Steve Happ never expected helping Ugandan orphans could be considered controversial.

A career IT professional, Steve caught the passion for world missions after meeting a new family at his church outside Memphis, Tenn.: the Birungis, who’d come to America seeking medical treatment for their son Omega’s brain tumor. After striking up a friendship, Steve felt the call not only to visit Uganda (where the father, Medad Birungi, was a pastor) but to create a way to help the people there directly.

After visiting Africa for the first time in 2012, Steve tells me he encountered a critical barrier to his plans for ministry: “No foreigner can understand Uganda well enough to do ministry there.” Having lived in Tennessee, Steve realized that his impact could be better spent helping ministries built by and for Ugandans, already working within the region.

Steve began searching for existing Ugandan ministries to align with and support through the assistance of American donors and philanthropists, and Indigenous Advance Ministries was born. Last August, the group had been operating for eight years serving as a vital conduit between Ugandan schools and orphanages and American financial support networks.

And that’s when everything changed.

Corporations Weaponize Banking System: Bank of America

One morning last April, Steve was sorting through his mail and discovered five identical letters from Bank of America, all referencing accounts to which Happ was a signatory, with a simple but life-changing message on them. “Upon review of your account,” the letters read, “we have determined you’re operating in a business type we have chosen not to service at Bank of America.”

With no explanation given, Steve immediately began making calls to sort out what he believed must be some kind of mistake. “We’d used Bank of America since 2015,” he explained to me, noting that the bank’s services were always top-notch, especially for a nonprofit manager who went to Uganda as often as four times a year. At least, they had been.

The answers to Steve’s calls were all the same. “We can’t discuss this with you.” When Steve pressed, asking what business type the bank actually considered Indigenous Advance Ministries to be, he was given the same answer. Upon visiting his local Bank of America branch, Steve described his experience with the branch manager. “She was initially surprised, left the room, and when she came back, it was like she turned into a robot: ‘We can’t discuss it.’”

Weeks later, Steve got another letter from Bank of America that only served to deepen the mystery: his nonprofit “no longer align[ed] with the bank’s risk tolerance.”

Indigenous Advance Ministries had been debanked.

In the abstract, debanking broadly refers to a process by which companies shutter a client’s access to banking services over perceived risk of various types (legal, reputational, etc). But in the real world, Steve Happ had 30 days to sort out exactly what had happened to his nonprofit, and the more than $100,000 his partners in Uganda depended on. (RELATED: Buying Guns and Bibles Might Just Get You Debanked)

Actually, no he didn’t — his next trip to Uganda left in a week, giving him seven days to sort out a banking problem that his bank categorically refused to talk with him about. (RELATED: The Biden Big Government/Big Banks Surveillance Collusion)

As Steve and I talked, he laid out the chaos of that next Uganda trip, with the nonprofit’s banking status still hanging in the balance. “I get to Uganda and I can’t access money. There’s 7 employees I can’t pay. We have partner ministries we can’t give money to.” One partner ministry was an orphanage in Mukono with almost two dozen children. If not for an unfathomably lucky purchase of bulk food Happ made shortly prior, Indigenous Advance’s debanking could have easily meant further hunger to those orphans — and further hardship to its Ugandan employees.

As the media broke the story, he told me he got calls from Bank of America offering a willingness to discuss reinstating his accounts. But, as he told me, he wasn’t interested in trusting any more of Indigenous Advance’s future to a company whose negligence could have easily been the end of the nonprofit. “It was the whole range of emotions: anger, disbelief was one of the biggest ones. I couldn’t believe this was actually happening,” he tells me. “I kept thinking if I could find the right person to talk to, they could explain this was all a mistake.”

Steve never truly received a conclusive answer about why he was debanked — or why, despite his personal accounts also being listed with Bank of America, only his ministry’s funds were targeted: “I could forgive them for an algorithm change, but to not have an appeals process?”

The skepticism about other potential motives is high. Indigenous Advance went on to file a consumer complaint against Bank of America in partnership with legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, raising questions about whether the ministry was targeted for its Christian beliefs, in direct violation of the bank’s own Code of Conduct that commits to respecting diversity of its customers’ religious views.

