Nine of the nation’s largest banks relied on subjective decision-making and the opinions of advocacy organizations to terminate customer accounts or deny service to potential customers—often because of Biblical beliefs on key moral issues—between 2020 and September 2025. The findings, released Wednesday, were part of a report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury that charters, regulates, and supervises banks and federal savings associations.

“What I think the state is doing is it’s trying to intimidate churches into following through with this,” he lamented. “They should not be receiving any kind of ideological training from the state on any moral issue. That’s why what churches need to be doing is asking for religious accommodations. The federal law and the state law already require businesses to accommodate people’s faith if they’re being required to do something that violates their faith. … [T]his is one of those points in history here in California where civil disobedience is going to be necessary.”

The controversy began in October 2023, when California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) signed into law a measure that allowed religious institutions and nonprofit colleges to bypass local zoning laws in order to quickly establish affordable housing. The measure was apparently intended to make it easier for local jurisdictions to abide by state regulations that mandate a certain amount of appropriately zoned land in order to accommodate population growth across all economic levels, including extremely low-income individuals like the homeless. But now, churches in the deep blue state are finding that property developers are attempting to use the regulations to force them to sell property against their will, which could eventually devolve into their property being confiscated through eminent domain.

Most Christians are aware of the struggle the church in Communist China has had with the government of that country. They have suffered from years of intense persecution and the limited ability to legally evangelize, gather to worship, or even teach their own children about Christ. As anti-Christian sentiment grows across the West, including here in America, we can expect policies like those in China to make their way over here, eventually (unless something changes, of course). Actually, the foundation for such persecution and limitation of Christian freedom is already being laid in America and the entire Western world.