In this week’s episode of Retire in Texas, Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group, takes a deep look into faith-based investing, sharing insights on how Judeo-Christian values can shape investment strategies. Darryl explores how the investment landscape has shifted over the past five years, leading to the rise of values-based investing for those seeking to align their portfolios with their beliefs.
Darryl breaks down three distinct approaches to faith-based investing, helping listeners identify where they might fit and offering practical guidance on how to incorporate biblical principles into financial planning. Whether you’re looking to avoid “bad” companies, disrupt corporate behavior, or simply work with an advisor who honors your faith, this episode has something for everyone.
Key highlights of the episode include:
- Understanding the avoid and embrace philosophy, which focuses on excluding companies with practices contrary to biblical values while supporting companies that align with those principles.
- Exploring the influence and disrupt approach, which leverages shareholder voting power to advocate for positive change within companies.
- Learning about the give and support mindset, where the priority is working with a firm that aligns with Judeo-Christian values and supports strategic charitable giving, such as tithing or legacy planning.
- Addressing challenges like navigating ethical dilemmas, implementing donor-advised funds, and leveraging technology to identify company practices.
- Biblical insights into money management, drawn from over 2,000 scriptures, to help listeners align their finances with their faith.
For more resources and to connect with a financial advisor who shares your values, visit http://www.PAXFinancialGroup.com. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend who might find it inspiring!
Disclaimer: Clicking the Like button does not constitute a testimonial for, recommendation or endorsement of our advisory firm, any associated person, or our services. Clicking the Like button is merely a mechanism to circulate our social media page. “Like” is not meant in the traditional sense. In addition, postings must refrain from recommending us or providing testimonials for our firm.
Transcript:
Hey, this is Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group. And you’re listening to Retire in Texas. This information is general in nature only. It’s not intended to provide specific investment, tax, or legal advice. Visit PAXFinancialGroup.com for more information. Okay, so we have been doing faith-based investing for, I want to say about five years now.
And the reason it wasn’t prevalent prior to that is we were really big Dave Ramsey folks. And we still are. We love the investment philosophy, but there was just not you know, Dave loves the 4 funds. I don’t know if you’ve ever done the Financial Peace University. It’s growth, growth to think of, aggressive, international. We do too.
So, it really works fine. But when about 4 or 5 years ago, the marketplace really started to become a lot more divided as you know, polarizing and, corporations were starting to take stances that, undermine a biblical worldview. So the investing landscape started to change, and our clients and our interest in that space started to deviate from just those four funds.
And so, we started to add a lot more color to our investment approach. And so, I want to talk about kind of the last five years of us doing faith-based Investing because there’s an interesting place that we’re at today. And I want to share that with you. And the way I would describe it, I was working with Roger Stukkie here, who’s one of the partners and an advisor.
You might work with him. And we were talking about there’s kind of three groups of people that are, Christians who have Judeo Christian values that work with us. There’s three different groups of people, and sometimes they overlap. But I want to describe those three groups of people. And so, the first group is those that invest, that use biblical responsible investing because they want to avoid companies that are bad and embrace companies that are good.
So we call these avoid embrace clients. They want to avoid bad companies, embrace good companies. And that makes sense. Some people, you know, really it makes them disgusted to know that they’re owners of companies that are doing bad things and they lean in. I don’t blame this group of people at all. In Proverbs 16:9 it says better is a little with righteousness than great gains with injustice.
I think I need to say that again. Proverbs 16: 9 says that better is a little with righteousness than great gains with injustice. And it’s really hard to dissect this marketplace because companies are often like people. There’s not like this perfect company, and they’re just like, there’s not a perfect person, but there’s elements of good and bad, and sometimes they’re a little bit more overt, like, I mean, for example, alcohol, alcohol companies, not alcohol in and of itself isn’t bad.
But we wonder, we have to ask ourselves, is it a good idea to invest in that? And what are your convictions there? We know that there’s an addiction. There’s a lot of misuse. The statistics of how it destroys families is absolutely off the charts. And so suppose that you came from a family of alcohol abusers, alcoholics, and it impacted your life, like, extremely.
Then you may have real trouble investing, being an owner of a company that produces alcohol just philosophically. So, I would get that and I so everyone kind of has a unique story that way. And so, this idea of avoiding bad companies is, that’s not lost to me. I really get that. I mean, some people say I want to stay away from owning anything that’s to do with pornography or any tobacco.
I know some people that it’s disgusting to think that tobacco companies target like 11-year-olds in India or gambling. I won’t have anything to do with gambling, even if it’s like this new sports betting thing is crazy. Even if there’s profit to be made, I don’t want to have anything to do with it. And some of it gets more nuanced, like ethical labor practices.
