Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Most Christians invest just like the world and are often advised by the world to do so. They chase returns alone while unknowingly funding things like abortion and pornography and the erosion of the family. But scripture calls us to something sharper shrewd investing that builds generational wealth without aiding and abetting evil.
Today on Abraham's Wallet, cfp, that stands for Certified Financial Planner Mark Parrott joins me to unpack concepts like Biblically responsible investing as we pursue how to honor God with every dollar we steward stick around. Toward the end, we'll talk about the first practical step every Abrahamic father needs to take right now.
Welcome to Abraham's Wallet where we equip fathers and grandfathers to lead their families with biblical vision across Congratulations. I'm Steve Manual, joined today by Mark Parrott, who's in Utah. He is a certified financial planner. And today we're diving into one of the most overlooked commands for kingdom stewards. That is investing in a godly way, not just for the biggest monetary return, but for returns that don't contradict the very values we're trying to pass along to our children and grandchildren. The tension is that your retirement account and your kid's future and even your donor advised fund might be quietly partnering with companies that promote things like that. Ephesians 5:11 tells us to expose rather than to support.
Second Corinthians reminds us that our outer man is wasting away, but our inner man is being renewed day by day. And that includes how we handle money in a fallen world.
So that's why I'm thrilled that Mark's going to walk us through some ideas, some biblical concepts about how to be wise in the way that we invest so that we are not partnering with evil and we can avoid complicity and still pursue wise growth. We're going to look at real options, common pitfalls and how this fits into the bigger picture of multi generational legacy. This episode today was partly inspired by a text message that I received from my friend Andy.
And Andy wrote this Stephen, I want to make wise decisions and have increase, but one is the stock market and that type of investment the modern day equivalent of the quote bull known to gore from Exodus 21 and 2. It seems to me that Vanguard, State Street, Blackrock, et cetera seem to be operating with the intent of advancing the kingdom of darkness and I don't know how to invest without going through them as you might have done. My reply to Andy was what are you talking about with regards to the bull known to gore from Exodus 21? The principle in Exodus 21.
It's just one of the laws that God gave to Israel is that if you have a bull who is known to go crazy, I always think of a pit bull with this story.
This animal is known to go crazy and attack people.
The idea was, if it's known to do that and it does attack someone, not only does the animal get killed, but you get killed for having let your animal loose in a way that was violent to other people. But if you have a peaceful animal that's never done anything nuts before and it goes wild and kills someone, then the animal has to be killed, but you are alone or saved. So I just asked Andy, what do you mean by that reference? And he wrote back, the bull would have been an asset to its owner. It would have been a source of multiplication and investment in the future. That's all good. And we should invest and grow and create an inheritance for our children's children, et cetera. But bulls can be predictable and at times dangerous. If your asset is ends up goring someone and it was unpredictable, then you eliminate the asset. But as you, you as the owner aren't liable if it gores, and you knew it would do that because it had a past of violence, you get stoned as well. So I don't think the market as a whole is the Goring bull necessarily. But as we own stakes in these assets, shouldn't we take into account if they've been known to Gore? I'm putting that in quotes. Known to Gore, meaning we know that it does violence to people. We know that this asset that we partially own creates harm is harmful to people. So I don't think the market as a whole is the Goring bull necessarily. But as we own stakes in these assets, says Andy, we should take into account if they've been known to Gore. In other terms, has this company shown that they'll make decisions for their profit that harm or destroy people's lives? And I will add on to the end of that text, do they act in ways that are anti Christian? Are they actively anti Christian?
So that's the problem today, Mark. And as you and I talked about this, you said, well, I think the problem, the issue that people need to learn about is bigger than, well, is this a godly company or an anti God company?
And it goes into a bigger question, which is, is investing in general moral. Is, is it ethical for us to do so? And if it is, then how can we navigate the whole world of investment? So take us away, Mark.
[00:05:51] Speaker B: So I'll apologize at the front End. Because this is a. This is. Was a juicy one that you tossed me. And I was very excited. Good to get my thoughts out. I might be reading my notes a little more than usual today because I wanted to really think through this.
The first thing I'll say, Andy who? I don't know if I know Andy. You didn't reveal enough.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: I don't know. I don't think you do know Andy.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: But, man, this is the type of dude we want in our crew, is somebody who's gonna go to Exodus 21 and pull out a principle and go, this is what the word says. I'm not just going to the four verses in the New Testament that talk about money because they say the word money.
