Anheuser-Busch InBev is the world's largest beer company. They own Budweiser, Bud Light, Stella Artois, Corona (in most markets), Beck's, Michelob Ultra, Hoegaarden, Leffe, and about 500 other brands. In 2026 they do roughly 58 billion dollars a year in revenue and are the textbook example of a BRI exclusion.

Every single major Biblically Responsible Investing fund excludes BUD. Not "mostly excludes." Not "depending on the methodology." All of them. Eventide does not own it. Inspire BIBL does not own it. Timothy Plan does not own it. GuideStone does not own it. Praxis does not own it.

Why the unanimity? Let me walk through it.

The screen is simple

BRI funds generally screen out companies where alcohol production is a meaningful revenue stream, usually defined as more than 5 or 10 percent of total revenue. BUD is about 99 percent alcohol. There is no nuance here. No "but they have a bottled water division" argument. The company is beer, beer, and more beer.

Contrast that with, say, Nestle, which sells everything from baby formula to chocolate and, through its joint venture, also sells wine. Nestle is not screened out by most BRI funds because alcohol is a tiny fraction of its revenue. BUD is the opposite end of the spectrum.

The biblical case

Scripture is not teetotaling. Psalm 104:15 talks about God giving "wine to gladden the heart of man." Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding at Cana in John 2. Paul told Timothy to drink a little wine for his stomach (1 Timothy 5:23). The Bible is not down on alcohol as a substance.

What Scripture is down on is drunkenness and the harm it causes. Proverbs 20:1, "Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler, and whoever is led astray by it is not wise." Ephesians 5:18, "do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery." 1 Corinthians 6:10 lists drunkards among those who will not inherit the kingdom. Isaiah 5:11 pronounces woe on those who "rise early in the morning, that they may run after strong drink."

The BRI position is not that drinking a beer is a sin. The position is that running a massive business whose revenue depends on as many people as possible drinking as much as possible is different from growing grapes for a wedding. The mission of BUD is explicit in its investor relations materials, "grow the category." That means get more people drinking more often. When the business model is literally "maximize alcohol consumption worldwide," that is where BRI draws the line.

The scale of the harm

A quick data check. The CDC estimates that alcohol causes around 178,000 deaths per year in the United States alone. Globally, the WHO puts alcohol attributable deaths at roughly 2.6 million per year. Alcohol is implicated in domestic violence, drunk driving fatalities, cirrhosis, certain cancers, and about a third of all fatal car crashes in the US.

BUD's share of the global beer market is around 25 percent. If you want to do the grim math, that gives you a rough sense of the company's footprint in those statistics. BRI funds think owning a slice of that footprint, and collecting dividends off it, is not a faithful stewardship position.

Then came 2023

As if the straight alcohol screen was not enough, BUD ran into a marketing disaster in April 2023. A social media partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender influencer, triggered a boycott that crushed Bud Light sales in the US. Bud Light lost its position as America's best selling beer. BUD stock dropped from the low 70s to the high 50s in a matter of weeks.

For BRI funds that also screen for LGBTQ advocacy (most of them do in some form), BUD now had a second strike. It was already excluded for alcohol, but for the strict subset of BRI funds that flag corporate advocacy, the Mulvaney partnership moved BUD from "excluded" to "extra excluded."

In hindsight, the boycott did real damage. Modelo Especial (which is owned in the US by Constellation Brands, another excluded stock) overtook Bud Light as the top selling beer in mid 2023. BUD's North American volumes were down significantly for years. The company's response was confused and slow, and consumer trust in Bud Light specifically never fully recovered.

Moral of the story for BRI investors: they were not in the stock. For everyone else who was, they took a hit.

The financial case for exclusion

BUD has been a mediocre investment for a long time, honestly. The stock traded around 130 dollars in 2016. In early 2026 it is in the high 50s. That is a decade of pain for shareholders. Debt from the 2016 SABMiller acquisition put the company in a tough spot, and the post-COVID consumer environment has not been kind to beer in general.

So BRI funds got the conviction win without giving up much return. If you had owned the S&P 500 for the last decade instead of BUD, you would have roughly tripled your money. Sometimes doing the right thing and the profitable thing line up. This is one of those times.

What about shareholder engagement

A reasonable counterargument to full exclusion is the shareholder engagement model. You buy the stock, you vote your shares, you attend the annual meeting, you push management on harmful practices. This is the approach ESG advocates often take. Own it, pressure it, change it.

BRI funds mostly reject this logic for core business exclusions. The argument is, you can pressure a company to stop dumping chemicals in a river. You can not pressure a company to stop making beer, because beer is the company. The only way to "change" BUD would be to dismantle it. That is not a realistic shareholder engagement target.

For secondary issues (marketing, labor practices, corporate giving), shareholder engagement makes more sense. For core business exclusions, full divestment is the only move that makes the position coherent.

The Constellation Brands question

Constellation Brands (STZ) is interesting because it is both an alcohol producer (Modelo, Corona in the US, various wine brands) and a cannabis investor through its stake in Canopy Growth. Constellation is excluded from every BRI fund, same as BUD, but the cannabis exposure adds an extra layer for funds that have cannabis in their screen. As of 2026, Constellation has been trying to unwind its Canopy stake, but the exclusion holds regardless.

What this means for your portfolio

If you hold VOO (the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF) or SPY or any broad market fund, you own BUD. As of early 2026, BUD has a small weight in international indexes but is not in the S&P 500 (it trades in the US as an ADR and is Belgian headquartered). So US investors who buy VOO or SPY do not actually own BUD directly, but they often own Constellation Brands and Molson Coors, which are in the index.

If you want to exclude alcohol producers, you can do it in a few ways. Buy a BRI fund like BIBL or ETGLX and let the screens do the work. Use an ESG fund that happens to exclude sin stocks (some do, many do not, check the methodology). Or hold the S&P 500 and manually exclude the alcohol names with a custom brokerage arrangement, which is harder to do cheaply for retail investors.

Direct indexing has become cheaper in 2026, and a few platforms (Wealthfront, Betterment, Fidelity) now offer customization that lets you exclude specific stocks from an index-tracked portfolio. That is probably the simplest way for a DIY investor to cut BUD and its peers without giving up the broad market exposure.

The honest takeaway

BUD is an easy call for BRI. The screen is straightforward, the biblical logic is clear, the harm is documented, and the company's own marketing has made it even easier to exclude. There is no reasonable BRI framework that lands on "own BUD." If you are moving your portfolio toward biblical alignment, this is one of the first names to go.

1 Corinthians 10:23 says, "All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful." The question for a Christian investor is not "is it legal to own BUD?" (obviously) but "does owning it help the mission I care about?" BRI funds have answered that question with a unanimous no. I think they have that one right.

Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD): Why BRI Funds Won't Touch It