Unlike categories such as gambling or pornography, tobacco occupies a distinctive place in the BRI screening landscape. Scripture does not mention tobacco by name and its widespread use was unknown to the ancient biblical world. Yet the Bible's robust teachings on the body as a temple of the Holy Spirit, the imperative of self-control, and the condemnation of anything that enslaves the human will provide a clear and compelling foundation for why producing and distributing tobacco products stands in conflict with biblical values.
Tobacco is the world's leading cause of preventable death, killing approximately 8 million people each year, nearly half of all long-term users. Unlike alcohol, which Scripture presents with nuance and even uses as a symbol of divine blessing, tobacco offers no analogous positive counterpart in Christian thought or practice. The product is addictive by design; its most consistent effects are disease, dependence, and premature death. Nicotine, tobacco's primary active compound, is one of the most addictive substances known to medicine, chemically enslaving users in a manner that directly undermines the God-given capacity for self-governance.3
As of the 2025 research update, Inspire Insight cites 56 instances of Tobacco violators matching this definition.
People die from tobacco use each year globally—including ~1.2 million non-smokers killed by secondhand smoke—making tobacco the world's leading cause of preventable death.1
Estimated global tobacco market value in 2024, projected to exceed $1.2 trillion by 20322
The reach of the tobacco industry is staggering. Approximately 1.3 billion people around the world currently use tobacco products, and tobacco companies continue to spend billions annually to recruit new users, disproportionately targeting young people in low- and middle-income countries as consumption declines in the West. It is this deliberate and systematic disregard for human flourishing and the sanctity of the body that motivates BRI investors to screen tobacco companies from their portfolios.4
While tobacco is never mentioned by name in Scripture, the Bible provides a rich and coherent framework for evaluating whether Christians should participate in, or financially support, an industry built upon addiction and bodily harm. That framework rests on four interlocking pillars: the body as God's temple, the imperative of self-control and sobriety, the principle of loving one's neighbor, and the consistent biblical warning against enslavement to earthly desires.
Perhaps the most direct biblical principle applicable to tobacco is Paul's teaching that the believer's body is not their own but belongs to God, indwelt by His Spirit and purchased by Christ's blood. The deliberate, habitual introduction of a known carcinogen and addictive compound into that body stands in direct tension with this calling to honor God with one's physical life.
"Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body."
"Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy, and you are that temple."
"Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God."
"I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship."
Scripture's instruction to honor God with the body is not ancillary to salvation, it is presented as an act of worship. The tobacco industry, by contrast, profits from a product whose sole mode of consumption systematically damages the body that God created, redeemed, and indwells.
The Bible consistently presents self-control as a fruit of the Holy Spirit and a hallmark of godly living. Addiction, by its very nature, is the abdication of self-control, a form of involuntary bondage to a substance that no longer serves the person but instead commands them. Nicotine's mechanism of physical and psychological dependence makes tobacco categorically incompatible with the biblical vision of a life that is free, governed by the Spirit, and surrendered to Christ's lordship alone.
"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law."
""All things are lawful for me," but not all things are helpful. "All things are lawful for me," but I will not be dominated by anything."
"Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour."
"If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest you have your fill of it and vomit it."
The principle in 1 Corinthians 6:12 ('I will not be dominated by anything') is particularly incisive in the context of tobacco. Nicotine addiction does not merely present a health risk; it represents a spiritual one, redirecting the will's allegiance away from Christ and toward a chemical dependency that users typically describe as extraordinarily difficult to break.
Biblical ethics are never purely individualistic. The call to love one's neighbor as oneself (Matthew 22:39) extends to how believers deploy economic power and financial capital. The tobacco industry's business model depends on recruiting new addicted users, a process that disproportionately targets adolescents and people in economically vulnerable communities. Christians who financially support this model through investment participate, in a meaningful sense, in the harm their capital enables.
"And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
"The commandments are summed up in this word: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law."
"And he said to his disciples, 'Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.'"
The weight of Luke 17 is particularly sobering when applied to an industry whose internal documents, released through decades of litigation, confirm that executives knowingly engineered products and marketing campaigns to hook children before their decision-making faculties were fully formed. The spiritual accountability Scripture assigns to those who cause 'the little ones' to stumble does not diminish because that harm is mediated through a corporate structure and a publicly traded share price.
