“The Attestation”

The situation

Dale is not a real man. He's a composite, pieces of several people put together so that nobody gets identified. But everything that happens to him has happened to somebody. Dale is forty-four. He's a business banking officer at a regional bank in a city of about ninety thousand people. Sixteen years at the same institution. He carries around two hundred small commercial accounts. Roofers. A dental practice. A feed store. Two churches. His wife teaches piano in the front room. They've got three kids, the mortgage runs one thousand nine hundred forty a month, and the middle boy just got braces. On a Tuesday morning at six-forty, before the kids are up, Dale reads an email at the kitchen table. It's from enterprise risk, copied to his manager. It says, quote, per updated reputational risk guidance, please initiate account exit for the client below and return the signed officer attestation by Friday, five p.m., end quote. The client is a pregnancy resource center across town. Twelve years with the bank. Never an overdraft. Never a late payment. Never a complaint filed against them by anybody. The attestation is one page. Dale has signed dozens of these over the years, for fraud flags and money laundering reviews. This one has a new sentence in it. It asks him to affirm, in his own name, as the relationship officer, that the client presents elevated reputational and values-alignment risk to the institution. Dale doesn't believe that. Nobody has shown him one fact that would make it true. Friday at five. And his manager has already told him what happens if the page comes back blank. It won't be a disagreement. It'll be a performance issue. Failure to follow risk procedure. There are three banks in that town, and Dale has spent sixteen years competing against the other two.

The technique

Now here's what's actually being run on Dale, and I want you to see the mechanism, not the villainy. In the book, William Green's Rules for Radical Christians, this one's called the borrowed signature. The decision has already been made. It was made upstairs, by a committee, in a room Dale has never been in, and no individual name is attached to it anywhere. What the institution still needs is a finding of fact from the man closest to the account. Because once Dale signs, the file doesn't show a policy that swept up a twelve-year customer. It shows a seasoned officer who reviewed the relationship and concluded there was risk. The bank gets the outcome. Dale carries the sentence. If a regulator asks later, if a reporter asks, if a lawyer asks, the paper points at Dale. That's the first half. Here's the second. Friday at five. Nothing happens on Friday. No wire clears, no filing is due. The short clock exists to prevent deliberation. A man with three weeks reads the form twice, prays about it, asks who wrote that sentence, and calls his pastor. A man with three days signs it on the way to a lunch meeting. And here's the third piece, the one that hides everything else. Dale's objection is about truth-telling. But the moment he raises it out loud, it gets restated as compliance. Now it isn't a question of conscience, it's a workflow problem, an HR matter, a coaching conversation about following procedure. The belief never enters the record at all. That's not an accident. That's the design. A conviction that never gets written down never has to be answered by anybody.

The temptation

Thursday night. Nine-fifteen. Dale is sitting in his truck in the empty branch lot with the engine off and the form on the seat beside him, and this is the moment the whole thing is built for. Not the meeting. The parking lot. And the arguments that come to him out there don't sound like the devil. They sound like a reasonable friend. It's one page. The account closes either way, my name on it doesn't save anybody, it only decides whether I'm employed on Monday. God knows my heart. And better a Christian sitting in that chair than whichever man they hire to replace me. Now look at those carefully, because every one of them has real weight. The account probably does close. Dale can't save it. God does know his heart. And there is genuine good done by a faithful man staying in a hard place. A lie that's all lie has no pull on anybody. These pull because they're mostly true. But notice what the form is not asking. It isn't asking Dale to permit something, or to stand nearby while something happens. It's asking him to say something. There's a wide difference between being present at a thing and testifying to it. Pilate found that out. He took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, and said he was innocent of the blood of that just person. His hands came out clean. His order went out signed. The washing changed nothing in the world except how he felt about himself. And as for God knowing your heart, brother, yes. He does. That's not the comfort you think it is at nine-fifteen in a parking lot.

Your move

So change the ground the fight is on. Dale is not going to win an argument about whether the pregnancy center is risky, and he's not going to win an argument about whether the policy is fair. Those are their fields. But the form has fused two different things together, and Dale can pull them apart in one sentence. There's the action, closing an account, which the bank has every authority to do. And there's the attestation, a personal statement of belief, which no employer can manufacture out of a man. So on Thursday night he writes back, in email, calm and courteous, to his manager and to risk together, and he says this. I will carry out any decision the bank makes, but I cannot personally attest to a finding I don't believe is true, because bearing false witness is a matter of sincere religious conviction for me. Please put in writing who made this decision and which policy requires my signature rather than the institution's. That's it. No speech. No accusation. It puts the conviction into the record where it has to be answered, and it asks the institution to name the duty that requires the belief. What you're doing there is what's recognized as a request for religious accommodation, and it exists only if somebody writes it down. Keep your copies. If it goes further than email, get real counsel, because I'm not giving you legal advice, I'm giving you ground. Then do two more things. Before Friday, tell one brother and one elder exactly what you will do and what you will not do. Say the words out loud to a man who will ask you about it on Saturday. Alone in a truck you'll negotiate with yourself. You won't renegotiate with your elder. And last, be excellent. Be the best officer in that building. Clean files, early in, calls returned same day. Make them fire a man who has nothing wrong with him but his conscience. Don't hand them a second reason.

Scripture & close

Hear the word of God. Proverbs twelve, verse twenty-two. Lying lips are abomination to the LORD: but they that deal truly are his delight. They can make you leave the room. They cannot make you say the sentence. This is the Business Mountain. If this is happening to you, Ask: rules for radical christians dot com, slash ask. Your first one is free. And to know which of the seven mountains you are standing on, take the free assessment at rules for radical christians dot com, slash start. Stand your ground. We'll see you on the wall.