I'm thinking through biblical principles and chomping on the. The meat of the Old Testament, not just the new, and saying, what does this say about how I'm supposed to handle the 401k plan that I have at my company? Or whatever. That's right. I absolutely commend that. And I actually think he's pulled something that I hadn't thought about out of a passage that's very relevant. So I, I. When biblically responsible investing comes up, I see a lot of people go either to the.
To the two extremes. Either we have to absolutely filter and micromanage every single thing we put money in. All the way to the extreme of some people going, it's just not biblical to ever put money in the stock market, because how can you. How can you really know what those companies are up to?
And then on the other hand, maybe the side I've leaned towards in the past says, it's fine. God's not holding us responsible for what these big companies do. Let's just multiply money, and when it gets into our hands, we'll do kingdom things with the money. Don't worry about it. And I think that the things that we can be sure of to help us answer the question, is investing in markets biblical?
Is that investing itself is for sure biblical. And it's commanded.
You know, we talk about it all the time. The parable of the talents is one of our favorites.
If you bury what you've been entrusted with in the ground and just say, well, I'm just gonna hang on to it. The master comes back and kicks you out of the family.
That's what happens, you know, so investing is a good thing.
The real questions then become a heart posture. Am I trusting in this?
And B, kind of the question of the day for this episode is complicity. Am I knowingly profiting, or maybe unknowingly profiting from harm. And as with, I think most things, the standard here is not sinless purity, perfection, it's faithfulness.
Uh, because we're going to get into it. But the scripture, Paul teaches that total separation from a fallen economy is pretty much impossible. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna present one thing and I will say at the front end of this, if you are listening and you're going, I disagree with that thing he just said.
There's a huge amount of whatever you want to call it, meat sacrifice to idols type stuff going on here where you might have convictions that aren't exactly lined up with what mine are. That's okay. We're, we're primarily con. Commending to you faithfulness to the things the Lord has put on your heart within the bounds of what scripture commands, which is don't be complicit with evil to the degree that you can and earn a return on the assets that the Lord has given you. So that's kind of my preface to what I want to follow. You know, Andy's kind of three things. You mentioned two of them. There was another thread that went into depth on the bull on Wall street, the bull statue and the symbolism around our stock market. I might touch on that. But the goring ox. So is the modern day stock market the bull known to gore of Exodus 21. And I think he did a really good job of kind of refining this question, saying, I know maybe the market isn't the as a whole, the ox, but as owners, it seems like we should take a stake in whether a company is known to Gore and known to profit by harming people.
And I think that's true.
We'll get into to this. But one of my big headlines is ownership carries with it responsibility.
And that's true whether you own a pit bull in the modern era or a rental home or a share of Microsoft stock. The second thing Andy mentioned was the big, the big three. He kind of called out Vanguard, blackrock and State Street. These, these companies that have been known to advance an anti Christian agenda. And it's nearly impossible in many cases to run an investment account without going through them or touching these companies.
So what do you do?
Like where, where do we land on the general idea of the market? And if we're saying, well, sometimes you can use it, then how.
So we'll get there and if we have time, we'll talk about this bull image. The, the, the bull market is the symbol of, of Wall street success.
And if you search up bulls, they. They are sometimes used as sacrifices to our God, but they're also symbols of things like BAAL and pagan gods themselves.
Yes. So is there something to that? I didn't get the sense that Andy was floating off into wild conspiracy land with his. He was just faithfully looking at scripture and going, this makes me raise my eyebrows. So I think that's good.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: Does that sound like a fair plan as we walk through this, Steve?
[00:11:42] Speaker A: Yeah, that sounds very helpful.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: Okay. The goring ox. You already summarized it. Exodus 21, 28, 36. This is case law. It's kind of cool that we get to read, like, legal text that's in our scriptures.
But you have, again, two scenarios side by side. One is the unforeseen goring. If an ox kills someone but the owner didn't have a clue that this ox was going to go crazy, the owner's not held liable, it was an accident.
And the second case is the known goring, and you pretty much covered that. But prior knowledge plus negligence transfers guilt to the owner in this case.
And so this is. This is actually, I looked it up. This is one of the oldest negligence statutes in human history.
And it has been. There have been statutes like this in law really, since this time, where as Western society and some Eastern societies, there's always been the truth that if you know something's dangerous, you know, whether that's you run a restaurant and you spilled the frying oil on the floor and your employees slipped and broke their neck, well, guess what, you're about to be a lot poorer or, you know, like you said, even animals today, there's all sorts of things that can cause negligence. I think the moral hinge for what triggers negligence is knowledge.
