A major bank in America has dropped its agenda to punish members of the Christian faith by “debanking” them.
That’s a process where a financial institution simply closes the accounts of a customer, sometimes a customer with years of established payment records with the bank.
It is JPMorgan Chase that has rolled back a policy through which is already had punished multiple conservative individuals and nonprofits in recent years, according to a report from Fox News.
The company now has confirmed changes that will make its WePay service available to those who earlier had been punished for allegedly violating the bank’s demands to avoid “social risk issues.”
That, the bank demanded, was anything “subject to allegation and impacts related to hate groups, systemic racism, sexual harassment and corporate culture.”
It is the ADF, a legal group that has fought multiple civil, constitutional and religious rights issues, that found out about the bank’s decision to remove the restrictive language from its terms of service.
The banking company said, in a statement to Fox News Digital, “We support clients around the globe and in every state in the U.S., across industries, religions, and political affiliations.”
It wasn’t always the case, the report suggested, citing an explanation from an ADF spokesman that, “Chase has used this policy to discriminate on the basis of viewpoint. The policy itself is a risk to every single person who uses WePay and Chase, the biggest bank in America.”
The statement from the ADF lawyer continued, “There’s millions of people where it’s a threat to them being denied or losing payment processing. So, it is significant that they eliminated that policy. The next step we think for Chase is because they’ve been saying, ‘we’re firmly committed to not discriminating against people on their religious or political views,’ in different documents. That statement, we want them to put in their forward-facing customer policies. That’s the next step.”
The history of the dispute includes the decision by Chase previously to cancel the banking of the National Committee for Religious Freedom, Fox reported.
No explanation was offered.
Fox reported, “Another incident in 2021 involved WePay denying ticket-payment processing services for a Republican event hosted by a nonprofit organization, Defense of Liberty. The event featured Donald Trump, Jr., and WePay initially denied services by citing policies against providing services connected to ‘hate … racial intolerance … or items or activities that encourage, promote, facilitate, or instruct others regarding the same.'”
The ADF now monitors banking companies for their reliance “on divisive concepts” like Critical Race Theory, and such.
The issue also is facing Bank of America, which recently got a letter from 15 financial officers representing 13 states warning it overs its alleged decisions to politicize banking, and de-bank conservatives.
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