Should Christians Vote with Their Investments? With Jerry Bowyer

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Thank you in advance for your support and partnership. In Matthew 10 16, Jesus calls us to be wise as snakes and gentle as doves. But can we be gentle and wise when standing up for biblical principles and our voting rights as investors?

Hi, I'm Rob West. It's annual shareholder meeting season for public corporations and that means companies will be hearing from investors about their policies. Jerry Boyer joins us today with a biblical perspective on corporate engagement. And then it's on to your calls at 800-525-7000.

That's 800-525-7000. This is faith and finance, biblical wisdom for your financial decisions. Well, Jerry Boyer is our longtime economist and a regular contributor here at Faithfi as well as World News Group. Jerry, great to have you back.

Great to be with you, as always. You know, Jerry, in addition to being gentle and shrewd, it might help us to consider how Paul was willing to suffer loss and insults as a Christian, but also his ability to stand up for his rights as a Roman citizen in Acts 22. Paul, as you know, informed his captors they couldn't beat him without a trial because he was a Roman citizen.

So when you work with corporations and voting chairs, are you helping Christians stand up for their rights in some way? Yeah, I like that Pauline analogy. By the way, notice he didn't tell them before they beat him that he was a Roman citizen. So I think he was being very subtle, you know, like a snake and basically kind of letting them do something that they didn't want to do. And basically kind of letting them do something that he knew then he could appeal to Caesar.

So I think he wanted to get to Caesar because he had something to say, and Jesus even talked about that. You know, you're going to stand before kings and it'll be given to you what to say. We don't have kings now. We don't have nobility. We don't have dukes.

We don't have earls. We don't have lords and ladies. But we do have something like a ruling class. And you know where you can see that ruling class? You see them on boards of directors of public corporations, either CEOs, former CEOs or former public officials, university presidents, foundation people.

The ruling class of America is on the boards of directors of corporations. And so you can talk to them. How can you talk to them?

If you own enough shares, it's not that much, $2,000 worth for three years. You can put a proposal on the ballot and you can actually make your case. You can preach your message to them and you are legally afforded that privilege. But you have to be subtle, and that's the point, because the rules are complicated and you don't necessarily know how to do it. Paul knew enough Roman law to arrange it that way, so he got to speak before Caesar. And what I try to do is know that law well enough so that I can help Christians also speak to the Caesars of our age.

Well, there's no question, Jerry, it's making a difference. Dig into this just a bit deeper and explain how proxy voting works and the potential impact it can have on a company. Pretty much every right that you have as a citizen in the United States of America, you have a similar right as a shareholder of a company.

In fact, the United States Constitution was to some degree that, you know, the model of a CEO as president, et cetera, that was intentional on the part of the founders. So, you know, if you're a citizen, you get to vote. Well, if you're a shareholder, you get to vote.

Well, who do you vote for? Well, if you're a citizen, you get to vote for members of Congress or the president. Well, if you're a shareholder, you get to vote for the board of directors. As a citizen, you can go to a town hall meeting and speak up. Well, as a shareholder, you can attend the annual meeting and speak up. How much do you have to own? Just one share and you can speak at the meeting. Even a fractional share will get you in the door.

And by the way, it's not usually in the door. It's almost always a log on. So you can do that and you can ask questions.

I just did that with a major bank and was able to ask some questions. Citizens in some states can put a proposal. They call it initiative. You put a referendum on the ballot and all the citizens vote for it. Well, it's not easy after gain signatures. Well, in the shareholder world, if you own two thousand dollars worth for three years, you can also put a proposal on the ballot. And that enables you to speak at the annual meeting or delegate that to somebody else. And you put your question and your case before Cesar, before the CEOs, the Cesar EO's of American corporate life.

Yeah. Quickly, Jerry, and we'll pick this up after the break. But how do you actually get one of those proposals on the agenda? How does that work? Yeah, that's something we help with because there is a paperwork kind of thing. It's not easy to do. So we've been working with financial advisors.

We don't really work with individuals. But a financial advisor can help. The advisor themselves can put these forward or they can work with a client to put it forward. So there's certain kinds of paperwork that you have to put forward. You have to write it a certain way. There are word limits. There are deadlines. Again, just like Paul had to know Roman law in order to use it.

We have to know Rule 14 a eight of the FCC code in order to use it. But once you know how to use it, then it's in muscle memory. And it is that for us. And you get to have meet almost every single time we've done a proposal with somebody. There have been meetings with executives at the company beforehand.

So there's a lot of ability to speak to kings with this. Yeah, no doubt. We're talking with Jerry Boyer, our longtime economist. We're talking corporate engagement today. Much more just around the corner. Stay with us.