So unpredictable harm leaves the owner innocent, whereas unknown warned about patterns that he fails to restrain makes him culpable for whatever his asset does.
That's not completely true in American law. Meaning if you've ever had a friend that's been the victim of a kind of spurious lawsuit, sometimes they come after you for negligence and you're going, there's no way I could have prevented this. But the biblical principle is that one, that. That knowledge is a key ingredient to guilt here. So like I said, I'd give Andy genuine credit. I think his reading on this is more careful than most sermons I've ever heard on this text.
And if we apply the principle, he's kind of teasing out to investing. When you own a stake in a company, you are legitimately taking a Measure of ownership. My kids love this. They're like, dad, do we own that company when we're driving around? No, that's a private company. What about that one? Yep, we own a little bit of that one. And so you're taking a real ownership stake. And if that company is known to Gore, you know, demonstrably willing to destroy lives for profit, then the knowledge of that creates some responsibility on your part. And this isn't just an old Jewish law thing. This is echoed in The New Testament. First Timothy 5, 22. Paul is speaking to Timothy and he says, do not share in the sins of others. Keep yourselves pure. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness. That's Ephesians 5, 11.
So this is the backbone of what has become a whole cottage industry called Biblically Responsible Investing.
And the goal of all the different ways people come at this is to screen out complicity in evil in biblical investing. So I think Andy's Exodus instinct and the modern Biblically responsible investing model are kind of at least hovering around the same idea. So any, any thoughts there before I move on?
[00:15:12] Speaker A: Well, I'm. Yeah, I'm really interested in where we're going to go because I see the application of these principles all over the place. For instance, you and I met with my cousin Bobby this, this summer. Bobby's big on biblical, Biblically Responsible Investing.
And he drew the distinction between making a purchase of an Apple iPhone and investing in Apple. And you're on two sides of the counter. One, you're just a customer going, well, there's phones I can buy. I'll buy your phone. It seems good. And now you're behind the counter and you're part of the decision making process and you take more ownership and all of the processes that are happening. Well, we know, for instance, that Nike famously has Chinese slave labor, you know, gluing its shoes together, for instance. I'm just thinking there's so many implications of this and one of them, which maybe you haven't considered, but to me go along with this conversation, is there's been a big kerfuffle in the last couple of years, like, what do you think about your church using Hillsong worship songs?
Is that a goring bull? Because there's all sorts of stuff that happens with Hillsong. Oh, that's not good. And, well, what about this product they've put out, which is a song? You could say the content of the song is all godly, etc. Anyways, just the whole stew of at what point do we become complicit in evil. And how clean do we have to keep our hands? I mean, I know we don't want to be people who go, well, if I have to go to this restaurant, I can't purchase food from the restaurant until I go into the back kitchen and make sure every person there is a believer of Jesus and every ingredient came from. You know, we don't want to go down that road, but there's gotta be a, there's gotta be a line drawn somewhere. So, I mean, anyways, I just say, I think the principles we're talking about today apply to all sorts of things.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: Totally agree. So I've got kind of three counterweights to hold intention with the stuff we're talking about. If, if we acknowledge, oh, maybe I never knew this before, but now I see it, I've got responsibility for the, the assets that I own and ultimately the ones that my family is going to profit from. Well, is that it? Do I, you know, do I just do my best without going crazy?
And I would say there's three things to keep in mind. One, degrees of ownership matter. So the ox owner, if we go back to Exodus 21, could physically pin up his animal. He was in charge of the quality of the fence. He had direct control.
A person that holds a fractional, and in our cases, Stephen, I mean, we're working on it, but right now we don't hold enough Apple stock for them to pick up our phone calls when we call the CEO.
[00:18:10] Speaker A: Right.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: But a person holding a fractional share of a company inside an index fund has almost no control and no visibility to that company.
Now, I'm not saying that's a hand wave you just so it doesn't matter, but the moral weight of ownership scales with your actual agency. And then going back to that Jewish legal principle and knowledge.
So a 0.0001% index holder is not the same as the ox owner who goes, I know that ox occasionally rams his horns through kids, but I just don't feel like getting off the couch today and fixing my fence. There's a, there's a different degree of, of responsibility there. Yeah, you may or may not like that, but that's at some level we could agree maybe that that's true. Point number two, I'm going to argue that scripture explicitly, it doesn't just say you can't win them all. It specifically forbids total withdrawal. So in First Corinthians 5, verse 9 and 10, Paul is saying, don't associate with the immoral. And then immediately he clarifies hold on.
