Over the last few years, anti-Christian activists have influenced asset managers and are pushing ungodly agendas. If you invest in Mutual Funds or ETFs, your Fund Managers may be voting on your behalf, against your values.
I wonder if Christian shareholders are aware their votes are pushing Marxist, social gospel resolutions. If we voted in a bloc for board members based on Biblical values, perhaps the blatant ungodliness we’ve seen at Bud Lite, Target, Ford, Disney, etc., would not even exist at all.
Proverbs 27:23 LSB – Know well the condition of your flocks, and pay attention to your herds.
Over the last five years, as I learned this was becoming a larger issue, I’ve been thinking of some good ways to invest from a Christian perspective.
Doing a quick search reveals Faith-Based funds. The Timothy Plan, Global X by SEI, and Inspire. These funds try to avoid “sin” stocks by screening out companies that promote abortion, homosexuality, cross-dressing, alcohol (which is not even a sin), tobacco (again..), etc. But I’m less interested in avoiding “sin” stocks. My investment strategy is to own the market. What I want to know is, for the funds you hold, are the fund managers using your proxy vote to support Biblical or ESG values? I couldn’t find a lot of information on this until earlier this year.
Pension Politics recently released a report on how Fund Companies Proxy Vote. The report grades Fund Managers on how they vote from A to F. The closer to A, the more the fund managers voted against ESG policies, and the companies rated closer to F voted for the ESG policies. Looking through the report, I took note of some of the larger players:
- PRIMECAP – A (perfect voting score)
- Dimensional – A
- Vanguard – A (of the largest three fund managers, Vanguard has the highest grade)
- Fidelity – A
- Blackrock – C (for all the bad press Blackrock gets, they aren’t the worst)
- JP Morgan – C (no surprise there)
- Charles Schwab – D (Chuck, what happened?!)
- State Street – D
Remember the “Christian” Faith-Based funds I mentioned earlier? I looked through all the fund families highlighted on the Faith Driven Investor site. I couldn’t find information on all of them, but of the ones in the report:
- The Timothy Plan got an F.
- SEI, which runs the Global X Catholic Values fund, got a D-.
- GuideStone – F.
- Praxis Mutual Funds (Everance) – F-.
- Knights of Columbus – F-.
Dave Ramsey, who is promoted in many churches, recommends SmartVestor Pro advisors, which sells Alger funds…
- Alger – F- (worst possible score voting for every woke proposal).
As an aside, many of the Alger funds have enormous fees; if you are ever tempted to buy such a fund, you may want to read Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? by Fred Schwed Jr. and Enough by John C. Bogle.
So, while Faith-Based investing funds appear to be pious in their avoidance of “sin” stocks, they vote to turn the stocks they do hold into social justice companies.
There is one exception (Update 2023-11-05) are two exceptions. Inspire and CrossMark Global Investments:
- The Inspire, which got an A grade with a perfect voting record. They aim to be Biblically responsible, and they do vote according to Biblical values. If the 0.35% net ER (Expense Ratio) were a bit lower, I’d consider holding their BIBL fund.
- CrossMark Global Investments – also got a perfect A. Now, some of the share classes of the fund have load fees, and the fund expenses are high (see my note on Alger); the Inspire ETF expenses are more reasonable.
Next time you’re about to invest, read the report from Pension Politics to see how your fund manager votes.
In the past, I’ve preferred to hold index funds from Vanguard, Schwab, Fidelity, State Street, and Blackrock without considering how they vote on my behalf; I have adjusted my IPS to prefer fund managers that are more likely to vote in the way I would.
Finally, while it is wise and good stewardship to verify your fund managers are representing your values, the fact that woke resolutions can even be successful is a symptom of a much larger problem, and that is simply that people are ungodly. Unless the hearts of men change towards God, which is only possible through the Gospel, any other form of resistance to ungodly shareholder resolutions is futile.
I’ve made the assumption that the reader already understands the dangers of Wokism and ESG; this has been well-defended and documented elsewhere, so I didn’t triple the size of this post to do that. But if you are interested, see MacArthur’s article on The Injustice of Social Justice and listen to A Biblical Theology of Climate Change at the Just Thinking podcast.
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In trying to understand your POV, would you be so kind as to define anti-Christian? I’m a gay Christian.
Also, how it is possible that so many so-called “Evangelical Christians” are voting for an unChristlike, Godless man whose conduct is consistently the exact opposite of the teachings of Christ? If we are going to be authentic and truly live by the Gospel, we can’t do that following a leader who does the exact opposite.
Hi, Jackson.