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I'm Rob West. With me, our longtime economist and regular contributor, Jerry Boyer. We're talking today about corporate engagement as we enter shareholder meeting season for public corporations. And before the break, Jerry was sharing with us how proxy voting and shareholder resolutions work. And Jerry, for all intents and purposes, this is a relatively new idea that those who hold to a Christian worldview are showing up and entering this conversation in this way.

Is that right? Yeah, that's absolutely true. Evangelical Christians, if that's the, you know, moniker you want to use or born again Christians or those who hold the historic faith, however you want to describe us, we're really new to this. There have been people in the past who've been sort of faith aligned, but it wouldn't really be the biblical agenda. And as we get into what I'm seeing on the proposal, it's shocking to see how often the faithful tithes of church members past are being used by current church funds to undermine a biblical worldview. But yeah, those of us who actually believe in what the Bible says are really very new to this process. I think there was some wake up calls. Some of the stuff that Disney did, for example, was a wake up call for a lot of Christians or Target, some of the stuff that they did, and which caused us to say, hey, wait a minute, what's going on? Well, it's been going on a long time.

We just didn't know what was going on. And it's now coming to fruition. You know, like the wheat and the tares.

OK, the tears are showing up as tears now weeds. And so we're kind of getting into there. I mean, the thing is, we have to avoid the temptation of just passive outrage at a distance. And that's largely what I've seen from conservative evangelicals up until now is it's just terrible. It's really bad what's happening or an ever growing boycott list. I mean, eventually you have to shop somewhere, right? As opposed to, wait a minute, let's change the culture of these companies where maybe the other side thinks maybe they need to do the boycotting. You know, like they keep trying to boycott Chick-fil-A, but people like the chicken sandwiches do much so it doesn't work. So, you know, boycotting is a defense maneuver when you're losing the battle. Corporate engagement is a way to move things in our direction.

Yeah. And although there's a variety of issues being discussed, Jerry, when you and others engage in this way, typically at the core of this, it seems like it's a call to return the company's focus to the core business and get out of politics and other issues that they shouldn't be concerned about. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, I agree. We're not trying to make these into conservative conservative companies or companies, you know, spouting conservative propaganda. We're not trying to make them make these companies make Christian professions or anything like that. We're essentially trying to get them out of the culture wars. Now, it just so happens that from my standpoint, when they come down on the side, they're almost always coming down on the wrong side.

But I don't want them to come down on the right side either, frankly, for most of these culture war issues, because it's not their core competence. It's not their function, right? A family has a function. Church has a function. Business has a function.

School has a function. And I just don't I don't trust corporations to be able to know how to adjudicate culture war issues. So, you know, basically, I don't know of any company that came out against abortion after Roe versus Wade was overturned, but a lot of companies came out in favor of it. So we didn't come out to these companies and say, well, you need to reverse and now denounce abortion.

We just said stay out of it. Not because we don't have views. I have very strong convictions about abortion, just because that's not a company's role. The other issue is there's a lot of religious liberty issues. There's been a lot of de-banking of Christians or de-platforming of Christians, because pretty much, you know, there's a lot of the Bible that some people point at that and they say that's hate speech. So if you can define biblical content as hate speech and they have anti-hate speech codes with these major banks or with these technology companies, what do you get? You get cancellation of Christian content under the label of hate speech. So we've pushed to say, let's get rid of these vague terms like hate speech. We want very specific language about who you can ban and who you can't. We don't want to leave it up to you, corporations, because again, we don't think it's your core competence. Yeah. Now, Jerry, I know you're engaging both corporations as well as government funds these days.

So explain the difference between the two with regard to engagement. Well, the government fund is over sort of on our side. It's the investor, right? So what we do is we help governments to engage properly when they're investors.

So just like, you know, you might own a share of stock or maybe you have money in a 401k plan or you have money in an ETF or a mutual fund. Well, these governments have these large pension plans and they have a fiduciary obligation to invest for the good of the retirees and also to vote in a way that's good for the retirees. So whatever you might think about this particular issue, if you're a Texas pension fund or school fund and you're funded by oil and gas royalties, then it doesn't seem to be very fiduciary to your state if you're out there voting for decarbonization or voting against the use of oil and gas.

So we can have a debate about that. I've got my opinions and other people have their own opinions, but it doesn't seem to be in the interest of Texas to be undermining its own industry. So what we're seeing now is we've helped create proxy guidelines that governments can adopt and they're starting to do it so that they are voting for get out of politics. They're voting for, you know, do not be pushing these companies to get out of the oil and gas business because it's not good for shareholders and it's not good for our local economy and let's put everything through the lens of what's good for the shareholder. Now that's, we call that fiduciary obligation, but it's there in New Testament parables. You know, the parable of the talents is essentially a fiduciary parable. It's about when you entrust assets to somebody, do they use them for your benefit or do they use them for their own benefit? Yeah, that's well said, Jerry.