I do not mean the immoral of the world because then you would have to leave the world.
And so total economic separation from a fallen system is not required because it's impossible.
I think back to the time we spent a weekend with Amish John and Pennsylvania, and I think, well, even people like that, they're still, they've got it all over them, the systems that participate in some of this stuff.
And Paul could have said, I want you to completely isolate yourselves and have separate economic systems. And he said exactly the opposite. I'm not talking about that, guys. I'm talking about keeping yourselves pure inside the church, not tolerating sin.
And so I think that that admonition is really important because otherwise we probably end up in a state of paralysis, like you said. Yeah, I find it a little bit hard to justify.
I'm going to own a share in Nike, but I'm not going to wear Nike shoes. Or the opposite. I'm going to wear Nike shoes because I'm just a customer, but I don't want to own a share.
A lot of times I've talked, and I'll talk about this when we get into the practicals, but I've said, you know, if you had to choose patronizing a business that had practices that don't align with the scriptures, but you give them money and you, you're a part of their revenues, or you can not patronize the business and have a vote, albeit one out of a thousand, you have a vote on their policies.
I'd say there's a real argument to say the best way for me to honor my king is for me to bring kingdom values and vote like a believer. And then I'm going to go try to fulfill the Great Commission. And if enough of my neighbors and my countrymen and other investors start having hearts turned towards the king, well, these companies are going to change because we're all owners and we're all voting like, like Jesus followers. Now that's fair. You might say, well, that's a pipe dream, Mark. But I'm just saying it's not totally clear to me that being a customer is okay, but being an owner isn't. And then the last thing I'll say is just again, going Back to Exodus 21, this is case law, not a stock market command. So the goring ox teaches a principle. Knowledge plus the power to prevent harm creates responsibility.
I think we have to apply it with wisdom. And if you read that, going back to what I said at the start, and you're like, I just feel deeply convicted that I cannot fill in the blank.
I would say proceed in confidence with faith. Like, I am not here to tell you act against your conscience.
I just think it's equally important that you not take that scripture, take a valid interpretation of it, and then turn it into a law that everyone has to follow, lest you condemn them. Because Paul was very clear that that's not what we're supposed to do where there's areas of honest disagreement and freedom inside the church.
Okay, that's kind of my. My sound bite for this. Portion knowledge being the trigger. An unforeseen harm from an asset doesn't necessarily condemn you. But when you start knowing and having some degree of control, now you've transitioned from being an innocent to maybe a negligent owner.
So next I want to talk about. Well, okay, let's say we do know of some places where we really. We really do see that there's some goring happening. How do we avoid owning those companies? How do I not profit from the pornography industry or whatever?
[00:23:10] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:23:11] Speaker B: So I've kind of already talked about the broader framework for biblical investing. It's parable of the talents, Matthew 25, parable of the Minas. Luke 19, like the master expects returns. And one of the things. One of the reasons that Abraham's wallet exists is because we've always said this is not just a spiritual, ethereal principle. It's actually got to do with money as well. And so we believe that, you know, Proverbs 13:22, A good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children.
That is hard to do, depending on where you live, without some form of investing. And for a lot of our listeners, you know, you're working hard at a job. You might be 25 years old and you got one little kid at home and you're hoping for a family. You're not going to go out and acquire lands right now. You know, you live in Chicago and you're just trying to get by and maybe put some aside for the future.
How do you do that? And so we've talked about diversification. You know, Ecclesiastes 11 says, divide your portion to seven or even to eight, for you do not know what disaster may happen.
There's all these principles that kind of tell us the Lord wants us investing.
And in our culture, one of the most accessible ways for us to do that is to invest in companies via the stock market.
Okay.
I think that if we can agree on kind of complicity as the constraints that we have. Complicity or partnering with Darkness, that's one of our constraints. We can screen for companies that are either explicitly or somehow violating our conscience and the boundaries that we think are important.
I think going back to First Corinthians 5, my biggest argument against just screening and screening for companies that might break the rules, so to speak, is that there's a limit to how much you can do it before every company violates the thing. Like the most Christian stock fund in the world is traded on the NASDAQ or the Dow, like the New York Stock Exchange or some of these exchanges, and those exchanges are throwing tons of dollars at the New York City Pride Parade or fill in the blank. I'm just saying there's almost no way to completely escape. So we gotta choose. Where are the limits? And this is where Romans 14 comes in. And there's, there's Christian freedom when it comes to matters of conscience. Paul says, whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.
