Christian investment screening is the practice of checking what a company actually does before you own it—and deciding, by your values, whether to invest. It works in two directions: negative screening filters out businesses built on harm (abortion, pornography, predatory gambling, and the like), and positive screening tilts toward companies that treat people and creation well. Together they let you grow wealth without quietly funding things you’d pray against.
That’s the whole idea in a paragraph. The rest of this page is the how: where to draw the lines, which categories genuinely divide thoughtful believers, how to read the screening data, and whether to do it yourself or let a fund do it for you. If you own a single index fund today, you almost certainly own companies you’d be uncomfortable defending by name—and screening is how you fix that on purpose rather than by accident.
What screening actually is
Every share of stock is part-ownership of a real business. Buy an S&P 500 index fund and you become a fractional owner of all 500 companies in it—including the ones running casinos, publishing pornography, or manufacturing abortifacients. Conventional funds don’t screen because their only mandate is to match an index cheaply. Screening adds a moral question to the financial one: not just “will this grow?” but “should I own this?”
Scripture sets the posture. “The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it” (Psalm 24:1), so the capital you invest is God’s, and where it goes matters to Him. Paul’s instruction to “test everything; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil” (1 Thessalonians 5:21-22) is, in effect, a screening mandate. And Philippians 4:8—”whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely… think about such things”—gives you the positive filter. Screening is just applying those instincts to a ticker symbol.
Where faith-based screening came from
Screening your investments by conviction isn’t a modern marketing gimmick—it’s centuries old. John Wesley preached “The Use of Money” in the 1700s, urging Christians to gain all they can without harming their neighbor’s body or soul, which ruled out profiting from certain trades. Quakers refused to invest in the slave trade and weapons. The first modern faith-based mutual fund in the United States, the Pioneer Fund, launched in 1928 specifically to avoid “sin stocks” like alcohol and tobacco for its religious investors. What’s new isn’t the conviction—it’s the toolkit. Today’s investor has dozens of screened funds, real-time data, and stock-level scoring that Wesley could only have dreamed of. The principle is ancient; the access is recent.
Negative screening: drawing the lines
Negative screening is the part most people picture first: a list of business activities you refuse to fund. It’s the foundation of negative screening, and the standard exclusion list is widely shared across faith-based funds:
| Excluded activity | Concern | Typical screen |
|---|---|---|
| Abortion & abortifacients | Sanctity of life (Psalm 139:13) | Often zero-tolerance |
| Pornography & adult content | Human dignity, purity | Any meaningful revenue |
| Gambling operators | Exploiting the vulnerable | Revenue threshold |
| Predatory / payday lending | Usury, justice for the poor | Revenue threshold |
| Tobacco & recreational cannabis | Stewardship of the body | Revenue threshold |
The mechanics hinge on a single word: threshold. Almost no large company earns 100 percent of its revenue from one activity, so funds set a cutoff. A strict fund might exclude any company with a single dollar of abortion-related revenue; a looser one might allow up to 5 percent of revenue from a screened category before dropping the holding. Neither is “right”—they reflect different consciences. What matters is that you know your fund’s threshold instead of assuming it matches yours. The clearest place to start understanding the lines is our breakdown of sin stocks and how funds define them.
The categories that genuinely divide believers
The easy exclusions—pornography, predatory gambling—command near-universal agreement among Christians. The interesting work happens in the gray zones, where sincere believers land in different places. Pretending these are obvious does no one any favors.
| Category | The case to exclude | The case to keep |
|---|---|---|
| Defense & weapons | Profiting from instruments of death | Legitimate national defense (Romans 13) |
| Healthcare & pharma | Abortifacients, certain biotech research | Healing the sick is profoundly good work |
| Big tech | Censorship, addictive design, data ethics | Productivity and connection are real goods |
| Alcohol | Drunkenness, addiction harms | Scripture permits moderate use (Psalm 104:15) |
Take each seriously. The defense and weapons question turns on whether a country’s right to self-defense extends to investing in the firms that arm it. Healthcare and bioethics screening is genuinely thorny, because the same companies that make life-saving drugs sometimes also produce contraceptives or fund embryonic research. Screening big tech wrestles with censorship and addictive design rather than a single product. And the gambling sector raises the question of where entertainment ends and exploitation begins. There’s also the cluster of alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis—often screened together—which we treat in our piece on alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis screening. On all of these, hold your convictions firmly and hold your judgment of other believers loosely (Romans 14).