Can you share some updates from this year's shareholder meeting season, which is now well underway? Yeah, we're seeing a whole lot of stuff from Christians now and or conservatives about de-banking, about de-platforming, and about religious discrimination based on religious or political view. So the debate is shifting. None of them are winning. They're not even getting very good votes. So we don't have a ground game yet.

I'm just going to be honest about that, right? We're putting the proposals forward, but we don't have a get out the vote effort. So that's, you know, that's on the to-do list. So we're really shifting the debate and I'm seeing when it comes to the big companies, instead of it being 10 to one proposals or 20 to one proposals from them compared to us, it's now getting more like 40 or 50%.

So we actually really have a debate going on now. We've had a lot of meetings with companies. Some companies have responded very well and made changes and said, for instance, JP Morgan Chase got rid of quote social risk as a cause to de-bank someone because that can be anything. Any group, if you're banking Sam Brownback and somebody says, well, I'm mad because I don't like his politics. Well, that's social risk, right?

And you can cancel them, but they got rid of social risk in their WePay app. So we're making progress with this, but it's a slow progress. And I'd urge Christians to be part of the fruit of the spirit is patience. The other side has been at it for 40 years. I've been at it for about four. Most of the new entrants have been at it for about one. So it is going to take some time to get things moving in the right direction.

Jerry, just about 45 seconds left. What would you say one or two issues you see coming on the horizon? I think the big one that nobody knows about is just how much activists are using the proxy voting process to attack Israel, either by pushing companies to divest from Israel, pushing travel companies to keep people away from Israel or pushing technology companies and arms manufacturers to disarm Israel. It's sneaky. It's hidden in the details of these things. A lot of Christians are going to get a proxy statement. They're not going to know it's there. They're going to throw it away. Christian asset managers are going to say, oh, well, this is risk of doing business in a conflict zone.

I guess we'll agree with it and end up voting against Israel. Wow. Well, we'll have to leave it there for today, Jerry, but I'm sure you'll have more on that in the days ahead. Thanks for stopping by, my friend. Thank you. God bless.

That's Jerry Boyer, our longtime economist, also president of Boyer Research and a regular columnist for World News Group at WNG.org. Your calls are next, 800-525-7000. I'm Rob West and this is Faith and Finance. If you enjoy this radio program, you're going to love all of the many different resources waiting for you at faithfi.com and the Faithfi app. You'll find powerful wisdom, free podcasts, articles, videos, and more from leading voices such as Randy Alcorn, Howard Dayton, Ron Blue, and our own Rob West. Grow in wisdom and knowledge by connecting with a community of thousands of Christians striving to be good and faithful stewards at faithfi.com or by downloading the Faithfi app. Are you a financial advisor or CPA seeking to build your practice on biblical wisdom? Not only does the certified Kingdom Advisor education provide you with deep biblical insights, the CKA designation sets you apart. Each year, almost 50,000 people search for a Christian financial advisor. Join our community and share your expertise with clients looking for someone who shares their faith and values.

Find more information at kingdomadvisors.com slash get certified. Great to have you with us today on Faith and Finance. We're taking your calls and questions today on anything financial. 800-525-7000 is the number to call. Again, lines are open. We're ready for your call right now.

800-525-7000. We'll head to the phones here in just a moment. But first, according to some new research from the Alliance for Lifetime Income, what we're seeing is most new retirees are claiming Social Security retirement benefits before age 65. Now, naturally, financial experts are urging retirees to consider waiting another five to even eight years to claim their Social Security benefits depending on whether they're taking it at 65 or even 62 because this results in significantly higher lifetime benefits.

Of course, the decision when to claim Social Security has to come down to ultimately the size of the monthly and lifetime benefits and what your need is today and in the future. More than half of the final cohort of the Baby Boom generation, which is about 30 million Americans, will turn 65 by 2030 and rely primarily on Social Security for income. Now, if you take Social Security as early as 62, you could see as much as a 30% reduction based on that full retirement benefit that you would have received if you waited. And then for every year you wait beyond full retirement age, you're going to see an increase in that check of about 8%. Now, here's what we see happening is that those who wait until age 70, obviously you're giving up the benefits you would have received between full retirement age and age 70. By doing so, you're going to end up with that check usually about 25% higher than full retirement age for the rest of your life. Now, how long does it take you to make up through that higher check of about 25% a month? How long does it take to make up what you gave up during the years between full retirement age and 70 when you were not collecting?