But also don't bind another believer's conscience. Where scripture leaves freedom. So sincere followers of Jesus are going to land on different places on how tightly to screen. But how do we do it then? How do we screen? You know, maybe people don't know this if this is their first episode, but you and I, we manage people's money. That's our day job, is as a part of providing comprehensive financial advice. One of the things we do is somebody hands us their investment accounts and not all, but a huge portion of our clients, that this is really important to them. I want to invest in a way that aligns to the kingdom. And a little secret just between you and me, Steve, even the ones who don't want to invest that way, we still invest them in a way that aligns with the kingdom because we think it's good for them and the world. But more and more we are screening. So we might say, well, we want to use the S&P 500 as a key piece of this portfolio.
One of the tools that we have that even still very few investors at smaller scales have, just if they open their own account at Fidelity or Vanguard or wherever, is that instead of just buying an exchange traded fund that tracks the S&P 500, we can use software tools to create our own S&P 500 index out of individual stocks. And when we do that, I can say things like if the company is involved in pornography, don't include them. So we've now just X'd1 category out of the S&P 500. Yep. You know, and then we can, we can have real conversations about other Things like, well, how do you feel about owning a company that produces alcohol? Is that, is that okay? Is that offline, off limits for you? What about companies that are involved in abortion? And how does that even get determined? Like Planned Parenthood is not a publicly traded company, but what about a drug company that makes a drug that has this one purpose, but it's also used in this other way? Is that okay?
And those are our longer conversations to get to again. Whereas each believer's conscience say, well, I think this is where I feel led in terms of screening. And the tools have just exploded so that back in the olden days you had to go find some tiny little Christian, you know, mutual fund to do this for you. And now we can do it across all sorts of values. And when I get into my tools to set this up, you know, it wants to go, well, do you have a Muslim person? We can do Muslim values.
I don't ever mess with the preset value settings like click one button and you'll get Christian values. Because I'm, I don't know who built that, but I don't trust it. So we get into much more granular detail on how we're going to screen. But like I said, even screening is just pretty limited. And if we take like they donate to causes we don't like. Well, every single company out there is donating pretty much to both sides of the political aisle.
And there's political causes that you might say, I think, I hope you say both parties are kind of complicit with a lot of junk, but one is certainly complicit with a lot of more junk than the other is kind of something we would say. So that's a step that we can take. If you're doing this on your own and you don't want to go through a financial planner and set up direct indexing and all that, you can go find specific index funds that, that are biblically responsible funds.
That's an option. Those typically have higher fees by quite a lot. And I don't quite understand why, Steve, because like what I just told you to set up a sort of index that aligns with one of our investors values doesn't cost me any more time or money than setting one up. That's just the whole can of worms.
But this has been one of my big critiques of the biblically responsible investing world is that it tends to be dramatically more expensive or a kind of back when environmentally sensitive investing was a big thing, people, they got really into it and they sold tons of Mutual funds that were, you know, environmentally.
[00:30:20] Speaker A: I forget what it's called, ESG kind of stuff.
[00:30:22] Speaker B: I mean, yeah, ESG is the acronym Environmental and Social Governance. Those were kind of the three things they were screening for.
And over time, people went, wait a second. These funds cost a lot more, perform worse. And it seems like it's just some fund manager that wanted carte blanche to do stock picking and have an excuse to charge more for. And then a free get out of jail card if I underperformed and say, well, yes, the market in general did 10% and I did seven this year, but look how noble you are. Because ESG, there's a lot of that that happened in the biblically responsible investing world. I've seen a person that, man, I believe they love the Lord and were pitching me on their biblically responsible funds. And I said, billy, how come the expense ratio on your fund is 3%? That feels high. These companies are just the same types of companies that are available in a vanguard fund that charges.05%. What gives? And I haven't heard great answers to that.
So you have to be on the lookout. But there's ways to find screens. And increasingly the costs for those are you can find screens that are not super expensive, whether you're doing mutual funds or you're doing something kind of like I was describing, a direct indexing route. So that's option one, option two.
Well, not really option two, but component two to creating a biblically responsible investment portfolio. You know, Andy mentioned blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street. And man, I hear these three names all the time.
I would throw Fidelity in there, too. These big custodians.
So all of these companies actually run their own funds, meaning you can buy a Vanguard S&P 500 index fund. And practically speaking, it's exactly the same stuff that's in a BlackRock S&P 500 index fund. So what's the difference? Well, maybe there's a little bit of a difference in cost, but realistically, not much in terms of investment performance. However, the owner of the stock, which in this case is Vanguard and BlackRock, they own the individual companies that they use to make up their index fund.
