Paris, France - The world's great religions are as global as multinational corporations, with congregations on all continents, polyglot leaders and name-recognition matching that of the largest companies.
With their finances, though, many faith groups act as if that outside world hardly existed, but a new group of activist investors want to change that.
Apart from rejecting "sin stocks" and firms exploiting poor countries, most managers of church-held assets invest conservatively in their own countries.
Taken together, faith groups control a huge variety of financial holdings that could be used to nudge multinationals to invest in ways that support the religions' ethical concerns.
"It's time that the world's first multinationals - the major faiths - flexed their full financial muscle," said Michiel Hardon, a board member of the Amsterdam-based International Interfaith Investment Group (3iG).
"Until now, faith organisations have consistently failed to use their investment power to the full," added group secretary-general Joost Douma. "They have focused solely on what not to invest in -- guns, pornography and so on.
"Now 3iG is asking faiths to focus on positive action, using investment to promote good activities rather than merely avoid bad ones," he told a meeting of faith-based fund managers in Paris.
ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS
The two-year-old group brings together 15 Christian, Jewish and Buddhist funds whose assets, Douma said, add up to more than the Bank of England's entire foreign currency and gold reserves.
It aims to link faith-based funds and investors in projects that promote ethical goals. Now, only about five percent of faith-based funds are invested in this way, Douma said.
This concern for ethical investment on a global scale grew out of faith groups' concern with the environment, said Rabbi Mark Goldsmith from London's North Western Reform Synagogue.
"We realised one of the biggest places to act was on relationships with business," he said.
In one recent project backed by 3iG, the Dutch pension fund ABP invested $60 million in a $100 million reforestation project in Angola and Mozambique run by the Swedish and Norwegian Lutheran churches and a Japanese Shinto group.
ABP is one of the world's largest pension funds, managing about 209 billion euros ($307 billion) at the end of 2006.
"3iG gives us a perspective of what's happening in the religious world, where things are changing fast," ABP Chief Investment Officer Roderick Munsters said at the conference.
"These environmental and social issues are important. If you don't take these into account as a company, you risk alienating yourselves from your consumers and stakeholders, of missing business opportunities, maybe of getting fined for polluting."
MONITORING RIGHTS
John Reynolds, chairman of the Church of England's Ethical Investment Advisory Group (EIAG), said faith-based investors screened companies for ethics performance and used their shareholder status to persuade those found wanting to change.
The EIAG reviewed the fate of employees with HIV/AIDS in 40 companies the Church of England held shares in and pressured those with discriminatory policies to change them, he said.
As an example of a possible new initiative, he noted that producers of X-rated movies saw mobile phones with video streaming as a lucrative new market to develop.
"How much revenue will mobile phone companies earn from porn?" Reynolds asked. "We should pre-engage them on this."
The Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility in London pressured BP Plc to divest from the oil company PetroChina in Sudan because of suspected human rights violations there, coordinator Miles Litvinoff said. BP divested in 2004.
Executive Director Laura Berry of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility said the New York-based ICCR lobbied U.S. companies and hoped the 3iG could help it expand its influence abroad, especially in Central and Eastern Europe.
The ICCR, with 275 members and $110 billion in combined assets, has established itself within the United States as the kind of pressure group 3iG would like to become, Douma said.
Berry said ICCR held over 600 "engagements" with companies in 2006. "People who meet us are concerned about the public perception of their companies," she said.
"Very few Fortune 500 companies refuse to meet us when we announce that we will submit a resolution at their annual general meeting."