The short version: Inspire Insight is free to anyone, covers 72,124 tickers, and publishes its methodology in full — start there. eVALUEator is the advisor tool with published prices, from $600 a year. And ESG ratings are not stricter or looser versions of biblical screening; they measure something else entirely, which the last section of this article demonstrates with a single example.
You can find out what your index fund actually owns in about ninety seconds, for free. Most Christians have never looked. Here is what each tool does and what it costs.
Inspire Insight: free, and the most transparent
Inspire Insight scores companies from −100 to +100. The mechanics are published rather than proprietary, which is unusual in this space.
Every company starts at zero. Exclusionary screens fire first and assign negative points — Inspire’s own language is that companies triggering them “are always excluded from investment.” Companies that pass then score positively across five sustainability categories. Inspire only invests in companies scoring zero or higher.
The fourteen negative categories, in Inspire’s own words: Abortifacients, Abortion Activism, Abortion Services, Alcohol, Cannabis (Cultivation and Processing), Cannabis (Retail THC), Embryonic Stem Cells, Exploitation, Gambling, In Vitro Fertilization, LGBT Activism, Sexually Explicit, State Owned Enterprise, and Tobacco. Twenty-five positive categories cover things like business ethics, human rights, labor practices, and emissions.
Three definitions are worth reading closely, because they are more specific than the category names suggest:
- Exploitation is scored according to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
- State Owned Enterprise names its excluded countries explicitly — China, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Vietnam.
- LGBT Activism is defined as “companies earning an above-average rating according to an annual self-reported survey conducted by a national LGBT advocacy organization.” Inspire does not name the organization on that page; reporting has identified it as the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.
Positive-category data comes from FactSet; the negative screens are Inspire’s own research. One inconsistency to be aware of: Inspire’s own pages give three different category counts — 40 in the FAQ, 39 across the enumerated pages, and “50+” on the About page. Cite the list, not the number.
Some live scores, useful for calibration: eBay and Amazon both score −100. Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Sanofi all score −93. The highest-scoring US companies are FuelCell Energy at 81, Alexandria Real Estate at 80, and Arrow Electronics at 78.
If those numbers surprise you, that is the point of the tool. Retail access is genuinely free and always has been. Advisor pricing exists but is not published anywhere — the pricing page returns a 404.
eVALUEator: the one with published prices
eVALUEator Services runs two products: eVALUEator covering more than 11,000 mutual funds, funds of funds, variable annuities and ETFs using Morningstar data, and INVESTigator covering nearly 30,000 individual companies.
It applies 8 broad screens across 63 sub-screens: Abortion (6 sub-screens), Entertainment (10), Pornography (11), Lifestyle (15), Rights (5), Alcohol (7), Tobacco (3), and Gambling (6). The language is blunt and shows its age — the Rights category includes a “Persecution” screen for companies conducting business in countries with known persecution of Christians.
Pricing is published, which makes it the only serious tool in this category you can budget for without a sales call:
| Tier | Annual price | Included |
|---|---|---|
| Silver | $600 | 100 fund reports/month, 5 equity |
| Silver Plus | $800 | — |
| Gold | $1,600 | 200 fund and 200 equity reports |
| Portfolio Manager | from $5,000 | Unlimited |
There is a free consumer sibling at christianinvestingtool.com, offering five free reports on registration. If you want a fund-level screen and Inspire Insight does not cover your holding, try there.
A detail that explains a lot: eVALUEator’s office is in the same building as Timothy Plan’s headquarters in Maitland, Florida. The relationship is confirmed from both sides — Timothy Plan says it screens “through the filtering tools provided to us by eVALUEator,” and eVALUEator says Timothy Plan has used its research since 1994.
Timothy Plan’s filters
Timothy Plan deliberately says “filtering” rather than “screening,” and applies eight filters in two named groups.
Faith-based filters: Abortion (including fetal tissue research and abortifacients), Pornography, Entertainment (“anti-family entertainment which includes; violence, language, sex and drugs”), Lifestyle, and Rights (covering human oppression, trafficking, slave labor, terrorism, and Christian persecution).
Social filters: Gambling, Tobacco — which includes recreational marijuana — and Alcohol.
Their own distinction between the two groups is candid and unusual: the social filters cover areas “where a certain element of ‘Christian liberty’ could be expressed, but because of the overwhelming abuses” they screen anyway. That is a firm acknowledging its screens go beyond what Scripture requires, which is more honest than the category norm.
Their enforcement policy is absolute: “if any company we currently own is determined to be within a violation, we will liquidate immediately.”
