Christian Investment Funds: A Complete Guide for Faith-Based Investors

Christian investment funds make it possible to grow your wealth while keeping your portfolio aligned with your faith. Rather than owning companies whose business practices contradict biblical values—pornography producers, abortion providers, gambling operators—Christian investment funds apply screens that exclude those companies and, in many cases, actively seek out businesses that reflect Christian principles. For investors who want their money to work in alignment with their convictions, these funds offer a structured, professionally managed solution.

This guide explains how Christian investment funds work, profiles the major fund families, and gives you a framework for choosing the right option for your situation.

What Are Christian Investment Funds?

Christian investment funds are pooled investment vehicles—typically mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs)—that apply faith-based criteria when selecting holdings. Unlike conventional funds that optimize purely for financial return, Christian funds also consider whether a company’s operations, products, and culture align with biblical values.

The practice has deep roots. The first explicitly faith-based mutual fund in the United States, the Pax World Fund, launched in 1971 as a response to the Vietnam War by United Methodist ministers who didn’t want church endowments invested in weapons manufacturers. The explicitly Christian investment fund movement emerged more fully in the 1990s with the founding of the Timothy Plan (1994), followed by a wave of funds in the 2000s and 2010s.

Today, dozens of Christian-oriented funds manage billions of dollars in assets. They range from conservative evangelical funds that apply strict screens against abortion, pornography, and LGBT advocacy to more broadly faith-inclusive funds that emphasize stewardship, justice, and creation care. Understanding those differences is essential when choosing where to invest.

How Christian Investment Funds Screen Portfolios

Every Christian investment fund applies some form of screening, but the specific criteria vary significantly between fund families. Most use a combination of negative screening (excluding problematic companies) and positive screening (actively seeking companies that demonstrate values alignment).

Negative Screens

Negative screens identify companies to exclude. Common exclusion categories in Christian funds include:

• Abortion and abortifacients: Companies that manufacture or distribute abortifacient drugs, own or operate abortion clinics, or donate significantly to organizations that perform abortions.
• Pornography: Companies that produce, distribute, or significantly profit from pornographic content, including some cable and streaming providers depending on their content libraries.
• Gambling: Casino operators, online gambling platforms, and companies that derive significant revenue from gambling activities.
• Tobacco: Manufacturers and major distributors of tobacco products, including cigarettes, cigars, and increasingly e-cigarettes and vaping products.
• Alcohol: Brewers, distillers, and wine producers. Some funds apply this screen selectively, excluding major producers while allowing food and beverage companies with minor alcohol exposure.
• Weapons and defense: The definition varies widely. Some funds exclude all defense contractors; others exclude only manufacturers of weapons of mass destruction or cluster munitions; some make no defense exclusion at all.
• LGBT lifestyle promotion: More controversial and variable. Some conservative evangelical funds screen out companies that publicly advocate for LGBT causes or provide benefits they consider problematic. Other Christian funds don’t apply this screen, or frame it differently.

Fund managers apply revenue thresholds when making these determinations—typically excluding companies if more than 5% or 10% of revenue comes from a prohibited activity. This means a diversified conglomerate with a small alcohol division might pass some screens but fail others depending on the threshold used.

Positive Screens

Beyond avoiding harmful companies, many Christian funds actively seek companies that demonstrate positive characteristics:

• Strong corporate governance and ethical leadership
• Fair treatment of employees, including living wages and safe working conditions
• Environmental stewardship and responsible use of natural resources
• Transparent business practices and honest dealings with customers
• Community investment and positive social impact

Funds like Eventide and Praxis place significant weight on positive screens, arguing that Christian investing isn’t just about avoiding evil but about directing capital toward companies that genuinely benefit people and reflect the image of God in their work.

The Major Christian Investment Fund Families

Timothy Plan

Founded in 1994 by Art Ally, the Timothy Plan is one of the oldest and most explicitly evangelical Christian fund families in the United States. The Timothy Plan applies strict screens for abortion, pornography, gambling, tobacco, alcohol, and what it terms “anti-family entertainment.” It also screens companies that offer same-sex benefits to employees—a screen that many other Christian fund families don’t apply.

The Timothy Plan offers a range of mutual funds covering large cap, small cap, international, fixed income, and high dividend strategies. Expense ratios tend to run higher than index funds, typically in the 0.90%–1.20% range, reflecting the active management required for screening and portfolio construction. The fund family has been influential in establishing the BRI (Biblically Responsible Investing) movement as a distinct approach within Christian finance.

