Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Religious Shareholder Activism an Inside Job to Harm Companies and Investors
Religious Shareholder Activism an Inside Job to Harm Companies and Investors
Dec 21, 2025 3:57 PM

The Manhattan Institute Centers’s “Proxy Monitor Season Wrap-Up” is hot off the press, and the findings presented by author James R. Copland, are remarkable.

Since 2011, MIC has monitored shareholder activism, which it describes as efforts “in which investors attempt to influence corporate management through the shareholder-proposal process.” This year’s wrap-up includes MIC-researched data from corporations’ annual meetings held by the end of June 2015. By that time, “216 of the 250 largest panies by revenues” pleted their meetings, which enable long-term shareholders owning $2,000 of equity securities to introduce proxy resolutions.

Among these proxy activists are As You Sow, the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility – groups with religious backgrounds and decidedly leftist ideological agendas – and a host of likeminded crusaders of progressive causes:

Among social investors, only As You Sow introduced more than five proposals in 2015 (seven). Many other socially oriented investors sponsored multiple proposals, however: social-investing platforms Arjuna Capital (three), Domini Social Investments (three), Green Century Capital Management (three), Investor Voice (five), Northstar Asset Management (two), Trillium Asset Management (four), and Walden Asset Management (four); religious investors Congregation of Sisters of St. Agnes (two), Sisters of Mercy (five), Province of St. Joseph of the Capuchin Order (two), Sisters of St. Dominic (two), Sisters of St. Francis (three), and the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (two); the public-policy group National Center for Public Policy Research (two); and the Nathan Cummings (two) and Park (three) charitable foundations.

According to Copland’s report, religious shareholder activists were responsible for 29 percent of all resolutions submitted to the 216 Fortune panies. What type of proposals did the nuns, clergy and other religious submit? According to Copland:

As was the case in 2006–14, shareholder proposals relating to social or policy concerns constituted a plurality of all such proposals in 2015 (43 percent). Close behind were proposals relating to corporate-governance issues (42 percent)….

As for subclasses of proposal, environmental concerns were introduced most often in 2015 (58 proposals). Proposals related to political spending or lobbying—the most-introduced subclass in 2012, 2013, and 2014—were the second-most numerous (49 proposals).

All told, social issues and policies accounted for 43 percent of all resolutions submitted. Yet none of them passed. Zero. Nought. Zed. Zilch. A big fat nothing:

No shareholder proposals related to social or policy issues received majority support—in keeping with each of the nine prior years in the ProxyMonitor.org database, when not a single social-policy-related shareholder proposal has received the support of a majority of shareholders over board opposition.

No harm, no foul, right? Not so fast. Copland continues:

To be sure, [carbon-intensive coal, oil and gas, and panies] may face peculiar regulatory risks, if rather obvious for energy and panies and their investors. (The risks that climate change itself may place on panies’ business models are too far in the future—and thus too discounted to present—to concern shareholders focused solely on share price, aside from sociopolitical or regulatory concerns.) Yet beyond changing their line of business or increasing lobbying or political activity, there is little that panies can do to mitigate such risks—and the former (but not the latter) would almost certainly be inimical [emphasis in original] to share value.

Got that? The 58 environmental proposals work in tandem with the 49 resolutions to curtail corporate political spending when es to reducing shareholder value. Let’s put it this way, any pany would lose value if plied with the activist shareholder agenda regarding climate change. The same pany also would lose value if it didn’t invest in lobbying efforts in pany’s – and its investors’ (not to mention customers’ and employees’) – best interests. Such lobbying includes countering astronomically expensive government bureaucratic emission-reduction edicts and regulations with little or no empirical proof such measures will result in any positive difference.

