What biblically responsible investing actually means in practice.
When I bring up biblically responsible investing with a new client, the response is almost never strong opposition. It's usually something closer to a shrug. They've heard the argument that faith-based portfolios don't necessarily produce worse returns. They also know that some of the companies they interact with every single day won't be in that portfolio. And they can't quite figure out why they should care enough to make the trade.
That ambivalence is understandable. And it usually dissolves the moment we get specific — because the specific cases are far more interesting, and far more consequential, than the abstract argument.
Let me show you what I mean by starting with the company everyone asks about first.
The Apple conversation — and why it matters
Apple is one of the most commonly excluded holdings in faith-based portfolios. The reason is that the App Store distributes adult content, and Apple has historically taken a permissive approach to what third-party developers can offer on its platform. For many screened portfolios, that's the end of the analysis. Apple is out.
I don't think that's the right conclusion for every client, and here's why.
Apple's permissiveness isn't a sign that the company is hostile to human dignity. It's largely the result of a deliberate policy against censorship and platform control — a policy that, at a higher level, is genuinely good for the free exchange of ideas. That same openness is why Apple devices are now one of the primary ways hundreds of millions of people access the Bible, Catholic devotionals, prayer apps, and religious community. The Church has more reach through Apple's platform than it has had through almost any medium in history.
That context changes the conversation. For a client who is troubled by the content distribution issue but values the platform's broader role, the answer isn't necessarily to exclude Apple — it might be to engage Apple as a shareholder. To show up at meetings. To vote proxies. To be one of the voices pushing the company toward policies that better protect vulnerable users, especially children, while preserving the openness that makes the platform valuable.
"You have more influence over a company as a shareholder than you do as someone who simply refuses to own it."
This is a conversation that most advisors running faith-based mutual funds cannot have with their clients, because those funds don't offer individual stock customization. You're in or you're out based on a screening committee's blanket decision. At Integritas, we can toggle individual holdings for individual clients based on their informed discernment. That's a different kind of financial advice — and it produces genuinely different portfolios for genuinely different people.
Not every client wants Apple included. Some hear the analysis and still decide they don't want to own it. That's a completely legitimate conclusion. The point isn't that Apple must be included. The point is that the decision deserves more than a checkbox.
The Philip Morris moment
I was going through a screening report with a client — walking them through which holdings were being flagged and why — when they stopped on a ticker symbol they didn't recognize. They asked what it was.
It was Philip Morris International. And the reason it was being excluded wasn't just that the company manufactures tobacco, which alone isn't disqualifying in every framework. It was a specific practice: the company had been documented distributing free cigarettes to children and young adults in developing markets — particularly in India — as a deliberate strategy to build addiction in populations that couldn't afford to sustain a habit otherwise. The business model, at least in this dimension, was built on reducing human beings to future customers rather than acknowledging that addiction destroys lives.
My client didn't need any more explanation. The exclusion was obvious to them the moment they understood what the company was actually doing with its marketing budget. That's the moment values-aligned investing stops being abstract and starts being real.
There are many versions of this story. Companies with seemingly strong financials — wide profit margins, consistent revenue, recognizable brands — that produce those numbers by exploiting forced labor somewhere in their supply chain. Companies whose financial statements look excellent precisely because their cost of goods is so low, and their cost is so low because the people making those goods have no power to demand anything different.
When clients push back on excluding these companies, I ask a simple question: what is all of this return worth if we funded it by denying the dignity of people made in the same image as you and your family? The people at the end of that supply chain aren't abstractions. They are, from a Catholic perspective, children of God. From any humane perspective, they are people whose suffering we are choosing to profit from or not.
Most clients, when the picture is that clear, don't want any part of it.
Three ways to act as a shareholder
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has published substantive guidance on how Catholics should approach investing, and it organizes the shareholder's role into three distinct postures. Understanding these transforms the way you think about what your portfolio is actually doing.