Well, like we talked about a second ago, with ownership comes voting rights.
And especially in like, 2020 and 2021, when it felt like all of America was going crazy, these companies said, there seems to be a huge push towards diversity, equity and inclusion and ESG and lgbt, all of that jazz.
Let's try to attract more investors with the topic du jour, and let's Just push as hard as we can to vote our shares to push these companies that we own through these massive index funds to do things that are super DEI or LGBTQ or esg, et cetera. So they ended up getting a reputation as these companies are just super funding and pressing your average big companies. Apple, Google, kind of the, all of the even kind of your, your bread and butter companies, Procter and Gamble, whatever was a part of those big indexes was being pushed by owners to say, well, we own, in some cases, if we collaborate with the four or five biggest stockholders in these companies, we're getting darn near 50% ownership. And so we can make them do whatever we want because we have voting rights.
And that's a legitimate risk is that a lot of Christians objected that these unelected asset managers were steering corporate America towards a worldview that was legitimately hostile to biblical values. This was well documented, it's true.
But I will now say I think these big companies are really just flags in the wind and they're doing whatever that seems most popular at the moment. Because where things stand in 2026 really changes the tenor. BlackRock, for example, they had support for environmental and social shareholder proposals, was over 40% in 2021, and it's 2% in 2025. Meaning of all these companies, when somebody brings up an ESG proposal and puts it on a shareholder vote, BlackRock says yes 2% of the time. Whereas in 2021 they were saying yes 40% of the time.
Vanguard has now supported these proposals zero times at any company in the past two years and instead has rolled out an investor choice program where you can, instead of saying just Vanguard, you vote my shares however you want. They'll say, actually, you get to choose. If you own a Vanguard index fund and you're opposed to dei, esg, et cetera, you can say, I elect to be in the antiesg voting block and you can take your shares and vote against all of those proposals. But as a, as a. If you don't elect that, even still, Vanguard has voted against all of them and in the past two years.
And BlackRock also in 2025, withdrew from the net zero asset managers program, where they would just push all companies to basically choose the, you know, quote, environment over humans at, at every opportunity, carbon
[00:36:01] Speaker A: neutral and all that crap.
[00:36:03] Speaker B: Do I think these companies have found their faith in Christ? I do not.
But what I do think is, like I said, they're just blown by the wind of public opinion.
And public opinion has, praise God at the moment. Shifted against some of the more outrageous kind of things that were bubbling around in our economy in 2020 and 2021. So the intent to advance darkness framework that was pretty true maybe a few years ago is less so today.
And there's political, legal, all sorts of pressures that have pushed these firms to kind of back off their activism and hand some of the voting power in those shares back to investors that own the funds. So like I said, they might be better described as amoral giants that are chasing fees than coordinated Dark agenda. And I think that that distinction may be helpful in deciding if you can custody assets there or not.
[00:37:05] Speaker A: Okay, that's kind of encouraging.
[00:37:08] Speaker B: Are there.
[00:37:08] Speaker A: If you wanted to buy a mutual fund through Vanguard, do you get to pick? I want the mutual fund that is anti esg or is that. That's. That's further upstream as far as a company policy?
[00:37:26] Speaker B: Yeah. So it depends. There's.
If you just buy their regular, I don't know, IVV is the ticker symbol for, I think their S&P 500 fund.
That's the biggest. If you just buy that and you do nothing, they're gonna vote like they wanna vote as a company. But you can go in to your account and say, I elect anti ESG voting for my shares.
[00:37:50] Speaker A: I see.
[00:37:51] Speaker B: You can do that or you can choose a different fund. You know, he's not a Christ follower, but Vivek Ramaswamy, who. He's some sort of politician in Ohio now, right? Yeah. Did he win? Yeah. A senator or what?
[00:38:07] Speaker A: Okay, well, it looks like he's going to be the nominee for. For governor, and I think he'll probably.
[00:38:12] Speaker B: Okay. Governor.
He has a company that our. Our firm has used called Strive, and they have their own index funds. And like I said, not Christian, but decidedly conservative in the way they vote. And so you can, you can go with something like that or you can go all the way over to places like the Eventide funds again.
Eventide. I've heard they're amazing people. That is the group that I saw outrageous fees associated with Inspire Investing has low cost ETFs. The tickers are like BI, B L or B L, E S, Bible and Bless.
And they use not just negative screens like keep me away from alcohol, weed, porn and abortion, they actually use impact screens. So, like what companies are putting money into the things I like. And so you might, you might research those. Timothy Plan is one of the older players in the game. They run mutual funds and ETFs that do a lot of screening.
