In 1971, the Episcopal Church helped ignite the modern movement for shareholder activism. Holding just 0.004 percent of General Motors stock, the denomination filed a resolution calling on the company to cease operations in apartheid South Africa. It was supported by Dr. Leon Sullivan, GM’s first Black board member and a Philadelphia pastor. The resolution drew 1.29 percent of the vote and lost. But the controversy pushed GM to change its policies, and the denominations behind the campaign went on to found the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility that same year. The episode also led to the Sullivan Principles, a code of conduct unveiled in 1977 that reshaped corporate America’s posture toward the regime.
Christianity has a great deal to say about money. By one widely cited index, the Bible contains roughly 2,350 verses touching on money and possessions. Some are cautionary, such as 1 Timothy 6:10 and its warning that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Others are instructive. Generosity is among the most persistent themes; Jesus tells his followers in Luke 6:38 to give, and it will be given to them. The Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25 encourages the faithful to expand the resources entrusted to them rather than bury them. Ecclesiastes 11:2 counsels diversification.
Other traditions reach similar conclusions. Ancient Jewish law governed lending, gleaning, and the ethical limits of gain. Shariah-compliant investing, grounded in the Quran, has operated in modern fund form since the 1960s. Christians have also echoed the Bible’s thoughts in more modern times. John Wesley urged Methodists in 1744 to gain all they could, but never by selling what harms a neighbor’s health, with distillers particularly in mind. Quakers and Methodists alike opposed the slave trade. Aligning capital with faith has a long history and a strong scriptural basis.
Yet since 1971, Christian investors have often fallen behind their mainstream peers in living this out through their portfolios. Even as ESG grew to encompass a quarter to a third of the roughly $120 trillion in managed assets globally, faith-driven investing has remained small. Brightlight Research counted about 155 Christian faith-based funds holding roughly $100 billion in mid-2024, and the total market at $130 billion or more — against Christian individuals and institutions influencing trillions on behalf of some 2.4 billion believers. The gap is less one of conviction than of attention. In a 2024 survey for Praxis Mutual Funds, 48 percent of investors said they were interested in faith-based investing, while only 21 percent were familiar with the funds available.
Where assets are aligned, they often rely solely on negative screening, avoiding gambling, alcohol, or adult entertainment. Screening has its place. But we have largely not sustained the lesson of the Episcopal Church’s more active engagement: that investors can advance a positive vision through the companies they own, not merely register objections through the ones they refuse to.
For fifteen years I have written on human flourishing, much of it for Harvard Business Review, including a new book, Good Money: Six Steps to Building a Financial Life with Purpose, which explores how anyone, regardless of faith, can align financial resources in a way that enables rather than impedes the good life. By day I co-lead Sovereign’s Capital, a Christian faith-driven investment firm.
In both Good Money and our work at Sovereign’s, I have anchored on mainstream, research-backed frameworks of flourishing. Perhaps the most powerful comes from the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, led by Tyler VanderWeele, in collaboration with Baylor University, Gallup, and the Center for Open Science. Its empirical backbone, the Global Flourishing Study, follows roughly 200,000 participants across 22 countries over five annual waves and has produced more than 90 peer-reviewed publications. It identifies six dimensions:
• Happiness and life satisfaction
• Mental and physical health
• Meaning and purpose
• Character and virtue
• Close social relationships
• Financial and material stability
These domains are reached through a few key pathways — family, work, education, and religious community — at least two of which are shaped directly by the companies and real estate investors own. One of the study’s most striking early findings is that wealth and flourishing diverge. Richer countries report higher life evaluation and financial security, but GDP per capita is negatively correlated with meaning and purpose, and middle-income countries often outscore the wealthy world on relationships and character. Which raises the question worth asking of any portfolio: how do we use an age of prosperity to build lives that are not only richer, but more purposeful?
Our investment portfolios are a key part of that, and an often-untapped source of influence. At Sovereign’s Capital, we believe “all investing is impact investing.” We believe capital is never idle. It is always building something. The only question is whether we’re aware and in charge of what we are building and how. The index funds in a retirement account carry voting rights that someone exercises. The venture and buyout firms inside an endowment sit on the boards of companies employing our neighbors. Even a donor-advised fund waiting to be granted out is invested while it waits.
So how do we use it well? I would argue for a renewed framework built around human flourishing, one that may resonate with faith-based and secular investors alike.
First, that approach involves attention to the impact our companies and real estate developments have on others, and whether they offer redemptive products and services that respect human dignity. This includes avoiding companies with a deleterious effect on those they touch, as Wesley urged. But most businesses are, or can be, redemptive. A fast-food restaurant can provide affordable, healthier options while treating customers and staff with dignity. An apartment community can connect residents to one another and to services like language or job training. Investors can help shape companies to lean into the good their work already does.
Second, we can focus on flourishing within those companies and communities. Companies that embrace a meaningful mission and set of values, and adhere to them genuinely, help employees find meaning and purpose in their work. Values authentically held reinforce character and virtue, and mentorship and leadership training build a culture in which people treat one another with dignity. This is not soft. Decades of organizational research find positive cultures among the most durable competitive differentiators available to a business.
Companies concerned for the mental, physical, and spiritual health of their people can introduce practices that reinforce it, from parental leave and adoption benefits to chaplaincy and care teams. Chaplaincy remains thinly researched in academia, but interviews with executives who have adopted it point consistently to effects on commitment, wellbeing, and retention that conventional benefits were not reaching.
Organizations focused on relationships can introduce mentorship groups or volunteer days when colleagues serve together. Those committed to financial stability can adopt fair wage policies and extend ownership more broadly. One practice we have found particularly impactful is the employee benevolence fund: someone facing a serious medical challenge or a death in the family can apply for a grant, funded by the company or fellow employees, to weather the shock. The need is larger than most employers assume. The Federal Reserve’s most recent Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking found that 37 percent of American adults could not cover a $400 emergency expense with cash or its equivalent.
None of this necessarily means sacrificing returns. Great cultures can make good investments, and apartment communities that respect residents may achieve higher occupancy and lower turnover. But it does mean applying to our investments the same attention we give the rest of our financial lives.
Individuals and foundations are often exceptionally thoughtful about grantmaking. Yet many distribute as little as 5 to 10 percent of assets annually while the other 90 to 95 percent sits invested without comparable scrutiny. An investment policy that extends a family’s or institution’s mission to its portfolio unlocks an enormous and largely untapped opportunity. We believe capital invested this way also grows the ranks of investment firms holding these values in tandem with investment excellence.
There is no single framework appropriate to every company or investment, and the perfect need not be the enemy of the good. Not every manager, family, or institution will hold exactly our values, nor should they. But investment firms like ours, and allocators from institutions to individuals, can build frameworks with human flourishing at their center, so that the world grows not only in prosperity but in purpose and meaning.
For a Christian investor, and for most investors of faith, this is a core command. If faith is relevant in our personal lives, our generosity, the way we treat others, and our houses of worship, it is equally relevant in how we steward our investments. In 1971, a denomination holding four thousandths of one percent of a company lost a vote and changed an industry anyway. Attending to that opens a realm of opportunity for believers to shape the world in ways that reflect Jesus’s great commandments, in Matthew 22, to love God and love our neighbors in all we do.
The foregoing article is Mr. Coleman’s opinion; not the opinion, nor an endorsement, of Sovereign’s Capital Management, LLC. This is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any fund. Any such offer will be made only pursuant to the applicable fund’s offering memorandum.
The third-party information appearing herein are the property of their respective owners and use by Sovereign’s Capital Management, LLC does not imply affiliation with, or endorsement by, such owners.
