What is "Faith-Based" Investing?

Faith-Based Investing is a style of investing that incorporates your values into the way you invest. This is also referred to as Biblically Responsible Investing (BRI) and Morally Responsible Investing.

The idea is simple. Instead of investing in just any company, faith-based investing seeks to "screen out" and avoid investing in companies that directly contradict your Christian values and violate your conscience. This allows you to align your investment dollars and your values to "vote" for the companies you actually want to support. It's about owning companies you can genuinely root for and who you want to see succeed and propsper.

For example:

If you prefer to avoid investing in companies that profit from the manufacturing of abortion-related drugs (or those which donate philanthropically to and advocate for pro-abortion legislation), then you may be interested in a faith-based investment approach that screens certain companies out.

Someone with these convictions would likely not want to own/invest in a company like Pfizer* since they manufacture abortifacient drugs that prevent the implantation of already fertilized eggs in the uterus, i.e., they prevent human life from being able to flourish where it normally would, therefore killing early stage unborn children.

*This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stock or security, just an example of how screening out "violators" works from a faith-based investing standpoint.

Faith-based investing is not for everyone and that's okay. We aren't interested in forcing our conscience on anyone. We offer both traditional investment approaches and faith-based investment approaches to make sure that all of our clients are able to invest how they feel comfortable. This is your choice, not ours, but we are very proud and excited to offer faith-based options to our Christian clients who are excited to invest in this way.

Some Considerations:

Given the nature of faith-based investing, this investment style should be expected to deviate from the performance of other portfolios that are not "screened" for qualitative values/beliefs. It cannot be known in advance whether a strategy like this will perform better or worse than more traditional approaches over the long-term, but it is not unreasonable to think that it could. You should give serious consideration as to whether or not this is a strategy you feel comfortable with if there are periods of both market underperformance and outperformance.

It's also very important that you only choose to invest in a faith-based portfolio because it personally violates your conscience. We aren't looking to burden fellow Christians with any obligation, guilt or shame around their investments. Our vision is that Christians who desire to have their values reflected in their investments would be able to joyfully and conveniently choose faith-based options.

We love and encourage all believers to consider faith-based investing, but we're also aware of the potential tradeoffs/cons. We simply do not and cannot know how faith-based "screening" might affect your long-term performance or the volatility of your portfolio.

Because there is a lack of long-term historical data, we cautiously encourage believers to consider if faith-based investing is for them. Of course, on the flip side, that's not to say that we can know future performance or volatility as it relates to traditional investments either. The future is unknown either way you invest, and although we use historical data to inform our decision making, it is not necessarily predictive of future outcomes.

We absolutely love and would be excited to create a portfolio that takes your values into account. If faith-based investing is not something you wish to engage in, that's perfectly okay too. There is no pressure on our end, as we believe this is a conscience issue for each person to consider.