Written by Mark W. Hendrickson |
Monday, August 22, 2022
To get swept up in the latest CSR or ESG fad is bad business. By pursuing partisan political goals instead of traditional business goals, business leaders offend some consumers, demoralize or anger some employees, and poorly serve their shareholders. Since consumers, employees, and shareholders are the members of society that a business affects most directly, it follows that sacrificing their welfare in the name of certain activists’ cause hurts society. In practice, ESG can be very antisocial.

What is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)? Wikipedia defines CSR as “a form of … private business self-regulation which aims to contribute to societal goals of a philanthropic, activist, or charitable nature.” That seems rather vague, even amorphous. As Wikipedia acknowledges, “A wide variety of definitions have been developed but with little consensus.”
Investopedia says that CSR “helps a company be socially accountable to itself, its stakeholders, and the public” and that CSR helps companies be aware of their impact “on all aspects of society, including economic, social, and environmental.” Once again, the very definition of CSR seems fuzzy, even amorphous.
The basic problem is that the concept of CSR is highly subjective. It all depends on what any particular advocate of CSR expects or wants corporations to do for the alleged betterment of society. What tends to distinguish the most vocal advocates of CSR is that they generally operate outside of the corporations that they are trying to influence. In fact, most of them have no experience at business. They prefer to tell businesses what they should do.
Traditionally, in our (mostly) free-market economic system, corporations have been deemed to have several sets of stakeholders—people with a direct connection to the activities of the corporation. These stakeholders include the corporation’s customers, its shareholders (owners), its employees, and its suppliers, distributors, lenders, etc.
CSR activists reject such a circumscribed, well-defined list of stakeholders. They argue that “society” itself is a stakeholder, and then they appoint themselves spokespersons for society, presuming to tell corporations how they should alter their business practices, revise their product lines, allocate their capital, and so on. If you agree with the political objectives of CSR activists, you might support the activists’ assertions that they are legitimate stakeholders in the corporation’s activities. If, on the other hand, it seems fishy to you that people who don’t own a business or work for that business should have as much or more say about corporate policies than the business’s shareholders, customers, and employees, then you would be inclined to view CSR activists as intrusive meddlers.
Activists play hardball. They often intimidate corporate leaders into making concessions using threats of bad publicity. One wonders, in these cases, where the legal line between free speech and extortion lies. Clearly, outside activists have little respect for the property rights of the legal owners of the corporation when they attempt to hijack a corporation to promote their favored political goals.
The current guise adopted by the CSR folks is called ESG: Environmental, Social, Governance scores. ESG has become a blunt instrument used to raise the costs of targeted businesses and sometimes to steer capital away from them.
In the area of the environment, activists and elite money managers tend not to focus on pollution. Indeed, that would be mostly superfluous, given the strict environmental regulations with which American businesses must comply. Instead, their scoring system penalizes both businesses and state governments for the “sin” of using or developing fossil fuels. Thus, ESG scores give states such as West Virginia lower scores of creditworthiness, even though their finances are in order and their bond-ratings high. And companies that produce fossil fuels, or even those companies that deal with fossil-fuel companies, are given low scores designed to discourage anyone from lending capital to them. In other words, activists try to asphyxiate such companies by denying access to the financial oxygen of capital.
ESG is an even bigger farce when it claims to seek “social improvements.” Today, many American citizens are struggling under soaring gasoline prices and rising heating and cooling costs due to the anti-fossil fuel policies of the Biden administration and its ESG allies. Perversely, ESG activists use low social scores to hamstring the very companies that could produce the energy that Americans so desperately need. If anyone deserves low social scores, it would be the ESG advocates who are crippling the production of fossil fuels that Americans so badly need.
As for governance, pressures from the self-anointed ESG graders may cause corporate leaders to misgovern their companies to the detriment of shareholders, employees, and customers. Two prominent examples of the danger posed by ESG to sound corporate governance are last year’s decision by Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred to move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta (taking a partisan position on a Georgia election law and thereby alienating many fans) and this year’s fiasco at Disney.
The Disney CEO declared that his company opposed a new Florida law that prohibits the teaching of sexual identity to children before the fourth grade. Regardless of how one feels about a particular law, it is poor corporate governance for a corporation to take an official stance on contentious moral issues. Inevitably, some customers are on one side, others on the other side. The same with employees and shareholders. Consequently, every time corporate leaders take an official corporate position on some controversial issue, they foolishly and gratuitously alienate a significant percentage of their legitimate stakeholders. And for what? To placate outside activists who often have zero actual stake in the corporation. CEOs should no more declare that their corporations are on one side or the other of a political controversy than to say the company officially supports a specific church or political party. The wise and respectful approach is for the company to remain officially neutral while encouraging its stakeholders to follow their own conscience in deciding which laws and initiatives to support and whether to do so privately or publicly.
Bottom line: A corporation can’t be all things to all people. To survive and to prosper, corporations need to focus on satisfying their customers and those to whom they have fiduciary and moral responsibilities, i.e., their shareholders and employees. To get swept up in the latest CSR or ESG fad is bad business. By pursuing partisan political goals instead of traditional business goals, business leaders offend some consumers, demoralize or anger some employees, and poorly serve their shareholders. Since consumers, employees, and shareholders are the members of society that a business affects most directly, it follows that sacrificing their welfare in the name of certain activists’ cause hurts society. In practice, ESG can be very antisocial.
Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is a retired adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with the Institute for Faith and Freedom at Grove City College. Used with permission.