Inspire Investing

Inspire Investing, founded in 2015, brought a new approach to Christian investing: passive ETF strategies with faith-based screens. Rather than active stock picking, Inspire uses its proprietary Inspire Impact Score to screen and rank companies, then constructs passive indexes from the highest-scoring companies. The result is lower expense ratios (typically 0.35%–0.55%) than actively managed Christian funds, while maintaining robust faith-based screening.

Inspire’s screening framework is evangelical in orientation, applying exclusions for abortion, pornography, gambling, tobacco, alcohol, and LGBT advocacy. The fund family has grown rapidly and now manages billions in assets across multiple ETF strategies, including the Inspire Global Hope ETF (BLES), Inspire Small/Mid Cap Impact ETF (ISMD), and Inspire Corporate Bond Impact ETF (IBD).

Guidestone Funds

Guidestone Financial Resources is the investment arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, originally established to manage retirement assets for SBC ministers and employees. Today, Guidestone Funds is open to all investors and manages tens of billions in assets, making it one of the largest faith-based investment managers in the world.

Guidestone applies screens consistent with Southern Baptist values, excluding abortion, pornography, gambling, alcohol, and tobacco. Its size enables institutional-quality investment management with competitive expense ratios. Guidestone offers mutual funds across a full range of asset classes, including a series of target-date retirement funds designed for long-term investors.

Eventide Asset Management

Eventide takes a distinctly different approach. Rather than simply screening out problematic companies, Eventide built its philosophy around what it calls “Business for the Common Good”—seeking companies that create genuine value for all stakeholders: customers, employees, communities, and society. Eventide’s screening framework integrates biblical principles of human flourishing, justice, and stewardship.

Eventide’s flagship funds—the Eventide Gilead Fund, Dividend Opportunities Fund, and Multi-Asset Income Fund—tend toward growth-oriented portfolios with significant technology and healthcare exposure, reflecting the view that companies solving real human problems are well-positioned for long-term growth. Eventide has consistently delivered competitive performance relative to conventional benchmarks, demonstrating that thorough faith-based investing need not sacrifice returns.

Ave Maria Mutual Funds

Ave Maria is the largest explicitly Catholic mutual fund family in the United States. Its screening criteria reflect Catholic social teaching: excluding abortion, pornography, and companies that fund contraception research. Ave Maria also screens for companies that significantly profit from pornography or have material connections to anti-life organizations.

Ave Maria’s funds are actively managed and have built a strong long-term performance record, particularly the Ave Maria Growth Fund and Ave Maria Rising Dividend Fund. The fund family uses a Catholic Advisory Board of theologians and investment professionals to maintain doctrinal consistency in its screening decisions.

Praxis Mutual Funds

Praxis, affiliated with Mennonite Financial Federal Credit Union and Everence Financial, integrates Anabaptist and broader Christian values into its investment approach. Praxis is distinctive for its emphasis on shareholder advocacy—actively engaging company management on issues of justice, peace, and environmental stewardship—alongside its screening work.

Praxis screens for weapons (with stricter standards than many other Christian funds), tobacco, alcohol, gambling, and pornography, but places particular emphasis on labor rights, environmental practices, and community impact. Its stewardship investing philosophy sees investment as an opportunity to steward capital in ways that build a more just and sustainable economy.

Mutual Funds vs. ETFs: Which Is Right for You?

Christian investment funds come in two primary structures, each with distinct advantages:

Mutual Funds

Traditional mutual funds pool investor capital and are priced once daily at the end of trading. They’re well-suited for retirement accounts (401(k)s, IRAs) and systematic investment plans where you invest fixed dollar amounts regularly. Most of the major Christian fund families offer mutual funds, which provide the flexibility of dollar-cost averaging into fractional shares.

The primary drawback is cost: actively managed mutual funds typically carry higher expense ratios (0.75%–1.50%) than passive ETFs, which compounds to a significant drag on returns over long time horizons. For a $100,000 portfolio held for 30 years, the difference between a 0.45% and a 1.15% expense ratio amounts to roughly $60,000–$80,000 in foregone wealth (assuming 7% gross returns).

ETFs

Exchange-traded funds trade on stock exchanges throughout the day like individual stocks. Inspire Investing and a growing number of other Christian investment managers have launched ETF versions of their strategies, offering the benefits of lower expense ratios (0.30%–0.65%), tax efficiency, and intraday trading flexibility.

ETFs are particularly advantageous in taxable brokerage accounts, where their structural tax efficiency reduces capital gains distributions. The limitation is that ETFs must be purchased in whole shares (though fractional shares are increasingly available through brokerages), which can complicate systematic investment plans.

Performance: Do Christian Funds Sacrifice Returns?

The question Christian investors most commonly raise is whether faith-based screening causes performance drag. The empirical evidence, while mixed, is more encouraging than skeptics suggest.

