How Religion Inc will save the world

The world’s great religions are realising the clout they have as multinational corporations 

PARIS: The world’s great religions are as global as multinational corporations, with congregations on all continents, polyglot leaders and name-recognition matching that of the largest companies.

With their finances, though, many faith groups act as if that outside world hardly existed, but a new group of activist investors want to change that.

Apart from rejecting “sin stocks” and firms exploiting poor countries, most managers of church-held assets invest conservatively in their own countries.

Taken together, faith groups control a huge variety of financial holdings that could be used to nudge multinationals to invest in ways that support the religions’ ethical concerns.

“It’s time that the world’s first multinationals — the major faiths — flexed their full financial muscle,” said Michiel Hardon, a board member of the Amsterdam-based International Interfaith Investment Group (3iG).

“Until now, faith organisations have consistently failed to use their investment power to the full,” added group secretary-general Joost Douma.

“They have focused solely on what not to invest in — guns, pornography and so on. “Now 3iG is asking faiths to focus on positive action, using investment to promote good activities rather than merely avoid bad ones,” he said.

The two-year-old group brings together 15 Christian, Jewish and Buddhist funds whose assets, Douma said, add up to more than the Bank of England’s entire foreign currency and gold reserves.

It aims to link faith-based funds and investors in projects that promote ethical goals. Now, only about five per cent of faith-based funds are invested in this way, Douma said.

This concern for ethical investment on a global scale grew out of faith groups’ concern with the environment, said Rabbi Mark Goldsmith from London’s North Western Reform Synagogue.

“We realised one of the biggest places to act was on relationships with business,” he said.

In one recent project backed by 3iG, the Dutch pension fund ABP invested $60 million in a $100 million reforestation project in Angola and Mozambique run by the Swedish and Norwegian Lutheran churches and a Japanese Shinto group.

ABP is one of the world’s largest pension funds, managing about $307 billion at the end of 2006. “3iG gives us a perspective of what’s happening in the religious world, where things are changing fast,” ABP Chief Investment Officer Roderick Munsters said.

“These environmental and social issues are important. If you don’t take these into account as a company, you risk alienating yourselves from your consumers and stakeholders, of missing business opportunities, maybe of getting fined for polluting.”