01
AVOID
Decline to own companies actively causing harm — exploitation, addiction, human trafficking, forced labor. Remove your capital and your implicit endorsement.
02
EMBRACE
Actively seek companies treating employees with dignity, making products that help people flourish, and building businesses that serve their communities rather than extract from them.
03
ENGAGE
Use shareholder standing to influence behavior through proxy voting, meeting participation, and direct advocacy — especially for companies open to listening.
What makes the USCCB framework genuinely sophisticated — more sophisticated, frankly, than many people expect from a religious institution — is its insistence on looking at the actual underlying economic relationships, not just the surface-level categorization. The Church's economists think carefully about revenue attribution: whether a harmful practice represents the true nature of a company's business or an ancillary revenue stream. Whether a parent company's subsidiary is the offending party or the whole enterprise. Whether the intent behind a business practice is predatory or merely coincident with an outcome that causes harm.
It is not always black and white at first. But it is also not relativistic gray. The Church holds its lines on human dignity, on the sanctity of life, on the exploitation of the vulnerable. What the framework does is provide a principled method for gathering enough information to make a real discernment — rather than either blanket exclusion or willful ignorance.
Does it actually perform worse?
This is the question most people ask before any other, and the honest answer is: it depends on the market cycle, and right now the answer is no — it's actually performing better.
Faith-aligned portfolios tend to underweight the largest technology companies and overweight small and mid-cap names that screens happen to favor. In different market environments, that tilt goes in different directions. In the era of the Magnificent Seven dominating every index return, a portfolio underweight those names paid a real opportunity cost. But markets rotate. Right now we're in a period where the mega-cap names are actually dragging on traditional portfolios while lesser-known companies are producing the returns. My faith-aligned model portfolio is outperforming the traditional portfolio without a faith mandate as of this writing.
The more durable answer is this: when a company excluded by a values screen misses the portfolio during a strong run, that absence doesn't necessarily leave a gaping hole. There are other companies — companies doing genuinely good things, treating their people well, building sustainable businesses — that fill the allocation. We find them. The portfolio isn't depleted by the absence of a screened holding; it's redirected toward something better.
The evidence on faith-based and ESG-screened investing has generally shown competitive returns over full market cycles, with the added benefit that you know what you own and why.
If you're not religious — why should you care?
The ESG movement of the last decade happened for a reason: people — regardless of their faith — demonstrated clearly that they care about what their investments are funding. That is a rational human response. The desire to be a good person, to not profit from exploitation, to support businesses that reflect the kind of world you want to live in — these are not exclusively religious instincts. They are simply human ones.
What the Catholic framework adds is a fixed standard of discernment rather than leaving the question entirely to each individual's moral intuition. Moral relativism — the idea that what's harmful is whatever each person decides is harmful — makes for very inconsistent portfolio construction. The Church's position is that there are things that are genuinely harmful to human beings regardless of who is doing them or in what context. Forced labor is wrong. Addiction marketed to children is wrong. Profit extracted from the degradation of human dignity is wrong.
"We're not asking you to share our faith. We're asking whether you want your capital funding things that you'd find indefensible if you knew about them."
Most people, when the question is put that plainly, find they care more than they initially thought.
You don't have to be Catholic to prefer owning companies that treat their workers with dignity, that make products that genuinely help people, and that aren't quietly destroying lives somewhere down their supply chain. You just have to be paying attention.
We can help with that part.
— Daniel Heidel, CFP® · CKA® · EA · Charleston, SC
INTEGRITAS · CHARLESTON, SC
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Daniel Heidel, CFP®, CKA®, EA is the founder of Integritas Wealth Strategies, LLC, a fee-only registered investment adviser in Charleston, SC. References to USCCB guidelines reflect the author's interpretation and are for informational purposes only. Past performance of any portfolio strategy does not guarantee future results. All investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. Nothing in this essay constitutes investment advice for any specific individual situation. The Certified Kingdom Advisor® (CKA®) designation is issued by Kingdom Advisors, Inc.