And I think that you might that would be kind of the far end of the spectrum on the funds.
And then custodian wise, you can go.
I mean, our firm changed custodians at one point because the custodian we were using for some of our client assets, I just, they kept sending me emails about, check out how awesome this is. We've given millions of dollars this year to all these things that hate you. And I finally said, okay, not doing it, we're out.
[00:39:47] Speaker A: Good for you, Mark.
[00:39:48] Speaker B: There are custodians that are more or less, I don't know of any, like biblical custodians because it's a massively expensive endeavor to stand up a custodian and try to compete with Schwab or somebody, Fidelity or Vanguard. But there are custodians that are less aggressive in kind of pushing darkness, I would say.
[00:40:11] Speaker A: I appreciate you kind of giving people an overview of like plans that they could go pursue if they're, if they want to do that.
I'm just to double click, if I may use that phrase, on the Timothy plan. I'm most familiar with them because as you know, I help to manage the funds at the cemetery, the Texas Family Cemetery. And we have just put, we have just bought into Timothy plan. And just to give people an idea that you said that they're high on their filters, which is true.
They're.
Their expense ratio hovers around 1% and they filter for pro life.
So there's no abortion support at all.
Pro stewardship that they call stewardship. If you're pro gambling or casinos or cruise lines, then you're not for stewardship. Pro purity. No pornography. Pro longevity. That's how they talk about tobacco.
Pro longevity. Pro sobriety. No alcohol. Pro liberty. And that is no oppression or Christian persecution. And they're fun. So anyways, I like giving people a kind of menu if they want to go find those things.
That's helpful. And I also want to send people before we're done.
We often come across clients who, they don't really have enough assets to justify hiring a professional financial planner, but they want to kind of do it themselves. And if they want to pursue biblical investing, are there platforms for them? I want to kind of give people options there as well.
[00:42:01] Speaker B: So anyways, the only other platforms I'd mentioned, Guidestone, they do a lot of 401k plans. I think they're okay, but they're all faith based mutual funds. And even their target date funds incorporate a lot of this stuff. There's a company called Praxis that has Mennonite Roots, but they do screening and impact investing. And the last one is called Crossmark or One Ascent. And that's like a values based family of funds that you can actually go in and look at their funds and build your own if you want to.
[00:42:37] Speaker A: But what did you think of the, of the organization that Cousin Bobby sent us toward financial issues?
[00:42:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's another one that, you know, based on what Cousin Bobby described, it sounds like it's very in line. I would say it's, it's a little bit more active than what I would ever recommend personally because it's, it's mostly going to end up being a stock picking game.
But it's the same heart and you know, based on your cousins reports, it's been very successful for him. So yeah, no, not knocking it. It's not totally aligned kind of with my investing framework. But there's plenty of people who are using it or even would say, you know, I, I do want to pick individual stocks. And, and that's a thread of biblically responsible investing where they would say you can't just index because we want to specify these are the companies we're putting our money behind. And if that's kind of where you land on this, that's a fine, that's a fine option too. It's. And what's that site called?
[00:43:42] Speaker A: Financialissues.org so their deal is that it's actually, I believe it's a 501C3. I think it's a ministry. And the brains kind of go through and put these filters on every single company and they give a grade for every single company. These are green light companies, these are yellow light companies, these are red companies. So if you're going to come onto our platform, you would put money on their platform just like you would at Betterment or at Schwab. And then you would pick, you would, you would fill out your portfolio with their green light companies.
So that's their idea. And I'll just say in thinking about that, it made me think of, you know, the way that Buffett has always said we just try to find good companies.
And once we found good companies, one of their famous examples was See's Candies. It was a tiny company. When they found it, they said we just like the company. So we weren't going to be in the sell and trade and buy and rebuy. We're just going to buy into the company and we're going to sit in it for a long, long time.
And I think that's the, I think that's the theory behind financialissues.org, which is we just want to find good companies that, that are in agreement with our worldview and then we just want to ride with them. So that's an option for people.
[00:45:09] Speaker B: Cool. I did a bunch of research, but all I would say, and this is kind of more relevant to the whole conversation we're having right now, and this is not a knock on Andy, I think we could have a very interesting conversation about the symbolism here. But, but if you listener were under the impression that maybe like Wall street was a God honoring place and that the symbols of American prosperity in the last, say, 40 years have mostly been stewardship and using wealth for the kingdom, I have bad news.