The origin story matters for understanding why this exists. Art Ally was asked in 1992 to design a retirement plan for independent-church pastors and found nothing on the market that screened for abortion or pornography. He spent two years building a filter model and launched in 1994, at 52, with a million dollars raised. There were five filters initially; entertainment and lifestyle came later. Our Timothy Plan review covers the current fund lineup.
The legacy tool people still cite
The Biblically Responsible Investing Institute comes up constantly in older articles, and two corrections are needed.
First, the site is effectively frozen around 2013-14. Its homepage backtest chart is labeled through June 2014 and its only press item is a magazine article from June 2013. It returns a live page, but describe it as legacy rather than current.
Second, and more important: the BRI Institute has no certification program of any kind. If a firm claims to be “BRI Certified,” that credential does not exist. The real designation is the CKA® from Kingdom Advisors, an entirely separate organization — see our guide to finding a Christian financial advisor for what it actually requires.
The methodology is still worth reading for two features nobody else has. It includes a predatory lending screen covering payday loans, pawn shops, auto title lending, and rent-to-own — a category no other Christian screen touches. And it assigns explicit per-parameter “failure periods,” so a company’s involvement carries a defined duration rather than a permanent mark. It also gathers data through primary research — SEC filings, public tax records, direct contact with management — rather than buying a vendor feed.
Two more clarifications. Faith Driven Investor is not a screening tool — it publishes no screener, no screened-fund list, and no manager directory. It is a content and community ministry, and a good one. And the Christian Investment Forum wound down in May 2020, with its content absorbed into Faith Driven Investor, so links to its old “Chart of Funds” are dead.
What ESG ratings actually measure
This is where most Christian investors get confused, and the confusion is understandable because the marketing invites it.
Morningstar Sustainalytics rates ESG risk from 0 to 100, where higher is worse: Negligible below 10, Low to 20, Medium to 30, High to 40, Severe above 40. It covers over 16,000 companies. Critically, the score measures unmanaged risk — and Sustainalytics deliberately carves out what it calls unmanageable risk, using tobacco as its own example, since a tobacco company cannot eliminate the health effects of its product.
MSCI rates AAA down to CCC across more than 17,000 issuers, and its ratings are industry-relative. A weapons or tobacco manufacturer can earn AAA by managing its risks better than its own peers do.
Both free public lookup tools are now gone. Sustainalytics’ per-company pages redirect to a sales page, and MSCI retired its free ESG search entirely. Fund-level Sustainalytics data is still visible on Morningstar’s retail fund pages.
On the Catholic side, the current USCCB Socially Responsible Investment Guidelines date from November 2021, replacing the 2003 version after eighteen years. Its three strategies are, verbatim: “First, Avoid Doing Harm / Second, Actively Work for Change / And third, Promote the Common Good.” Its five policy categories are Protecting Human Life, Promoting Human Dignity, Enhancing the Common Good, Pursuing Economic Justice, and Saving Our Global Common Home. One hard threshold worth quoting: the guidelines exclude companies deriving more than 10% of revenue from contraceptives.
The comparison that settles the argument
Here is the cleanest proof that biblical screening and ESG rating are not two points on one scale.
A high score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index raises a company’s social profile in ESG terms. That same high score drives its Inspire Impact Score toward −100. The identical fact pattern moves one score up and the other down.
They are not measuring the same thing more or less strictly. One prices financial risk to the shareholder; the other declines participation in an activity regardless of whether it is profitable. Sustainalytics says so in its own definitions — its bands are written in enterprise-value terms, about material financial impacts. Biblical screening excludes on conscience whether or not the exclusion costs anything.
Once you see that, the “does ESG cover this for me?” question answers itself. It does not, and it was never designed to.
What screening is for
Paul’s instruction to the Ephesians is the sharpest verse in this area: “Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them” (Ephesians 5:11). Two commands, and the second is the harder one. Declining involvement is passive; bringing what is hidden into view takes work. That second command is a fair description of what a screening tool does to a portfolio nobody has examined.
Alongside it, “Test them all; hold on to what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Testing implies a standard and a method. For most of Christian history, an investor had no practical way to know what he owned inside a pooled fund. That constraint is gone, which changes what faithfulness requires — not because Scripture changed, but because the excuse of ignorance is no longer available.
Start with the free tool, look up the largest holding in your retirement account, and decide what to do with what you learn. Our guides to negative screening and positive screening cover the two approaches, and Christian investment screening is the fuller treatment.
Related reading
- How to Talk to Your Spouse About Christian Investing
- Christian Finance Conferences
- Christian Investing FAQ
- Best Christian Investment Funds, ETFs, and Platforms in 2026
- From Wesley to Modern ETFs
- Everything You Need
- Christian Investment Calculator
- Christian Investing Glossary
- Christian Investing Podcasts
- Christian Investing: The Complete Guide for 2026