What we're seeing is about 12 years, so about the age of 82. And so if you live beyond 82, you've got that higher check, you've been paid back in full for that which you gave up, and then you enjoy that benefit a benefit check about 25% higher for the rest of your life. And so I think the idea here is if you have the ability to delay taking it, maybe you're working a few years longer than you anticipated, especially if you feel you are ill-prepared. You have not saved enough for retirement. I think there's something to be said about waiting to take that check, allowing that check to continue to grow so that you have a little bit more margin to be able to cover your expenses for the rest of your life.

Something to think about, especially in light of this data that says most new retirees are claiming benefits before the age of 65, which means they're taking a pretty significant reduction off of that full retirement age benefit. All right, let's head to the phones. Two lines open, 800-525-7000.

Let's go to Virginia. Hi, Sue Zuan. Thanks for calling. Go ahead.

Thank you for taking my call. I just read the book Home Equity and Reverse Mortgages and have decided to move forward to do that. I've contacted my bank and they don't do it. I did not find a list of banks maybe I could contact in the book. Do you have any suggestions in Virginia, specifically Richmond, of banks that do this?

Yeah. Well, what I would tell you is that, you know, we have a partner, an underwriter here at Faith and Finance that we've worked with for a long time, that are specialists in this area of reverse mortgages. The reason that we're partners with them is just because the organization is really founded on biblical principles. The CEO is a committed Christ follower, and they really are experts in this area.

So they're trusted and they cover the entire United States. So what I would do, at least alongside any other options you're exploring, is at the very least go to movement.com slash faith. That's Movement Mortgage.

You'll find them at movement.com forward slash faith. And then somebody can give you a call and talk through your options. Got it. Okay, I will absolutely do that. And I thank you so much for all you do and for this book, because it's made me feel a lot better about doing that.

Well, very good. Thank you for calling, Suzanne. May the Lord bless you and call anytime. 800-525-7000 is the number to call. Let's go to Mississippi. Hi, Diane.

How can I help? My house loan is only my husband's name. And I was wondering if I should try to put my name on it also, or just leave it the way it is. Yes. And so you're not talking about the deed to your home, Diane, you're talking about the mortgage specifically, is that right? That's right. Yeah.

Okay. You know, the only way to change the names listed on a mortgage would be to refinance in the the new borrower's names. Now, I don't think it's an issue because by law, if your spouse passes away, you are able to assume that mortgage. I think the main thing is that you're listed on the deed as co owners now, depending on the state you're in, and it does change in terms of whether it's a community property state or not, you know, that would likely not be an issue either, even if it was in your husband's name only. But if we're really just talking about the mortgage, and not the deed, you know, it's, it's definitely not worth refinancing at this point, just to get your name on it.

Because, you know, you're going to end up with a significantly higher interest rate in most cases. And if he were to pass away before you, you know, the law requires that you be able to assume that and then just continue on. Does that make sense? Yes, thank you. All right. Very good. Thank you for your call today. May the Lord bless you, Diane, we appreciate you being on the program. Quickly to Tennessee Marjorie. I just have less than two minutes.

How can I help? Okay. I'm gonna be 65 in June. I don't really want to work to my full retirement.

My job is very rewarding, but very stressful. I have no credit card bills or anything additional to mortgage and a car payment as far as the other just utility thing. My car payment is about $400 a month, and I still owe about 18,000 on it.

And I was wondering if it would be to my best interest instead of taking my additional commission checks every month that I typically put in savings and put that toward paying the car off. Yeah. What is the interest rate on it? About 50,000. I don't remember, honestly. I honestly don't know.

It's not very high. But these would be commission checks above your regular income? Yes.

Yes. And how quickly do you think you could pay the car off if you did that? I could probably pay that off by the end of the year. Okay. And then all you'd have left would be the mortgage at that point? That is correct.

I have about $175,000 in a simple IRA. Good. Okay, great.

Yeah, I like that plan, Marge. I mean, obviously, I don't know a whole lot here other than what you just described, which was very helpful. But I think that's great because it gives you a goal. It's surplus income. Obviously, you're paying some interest on that, so you're going to get a guaranteed return on that money equal to that interest. And it sets you up so that your living expenses are $400 lower every month when you hit retirement, which you say is not too far down the road, Lord willing. So I think that's a great plan.

I'd work as long as you can, grow that Social Security and build up your savings. But I do like this plan of paying off the car. Hey, thanks for calling today. That's going to do it for us today. I hope you found something encouraging and helpful today. A big thanks to my team. I certainly couldn't do it without them. Amy, Dan, Taylor, and Jim, may the Lord bless you. And I hope you'll come back and join us next time on Faith and Finance. We'll see you then. faith and finance is provided by faith by and listeners like you