Beyond the Screen: Why Faith-Based Investing Needs a New Definition

Written by:

Heather Hook

Date:

08 May 2026

KeyCrew Studio

Share

Share via Facebook

Share via Linkedin

Share via X

Copy to clipboard

For decades, the phrase “faith-based investing” has functioned mostly as a filter. Avoid tobacco. Avoid adult entertainment. Avoid alcohol. Put a Christian label on a mutual fund that holds the same 200 large-cap companies as every other ESG product, and call it values-aligned. That, according to Steven Libman, founder of Investing with Purpose, is the industry’s defining failure.

“The definition that the industry has been operating under for the last 30 years is a lazy one,” says Libman, who after 15 years in the industry, has recently built the multifamily real estate investment platform explicitly structured around faith-driven principles. “Screening is the floor. Building intentionally would be the ceiling.”

The distinction matters more than it might appear. In an investment landscape where capital allocation increasingly reflects values, the gap between genuine alignment and surface-level compliance is widening. And investors who cannot tell the difference are, Libman argues, outsourcing their conscience to people who may not share their priorities.

Every Dollar Is a Vote

The core premise behind intentional faith-based investing is straightforward: capital goes somewhere, and where it goes signals something. Whether you are invested in a multifamily property, a bond fund, or a private equity vehicle, those dollars are funding something. The question Libman puts to prospective investors is simple but disorienting for many: if your grandchildren inherited your portfolio tomorrow, what would they know about what you believed in?

“A question I asked at an event recently was, if you turned your portfolio over to your pastor, is there anything in there you might feel embarrassed about?” he says. “It is not to convict anyone. It is to get people thinking in a different way, because we have not been taught to think this way.”

The conventional wisdom in personal finance is to separate investment returns from values, then deploy the returns philanthropically. Libman’s counterargument is that this creates an unnecessary bifurcation. Why fund something misaligned with your values in order to generate returns you then donate to causes that reflect them? The premise, he says, is inherited from a financial services industry built on product sales, not values architecture.

The ESG Warning

The cautionary tale here is the ESG sector. Environmental, social, and governance funds marketed themselves through the 2010s on the promise of impact investing. They attracted significant capital and generated considerable coverage. They also, in aggregate, delivered weak returns.

“ESG put a dagger in the heart of values-aligned investing,” says Libman. “They were saying, you are going to get lower returns, but we will make an impact. In fact, they were not making an impact, and they were not making a return either.”

A recent study tracking ESG fund performance put total average returns well behind conventional benchmarks. For Libman, the lesson is not that values and returns are incompatible. It is that funds using impact as a marketing hook rather than an operational framework tend to deliver on neither.

Operators who have built genuine values alignment into their structure – not as a label but as an operating philosophy – have found that the premise of the question is simply wrong. Strong performance and principled investing are not in conflict. The data, Libman argues, is increasingly making that case.

Ministry as a Moat, Not a Margin Cost

The specific mechanism through which Investing with Purpose generates community outcomes is an on-site asset ministry program embedded in the multifamily properties the firm operates. Free apartments are provided to on-site ministry staff, who run tenant engagement programming – movie nights, farmers markets, food truck events, and more frequent personal touchpoints including hospital visits for residents in need.

The business logic is not incidental. Tenants who have six or seven friends within the same complex are 45 percent less likely to move out, according to Libman. Lower turnover means lower vacancy, lower unit-refresh costs, and more stable cash flow. The ministry program functions as a retention and community-building mechanism with compounding economic effects.

“Ministry is the moat around the investment,” he says. “When people say impact is going to decrease returns, we think the opposite is true. Caring is a durable business advantage, not a disadvantage.”

The faith dimension of the work is present but not imposed. Tenant engagement is service-first. Residents are not required to participate in religious programming or share the values of the operators. The mission is expressed through behavior rather than doctrine.

What Genuine Transparency Looks Like

One practical measure of whether a faith-based investment firm is operating with real alignment or surface-level branding is the quality and nature of its reporting. Libman’s firm sends investors not only the standard financial KPIs – net operating income, expense ratios, occupancy rates – but also a ministry impact report tracking how many residents were connected with community programming, how many received pastoral support, and how many on-site acts of care and service were recorded in a given month.

Investors are also invited on-site quarterly for serve days, a tangible mechanism for direct engagement with both the asset and the community it houses.

“Unlike your Wall Street investments, you can drive by it, touch it, feel it, actually see the impact that we are making, and actually be a part of that impact as well,” says Libman.

The transparency standard he describes stands in contrast to the opacity that characterizes much of the ESG sector, where fund methodologies are often difficult to evaluate and impact claims difficult to verify.

The Broader Investment Thesis

For investors who have not considered aligning their portfolios with their values, Libman’s framing is deliberately non-threatening. The entry point is often a straightforward appreciation of real estate as an asset class. Most people understand rental property. Most people understand that housing is a fundamental need. From there, the question becomes not whether to invest in real estate, but what kind of operator and structure best reflects your principles.

The faith-based label, in this framing, is not a constraint on returns. It is a signal about operational philosophy, community orientation, and the long-term nature of the relationships being built within the portfolio.

“We want to define it as, what are we building?” Libman says. “Every dollar that you invest is a vote for something. So when you deploy your capital, it is either going to build something you are aligned with or something that might be in conflict with your own values.”

In an era where investors are increasingly asking harder questions about where their money goes, that framing is less niche than it might have seemed a decade ago.

About Steven Libman: Steven Libman is the founder of Investing with Purpose, a faith-driven multifamily real estate firm. He has a 15-year history operating in the industry.

This article is based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.