Positive Screening in Christian Investing: Seeking Companies That Reflect Biblical Values

Most discussions of Christian investing focus on what to avoid—the companies excluded because of their involvement in gambling, pornography, abortion, or other activities contrary to biblical values. This negative screening approach is essential, but it’s only half the picture. Equally important—and often more demanding—is positive screening: the active identification of companies whose operations, relationships, and impact reflect values a Christian investor can affirm.

Positive screening asks not just “What doesn’t this company do?” but “What does this company do, and does it reflect the values God calls us to steward?” It’s the difference between a company that passes an ethics exam by avoiding the worst failures and a company that actively merits investment because it genuinely contributes to human flourishing.

What Is Positive Screening?

Positive screening (also called “best-in-class” or “positive tilting”) evaluates companies on criteria that reflect values alignment and selects investments that score favorably on those criteria. Rather than simply excluding companies engaged in prohibited activities, positive screening builds portfolios from companies that demonstrate positive characteristics: excellent treatment of employees, strong community relationships, honest and transparent governance, responsible environmental stewardship, and products or services that genuinely benefit people.

Positive screening can stand alone or work alongside negative screening. Most sophisticated Christian fund managers use both: negative screening identifies the universe of companies eligible for investment (excluding those in prohibited industries), while positive screening selects the best companies within that eligible universe and weights them based on their values performance.

The philosophy behind positive screening reflects a deeper stewardship conviction: Christians aren’t merely called to avoid evil; they’re called to pursue good. Choosing not to own pornographers is necessary but insufficient. The capital you deploy still has to go somewhere. Where it goes reflects your values as powerfully as where it doesn’t go.

The Biblical Foundation for Positive Screening

Positive screening finds its deepest roots in the biblical understanding of work and business as legitimate vehicles for human flourishing and the glory of God.

The Creation Mandate in Genesis 1:28 calls humanity to “fill the earth and subdue it”—to order and develop the world in ways that reflect God’s purposes and benefit human life. Business, at its best, is exactly this: organizing human effort and resources to create value that improves people’s lives. A company that develops life-saving medicines, produces food efficiently, builds communication infrastructure, or provides financial services that help families thrive is participating in the creation mandate.

Colossians 3:23 instructs: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.” This applies to the doctor developing treatments, the engineer designing better products, and the business leader building an organization that creates employment and value. Companies where this spirit of excellent, purposeful work is genuinely present deserve recognition from Christian investors.

The Hebrew concept of shalom—the comprehensive flourishing and right-ordering of all creation—provides another theological anchor for positive screening. Companies that contribute to shalom: that treat workers with dignity, that deal honestly with customers, that strengthen communities, that exercise responsible dominion over natural resources—these are companies worth owning from a Christian stewardship perspective.

Key Positive Screening Criteria

What specific characteristics do positive screens seek? The major categories align closely with biblical values:

Treatment of Employees

Perhaps the most important positive criterion. Scripture consistently calls for just treatment of workers: fair wages (Leviticus 19:13; Deuteronomy 24:15), safe conditions, respect for worker dignity, and honesty in employment relationships. In modern corporate contexts, positive screening for employee treatment looks for:

• Living wages that genuinely enable workers to support themselves and their families
• Safe and healthy working conditions with strong safety records and transparent reporting
• Opportunities for worker development and advancement
• Genuine inclusion and fair treatment regardless of background
• Ethical treatment of contract workers and supply chain employees, not just direct employees
• Benefit programs that reflect genuine concern for worker wellbeing

Companies that treat workers well tend to outperform over time—lower turnover, higher productivity, stronger innovation—suggesting that the moral case and financial case for this criterion align.

Honesty and Transparency

Proverbs 11:1 declares that “dishonest scales are an abomination to the Lord.” The New Testament consistently emphasizes honesty in all dealings—”let your yes be yes and your no be no” (Matthew 5:37). For companies, this translates to:

• Transparent financial reporting that gives shareholders accurate pictures of business performance
• Honest marketing that doesn’t mislead or manipulate customers
• Fair dealing with suppliers, partners, and counterparties
• Consistent disclosure of risks, problems, and conflicts of interest
• Governance structures that enable accountability and prevent management self-dealing

Companies with strong governance records—independent boards, clean audit histories, conservative accounting—reflect the integrity that Christian investors should seek. Conversely, companies with histories of financial fraud, regulatory deception, or misleading customer communication are poor candidates for investment regardless of their performance on other criteria.

Community Impact

Christians are called to love their neighbors—which, as the Parable of the Good Samaritan illustrates, extends to anyone in need, particularly the vulnerable. For businesses, community impact criteria examine:

• Whether the company’s products and services genuinely benefit customers and communities
• Investment in the communities where the company operates
• Charitable giving and community development activities
• Whether the company’s existence makes the communities it touches better or worse
• Treatment of customers: are products safe? Are services fairly priced? Are vulnerable customers protected or exploited?

A payday lending company that generates high returns by charging 400% APR to financially vulnerable borrowers might pass many negative screens (it’s not in the gambling or pornography business) but fails a positive screening examination rooted in biblical values about justice, exploitation of the poor (Proverbs 22:22), and care for the vulnerable.

Environmental Stewardship

Creation care as a positive criterion—not just the avoidance of extreme environmental harm but the active pursuit of responsible stewardship of natural resources—reflects the biblical mandate in Genesis 2:15. Positive environmental criteria look for:

• Responsible management of energy use and carbon emissions
• Minimization of pollution and waste
• Responsible sourcing of raw materials
• Investment in cleaner production methods
• Genuine environmental accountability rather than greenwashing

This doesn’t require companies to adopt any particular political position on climate change, but it does mean examining whether companies are genuinely responsible stewards of the environmental resources they use and affect.