The concern is logical: by excluding companies, you reduce your investable universe, potentially missing high-performing stocks in excluded sectors. Historically, tobacco stocks were among the best performers in the market over long periods—some studies showing they outperformed the broad market by several percentage points annually due to high profit margins, strong cash flows, and consistent dividends.

However, several factors work in favor of Christian funds:

Quality tilt: Faith-based screens often exclude companies with poor governance, ethical controversies, or regulatory risk—characteristics associated with underperformance. Companies that treat employees well, maintain ethical supplier relationships, and avoid legal controversies tend to be better-managed businesses that generate durable long-term returns.

Sector timing: The secular cycle matters. Sin stock performance is cyclical. Tobacco has underperformed in recent years as regulatory pressure, declining smoking rates, and ESG selling have weighed on valuations. Christian funds that excluded tobacco over the past decade didn’t pay the expected penalty.

Long-term evidence: Multiple academic studies have found that faith-based and socially screened funds perform roughly in line with their conventional counterparts over long time periods—neither significantly better nor significantly worse. The screening cost is often smaller in practice than in theory.

Eventide, Ave Maria, and Guidestone have all delivered competitive long-term performance relative to their conventional benchmark categories. Inspire’s ETFs, launched in 2015–2016, have accumulated track records showing competitive performance versus conventional ETFs with similar characteristics.

The honest answer is that performance depends heavily on the specific fund, time period, and comparison benchmark. Christian investors should evaluate each fund’s long-term record carefully, comparing it against appropriate benchmarks rather than accepting either optimistic claims from fund marketers or pessimistic assumptions from skeptics.

Expense Ratios and Fees: What Christian Investors Pay

Fees matter enormously in long-term investing. Here’s a representative snapshot of expense ratios across major Christian fund options (note: fees change, so verify current figures before investing):

• Timothy Plan funds: 0.90%–1.20% for equity funds
• Inspire ETFs: 0.35%–0.55% depending on fund
• Guidestone Funds: 0.45%–0.85% depending on strategy
• Eventide Funds: 0.95%–1.15% for equity funds
• Ave Maria Funds: 0.80%–1.10% for eyuity funds
• Praxis Funds: 0.70%–0.95% for equity funds

For cost-conscious investors, the Inspire ETF lineup offers the most competitive pricing in the Christian investing space. For investors who value active management, seek specific theological alignment, or want funds with particular track records, the higher fees at active fund families may be justified.

Beyond expense ratios, watch for load charges on some mutual funds. Front-end loads (sales charges applied when you purchase) of 3%–5% were common in older Christian mutual funds, though many share classes now offer no-load options through direct purchase or retirement plan participation.

How to Choose the Right Christian Investment Fund

With dozens of options available, choosing the right Christian investment fund comes down to five key factors:

1. Theological Alignment

Different fund families reflect different Christian traditions and moral frameworks. Timothy Plan and Inspire reflect broadly evangelical commitments with strong pro-life and traditional marriage screens. Ave Maria reflects Catholic social teaching with emphasis on life issues. Praxis reflects Mennonite/Anabaptist values with emphasis on peace and justice. Eventide reflects a broadly Reformed perspective emphasizing business as a vehicle for human flourishing.

Choose a fund family whose theological convictions are close to your own. Review each fund’s screening criteria carefully—particularly on issues like weapons manufacturing, same-sex benefits, and cannabis—where fund families diverge significantly.

2. Asset Class Coverage

Build a diversified portfolio across asset classes: large-cap domestic equity, small/mid-cap equity, international equity, fixed income, and possibly real assets. Not every Christian fund family covers every asset class, so you may need to use funds from multiple families to achieve proper diversification.

3. Performance Track Record

Evaluate 5-year and 10-year performance relative to the fund’s benchmark (e.g., S&P 500 for large-cap domestic funds). Don’t be misled by short-term outperformance or underperformance in any single period. Look for consistent, competitive performance over market cycles.

4. Cost Structure

Compare expense ratios for similar strategies across fund families. A 0.40% difference in annual fees might seem small, but compounds to tens of thousands of dollars over a 30-year investment horizon. For passive/index-style strategies, Inspire ETFs offer the most cost-competitive options. For active management, compare Guidestone’s generally competitive pricing with Timothy Plan, Eventide, and Ave Maria.

5. Account Type and Access

Not all funds are available on all platforms. If you’re investing through an employer 401(k), your options are limited to what your plan offers—Guidestone is the most commonly available Christian option in employer retirement plans. For IRAs and taxable accounts, you’ll have broader access to the full range of Christian funds and ETFs.