Inimical indeed. Yet, religious shareholder activism trundles on unabated, its crusade an inside job to harm corporate profitability and shareholder value. It’s shameful and antithetical to any concept of moral principles promulgated by any major religion with which this writer is familiar. More’s the pity.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
How to Prove That Everyone Knows Raising Minimum Wages Increases Unemployment
Yesterday I mentioned that translating economic principles into intuitive concepts is one of the most urgent and necessary tasks to prevent such evils as harm to the poor. Today, William Poole provides an excellent example of what is needed with his mon-sense thought experiment” on minimum wage increases: Suppose Congress were to enact a minimum wage $50 higher than the current one of $7.25 per hour. Would a minimum of $57.25 reduce employment? I know of no economist who would...
Martin Luther King and The Birth of Freedom
Acton’s second documentary, The Birth of Freedom, begins with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech and ends with an image from the Civil Rights movement. The documentary, which aired on PBS, explores how the speech is rooted deeply in the Western freedom project and how that centuries-old project is itself rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. If you watched one promotional about the documentary, it was probably the official trailer, but Acton also made a shorter teaser for...
Freedom Drove a Car: How Cars Helped Fight Racial Segregation
If you want to improve the material conditions of the poor and working classes, what is the one economic metric you should consider most important? For progressives the answer is e inequality, since a wide disparity between the es of the rich and poor is considered by them to be an obvious sign of injustice and a justification for using the force of the government to redistribute wealth. But for conservatives, the answer is upward economic mobility, the ability of...
MLK, Jim Crow, and the Rule of Law
The legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., like most mortals, evokes a certain ambivalence regarding what should be celebrated and what should be rightly critiqued. There are certainly parts of his life and thinking that warrant correction, rebuke, and challenge, but this will be true of all us if we live long enough. On this MLK holiday, however, I am thinking about my parents. My parents spent the first third of their lives being denied the equal application of...
MLK and the Natural Law
Martin Luther King, Jr. was fond of saying that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” This was no thin, pragmatic account of rights-based egalitarian liberalism, says Derek Rishmawy, but rather a philosophically and theologically thick appeal to a divinely ordered and sustained cosmos. As Rishmawy notes, it is simply impossible to separate King’s denunciation of racism and segregation from his Christian confession and theological convictions about the nature of the universe: For King,...
Straight Talk About The Wage Gap: Women Are Not Victims
Ladies: are you upset that women make only 77 cents on the dollar pared to men? Are you sure that’s even accurate? It’s time for some straight talk about the so-called “wage gap.” Video courtesy of the Independent Women’s Forum. ...
‘I Am Woman;’ Identifying Real Ways To Help Those On The Brink Of Poverty
Is America inherently unfair to females? Do we need to expand government programs and invest in new ones in order to get women out of poverty and keep them above the poverty line? Carrie Lukas, the managing director at the Independent Women’s Forum, believes the answer is a resounding, “No!” Lukas replies to the recent Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back From the Brink. There are a lot of negative issues with this report, but Lukas says the primary...
Free Book Giveaway: Kuyper’s ‘Guidance for Christian Engagement in Government’
Christian’s Library Press has just released the first-ever English translation of Abraham Kuyper’sOur Program (Ons Program),under the titleGuidance for Christian Engagement in Government. Firstpublished in 1879,Ons Programserved as an outline for Kuyper’s Anti-Revolutionary Party. As Greg Forster argues in his endorsement, the work is as “equally profound and equally consequential” as Edmund Burke’s response to the French Revolution. Read additional praise for the bookhere. To celebrate the release,CLP will be giving awaythreecopies of the book. To enter, use the interface...
Is There a Moral Basis for the Free Market?
The morality of the market, important as it is in a free society, says James Stoner, is not the only kind of morality that matters mon life: So is there a moral basis for the free market? Sure, but it is part of plex moral environment that rightly limits market freedom even as it supports it. The morality of the market, important as it is in a free society, should not be mistaken for the only kind of morality that...
National Religious Freedom Day In The U.S. And The Vision of Jefferson
Perhaps it’s because we Americans are still getting over Christmas, or talking about the Super Bowl, but National Religious Freedom Day doesn’t get a lot of press. But indeed: January 16 is National Religious Freedom Day, adopted originally by the state of Virginia and now remembered annually by the White House. Penned by Thomas Jefferson, the Statute for Religious Freedom reads, in part: Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall pelled to frequent or support any religious...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved