Washington Times | Julia Duin | July 9, 2007

The love of money doesn’t have to be the root of all evil, according to several organizations active in “values investing.”

The search for stocks and mutual funds known for religious virtue as well as financial vitality has shot up in recent years with a proliferation of evangelical Protestant, Catholic and Muslim investment companies.

The Matthews, N.C.-based Stewardship Partners, for instance, specializes in “biblically responsible” stocks in companies that eschew abortion, alcohol, gambling, tobacco, pornography, cloning, stem-cell research and homosexual rights.

Investors must be well-heeled, as the starting fee is $100,000 and the company is managing $230 million in stocks in 580 accounts.

“We help people make money and we hope they can send some of that money back into the work of the Lord,” says Rusty Leonard, a former executive vice president with Templeton Investment Counsel Inc. who founded the company in 2001. His company’s investment returns, he added, have outperformed the Standard & Poor 500 index, by 26.6 percent since then.

Stewardship Partners praises Cisco Systems, a San Jose, Calif. communications-technology designer that emphasizes helping charities with technology and employee loans, and has programs for wounded American veterans and refugees in Jordan and Israel.

On the opposite end is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., owner of Fox News, Fox Faith and Zondervan, the latter an evangelical Christian publisher. Nevertheless, Stewardship hits on Fox for its “anti-family” TV programs, “gambling interests” and its collection of hard-core porn channels for its British Sky Broadcasting subsidiary.

“The Lord’s called you to be a steward of what He’s giving you,” Mr. Leonard said, “and you should bring that wealth under His authority. I don’t want to invest in companies that are working at odds with everything He is trying to achieve in this world.”

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