Tobacco's history is a story of immense cultural diffusion, industrial ambition, and the slow and painful reckoning with catastrophic human cost. Indigenous peoples of the Americas cultivated and ceremonially used tobacco for thousands of years before European contact. When Spanish and Portuguese explorers encountered tobacco in the 16th century, they carried it back to Europe, where it spread as a fashionable novelty. By the early 17th century, tobacco had become a cornerstone of the colonial economy. It was John Rolfe's successful cultivation of Nicotiana tabacum in Virginia in 1612 that established tobacco as the economic engine of England's first permanent American colony and created the template for the transatlantic tobacco trade.5
For much of the 17th through 19th centuries, tobacco was consumed primarily as pipe tobacco, chewing tobacco, and snuff. That changed fundamentally in 1880 when James Bonsack invented the cigarette-rolling machine, which was acquired by James Buchanan Duke. Duke's American Tobacco Company, founded in 1890, could produce cigarettes at a price that made mass-market distribution possible for the first time. A 1911 Supreme Court antitrust ruling dissolved the American Tobacco Company, but the successor companies (R.J. Reynolds, Liggett & Myers, Lorillard, and others) simply divided the market and continued to expand.6
The 20th century saw tobacco companies ascend to extraordinary cultural and political influence. Through radio, film, and television, cigarettes were promoted as symbols of sophistication, masculinity, and even health, physicians appeared in advertisements for Camel and Chesterfield cigarettes as late as the 1950s. By the early 1960s, nearly half the U.S. adult population smoked. The tide turned decisively on January 11, 1964, when Surgeon General Luther Terry released a landmark report definitively linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, and other diseases, widely regarded as one of the most consequential public health announcements in American history.7
The regulatory response was gradual but cumulative. Congress required warning labels on cigarette packaging in 1965 and in 1971 banned cigarette advertising on television and radio under the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act. Despite these measures, tobacco companies continued to grow through aggressive marketing and overseas expansion. A pivotal reckoning arrived in April 1994 when executives of the seven largest U.S. tobacco companies testified before Congress that they did not believe nicotine was addictive—testimony that directly contradicted internal corporate research suppressed for decades. 8 9
"We must in the near future provide some answers which will give smokers a psychological crutch and a self-rationale to continue smoking".
—VP of Philip Morris USA, internal company memorandum written shortly after the release of the landmark 1964 U.S. Surgeon General's report on smoking and health, which publicly linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer and other diseases
In November 1998, Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, and Lorillard entered the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) with 46 state attorneys general, agreeing to pay a minimum of $206 billion over 25 years to reimburse states for tobacco-related healthcare costs. The MSA also banned advertising directed at minors, eliminated cartoon mascots like Joe Camel, and restricted outdoor advertising. Though critics argued the MSA failed to mandate meaningful product changes, it represented the largest civil litigation settlement in U.S. history at the time.10
The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009 granted the FDA sweeping authority to regulate tobacco products for the first time, including the power to restrict marketing, mandate disclosure of ingredients, and require larger graphic warning labels. The law explicitly prohibited describing any tobacco product as 'light,' 'mild,' or 'low tar' without FDA authorization. Though it did not authorize the FDA to ban nicotine outright, it fundamentally altered the regulatory landscape for tobacco companies.11
Even as combustible cigarette use declined in high-income countries, the industry pivoted aggressively into new products and new markets. E-cigarettes arrived commercially in the mid-2000s, and the explosive growth of JUUL, a USB-drive-shaped device delivering nicotine concentrations far exceeding traditional cigarettes, reframed the market entirely. In December 2018, Altria Group invested $12.8 billion for a 35% stake in JUUL Labs, valuing the company at $38 billion and signaling that established tobacco companies had fully embraced next-generation nicotine delivery.12
The JUUL era produced an acute public health crisis of its own. Teen vaping rates surged, driven by appealing flavors, discreet hardware, and viral social media marketing. In December 2018, the U.S. Surgeon General declared e-cigarette use among youth a public health epidemic. By 2023, e-cigarettes were the most commonly used tobacco product among U.S. middle and high school students. Today, the global tobacco industry is dominated by five publicly traded conglomerates, Philip Morris International (PMI), Altria Group, British American Tobacco (BAT), Japan Tobacco International (JTI), and Imperial Brands, whose combined market capitalizations represent hundreds of billions of dollars of investor capital.13
Inspire's screening definition for Tobacco is intentionally comprehensive: companies that derive revenue from producing or exclusively distributing tobacco products are flagged as violators. This captures the full commercial spectrum of tobacco, cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, smokeless tobacco (chewing tobacco, snuff, and snus), and electronic nicotine delivery systems (e-cigarettes, vaping products, and heated tobacco devices) manufactured or distributed by tobacco entities. The definition is precise in one key respect: it does not flag companies that merely carry tobacco products among a wide range of consumer goods, but it does flag companies whose business is substantially constituted by producing or exclusively distributing such products.14
