Religious Investments - Faith-Based Groups Increasingly Turn to Wall Street to Push Their Moral Agendas

This article from the Washington Post shows that the fundies and far right Catholics are pushing their agenda in more ways than just boycotts and other demonstrations. Here are some highlights (the full story is at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/10/AR2007081001999.html?hpid=sec-religion):

Over the past decade, America's market for religious investment products has grown by more than 3,500 percent, according to data from fund-tracker Morningstar Inc. During the same period, faith-based mutual funds, which routinely agitate for social change in corporate board rooms or shun stocks they deem immoral, grew from about $500 million to more than $17 billion.

What's emerging, observers say, is a market-based response to popular demand for ways that people of faith can make their voices heard on issues closest to their hearts. And people of faith -- especially social conservatives -- are seizing what they see as a new opportunity to make a difference.

Religious conservatives are mobilizing to attach a voice to the cash they have on Wall Street. For example, the Tupelo, Miss.-based American Family Association is for the first time urging its 2.8 million online members to purge their investment portfolios of companies that support a "gay agenda" or "anti-family" practices.

For socially conservative activists, the process of engaging corporations has evolved gradually over two decades. Until now, the American Family Association, for instance, has focused on consumer action, such as a successful 2006 boycott that led to the demise of NBC's racy "The Book of Daniel." Consumer pressure is easier than investor pressure to explain and to use in rallying a broad base of supporters, according to AFA President Tim Wildmon. But he says his organization has been remiss in letting agenda-driven investing be the near-exclusive province of left-leaning mutual funds with a "socially responsible" label. "We just dropped the ball on that," he said. "We haven't been very smart in that regard. But now that's about to start changing."

I guess the moral is that if the fundies are engaging in this investment strategy, the LGBT community needs to make sure that it focuses its financial resources to offset the attempts to push corporations to heed the far right's culture war agenda.