Faith-based investors should act like owners

Dustin DeVito

September 8, 2026

Earlier this summer, the rating service Morningstar released its second-ever report on faith-based investing, a market that has grown to roughly $169 billion in assets.

The report analyzes hundreds of faith-based funds, comparing their screening methodologies and how those screens affect portfolio construction and performance.

The report offers valuable insight into a complex and rapidly growing segment of the investment industry, but it overlooks several important aspects of the broader faith-based investing landscape.

For starters, the universe of investors making decisions based on values is much broader than the funds formally labeled “faith-based” because no investment strategy is truly values-neutral.

Every fund makes choices about which companies and industries to include, which to exclude, and how heavily to weight them. Even a broad-market index reflects a set of rules determining what qualifies for inclusion and how much representation each company receives within the portfolio. Every investor has some worldview or set of values that informs how he or she lives. Faith-based investing simply makes the connection between those values and investment decisions more explicit and, hopefully, more consistent. Investors who fall outside the Islamic, Catholic, and Christian categories examined by Morningstar may still make investment decisions based on deeply held beliefs about social responsibility, environmental concerns, national security, human rights, or other issues.

The full article can be found in WORLD Opinions

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