While working at a large investment consulting firm, I remember the moment a fellow Christian in-house counsel leaned over the table in my direction and said, “I understand that you want to think about your Christian values when you are investing, but that is actually illegal. You would be breaching your fiduciary duty.”
After that meeting, I remember pondering his statement. Does including non-financial objectives in the investment process really invoke the possibility of jail time? But as I investigated the matter, I discovered that Christians have often faced resistance, even from other Christians, for trying to change the investment management process.
Before William Wilberforce began his abolition campaign, a lowly leader in the Quaker tradition in the American colonies, John Woolman (1720–1772), began to grow convicted that owning clothing with dye was morally wrong, given that the dye was a direct result of the slave industry. The universal response of his fellow believers was scorn and contempt.
The moment John appeared in public with a hat that was without the slave-made dye, his fellow Quakers shunned him:
“Some Friends were apprehensive that my wearing such a hat savored of an affected singularity; those who spoke with me in a friendly way I generally informed, in a few words, that I believed my wearing it was not in my own will… many Friends being now uneasy with me, I had an inclination to acquaint some with the manner of my being led into these things…”
In another example, in 1983, Sister Nicole Reille in France wanted to fund a pension for her fellow sisters so they could avoid poverty in later years. But she had one key demand: the savings had to be managed in accordance with the values of the convent, namely, justice and respect for humanity and the environment.
This request to go beyond maximizing risk-adjusted returns was met with a dismissive attitude from companies assuming that their ethical investment strategy “would not survive the cold, hard realities of the business world.” Companies often patronized the nuns, asking them rhetorical questions about whether they really thought they could change the rules of the economy.
The good news in both stories is that things did change. Woolman helped move Quakers toward rejecting slavery, and Quakers became an important force in the abolition movement. Sister Reille gained support among French investment professionals and helped pioneer socially responsible investing in France.
The practice of aligning a person’s investments with their values has gone by different names over the years. One longstanding name is “ethical investing.” During the 1970s and 1980s, “socially responsible investing” (SRI) gained prominence as investors sought to address social concerns through their portfolios. Campaigns encouraged investors to divest from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. In the 2000s, similar efforts targeted companies with business ties to Sudan in response to the genocide in Darfur.
During the 2000s, the language broadened to include “sustainable and responsible investing.” Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and triple-bottom-line initiatives encouraged companies to report on their social and environmental impacts alongside their financial results. These disclosures gave investors more information to consider. By the 2010s, ESG investing, which incorporates environmental, social, and governance factors into investment decisions, had become increasingly prominent (and controversial).
Christians played an important role in this history.
Early approaches often focused on avoiding or selling investments that conflicted with their Christian convictions, practices known as negative screening and divestment. Louche, Arenas, and Van Cranenburgh (2012) describe the prevalence of Christian participation in early modern moral divestment movements, including Quaker opposition to investments connected to the slave trade and Methodist restrictions on investments in armaments, alcohol, and gambling.1
Christian investors also recognized that owning shares could give them a voice in how companies behaved. Through shareholder advocacy, they engaged company management and pressed for more ethical business practices. In 1973, a coalition of American Baptists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists filed shareholder resolutions requesting information about companies’ South African operations, including wages, racial employment practices, and compliance with apartheid laws.
Alongside these broader movements, a distinct Christian-led investing marketplace developed, which is often labeled as Faith-Based Investing (FBI) or Biblically Responsible Investing (BRI).
Even more recently, the growth of ETFs has expanded the range of solutions for Christian investment products and created additional opportunities for fund managers to pursue positive screening. Rather than focusing only on what to avoid, these approaches seek to “overweight the good.” Christian investors might favor companies that care well for their employees, or use ESG data to identify companies that treat their stakeholders admirably.
In 2025, Brightlight research estimated the Christian investing marketplace, including mutual fund and ETF strategies, at roughly $119 billion. This represents considerable growth from the market’s comparatively small size and limited visibility before 2000.
Although this emerging Christian marketplace is not perfect and sometimes attracts friendly fire, Christian investing is a movement blazing a trail in the right direction. Christians today live in an exciting time when opportunities to align their investments with their faith are expanding and increasingly being met with interest and support, rather than the ridicule some earlier Christian brothers and sisters experienced.
Notes
- Louche, C., Arenas, D., & van Cranenburgh, K. C. (2012). From preaching to investing: Attitudes of religious organisations towards responsible investment. Journal of Business Ethics, 110(3), 301–320. ↩︎