You know, just what’s the dispersion between top executive pay, middle management and others? Forced child labor? You know, that’s an issue that really, really bugs people. Even product safety. Like you can get really granular here. And in today’s world of technology, it’s amazing how you can quickly, identify companies that are misbehaving, like technology.
As you can imagine, artificial intelligence allows you not completely perfect, but identify these companies that are misbehaving way, way before, it would take, you know, you would get a very much lagging information. Now it’s almost real time. And then even there’s some people that say, yeah, I know you’re a good company, but you’re just doing bad things.
Target’s an example of and we all, you know, I don’t have to get into that. But you know how Target was behaving in the recent years. You just say I just want to avoid these companies that are they may not be producing something as bad, but their behavior is bad. Those people that come to us and say, I want to avoid these companies that are bad, and I want to embrace good companies.
I get you like; I completely get you. I have got to tell you, I am in that camp and there’s been plenty of research that shows that there’s no, drop off in performance, in investment performance. But in recent years, there has been because, those good companies, haven’t done as well as, like the Nvidias and the Facebooks, those companies that have done some things that we all disagree with.
Some of the big companies, they’ve actually performed well, real well. But investment asset classes tend to rotate, so I don’t really get too worried about that. And I am personally proud, to have this avoid embrace exclusion as part of my investment strategy personally. But it’s not for everyone. Now, the other group of people, in fact, I would say I’m actually even more in this camp.
If anything is the influence or disrupt camp. These are people that say, I don’t really care necessarily, because I’m so nuanced about trying to avoid companies and embrace companies. I get that, but it’s just it’s so difficult to handle. And, you know, how am I supposed to? I still shop at Target. So am I a hypocrite for shopping at Target?
And I don’t want to. I don’t even want to think about that stuff. That’s just too nuanced. Everything’s okay. I get you too. And then this group of people says, but I do want to influence and disrupt. Now, what that means is that whenever you own a stock of a company, you get a vote. It’s a proxy vote.
And so, a proxy means that you’re not traveling to the annual meeting. You’re sending in your vote. Somebody is voting on your behalf on it as a proxy. Now, what happens when you own a stock that’s pretty easy. You get a little if you haven’t owned stock before, you get a little notice in the mail.
It’s proxy vote. You read it, you say, I’m voting for these board of directors or I’m, you know, whatever issues on the vote, on on deck. But the, the fund world is different because when you have a mutual fund or exchange traded fund, the vote that you get as an investor is actually transferred to the fund company.
So, if the fund company shares your values, then that’s fine. But if they don’t, if they absolutely have completely opposite values than you, then that’s a real problem. And this was really transparent with fossil fuels. So oil and gas companies woke up I don’t know maybe 2 or 3 years ago and said wait a minute. States actually did this.
I’ll tell you the states. I actually saw this in real time. The States woke up one day and said, wait, we’re Texas. We have a lot of oil and gas revenue and our pensions, when we invest in these pension companies are actually voting against fossil fuels like that makes zero sense to us. We’re giving them power to eliminate us.
And so that happens actually in Christianity too, is like so some of these funds that you invest in, you’ve got to be very careful that they’re not voting against you. The specific issue that I think really should have woken us all up and we can’t be too complacent here, is the Equality Act. That was our key priority with the Biden administration and this was making sexual orientation and gender identity as a protected class under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But doing that really becomes problematic is an example. If you go to there’s an Alaska biological man who identified as a woman who attempted in era Hope center, a shelter for abused women. And since the women share the same bathroom facilities and sleep, sleep near each other, the shelter said, no, we can’t let you in. So, he later filed a complaint for gender identity discrimination.
And so that’s where it can be really problematic. And so, like adoption agencies, churches, prisons, this can be a real problem in prisons. If the Equality Act were implemented, we would see chaos in prisons, in health care. We see it in public schools and sports, bakers, florists, photographers, all of them would be impacted by the Equality Act, wedding venue services, counselors.
And if we think that that’s not going to happen, then we just need to wake up really quick because that overseas, for example, in Spain, there’s two Catholic bishops who’ve been prosecuted for repeating the Catholic Church’s teachings on marriage and equality in Ireland. A schoolteacher was dismissed from his post and eventually jailed for refusing to call a student by their proper pronouns or what, transgender pronouns.
And then finally, a pro-life activist in England was arrested for silently praying outside an abortion facility. This Catholic woman held a rosary, did not speak, but simply stood in silence. She was arrested, tried, and ultimately arrested, acquitted, and then ultimately arrested again in two weeks. Unbelievable stuff happening in Europe. That will happen here.