Tax Considerations for Christian Fund Investors

Tax efficiency should inform how you structure your Christian fund investments across account types:

Tax-advantaged accounts (IRA, 401(k)): Use these for actively managed funds that generate significant capital gains distributions. The tax shelter eliminates the annual tax drag from portfolio turnover.

Taxable accounts: Prefer ETFs here, as their structural tax efficiency minimizes capital gains distributions. Inspire ETFs are well-suited for taxable accounts.

Asset location: Bond funds are generally most efficient in tax-advantaged accounts due to the ordinary income tax treatment of bond interest. Equity funds (especially ETFs) can be held more efficiently in taxable accounts.

Building a Complete Portfolio with Christian Funds

A sample portfolio for a growth-oriented Christian investor using available funds might look like this:

• 40% US Large Cap: Inspire 100 ETF (BIBL) or Guidestone Growth Equity Fund
• 15% US Small/Mid Cap: Inspire Small/Mid Cap Impact ETF (ISMD) or Timothy Plan Small Cap Value Fund
• 20% International: Inspire International ESG ETF (WWJD) or Ave Maria International Fund
• 20% Bonds/Fixed Income: Inspire Corporate Bond Impact ETF (IBD) or Guidestone Low-Duration Bond Fund
• 5% Alternatives/Real Assets: Praxis Growth Index Fund or another diversifying holding

This allocation provides diversification across asset classes and geographies while maintaining consistent faith-based screening. Adjust the equity/bond split based on your time horizon, risk tolerance, and proximity to retirement.

Common Mistakes Christian Fund Investors Make

Assuming all Christian funds are equivalent: Fund families differ significantly in their screening criteria, investment philosophy, and performance track records. A Timothy Plan fund and a Praxis fund both call themselves Christian, but they make very different investment decisions. Do the research.

Paying too much in fees: Some Christian investors, grateful that faith-aligned options exist, pay more attention to theological alignment than to costs. Both matter. A 1.5% expense ratio in an actively managed fund with average performance will cost you dearly over decades. Compare fees across similar strategies before committing capital.

Neglecting diversification: It’s tempting to concentrate in the Christian fund you know best, but asset class diversification remains essential regardless of your screening preferences. Domestic, international, equity, and fixed income exposure all belong in a complete long-term portfolio.

Conflating faith alignment with financial safety: Christian funds can lose money. Faith-based screening says nothing about a fund’s risk characteristics, leverage, or susceptibility to market downturns. Evaluate Christian funds with the same financial rigor you’d apply to conventional options.

Ignoring account-type considerations: Where you hold Christian funds—IRA, 401(k), or taxable brokerage—has significant tax implications. Don’t simply concentrate all Christian funds in one account without considering the tax efficiency of each fund type in each account context.

The Future of Christian Investment Funds

The Christian investment fund industry has grown substantially over the past three decades and shows signs of continued expansion. Several trends are shaping its trajectory:

ETF proliferation: The success of Inspire’s ETF lineup has demonstrated that faith-based investing is compatible with low-cost passive strategies. More Christian fund managers will launch ETF options, putting downward pressure on expense ratios across the industry.

ESG backlash differentiation: As mainstream ESG investing faces political and credibility challenges, explicitly faith-based investing that’s grounded in clear theological principles offers a differentiated alternative. Christian funds that clearly articulate their biblical basis for screening decisions are better positioned than those that blur faith and secular ESG frameworks.

Retirement plan access: The largest opportunity for Christian investing growth is 401(k) plans. Guidestone has demonstrated that faith-based funds can achieve scale in employer retirement plans. As more faith-based institutions add Christian fund options to their retirement plans, assets under management will grow substantially.

Direct indexing: Emerging technology allows wealthy investors to own individual securities directly rather than through funds, applying custom screens. As direct indexing becomes more accessible to smaller investors, it will enable more personalized Christian investment portfolios.

Conclusion

Christian investment funds have matured into a diverse, professionally managed ecosystem that gives faith-based investors real choices. Whether you prioritize strict evangelical screens, Catholic social teaching, Anabaptist peace commitments, or a broad stewardship framework, there’s likely a fund family that reflects your convictions.

The key is doing the homework: comparing screening criteria against your theological convictions, evaluating long-term performance relative to appropriate benchmarks, comparing costs across similar strategies, and ensuring you build a properly diversified portfolio across asset classes. Christian investing isn’t about settling for less—it’s about deploying capital wisely in ways that honor God while building the financial resources that enable stewardship, generosity, and legacy.

As Proverbs 27:23 instructs, “Be sure you know the condition of your flocks, give careful attention to your herds.” The same diligence applies to your investment portfolio—and to the companies you own through it.