‘Get Thee Behind Me, ESG’: Biblical Investors Disavow ESG

The embattled environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement has another new foe: Inspire Investing, a Christian financial firm that renounced the term in an Aug. 18 blog post from CEO Robert Netzly.

“The hard left wants to say that ESG can only mean their view, in typical cultural Marxist fashion,” Netzly told The Epoch Times in an Aug. 26 interview.

“We just don’t want to be associated with that anymore.”

Inspire, which manages over $2 billion in assets, previously identified some of its funds as “faith-based ESG,” grounded in Biblical values. Unlike many other ESG-focused firms and funds, Inspire has invested in firearms companies—specifically, Sturm Ruger & Company and Vista Outdoor.

In an interview for a June article in The Epoch Times, Netzly was still an ESG advocate. At the time, treasurers from many energy-producing states were intensifying an ongoing campaign against ESG using their control over state pensions and other public money.

“We believe state pensions should not be forced to invest along any particular ESG guidelines, but should have the freedom to do so if they decide that is in the best interest of their constituents,” Netzly said in that June interview.

What changed?

According to Netzly, as recently as a year ago, “nobody had a clue” what ESG meant.

“Today, everybody with a radio who’s a conservative knows what it is and it’s specifically evil, right? And it’s earned its reputation,” he continued.

“We see that battle lines have been drawn—not by us, but by the hard left—which squarely position us at odds with the ESG world that has been overrun by the intolerant, extremist viewpoints of hostile liberal activists. In our view, ESG has joined CRT [critical race theory] among acronyms worth fighting against,” Netzly wrote in his blog entry renouncing the term.

Notably, although Inspire has

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