Should Christians’ investments align with biblical values? Idaho firm thinks so
BOISE – Under the guidance of one Idaho firm, Apple is one of the last companies in which you’d want to invest. The adult content it offers, as well as its stances on abortion access and LGBTQ+ advocacy, earned it the investment firm’s lowest possible score. Amazon flunked, too, in part because it sold an abortion pill and, on Prime Video, “inserts unnecessary, gratuitous nudity and simulated sex scenes.”
A company that manufactures water heaters, in contrast, earned top marks for its business ethics, water conservation and low greenhouse gas emissions. A boat-building company and a real-estate firm were close behind, earning accolades for their ethical labor practices and low ecological impact.
The scoring system was devised by Inspire Investing, a Meridian-based firm that specializes in “biblically responsible” investing. Inspire helps people decide whether to invest in companies based on its evaluation of the companies’ adherence to biblical values.
For too long, Christians have been investing in companies blindly, without realizing they were profiting from companies producing abortion drugs, distributing pornography or using slave labor, said Robert Netzly, Inspire’s CEO. His company has been the “tip of the spear” in trying to change that, he said.
“We just really see what we believe is a movement of God in the investment space, where he’s opening the eyes of his people to this huge problem,” Netzly told the Idaho Statesman. “It’s come to kind of a crescendo, where people are realizing that they’re investing in things and profiting from things that their deeply held faith values are just diametrically opposed to.”
It’s a message that seems to resonate widely. Founded in 2015, the company has over $3.3 billion under management, Netzly said. His firm, which offers exchange-traded funds – baskets of stocks, bonds and other securities that are traded on the stock exchange – has made its way onto multiple lists of the country’s fastest-growing companies. Netzly declined to share how much his company, which has 34 employees, is worth.
As of June 2024, about 155 investment funds were available in public markets from Christian faith-based managers, according to Brightlight, a Christian wealth management firm that publishes an annual report on faith-based investment strategies. Across the country, Christian faith-focused fund managers held about $99 billion under management, Brightlight found.
Inspire Investing is the largest provider of faith-based exchange-traded funds in the world, Netzly said.
And it has plenty of room to grow. Kingdom Advisors, a Georgia-based firm that offers “biblical financial advice,” reported in 2023 that American Christians held about half of the stock, bond and mutual fund investments in the U.S. All of that money is “walking around in the pockets of church members,” Netzly said.
“If we just got a little bit organized, we could really make an influence and help shape the country in perhaps a much more favorable way,” he said. “We encourage Christians to not just be asleep at the wheel, but to speak truth to corporate power.”
Biblically responsible investing firm rejects ‘ESG’ label
Inspire used to describe its investment offerings as “faith-based ESG,” a nod to the standards some investors use to assess companies based on their approaches to “environmental, social and governance” concerns. ESG investors may take into account, for example, a company’s carbon emissions, labor practices and the diversity of its board when assessing its likelihood of success or risk as an investment.
With its focus on companies’ values, Inspire offered something comparable to ESG, albeit stemming from a more conservative perspective. When Inspire in 2019 adopted the term ESG to describe its funds, it hoped to see a “ ‘two-party system’ in the ESG community, where biblical values could provide counterpressure on the overwhelming progressive-left dominance in the space,” Netzly wrote.
Instead, Netzly’s firm was “ridiculed” by the media, ostracized at industry events and blocked from databases of ESG investment options, he wrote. He told the Statesman by email that he was “not at liberty” to name which companies or platforms blocked his firm.
So in 2022, Inspire announced that it was “renouncing” the ESG label.
The idea of ESG has faced backlash in recent years, especially following the federal government’s efforts to make ESG standards more consistent and widespread. In 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal government’s market regulator, proposed requiring publicly traded companies to disclose their climate-related risks and greenhouse gas emissions, among other ideas.
In response, Idaho lawmakers introduced several bills to combat financial scrutiny based on social and environmental factors, the Statesman previously reported. At a roundtable, Idaho lawmakers and State Treasurer Julie Ellsworth decried ESG as a leftist attempt to undermine the business practices of companies deemed unsustainable.
“Imposing subjective standards to choke off capital to disfavored industries is a disservice to businesses, employees and investors,” U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, said at the roundtable. David Pace, a spokesperson for Crapo, did not respond to a question from the Statesman about whether biblically responsible investing poses similar concerns.
Netzly, who founded Inspire in California before moving the company to Idaho in 2020, said he’s found a warm welcome among leaders in the state, including Ellsworth.
“We’ve had some very constructive conversations” with her, and she’s been “very helpful, very friendly” toward the efforts of a coalition of state financial officers that Inspire helped to gather, he said.
“It’s common-sense business,” Netzly said. “It has nothing to do, really, with faith-based values, in particular. It’s just trying to keep companies from making bad decisions by stepping into a social fight that’s already put other companies down in flames.”