“No American should have to worry that a financial institution will deny them service based on their religious beliefs, but Bank of America appears to have done just that with Indigenous Advance,” said ADF senior counsel Jeremy Tedesco. And, as Steve tells me, after the ADF angle hit the news cycle, he began to receive letters from other ministry leaders saying, “The same thing happened to my ministry.”

“Was it several different banks that did this?” I asked. “No,” Steve responded. “It was all Bank of America.”

Maybe Bank of America has a problem with the religious nonprofits who rely on it for financial services. The bank maintains that this isn’t the case, but its lack of plausible rationale regarding numerous debanking cases, such as Indigenous Advance and global pastoral training organization Timothy Two Project International, certainly isn’t helping its case.

And Bank of America’s current position, highlighted in Trump’s recent address at Davos, as the most notorious offender on suspicious cases of debanking, including Indigenous Advance, is reminding the world of how shaky its track record on institutional neutrality really is.

It’s easy to think about corporate politicization as something that happens in the abstract, in numbers and industries and returns (all of which profoundly impact real people, to be very clear). But when it comes to the 22 Ugandan orphans who almost went hungry because an American bank decided that the ministry feeding them didn’t pass muster? These are the human costs of corporate politicization — and the disingenuous responses of many companies to such trends being called out.

Corporations Censoring Thought and Speech: Adobe

Sometimes though, the politicization problem isn’t a decision made for vague reasons that puts livelihoods in jeopardy. Sometimes it’s just a company’s decision to opine on things that don’t neatly fall within the boundaries of business.

In 2015, James Brown was working on web analytics for Adobe, when he logged on to one of the company’s internal websites, normally a commenting forum for announcing work events. Except what he found had nothing to do with work — it was a statement about the then-recent Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage. With an open comments section.

Brown, who worked in Utah and told me he’d been a member of the Mormon church for decades, decided to weigh in on the discussion. In response to a fellow employee slamming the socially conservative Family Research Council, citing the Southern Poverty Law Center’s labeling of the FRC as a hate group, Brown responded that the standards used by the SPLC to determine its hate group list, often characterized as a politicized and biased grouping, including “marches,” “rallies,” and “leaflets,” would apply to many groups that obviously aren’t hate groups, including members of the LGBTQ+ community. (RELATED: The Loser of the Year: The Southern Poverty Law Center)

While several employees voiced similar sentiments, several other employees criticized Brown, and the comments section was later turned off completely. Shortly after, one of the company’s vice presidents delivered Brown a written warning, informing him that his comments were “inappropriate for the workplace … offensive and hurtful to a number of employees … [and] inconsistent with Adobe’s values and policies.”

Despite the warning, Brown asked for clarification, noting that Adobe’s censure of him for expressing his views in a public forum potentially ran afoul of the Utah Antidiscrimination Act which forbids employment discrimination based on religion.

In response, Adobe retracted the written warning from Brown’s personnel file — a step a different vice president informed him was unheard of in the past. But the damage may have been done as it was. After Brown’s web analytics team was laid off due to business cuts, James applied to work at other internal Adobe teams without success. There’s no way to know, but Brown says he suspects he was on an internal HR blacklist.

James retired several years later, but he still remembers his experience at Adobe and says he felt remarkably targeted. “As far as I’m the only one that got in trouble for [making employee comments].”

James’ story isn’t a dramatic story about jeopardized livelihoods in the Third World, like the tragic story of Indigenous Advance. But it is a complication — a hurdle in his corporate career that could have easily been avoided by Adobe simply not opining (and what’s more, encouraging employees to opine) on social and political issues that aren’t connected to core business.

And when we talk about corporate bias, we have to remember: the impact stories are human stories. James Brown. Steve Happ. The schoolchildren in Uganda. These are the people who get affected by corporations veering off the fiduciary mark.

In a moment where the chickens of corporate bias are increasingly coming home to roost, we can’t afford to forget this critical reality: The free enterprise system has always been built on advancing human flourishing. And as such, America’s biggest companies getting out of politics and back into a business-first approach is really a people-first approach. We forget that at our peril — and as the Mukono orphans remind us, that approach is only a few bad decisions away from being destroyed.

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Isaac Willour oversees shareholder engagement at Bowyer Research, America’s leading pro-fiduciary proxy consulting firm. A graduate of Grove City College, he is an award-winning journalist, writing frequently on ESG, DEI, and the culture war at National Review, The Daily Wire, and elsewhere. He can be found on X @IsaacWillour.