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Prayer, by human persons to the living and personal God, is far more than transactional. It is relational, and often incremental, with measured, humble boldness. God leads us, like Moses, into prayer. We make our requests. He answers in time. We learn more of him, which leads us to ask to see more of him.

It is one of the most audacious, and awe-inspiring, moments in all of Scripture.
In the wake of Israel’s shocking rebellion against God — blatantly violating the covenant God just made with them — Moses humbly dares to mediate between God and his people. At the climax of his intercession, and his careful yet determined dialogue with the living God, Moses makes what is perhaps the greatest, and most perceptive, petition a creature can of his Creator.
And it is, after all, a prayer — a modest yet bold request, made by man, to God Almighty: “Please show me your glory.”
That this is, in some sense, a special moment is plain. We do not stand in Moses’s sandals. We are not prophets called to mediate a covenant, nor do we live under that Sinai pact. Yet Moses’s prayer still functions as a model for the godly after him. It will not be the last prayer in Scripture for a sight of God’s glory, and rightly do the faithful echo it today. What might we who are in Christ learn about our own prayers from the amazing sequence of Moses’s pressing into God in Exodus 32–33?
Can and Will God Forgive?
Before wrestling with the prayer itself, we need to first acknowledge Moses’s haunting question: Could and would God forgive the people such a horrific breach of the covenant? Moses was not yet sure. He heard stories of his forefathers, encountered God at the bush, and witnessed the plagues in Egypt and the rescue in the Red Sea. Moses knew a powerful God who had delivered his people, but would he also forgive them?
At first, it looked like he wouldn’t. When God first informed Moses, on the mountain, that the people had “corrupted themselves,” by making and worshiping a golden calf (32:7–8), God had said, “Let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them. . .” (32:10). As Moses began to plead that God withhold destruction, it was far from clear that any relationship of peace could be fully restored.
God did relent of immediately consuming the people (32:14), yet the covenant remained broken. Although Moses went down the mountain, confronted the people in their rebellion, burnt the calf, disciplined the people (32:15–20), and oversaw the purging of the three thousand who led in the rebellion (32:21–29), Moses knew this did not restore what lay shattered. The next day, he returned to meet God on the mountain.
What drives Moses’s sequence of prayer in Exodus 33 is the question he begins to ask in 32:32: Can and will Yahweh forgive? Will God restore the relationship, and dwell among them, after they had worshiped the golden calf? And as we will see, God draws prayer out of Moses, and then moves to answer Moses’s question, in a way far more powerful, and memorable, than if there had not been an unfolding, developing, deepening relationship with God.
Moses, Teach Us to Pray
Exodus 33 begins with God declaring to the people that even though he will give them the land promised to their forefathers, God himself will not go up among them (33:3). They mourn this “disastrous word.” They want him, not just the promised land. They humble themselves before God, taking off their ornaments “from Mount Horeb onward” (33:6).
Even though the people heard this disastrous word, however, Moses continues to enjoy remarkable favor with God. In a tent pitched far off from the camp, God speaks with Moses (33:9), and verse 11 comments: “Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.” This sets the scene for Moses’s remarkable intercessory prayer in 33:12–18.
Observe, then, at least three lessons Christians today might take from Moses’s otherwise inimitable prayer.
1. Prayer responds to God.
The living God takes the initiative. He first announced to Moses the people’s breach of the covenant (32:7–10). And he revealed his enduring favor on Moses, prompting the prophet to reply. So too for us. We don’t just “dial up” God in prayer when we so wish. First, he speaks, as he has revealed himself in his world, and in his word, and in his Son, the Word.
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Let us not read God’s Word for self-promotion, self-justification, or self-improvement. Rather, may we approach Scripture as those who love God and desire to know Him more, as those who desire transformation into the image of Christ, and as those who know that the Holy Spirit uses the Word to strengthen His people to endure to the end.

As a newly saved college student, I stumbled across Jeremiah 15:16 in my Bible reading:
Your words were found, and I ate them,and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart, for I am called by your name, O LORD, God of hosts.
This vivid depiction of the happiness that springs up in the heart from taking in God’s Word deeply resonated with my newfound faith and my newfound delight in reading the Bible.
God’s Word is precious to believers. Yet because of the indwelling sin that remains in us, we can be tempted to do good things for the wrong reasons. What then, should be our motives and goals when we come to God’s Word? I’d like to suggest three. As Jeremiah ate the words of the Lord, so too can we as we approach Scripture for the purposes of awe, transformation, and endurance.
1. Awe
An encounter with the God of the universe can’t help but produce awe and wonder in those to whom He reveals Himself. He is glorious and majestic, unlike anyone or anything else:
The LORD reigns; he is robed in majesty . . .  Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the LORD on high is mighty!” (Ps. 93:1, 4)
His greatness is unsearchable, and He is glorious, splendid, and majestic (see Ps. 145:3, 5). Holy Scripture is how we come to better know the God who has called us to Himself.
To be sure, our Bible reading won’t always evoke the degree of awe from us that is due Him. But through the work of the Holy Spirit, God can and does draw us into a deeper knowledge of Himself that results in true worship and greater love for Him. We marvel at His power and His wisdom (see Ps. 62:11; Rom. 16:27). We are comforted by His love and His sovereignty (see 1 John 3:1; Eph. 1:11). Therefore, one proper motivation for reading the Bible is to be drawn into a deeper knowledge of—and therefore deeper awe, appreciation, love, and gratitude for—its Author.
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