Scottish bank chastised for mixing God and Mammon

God and Mammon can rarely have become so bizarrely entangled as in Scotland this month, where the Bank of Scotland is under attack from a cross-section of churches in its home country for dabbling dangerously in matters spiritual.

The nation's ecumenical body, which includes the Roman Catholic church, is advising its members to withdraw their accounts. The Iona Community is already doing so. The Episcopalian Bishop of Edinburgh is outraged. This week, Edinburgh's civic burghers added their weight to the criticism. The financial services union is saying that its members jobs are threatened by the growing prospect of a boycott, similar to that against Barclays Bank for investing in apartheid.

And what sin has this august bank committed? Simply that of doing what the canny financiers thought looked like a smart deal with a charismatic churchman of Scots ancestry.

Mr Pat Robertson, of course, is no ordinary minister. He is the pastor who runs the Christian Broadcasting Network out of North Carolina, reaching 55 to 60 million people with a blend of down-home, friendly Christian good sense and breathtaking prejudice and all-American conspiracy theory.

That televisual clout gives the evangelist the ability to round up the flock and pen them in his own Robertson Financial Services company. As a result of the deal, a new telebanking and computer banking service will be provided by those upstanding Presbyterian Scots back in the Old Country, whose expertise in the field is far ahead of anything the relatively backward US personal finance sector can provide.

If approved by US federal regulators, Mr Robertson will chair the new company. He will have a 25 per cent stake in it, the bank will have 65 per cent, with the remainder to be held by another US bank partner, Marshall and Ilsley. The Scottish link will come as a relief to the faithful who tune into Mr Robertson's massively popular 700 Club programme, who might otherwise fear their finances were being dealt with by "heathens", gays, liberals, feminists and Roman Catholics - all of whom are routinely denounced by this former contender for the US Presidency.

Mr Robertson has claimed homosexuality and satanism "seem to go together" and that gay people want to destroy Christians. Muslims and Hindus were deemed unsuited to jobs in government. President George Bush was an unwitting accomplice of Lucifer in working towards one-world government. And feminism, claimed Mr Robertson, is "a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians".

To Mr Allan Massie, a conservative columnist in Scotland, the preacher is merely voicing what was an orthodoxy among Scottish Protestants 50 years ago, but is now confined in the UK to the Rev Dr Ian Paisley.

To the 304-year-old Bank of Scotland, however, he represents a good business opportunity. Though a relatively very small player in the increasingly multinational banking sector, the bank has scored a major success in teaming up with Sainsbury's supermarkets. Within just over a year of starting up, Sainsbury Bank had 800,000 customers - 10 per cent of those who hold the store's loyalty card.

The move into the US, with a vehicle closely modelled on Sainsbury Bank, is seen as the next natural move to grow the business and make it more difficult to take over. It reckons that if it can sell banking services to a tenth of the shoppers it targets, a similar hit rate with Mr Robertson's TV viewers could rake in the dollars from five million people.

"If the bank stands still, it'll be gobbled up," said a spokesman. Now, it may have succeeded beyond its wildest dreams, making itself completely unpalatable to potential buyers, with a poison-pill of prejudice.

The Bank of Scotland's chiefs sound astonished by the backlash. Having hired a public relations company at the weekend to handle it, the line is that in the three weeks since first announcing the link with Mr Robertson, the gradual growth in attacks through the media has resulted so far in only a couple of dozen individual accounts being withdrawn.

"The bank doesn't involve itself in personal beliefs or creeds," said the spokesman. This is a commercial deal. It's a quick way into the States from the commercial point of view, a spring board for development in America and a long-term investment. "There will be no U-turn on this. The bank is not going to be swayed by a small but vocal minority group."

As it steps up its defences on the splendid headquarters on Edinburgh's Mound, it may be that the bank comes to see the initial concerns expressed by Mr Peter Burt, group chief executive, as naive - that the biggest problem the project faced was how to handle a flood of people if as many as five million signed up in the first year.