Positive screening: owning the good, not just avoiding the bad
Screening that only ever says “no” misses half the point. Positive screening actively seeks out companies doing genuine good—treating employees justly, building products that help people, stewarding the environment, governing honestly. It’s the difference between a portfolio that’s merely not evil and one that’s actively good. This is where positive screening earns its keep, and it maps directly onto Philippians 4:8. A company that pays fair wages, makes an honest product, and treats creation as a trust rather than a dumping ground is the kind of business Scripture would have you partner with.
Funds like Eventide lean hardest into this, framing their work as investing in companies that create real value for customers, employees, and communities—what they call “investing that makes the world rejoice.” The positive lens also widens your options: instead of a shrinking blacklist, you get a growing universe of businesses worth owning.
Best-in-class: the practical hybrid
Most serious faith-based funds don’t choose between negative and positive screening—they combine them into a best-in-class approach. First exclude the clearly objectionable, then, among what remains, favor the companies leading their peers on the things you care about. A best-in-class energy holding, for instance, isn’t a tobacco company; it’s the cleanest, best-governed operator in a sector you’ve decided to keep. This hybrid is how funds maintain diversification while still expressing real values—you’re not forced to choose between a clean conscience and a balanced portfolio.
ESG scores: useful data or a Trojan horse?
You’ll quickly run into ESG ratings—environmental, social, and governance scores from providers like MSCI and Sustainalytics that grade companies on dozens of factors. They’re tempting shortcuts, and they’re genuinely useful for one thing: surfacing data you’d never dig up yourself, like a company’s labor practices or governance red flags. But treat them with caution. ESG and Christian values overlap in places and diverge sharply in others—a company can score brilliantly on ESG while manufacturing abortifacients or pushing causes at odds with biblical conviction, because ESG measures different things than you do. Our deep dive on using ESG scores wisely shows how to mine the data without outsourcing your conscience to a rating agency, and the broader contrast is laid out in ESG versus biblically responsible investing.
The short version: ESG scores are an input, not an authority. Use the underlying data, ignore the letter grade, and apply your own screen.
Funds versus do-it-yourself stock screening
You have two honest routes to a screened portfolio, and most people are better off with the first.
Buy screened funds. Funds like the leading Christian ETFs—Inspire’s lineup (the Inspire 100 ETF trades as BIBL), the Timothy Plan family, Eventide, Ave Maria, and GuideStone—have already done the screening for thousands of companies. You get instant diversification and a research team you’d never replicate alone, in exchange for an expense ratio that today typically runs 0.35 to 1.0 percent. For the vast majority of investors, this is the right answer.
Screen individual stocks yourself. If you prefer picking companies, you can screen them one at a time using a tool like the Inspire Impact Score, which rates individual stocks against biblical values, alongside each company’s own revenue disclosures. The upside is total control; the downside is the time, the research burden, and the diversification risk of holding too few names. Reserve this for the slice of your portfolio you actively want to manage, and let funds handle the core.
How the major fund families screen differently
“Faith-based” is not one standard. Each major provider draws its lines in a slightly different place, and the differences are worth knowing before you commit your money:
| Provider | Tradition / emphasis | Screening character |
|---|---|---|
| Timothy Plan | Evangelical; pioneer of BRI funds | Strict negative screens; deep social-issue focus |
| Inspire Investing | Evangelical; ETF-focused, low cost | Inspire Impact Score; positive + negative |
| Eventide | Evangelical; “business as ministry” | Heavy positive screening for value creation |
| Ave Maria | Catholic | Catholic moral teaching; abortion & pornography lines |
| GuideStone | Southern Baptist heritage | Broad denominational screens; full fund lineup |
| Praxis (Everence) | Mennonite / Anabaptist | Peace tradition; weapons & justice emphasis |
Notice how tradition shapes the screen. The Mennonite-rooted Praxis funds weigh weapons and militarism heavily because of the Anabaptist peace witness, while a Catholic family like Ave Maria foregrounds abortion and contraception. An evangelical investor and a Catholic investor might both call themselves “biblically responsible” and still build noticeably different portfolios. Match the fund’s instincts to your own rather than assuming the label settles it.
