For decades, faith-based investing has been defined largely by what it excludes: tobacco, adult entertainment, alcohol. But Steven Libman, founder of Investing with Purpose, says that approach is a failure. "The definition that the industry has been operating under for the last 30 years is a lazy one," Libman says. "Screening is the floor. Building intentionally would be the ceiling."
Libman, who spent 15 years in the industry before building a multifamily real estate investment platform structured around faith-driven principles, argues that the gap between surface-level compliance and genuine alignment is widening. Investors who cannot tell the difference, he says, are outsourcing their conscience to people who may not share their priorities.
The core premise of intentional faith-based investing is that capital goes somewhere, and where it goes signals something. Libman challenges investors to consider what their portfolio would reveal about their beliefs. "If you turned your portfolio over to your pastor, is there anything in there you might feel embarrassed about?" he asks. "It is not to convict anyone. It is to get people thinking in a different way."
The cautionary tale here is the ESG sector. Environmental, social, and governance funds attracted significant capital through the 2010s on the promise of impact investing, but in aggregate delivered weak returns. "ESG put a dagger in the heart of values-aligned investing," says Libman. "They were saying, you are going to get lower returns, but we will make an impact. In fact, they were not making an impact, and they were not making a return either." A recent study tracking ESG fund performance put total average returns well behind conventional benchmarks. For Libman, the lesson is that funds using impact as a marketing hook rather than an operational framework tend to deliver on neither.
Investing with Purpose incorporates an on-site asset ministry program in its multifamily properties. Free apartments are provided to on-site ministry staff, who run tenant engagement programming such as movie nights, farmers markets, and hospital visits. The business logic is clear: tenants with six or seven friends within the same complex are 45 percent less likely to move out, leading to lower vacancy and more stable cash flow. "Ministry is the moat around the investment," Libman says. "Caring is a durable business advantage, not a disadvantage." The faith dimension is present but not imposed; tenant engagement is service-first, and residents are not required to participate in religious programming.
Transparency is another key differentiator. Investing with Purpose sends investors not only standard financial KPIs but also a ministry impact report tracking community connections, pastoral support, and acts of care. Investors are invited on-site quarterly for serve days, allowing them to see and participate in the impact. "Unlike your Wall Street investments, you can drive by it, touch it, feel it, actually see the impact that we are making, and actually be a part of that impact as well," Libman says. This contrasts with the opacity of much of the ESG sector, where impact claims are difficult to verify.
For investors new to values-aligned investing, Libman's entry point is real estate—a familiar asset class. The question becomes not whether to invest, but what kind of operator best reflects your principles. "Every dollar that you invest is a vote for something," he says. "So when you deploy your capital, it is either going to build something you are aligned with or something that might be in conflict with your own values." In an era where investors are asking harder questions about where their money goes, that framing is less niche than it might have seemed a decade ago.