Money managers’ main obligation is to maximize investors’ return on investment, Ellsworth told the Statesman in an emailed statement. ESG “is wrong” because it prioritizes other goals “without transparency and full agreement by the shareholders,” she wrote.
When lawmakers pushed bills to stave off the ESG trend, their opposition stemmed from the federal government’s attempts to require ESG-related reporting rather than from the ESG standards themselves, said Sage Dixon, a former Republican representative from Sandpoint who sponsored one of the bills.
Alex LaBeau, the president of the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry, told the Statesman that private investors generally want “unfettered access to the market” based on their values. When the government gets involved in decisions about investing, it’s a slippery slope, LaBeau said, to telling people where they can or can’t buy a home or how they should spend their money.
“That’s antithetical to what we are as a society in America,” he said.
Inspire Investing encourages conservative Christian values
There’s a “ton of work” that goes into Inspire’s screens of companies to determine whether they align with biblical values, Netzly said. It avoids companies that sell alcohol, abortion drugs or pornography, as well as companies that are outspoken in promoting LGBTQ+ rights.
Inspire scores companies on a scale from -100 to +100 based on their adherence to biblical values. A score below zero reflects a violation of biblical values, with lower negative scores reflecting greater “breadth and/or severity of involvement in morally problematic issues,” according to a company white paper on its methodology. A positive score, in contrast, represents alignment with biblical values.
Inspire’s selection of scoring categories is rooted in the Bible’s teachings, Netzly said. Categories related to environmental protection, for example, stem from a call in the book of Genesis for humans to “work and keep” the Earth, using natural resources for human flourishing while protecting the planet for future generations, Netzly said.
Companies’ scores, which Inspire makes publicly available, “allows an investor to quickly ascertain not just a binary ‘good or bad’ analysis of a company or fund in relation to biblically responsible investing criterion, but also the degree of ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of that company,” the white paper says.
Inspire first evaluates companies’ “negatives,” including any involvement with alcohol, gambling, sexual exploitation, LGBTQ+ activism and in-vitro fertilization. It assesses how involved each company is with the “negative” action and how severe its violation is. Producing or selling an abortion drug, for example, is weighed more heavily than being involved in abortion activism. Inspire then evaluates companies’ “positives,” including customer privacy, environmental risk mitigation and business ethics.
Inspire seeks to engage with companies it has dinged before writing them off, to see whether it can persuade them to change their behavior. After former President Joe Biden created a process for major retail pharmacies to dispense an abortion pill in 2023, Inspire reached out to Costco, Walmart and Albertsons to warn them of the “backlash” they would see if they began to sell the medication, Netzly said.
“We’re not just avoiding ownership of the stock of companies that are engaged in immoral industries,” Netzly said. “When we see issues at a company that are problematic, we want to engage with those companies.”
Inspire’s biblical values, he said, stem from a conservative view of the Bible’s teachings and Christian morality. Chief among those beliefs are the idea that life begins at conception, and that marriage is between one man and one woman.
LGBTQ Americans “are paying the price” for the latter position, wrote Uncloseted Media, a news outlet focused on the U.S.’ “anti-LGBTQ ecosystem.” Inspire Investing and other companies like it steer Christians away from investing in companies that promote LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion, the outlet found.
Biblically responsible investing creates a “false equivalency” between discrimination against LGBTQ+ people and against religious people, Wendy Via, the head of the Global Projects Against Hate and Extremism, told Uncloseted Media.
“The gay community has worked for years and years to get folks the rights and the protections that they have earned and deserve,” she said.
The company’s investors and employees fall under a large umbrella of Christian denominations, Netzly said, including Baptists, mainline Protestants, Catholics and Evangelicals. It does not include “a church that would fly the rainbow flag in June” or advocate “for what they would call women’s health (and) we would call abortion,” he said.
In 2023, Inspire and other plaintiffs sued Target, accusing the company of misleading its investors about the business risks of promoting LGBTQ+ visibility through sales of Pride-themed decorations and clothing. Target’s activism “cost investors billions,” Inspire alleged, while the company’s CEO “misleadingly downplayed the severity of consumer backlash.” Since then, Target has also faced backlash, boycotts and legal action after ending its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in February.
Netzly is adamant that his company isn’t advocating for corporations to discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community, and that it just wants companies to stay neutral on social issues. The problem, he said, arises when companies take a stand on an issue – sponsoring a Pride event, for example, or requiring trainings that urge “not just tolerance, but acceptance and even celebration of LGBT relationships,” he said.
He would similarly object, he said, if a company required its employees to take a training that taught that marriage was between one man and one woman.
“We’re not the moral police. We’re not here to try to force our values down anybody’s throats,” he said.
“People are free to believe what they believe.”