1. Anti-Christian is anything that is opposed to Christianity as reavealed in His word, the Bible. How ESG and Wokism is anti-Christian is well discussed in the two resources I linked to.
2. So-called Christians are simply not Christians, so it is not only possible, but expected that they would be decieved, vote for, and follow an unrighteous man. It should not suprise us that there are many who claim to be Christians but are not (Matt 7:21-23). I’m not saying that voting for an unrighteous man makes one an unbeliever… a genuine Christian may not be well educated yet, at the beginning of their sanctification process, or perhaps voting for who they think is the lesser of two evils. But we shouldn’t be surprised when false converts act like unbelievers.
I am concerned, because Christians don’t identify themselves with sin, but instead identify themselves with Christ. I’ve never heard anyone introduce himself as a Christian thief! If you are indeed in Christ, you are no longer a slave to sin (Romans 6). You don’t need to call yourself a gay Christian. If you are struggling with sin, seek counsel from pastors at a biblical church, study and memorize Scripture (Ps 1; Ps 119:11). But if you are not saved, I urge you to repent, and believe. (Mark 1:15).
Your response to that person reminds me of when I would ask far leftists (woke people) about their point of view and they would simply point me to the work of Marx and expect that to explain everything. Replace books of Marx with Bible, and here we have the same thing.
At best, your suggestions are overly academic and don’t touch ground to be practical, and at worst, are hypocritical by accusing the “woke” of pushing their twisted morals instead of the morals you want them to push.
There are plenty of investments to choose from still. There are many other options such as Acorns, WeBull, Robinhood (if they haven’t completely driven everyone off).
This victim mentality of some Christians is old. You are not a victim of the woke. You have choices. Maybe take responsibility for yourself, lest you start acting like the people you are criticizing.
Thank you for your thoughts, SE.
1. No. This is different than what you said, I sent him to several chapters in the Bible–this is far less reading than Marx’s books. The point of this post is not to defend or debate my position (I linked to other resources that do a good job at this), but to provide a practical application to those who share it.
2. (a) The woke openly admit to this themselves, I don’t need to accuse them of it. (b) I never asked the woke to push morals with which they don’t agree.
3. Where did you get victim mentality or responsibility from?
Thank you for this enlightening article. I believe every Christian investor should indeed keep their values at the forefront when making investment decisions.
It’s quite shocking to see some of the Faith-Based funds not aligning their votes with their declared principles. This emphasizes the need for every Christian investor to not just trust the ‘Faith-Based’ label blindly but scrutinize the underlying actions as well.
I’ve never heard of Inspire and CrossMark Global Investments prior to this, but I’m glad there are funds out there that stick to their biblical principles. It’s refreshing to see that there are companies who walk the talk and align their actions with their professed values.
The recommendation to read the report from Pension Politics is insightful; getting to know how fund managers vote indeed presents a clearer picture. This nudges me to re-evaluate my current portfolio and make adjustments if needed.
Further, your conclusion about the issue being symptomatic of a larger problem of ungodliness is very poignant. As Christian investors, we can strive to use our economic power to reflect God’s kingdom, but ultimately, change has to occur at the heart level, and this is only possible through the Gospel.
Finally, thanks for sharing the additional resources on Wokism and ESG. Looking forward to reading MacArthur’s article on The Injustice of Social Justice and listening to A Biblical Theology of Climate Change at the Just Thinking podcast. Thanks again for shedding light on this very important issue.
Thanks, Based Dynamics, I appreciate your comment.
Thank you for this post. I just started researching this exact topic, and finding information written from a non-ESG viewpoint is not easy.
As I understood, you’re interested in owning wide-market ETFs from companies that do not engage in ESG voting. I have several questions:
* Do you have any specific ETF recommendations?
* Do you have any updates/new thoughts on this topic since this post was published? Maybe some articles and resources you can recommend?
By the way, I see that Pension Politics has released a new report in May 2024.
Hi, Dmitry. Thanks for reading, I couldn’t find much information either other than the Pension Politics report, which is why I wrote this post. You are correct, I’m interested in owning the market, but I don’t want the ETF or fund I hold to vote for ESG values. I don’t have any recommendations because I’m not a financial advisor and it really depends on each situation, the majority of my holdings are in Vanguard funds and I’m happy with how Vanguard did in the report.
I did not realize there was a new report, thanks for the heads up! I skimmed through it and didn’t see any significant changes. The only major news you may be interested in is Inspire now has a 500 ETF with a .09% ER. https://www.inspireetf.com/ptl which isn’t useful for my strategy (since this fund doesn’t hold the entire market), but for people looking for the top 500 most biblically aligned companies this seems worth considering.