How to screen the portfolio you already own
Most people discover they’ve been unintentionally invested in things they object to. Here’s the practical fix, in order:
| Step | What to do |
|---|---|
| 1. Look under the hood | Pull up each fund’s top holdings (your brokerage lists them) and run the ticker through a screening tool |
| 2. Identify the conflicts | Flag holdings that cross your lines—and note how large the position actually is |
| 3. Find screened replacements | Match each problem fund to a faith-based equivalent in the same asset class |
| 4. Transition tax-smart | Swap freely inside IRAs/401(k)s; in taxable accounts, redirect new money first and sell winners across two tax years |
| 5. Re-check yearly | Holdings change; a fund that passed last year may add a borderline name this year |
Don’t let perfectionism stall you. A small position—say, under 1 percent of your portfolio—in an otherwise excellent fund may be an acceptable trade-off while you transition. The goal is faithful stewardship, not a frantic hunt for the theoretically spotless portfolio that doesn’t exist.
When screening isn’t enough
Screening has a real limit: selling a company removes your conscience from the picture, but it doesn’t change the company. The new owner of those shares may care nothing for the harm you walked away from. That’s why many thoughtful believers pair screening with shareholder engagement—keeping a position specifically to vote proxies, file resolutions, and press management toward better practices. Exclusion keeps your hands clean; engagement tries to clean the company. The fullest expression of faithful investing often uses both, and it connects screening to the wider world of biblically responsible investing.
Denominational differences in where the lines fall
Christians don’t screen identically, and the differences are instructive rather than embarrassing. Catholic investors, guided by formal teaching from the U.S. bishops, tend to draw firm lines around abortion, contraception, and embryonic stem-cell research. Evangelical investors often share those life convictions while adding strong screens against pornography and gambling. Anabaptist traditions—Mennonites, Brethren—elevate the peace witness, screening weapons and military contractors more strictly than most. Mainline Protestants frequently emphasize justice, labor, and creation care, sometimes leaning into shareholder engagement over outright exclusion. None of these is the single “Christian” position; they’re faithful communities weighting shared values differently. Romans 14 gives you permission to hold your convictions seriously without binding another believer’s conscience to them.
Common misconceptions about screening
A few myths keep believers from screening at all. The first is that it requires a finance degree—it doesn’t; buying one screened fund accomplishes more than most people manage with hours of research. The second is that screening means sacrificing serious returns, when the actual historical gap is small and sometimes runs the other way. The third is the perfectionism trap: the belief that unless your portfolio is flawlessly pure, screening is pointless. That’s backwards. Stewardship is faithfulness in the direction of obedience, not the achievement of a spotless ledger no investor on earth actually holds. You will own imperfect companies. The real question is simpler: are you moving deliberately toward what honors God, or drifting wherever the index happens to point? Direction beats perfection every time.
The simplest possible starting point
If this all feels like a lot, collapse it to one move. Open your retirement account, sell whatever broad index fund sits at the center of it, and buy one diversified, faith-screened equivalent in its place. That single swap—done inside a tax-advantaged account where it triggers no tax bill—instantly aligns the bulk of your money with your values and screens thousands of companies in one click. You can refine later: add international exposure, tune your bond allocation, layer in shareholder engagement when you’re ready. But the eighty-percent solution is one fund and one afternoon. Stewardship rewards the believer who starts imperfectly over the one who studies forever and never acts. Make the single swap this week, then perfect the edges over the year that follows.
Frequently asked questions
Doesn’t screening hurt my returns?
Less than people fear. Screened indexes like the S&P 500 Catholic Values Index have trailed the broad market by under a percentage point annually over the past decade, and in low-fee form the real-world gap shrinks further. Screening also dodges some blow-ups, which can improve risk-adjusted returns even when raw returns lag slightly.
How strict should my screens be?
That’s a conscience question, not a math one. Decide which categories are non-negotiable (most believers agree on abortion, pornography, and predatory gambling) and which are gray zones where you’ll extend grace. Then pick funds whose published revenue thresholds match your convictions. There’s no single correct strictness—only honesty about where you’ve drawn your own lines.
Can I trust a fund that calls itself “Christian” or “biblically responsible”?
Verify, don’t assume. Read the fund’s actual screening methodology and look at its real holdings rather than its marketing. Standards vary widely between providers, and a label is not a guarantee. The good news is that the major faith-based fund families publish their criteria openly, so a few minutes of reading tells you whether their lines match yours.
Is screening the same as ESG investing?
No, though they share tools. ESG investing optimizes for environmental, social, and governance metrics defined by secular rating agencies. Christian screening starts from biblical convictions—the sanctity of life, sexual integrity, justice for the poor—which overlap with ESG in places and clash with it in others. A high ESG score never guarantees a company passes a biblical screen.