Products and Services That Benefit Humanity

At the most fundamental level, positive screening asks: Is this company contributing to human flourishing? Are its products and services making people’s lives genuinely better?

Eventide Asset Management built its entire investment philosophy around this question, calling it “Business for the Common Good.” Eventide’s research process explicitly asks: Who does this company serve? What problem does it solve? Does its success create genuine value for customers, employees, and society, or does it extract value while creating harm?

This criterion leads Eventide toward significant overweights in healthcare companies developing genuinely life-improving therapies, technology companies building infrastructure that enables human connection and productivity, and other businesses whose fundamental purpose is clearly beneficial.

How Fund Families Implement Positive Screening

Inspire Impact Score

Inspire Investing developed a proprietary Inspire Impact Score that evaluates companies on both positive and negative criteria. The positive components include environmental stewardship, labor practices, and community impact. Companies with the highest Impact Scores are selected for Inspire’s faith-based ETFs, which then weight these companies based on their scores. This creates a systematic, data-driven approach to positive screening within a passive index strategy.

Eventide’s Stakeholder Framework

Eventide’s positive screening goes furthest of any major Christian fund family in assessing whether companies create genuine value for all stakeholders—not just shareholders. Eventide analysts evaluate companies on six dimensions: employees, customers, communities, society, the environment, and the value of innovation. This framework reflects a comprehensive stewardship vision that sees investment as a participation in the company’s broader mission, not merely a financial transaction.

Praxis’s Community Impact Focus

Praxis Mutual Funds, influenced by Anabaptist values, places particular weight on community development impact in its positive criteria. Praxis invests a portion of its fixed income assets in community development financial institutions (CDFIs) and other vehicles that provide credit to underserved communities—a form of positive screening that directly deploys investment capital where it serves the vulnerable.

ESG Data in Service of Biblical Criteria

Many Christian fund managers use third-party ESG data sources—MSCI, Sustainalytics, Bloomberg ESG—selectively as inputs into positive screening, extracting the governance, labor, and environmental data that serves their biblical criteria while ignoring ESG score components that conflict with their values (such as components that reward companies for pro-abortion benefits or LGBT advocacy).

Positive Screening vs. ESG: A Critical Distinction

Positive screening in Christian investing looks superficially similar to ESG investing, but the underlying framework differs significantly.

Source of authority: ESG criteria are determined by secular rating agencies and index providers based on research about which factors correlate with financial performance or reduce various risks. Christian positive screening criteria are derived from Scripture and theological reflection about what it means to conduct business in a way that honors God and serves human flourishing.

Life issues: Mainstream ESG often scores companies positively for providing comprehensive reproductive health benefits including abortion. Christian positive screening frameworks either ignore this criterion or explicitly treat it negatively. This is one of the most important divergences.

Human dignity foundation: Christian positive screening is grounded in the theological conviction that every person is made in the image of God (imago Dei) and therefore deserves treatment that honors that dignity. This foundation produces screening criteria that are more absolute in their protection of human dignity and less utilitarian than typical ESG frameworks.

Long-term orientation: Biblical stewardship is inherently long-term—it concerns itself with the impact of present decisions on future generations, communities, and creation. This aligns well with the long-term orientation that genuine positive screening requires.

Challenges and Limitations of Positive Screening

Positive screening is harder to implement rigorously than negative screening, for several reasons:

Subjectivity: Whether a company genuinely benefits its employees or community involves judgment that different analysts will exercise differently. Negative screens are (relatively) binary: a company either manufactures tobacco or doesn’t. Positive screens involve assessment of degree, consistency, and authenticity that resist simple categorization.

Greenwashing and value-washing: Companies have strong incentives to present themselves in the best possible light to ESG and values-focused investors. Distinguishing genuine positive practices from sophisticated public relations is genuinely difficult. Eventide and other deep-research managers invest heavily in proprietary analysis to cut through marketing claims.

Incomplete data: Information about company practices—particularly for supply chain labor, environmental impact, and community relations—is often incomplete, inconsistently reported, and not audited. Positive screening based on self-reported data may not accurately reflect actual company practices.

Portfolio construction: Applying rigorous positive screens alongside negative screens reduces the investable universe significantly, which can create diversification challenges and tracking error relative to conventional benchmarks.

Why Positive Screening Matters for Christian Investors

Despite these challenges, positive screening reflects something important about the nature of Christian investing. The goal isn’t merely a clean conscience—avoiding the companies that embarrass you. The goal is active stewardship: deploying capital toward companies that are doing genuine good in the world, that treat people with dignity, that contribute to the kind of flourishing God calls humanity toward.

Colossians 1:16 declares that all things were created “by him and for him”—for Christ’s purposes and glory. That includes corporate enterprises. The question positive screening asks is: Is this company operating in a way that serves those purposes, that reflects those values, that could be said (in some real if incomplete sense) to be conducted for His glory?

Not every company will fully embody these values. The world is fallen, and every human institution is imperfect. But the direction matters. Companies that are genuinely trying to treat workers well, deal honestly, serve customers faithfully, and steward resources responsibly deserve different consideration from companies that are merely technically not in excluded industries.

Positive screening is how Christian investors express that conviction through their portfolios.