Since tobacco, similar to alcohol, is an easily tacked product, the primary data sources for tobacco research are common data institutions like Bloomberg and Sustainalytics. When these sources identify a potential violator, Inspire Insight analysts visit the company's website to verify that its operations align with the category definition, using the company's website as the primary sourcing document. This verification step ensures that Inspire's methodology is grounded in current, first-party information rather than relying solely on aggregated databases that may lag behind corporate restructurings, acquisitions, or product changes.15
One area warranting particular attention is the treatment of reduced-risk and next-generation tobacco products. Companies such as Philip Morris International have heavily promoted heated tobacco products (e.g., IQOS) as fundamentally less harmful than combustible cigarettes. In July 2020, the FDA authorized IQOS to be marketed with 'exposure modification' claims,a significant regulatory milestone. While the FDA's action acknowledged meaningful differences in certain harmful constituent exposures compared to cigarettes, IQOS still delivers nicotine through tobacco-derived means, its long-term health effects remain under study, and it is manufactured by a tobacco company as a core business line. Inspire treats heated tobacco products, e-cigarettes, and vaping devices manufactured by tobacco conglomerates as within the tobacco screening category. Any company whose revenue is materially tied to producing or exclusively distributing nicotine-tobacco products is a violator under this screen.16
The human cost of the tobacco industry is not abstract, it is measured in millions of preventable deaths every year from a product that companies have long known to be lethal and addictive. In the United States, tobacco remains the leading cause of preventable death, killing approximately 480,000 Americans annually. To place that figure in context: tobacco kills more Americans each year than alcohol, illegal drugs, HIV/AIDS, motor vehicle accidents, and firearms combined. Globally, the toll reaches 8 million deaths per year, with roughly 80 percent occurring in low- and middle-income countries where tobacco companies continue to expand as Western consumption gradually declines.24
The suffering tobacco causes extends far beyond mortality statistics. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), coronary heart disease, stroke, and at least 12 forms of cancer are causally linked to tobacco use. The U.S. healthcare system absorbs more than $240 billion per year in direct medical costs attributable to smoking, and the total economic burden, including lost productivity from premature death and disability, exceeds $600 billion annually. These costs are borne not only by individuals and families most directly harmed, but by taxpayers, insurance pools, and communities that absorb the chronic burden of tobacco-related illness.25
Perhaps most damning is the tobacco industry's systematic targeting of young people, conduct documented not from external critics but from the companies' own internal records. Documents released through decades of litigation established that tobacco executives deliberately engineered products and devised marketing strategies to recruit adolescent 'starter smokers,' fully aware that long-term customer acquisition depended on hooking users before the age of eighteen. The archives held by the University of California San Francisco's Industry Documents Library contain millions of pages of such records, representing one of the most thoroughly documented cases of corporate deception in American legal history.26
The modern vaping epidemic represents a continuation of this pattern in a new medium. JUUL's rapid ascent to more than 75 percent of the U.S. e-cigarette market was built substantially on social media marketing, influencer campaigns, and candy-inspired flavors, a strategy that deliberately targeted a generation of young people who had largely escaped the combustible cigarette era. By 2018, one in five high school students reported using e-cigarettes. In December 2018, the U.S. Surgeon General declared youth e-cigarette use a public health epidemic, the same month Altria completed its $12.8 billion stake in JUUL. The convergence of those two events captures, with uncomfortable clarity, the industry's enduring priorities.27 28
From a BRI perspective, the human cost of tobacco is inseparable from the spiritual cost. Every premature death represents the loss of an image-bearer of God, someone uniquely formed by His hand, purposed for His glory, and loved by Christ to the point of His death and resurrection. Every young person ensnared in nicotine addiction has had a portion of their God-given freedom taken from them by a company that knowingly engineered that outcome. And every investor who financially supports that company through capital allocation shares, in some measure, in the consequences of those choices.
The Scriptures call believers to live as faithful stewards, not only of their finances, but of their bodies, their influence, and the testimony their choices project to a watching world. The following biblical principles speak directly to the tobacco industry and inform Inspire's screening approach:
Any company that generates revenue from producing or distributing products designed to addict and harm image-bearers of God, and that systematically recruits new users among the young, falls outside the boundaries of enterprises that BRI investors should support. For Inspire, screening tobacco is not merely a matter of health ethics or financial prudence. It is a matter of faithfulness: a commitment to deploy capital in ways that honor God, protect the vulnerable, and refuse complicity in industries whose business model depends on human suffering.