And it’ll happen here if corporations use your dollars to support legislation that would undermine a Christian worldview. Just like corporations use oil and gas companies money to support legislation that would undermine oil and gas, same kind of principle. And so, that’s why that’s where I started getting really heavy into the Christian investing business, because I saw that the power of pulling dollars to influence legislation was really important.
And that group of people is the influence and disrupt group of people. So, you have the one you avoid embrace. And then you have two then, influence and disrupt. And the third group of people love just as much and just have different convictions and say, yeah, I just don’t see it that way. And here’s the thing about it, I think that I love about PAX, none of us here like, here’s the Bible.
Let me hit you over the head with it because you’re a sinner, because you don’t believe in this. I actually, I don’t see that. I see that we’re kind of like all on this journey together. And I want to share kind of the issues that are going on and, let you wrestle with these and see how we can help, meet you where you’re at.
And then, walk alongside of you. So, there’s a third group of people that say, I’m not yet bought into the avoid embrace. I’m not yet really sold on the influence and disrupt, but I am and Roger framed this group of people as I’m the give and support type of person. What does that mean? That means that they want to work with an advisory firm that understands their strongly held Judeo-Christian values, somebody that can relate to them and that can walk alongside of their investment journey as they discover new things, and that their perspective shifts along the way, and even the marketplace changes as new tools and resources and, technology and, ideas come around, which moves all the time.
Things are always changing, and they just want to walk alongside an investment firm that can at the very least honor their values. And that can mean in terms of tithing, like somebody comes in and says, I want to start giving 10% of my money to the church and, they don’t sit across the desk from an investment advisor that says why would you do that?
Like, I don’t get that. And that’s not the culture. Of course, here we embrace that, and we understand it, and then we try to find ways to do that effectively, like how to reduce your taxable income along that journey. Or if you talk about inheritance, what does that mean? Leave, a wise man leaves an inheritance for his children’s children.
And so talking through that or even talking about like, we’ve gotten into stuff where, in its challenge. It doesn’t always work out. We try to do our best to just kind of, be sensitive to things, but, like, we’ve had plenty of families that are going through deep stuff, marriage issues where we can say, okay, let me point you to some counselors just to walk alongside of you.
And I’m rooting for you and I’m praying for you or how do we get out of debt? Because it tends, Christians tend to be allergic to debt. And there’s some spiritual reasons why. And then you get into some really nuanced things, like, how do we utilize donor advised funds to do our giving in a very, very strategic way?
And I’ve talked about that in other podcast episodes. But the main idea of this group is like, I’m not yet in avoid embrace, Christian, neither am I influenced or disrupt. But I do want to work with an advisory firm that can help me understand how to give and then support me in that journey. That’s the third group, and you’re equally entitled to that perspective.
And I don’t think there’s a right or wrong in any of this. I think we’re all kind of discovering it together because this is not like, hey, I can look up the book of numbers and understand sophisticated investment strategies. We’ve got to go to the Word of God and then try to understand how that stuff applies today, through the principles of the Word of God.
And there’s over 2000 scriptures and money. So, it can be nuanced. But we think about that deeply, and we recognize that there are three groups of people and they all have different perspectives when it comes to money, and they all kind of view things differently. And I think for most of us, we just fall short of thinking about it all the time.
This idea of money in our faith and I think the more that we think about it, I think the closer we get to God’s will in our life and what he wants to do in and through us regarding our finances. So, there you are. Which type of person are you? Are you the avoid embrace type of person?
Or are you the influence or disrupt person? Or are you give and support person? Either way, I want you to know that you’re welcome with PAX, of course. And are what we say oftentimes is we’re fiduciaries who honor Judeo-Christian values. And so, we’ll continue to do that. And we’re, honored to serve you. So, thank you for listening.
I hope that all makes sense. And remember, you think different when you think long term. Have a great day.
Disclaimer: Clicking the Like button does not constitute a testimonial for, recommendation or endorsement of our advisory firm, any associated person, or our services. Clicking the Like button is merely a mechanism to circulate our social media page. “Like” is not meant in the traditional sense. In addition, postings must refrain from recommending us or providing testimonials for our firm.
References:
Voters anchorage can protect womens privacy ballot initiative
British pro-life advocate again arrested for ‘thoughtcrime’ of silent prayer near abortion clinic
The Dangers of the Equality Act | The Heritage Foundation
Anti-Christian hate rising in Europe: From job firings to arson to murders – The Lion
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