Wall street has not pointed wealth typically in the direction of heaven. Um, and so it's not surprising that there would be symbols. Whether you think the bull on Wall street has actual spiritual implications or not, the world doesn't have a stinking clue what to do with wealth. And when they get it in their hands, by and large, they make shipwreck of their lives. And so we're not surprised that Satan is super interested in increasing worldly wealth because Jesus says it's one of the number one things that capture our hearts and can make us stop worshiping him. And so, gosh, that's, that's why we have a whole podcast that keeps just coming back to this topic of wise handling of money, because it is a. Maybe the biggest, gnarliest tooth that the lion that's roaring and prowling around to kill you has is how can I get my hooks into you with money? And yeah, maybe that bull is just one of the many indicators that, hey, this is not your place, Jesus follower. These are not your people. But let's still navigate it, like Paul says, with wisdom and not try to just stick our heads in the sand. And that's right.
[00:47:06] Speaker A: That point alone is worth. Is worth elaborating on because Andy asked the question, do you think that that giant, like brass bull that sits on Wall street in New York City, do you think that might have some godless or even demonic references? I was like, yes, next question.
Move on for sure.
So we would say about that the same thing that we would say about being in the world as Paul's talking to us deal with culture, which is we live in a world that idolizes money and the United States of America, there is a demon on the prowl, which is wealth and worldly success.
We believe that there is a way to do things in a Godly way so that we could dart in and out of those systems wisely without getting ensnared by the enemy. And. And we don't think it's an either or proposition. We think that we could participate to some extent in world systems. Again, think of Paul saying, otherwise you'd have to leave the world without giving our lives to these evil spirits. So is the bull on Wall street evil? Yep.
Is money a danger? Yep. Do people's lives get shipwrecked because they love money? Yes.
The reason we exist is try to help people be clever and to dart those. Dart around those pitfalls.
[00:48:46] Speaker B: Okay, so I'm going to bring us home here just to wrap it all up. I guess the question in my mind is, okay, Andy, are you just overthinking this?
And I would say two things. One, no. Your instinct here is right and it's worth honoring. So ownership, remember, ownership carries responsibility and avoiding known complicity in evil is evidence of real discipleship. Most Christians never even think this hard about it. So good on you.
But that no could become a yes if this thinking and overthinking sometimes becomes paralysis.
So just to remind you, Scripture says that a total separation from a fallen economy isn't possible and never asks for it. The goal is faithful stewardship, not a flawless, squeaky clean supply chain with your money. So don't let the perfect become the enemy of the faithful.
Money can become a tool that will build inheritance for your children's children, or it can become the golden calf that your whole family gathers around and worships and. And it kills you all.
So which one it is gets decided in your heart, not on Wall Street.
Do what you can. Reasonably, I would say I am a big fan of screening the egregious and use leverage where you have it. If you're an employer and you're starting a 401k, go look at those companies we mentioned or give us a call and we can help you set up a 401k plan that does some of these things.
But regardless of where you find yourself, keep your heart free from the love of money and hold, hold the unavoidable entanglement with open hands before a God who owns it all. Anyways.
So just to wrap us up, God is not asking you to find a sinless place to put your money. There isn't one on this side of heaven. And he's asking you to be a faithful steward with what's in front of you. So keep your heart from bowing to the bull and trust him with the rest. And and invest like the owner is returning because he is.
[00:51:01] Speaker A: That's so good, fellas.
Just to reiterate, every dollar is a vote for the kind of world that we're building for our families and the next generation.
One Action Step if you haven't thought of doing something like this as an Abrahamic family leader, why don't you pull up your largest investment account, whether it's your IRA, maybe even a 401k at work or brokerage account, and run it through.
You could run through a free BRI screener and you could identify what's where at. Where does where does my money stand right now? What is my money doing?
I'm going to refer to one called inspireinsight.com you can type in ticker symbols and it'll instantly show you what they have come up with called an Inspire impact score. From negative 100 to positive 100. It'll break down any concerns like involvement in abortion, pornography, et cetera. So that's a, to me, that's a starting place. If you never thought in these terms, how could I go from just wanting to make a pile of money to being a little bit more sensitive about what my investments are doing? So if this episode strengthened your vision, would you do one of three things? Would you leave us a review on your favorite platform, share it with another father that you you respect who might value this kind of information and join the conversation inside the Abraham's Wallet Insiders community over at ur, which is our discussion platform.
Until next time, we encourage you to keep leading courageously and stewarding faithfully and building something that lasts. Bless you. See you next week.
