The case against ESG, for a Christian investor, comes down to three failures: it never reliably beat the market, it turned into a political football, and its scoring quietly bakes in moral positions you may not share. You can care deeply about stewardship and still walk away from the ESG label.
ESG—environmental, social, and governance investing—took off in the 2010s with a tidy promise: rate companies on those three buckets and you would do well while doing good. By 2025 that promise was unraveling in public. Investors pulled roughly $84 billion out of ESG funds over the year. The framework’s loudest champion reversed course. And a growing number of Christians noticed that the "S" was scoring companies on questions their faith answers differently.
I want to be fair to ESG before I take it apart, because the instinct behind it is one Scripture actually supports. Then I will lay out the financial, political, and theological case against it—and point you toward a sturdier way to invest your convictions. If you are new to the term itself, start with what ESG investing actually measures.
What ESG gets right
The core idea is not crazy. A market that ignores everything except next quarter’s earnings will happily fund things that wreck people and places. The Bible assumes the opposite. "The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it" (Psalm 24:1), which makes how a company treats land, air, and water a stewardship question rather than a footnote. Deuteronomy 24:14-15 tells an employer not to hold a poor worker’s wages overnight, so labor practices matter to God. Proverbs 11:1 calls a dishonest scale an abomination—honest disclosure and governance in older clothes.
So if ESG only meant "weigh a company’s treatment of creation, workers, and shareholders alongside its profits," I would have little to argue with. That overlap with biblical creation care is real. The trouble is what ESG became once it left the seminar room.
The financial case: it did not deliver
ESG was sold partly as a free lunch—higher returns because you were dodging hidden risks. The data never cooperated. ESG funds posted inconsistent results, with plenty trailing plain index funds, and ESG-rated companies have not systematically beaten their lower-rated peers. The thesis that managing ESG risk produces market-beating returns is still unproven at any real scale.
Then came the retreat, and it came from the people who built the business:
- BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager and ESG’s most visible cheerleader, cut its proxy-voting support for environmental and social shareholder proposals from more than 40% in 2021 to under 2% in 2025.
- Vanguard paid a $29.5 million SEC settlement tied to ESG-related disclosures it could not fully back up.
- $84 billion walked out of ESG funds in 2025 as investors stopped taking the performance story on faith.
When the firms that profited most from ESG start backing away this fast, that tells you something the brochures will not. There is also the rating mess: ESG scores from different agencies routinely disagree about the same company, and the scores often track how well a firm reports its practices rather than what it actually does. That rewards a glossy sustainability PDF—plain old greenwashing—over real change.
The fiduciary problem
When a pension manager tilts a teacher’s retirement toward ESG criteria unrelated to financial risk, regulators and courts have increasingly asked whether that breaches the duty to put beneficiaries’ money first. That is not a small technicality. It is the legal spine of institutional investing, and ESG kept leaning on it.
The political case: ESG became a battlefield
Capital that claims to be neutral makes a poor target—until it stops looking neutral. Since 2021, lawmakers have introduced 482 anti-ESG bills across 42 states, and several have become law. Texas and Florida restricted how state pension funds and financial institutions can weigh ESG factors. State treasurers managing public money for teachers, police officers, and firefighters have pulled assets from firms they judge to be using ESG against their states’ interests.
The corporate response is its own tell. Around 87% of companies still run ESG programs, but roughly a third now talk about them less—a habit the industry nicknamed "greenhushing." When companies keep doing the thing but quietly stop bragging about it, the thing has become a liability. You do not have to pick a political side to read that signal honestly.
The Christian case: the worldview underneath
Here is the part that gets the least attention and matters most for believers. ESG is not neutral, and its "S" often encodes answers that cut against Christian conviction.
Social scores have, in various frameworks, treated abortion access and contraception availability as positive "reproductive health" metrics. If you believe life begins at conception, a high score there is not virtue—it is the opposite. Gender and sexuality policies sometimes show up as scored criteria too, in ways that ask for endorsement of positions many Christians cannot give in good conscience. Believers do not all land in the same place on every one of these questions, and that is exactly the point: ESG tends to treat one set of answers as settled and leaves dissenting investors no room.
Underneath the metrics sits a quiet theology. ESG assumes human problems are mostly systemic—fixable with better corporate behavior—rather than moral and spiritual. Jesus located the trouble elsewhere: "No one can serve two masters… You cannot serve God and money" (Matthew 6:24). The harms ESG names are real, but they are symptoms. Christian stewardship can care about clean water, fair pay, and honest books without pretending that a better-managed corporation is what ultimately heals a person or a society.
This is not the same as "anti-ESG"
Do not hear me say values have no place in a portfolio. Rejecting ESG and rejecting values-based investing are two different moves, and treating them as one is a mistake. Biblically responsible investing (BRI) is the alternative, and it differs from ESG on purpose rather than by accident.
| Question | ESG | Biblically responsible investing |
|---|---|---|
| Worldview | Claims neutrality | States its convictions plainly |
| Main tool | Optimize multiple stakeholder scores | Avoid clear evils, reward good practice |
| Returns pitch | Promised outperformance | Accepts faithfulness may cost something |
| Room to disagree | One settled answer | Space for Christians to differ |
If you want the side-by-side in full, I walk through it in ESG versus BRI. The short version: BRI is honest about being a Christian framework, where ESG keeps insisting it is just math.
What to do instead
Know what you actually own. Not the ESG score, not the corporate statement—the real operations. That means reading past the rating agency. Negative screening gives you a repeatable way to filter out what you will not fund.
Set clear exclusions. For most Christians that starts with companies primarily engaged in abortion, pornography, or predatory practices—the kind of sin stocks that are hard to square with any reading of Scripture. Past those clear cases, leave room for honest disagreement.
Engage instead of only avoiding. Owning a share is owning a voice. Shareholder engagement—voting proxies, filing resolutions, pressing management—lets you push for change without outsourcing your judgment to a scoring firm.
Accept the tradeoffs. Faithful stewardship sometimes costs a little return, and no portfolio is spotless in a fallen economy. The goal is not a perfect ledger. It is wise management toward ends you can answer for. For the bigger map, see the full Christian guide to ESG investing and how it fits the broader biblically responsible investing approach.
Frequently asked questions
Is it a sin to hold an ESG fund?
Not automatically. Owning a broad ESG fund is not the same as endorsing every position baked into its scores. The real question is whether the fund pushes you to fund things you object to. If you cannot tell what is inside, that uncertainty is itself a reason to look for a holding you can actually explain.
Does dropping ESG mean accepting lower returns?
No. ESG never reliably delivered higher returns in the first place, so leaving it is not a financial sacrifice on its own. A disciplined, low-cost portfolio built on clear convictions can track the market closely. Any cost comes from specific exclusions you choose, not from refusing the ESG label.
What is the one-line difference between ESG and BRI?
ESG claims to be a neutral risk framework while quietly carrying a worldview; biblically responsible investing names its worldview out loud and lets you disagree with parts of it. One asks you to trust the score. The other asks you to own your judgment.
Where this leaves you
The case against ESG is not a case against caring. It is a case against a framework that promised neutral, market-beating virtue and delivered uncertain returns, political crossfire, and a smuggled-in theology. You can do better by being explicit about your convictions, accepting that stewardship costs something, and judging companies one at a time instead of trusting a label. That is older and slower than an ESG rating, and it is far more honest.