On Wednesday, Alliance Defending Freedom released its fourth-annual Viewpoint Diversity Score Business Index. The premier benchmark for measuring corporate respect for free speech and religious liberty, the Index scored 100 publicly traded corporations in its 2025 edition. Last year’s edition drove 22 policy and behavioral changes at America’s top corporations over the past year.

Leveraging the Index, ADF has worked alongside values-aligned investors to file 74 shareholder proposals at major companies this year, dwarfing last year’s total of 28. That accounts for 61% of all proposals filed by conservative shareholders this proxy season and more than 22% of all proposals that addressed social issues. Oklahoma Treasurer Todd Russ filed five of those resolutions through proxy advisory service Bowyer Research, including a proposal at Lululemon, which held its annual shareholder meeting Wednesday. Utilizing investments from his state’s Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust, Russ is the first Republican state official to file resolutions calling for fiscal prioritization over politicization.

“Activists have weaponized corporations to achieve their fringe political agendas for far too long,” said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel and Vice President of Corporate Engagement Jeremy Tedesco. “Thankfully, we’re starting to see common sense and respect for fundamental freedoms return to the corporate boardroom. Shareholder-first advocates like Treasurer Russ are doing their part to exercise their rights as owners in these companies, and we’re honored to come alongside them with the legal expertise and strategic insight to chart a new path forward for corporate America.”

As Russ’ proposal highlights, Lululemon has made a series of highly questionable decisions that prioritized ideology over sound business practices in recent years. At the top of the list is the company’s policy on shoplifting, which garnered headlines less than two years ago when it fired two Georgia women because they had respectfully and verbally confronted two shoplifters before calling the police. Meanwhile, Lululemon executives were writing six-figure checks to pro-looting, anti-police groups like Reclaim the Block and Black Lives Matter.

Russ also filed resolutions at Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Netflix, and YUM! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell).

The 100 companies on the Business Index are drawn from the financial services, insurance, software, and technology industries—which represent the greatest threat for digital and financial censorship in the marketplace. The Business Index’s findings over 46 benchmarks apply to all industries, setting the stage for engagement via the shareholder resolution process across a wide variety of American companies.

Key findings of the Business Index include the following:

  • 92% of digital services providers rely on so-called “acceptable use policies” that censor “hate speech,” “intolerance,” and similar terms.
  • 90% of companies promote workforce training policies that use divisive concepts like critical theory.
  • 64% support organizations like the widely discredited Southern Poverty Law Center and the Human Rights Campaign, which pressure corporations to restrict constitutional freedoms.

The biggest Business Index win this year came at JPMorgan Chase, which recently agreed to enact a major policy change to prevent future discriminatory debanking in exchange for the withdrawal of an ADF resolution. ADF and its allies also scored a major win at IBM, which adopted a new stance of viewpoint neutrality in its advertising policies in exchange for the Heritage Foundation’s agreement to pull its resolution from the proxy ballot.

Other victories this year came at PepsiCo, Comcast, Mastercard, Johnson & Johnson, Charles Schwab, Citigroup, and Walmart. Overall, the coalition’s proposals resulted in 80 meetings with 45 different companies, leveraging over $250 billion in assets and state financial officers from 14 states.

“Companies don’t exist to appease activists but to deliver the best quality of goods and services,” said Tedesco. “We have a lot of work still to do, but we’re confident that our combined efforts will make a lasting impact on America’s business leaders as they seek to do right by their investors, employees, and customers.”