Steven Anderson is a fiery and controversial preacher from Tempe, Arizona, where he pastors Faithful Word Baptist Church. Anderson has been a public figure for some time, making the news for praying imprecatory prayers against President Obama, seeming pleased by the shooting at the Orlando gay night club, and perhaps most famously, getting tased by Border Patrol for resisting an unconstitutional traffic stop (a jury found Anderson not guilty).
Anderson is an Independent Fundamental Baptist, a title that varies widely in regard to its meaning and definition. Anderson has also been banned from numerous countries (ostensibly for ‘hate speech’ or its equivalent thought-crime equivalent) and has had as many as eight online financial platforms cancel his accounts due to pressure from online activists, usually associated with the LGBTQXYZLMNOP lobby.
Pulpit & Pen reached out to Anderson regarding the news that Bank of America has frozen his church’s assets and made his church’s money inaccessible.
Anderson told P&P, “First thing yesterday morning, I went to pay someone online and I went to transfer funds and neither transaction would go through. So, I figure the bank just put on a hold because I have been traveling…so I called the bank and [I was transferred to] a new department, and while I’m on hold it tells you that your account has been terminated and the representative will not be able to tell you why, will not change our decision, and will not give you any more information.”
Anderson continued, “They said, ‘Your account is frozen. You can’t remove any funds from your account. On the 23rd we’re going to issue you a cashier’s check and mail it to you.’ So they’re going to sit on our money for weeks.”
When asked if it was in relation to Southern Poverty Law Center or other activist groups that have flagged Anderson’s church for hate speech, Anderson relayed, “We’ve already been shut off by eight different online giving platforms. Paypal shut me off years ago. Paypal, then Easy Tithe, these other platforms and they’ve all been shut down. None of them will tell you why because they don’t want to get sued or be held accountable.
Anderson blamed the account closure on homosexual activism.
Anderson said, “It usually has something to do about the Sodomites. Typically this happens when we’re going viral in an article about the Sodomites. Right now we’ve been big in the media over the last week because I’m going to go preach in Ireland and Sweden and the Netherlands and because of that a whole bunch of people have done articles about that.”
Anderson credited Providence with his church’s financial solvency during the time period between the sudden freezing of his assets and when his church will receive their money from Bank of America. He explained that as rarely [as it] happens, the church treasurer had yet to make a deposit from the week prior, and they had an offering from the day before, which left two weeks of capital to start an account and get by until they could receive their funds.
Anderson said, “If we had already deposited our offerings, we would have been in a really hard place. It would’ve been a really bad thing. But thank God, even though it wasted a full day, it will work out. By the end of the day we fixed everything, and we have enough money to coast until we get our money in this cashier’s check.”
Anderson continued, “I mean, it’s a lot of money. It’s tens of thousands of dollars. We have like five full-time employees, we have three different locations where we’re paying rent. It could have been a disaster. The fact that they freeze your account for a few weeks, that can really wreak havoc when there’s no warning and you have obligations.”
One must question whether or not it is appropriate for financial institutions – which are backed by the United States Congress-appointed FDIC and governed by state and federal regulatory agencies – to discriminate based upon the religious or political views of customers when doing business with United States Citizens.
[Publisher’s Note: Pulpit & Pen does not endorse Anderson’s theology. For a statement of our doctrinal beliefs, click here]
