) rather than rounding it up into a claim the report does not make.
Chapter 3 sets out the rules; Chapter 15 answers each of them in turn. This is that pairing applied to this story.
Know where you stand
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