Are Religious People More Charitable than Non-Believers?

I was watching “The Great God Debate” featuring atheist Christopher Hitchens and the Jewish Rabbi David Wolpe on YouTube the other day. Like many of the encounters Hitchens has with religious leaders, the debate was spirited and quite enjoyable, particularly because Wolpe isn’t your typical fire-breathing religious fundamentalist.

One topic that came up—and invariably does in these debates—was the issue of charitable giving, and the fact that religious people give appreciably more of their time and money to charity than secular people.

While Hitchens attempted to rebut that assertion by pointing out that religious charitable giving often comes with strings attached—i.e. as part of some type of evangelical outreach to win more converts—I think the basic truth that religious people give more is hard to deny. Hitches also talked about the Richard Dawkins Foundation’s effort to raise money for survivors of the Haitian earthquake which, while laudable, but doesn’t begin to cover the shortfall.

While I was looking for more information on the subject, I came across this article on the Hoover Institute’s web site, Religious Faith and Charitable Giving by Arthur C. Brooks. The numbers Brooks presents are quite compelling:

The differences in charity between secular and religious people are dramatic. Religious people are 25 percentage points more likely than secularists to donate money (91 percent to 66 percent) and 23 points more likely to volunteer time (67 percent to 44 percent). And, consistent with the findings of other writers, these data show that practicing a religion is more important than the actual religion itself in predicting charitable behavior. For example, among those who attend worship services regularly, 92 percent of Protestants give charitably, compared with 91 percent of Catholics, 91 percent of Jews, and 89 percent from other religions.

But note that the difference doesn’t just apply to Christians. People of all religious faiths are equally generous with their time and money. So whatever the reason is, it’s not a reason specific to one religion. Thus believers cannot legitimately claim that their generosity is because of some intrinsic moral virtue or rectitude of their faith. There must be factors at work that are common to all major religious groups.

Furthermore, the importance of charitable giving isn’t restricted to one political group within a religion either:

Note that neither political ideology nor income is responsible for much of the charitable differences between secular and religious people. For example, religious liberals are 19 points more likely than secular liberals to give to charity, while religious conservatives are 28 points more likely than secular conservatives to do so. In other words, religious conservatives (who give and volunteer at rates of 91 percent and 67 percent) appear to differ from secular liberals (who give and volunteer at rates of 72 percent and 52 percent) more due to religion than to politics.

Religious liberals are also much more likely to donate time and money to charitable causes than their non-believing counterparts. (This does not surprise me in the least since my parents are both liberal Christians and have always donated a lot of their time and money to charitable works.) Now it is true that liberals typically believe that the government should have a greater role in helping the poor and needy in society which, in turn, should reduce the need for private donations, but that belief certainly doesn’t stop religious liberals donating their time and money at the higher rates typical of all religious believers, so the reason why religious people give more is little to do with politics.

Finally, after a lengthy critique of government welfare and how he believes it is harming religious faith and charitable giving, Brooks gets around to addressing the causes of why religious believers tend to be more generous than non-believers:

It might be that religion simply has a strong pedagogical (endogenous) influence over giving and volunteering. Houses of worship might teach their congregants the religious duty to give, and about both the physical and spiritual needs of the poor. Simply put, people may be more likely to learn charity inside a church, synagogue, or mosque than outside.

I don’t think there is any doubt that houses of worship are highly influential when it comes to charitable giving. But it’s much more than just teaching people that they should give.

First, congregants are not only taught that it is their moral duty to give, they are often told in no uncertain terms that “they will be known by their fruits”—that if they are indeed faithful to their religion, they will show it by donating their time and money to worthy causes. This is an incentive above and beyond just telling people that it is the right thing to do.

Second, religious leaders are constantly reminding their congregants of their religious duty to give generously, particularly in times of crisis. For example, how many American pastors passed up the opportunity to preach a sermon about the moral responsibility of looking after those less fortunate than ourselves in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Very few, I’d wager. And it’s not just the leaders who regularly remind believers about charity, it’s peer pressure too. In any congregation there will always be a number of people looking for help with one worthy cause or another—looking for people to help staff the local homeless shelter, looking for sponsors for a marathon run in aid of earthquake victims, and so on. If you are an active member of religious community, it’s hard to avoid all these requests for your time and money.

Finally, religious institutions encourage charitable donations by setting up the infrastructure that makes giving as easy and painless as possible. Every Sunday in millions of churches around the world, a collection plate is passed under every congregant’s nose. In many of those churches, you can even set up a monthly direct debit to send your money from your bank account to the church’s own coffers without lifting a finger. And as a bonus, you get to save some money on your taxes too. There are stalls in the church coffee room selling Traidcraft goods in aid of Third World poverty, and tables set up where people can volunteer their time to help out in the local community—no need to organize anything, just turn up on the day and help. The list of ways that religious institutions help people donate their time and money to charitable causes is endless.

It’s also worth remembering that while most organizations charge a membership fee in order to help fund its financial obligations, religious organizations typically do not, and thus all monies collected from members in support of their operations are classed as charity, thus greatly boosting the overall amount religious people donate.

Compare all that with the experience of the non-believer. There is little question that the vast majority of non-religious people believe that charitable giving is a good and moral thing to do. Even without access to a vast religious infrastructure to help them, two-thirds of all non-believers still donate money to charity on a regular basis. So why don’t non-believers donate as much or as often?

Simply put, they lack the same motivations and opportunities that religious people have.

Non-believers do not have their moral duty to give to charity preached at fifty-two Sundays a year. They do not have a collection plate waved in their face every week reminding them of their obligation to make a donation. They do not typically frequent places where large on-going efforts to raise money for charity are underway, and they usually only have their consciences stirred when some great tragedy hits the news headlines—like the Ethiopian famines, Hurricane Katrina, or the Haitian earthquake.

So I don’t think that it is at all surprising that non-religious people give less of their time and money to charity. But it’s not because non-believers are intrinsically less moral in any way, it’s simply because they lack the same obligations, encouragement, and outlets that religious people have.

Brooks finishes his article with an excellent suggestion:

If charity is indeed a learned behavior, it may be that houses of worship are only one means (albeit an especially efficacious one) to teach it. Secularists interested in increasing charitable giving and volunteering among their ranks might spend some effort thinking of alternative ways to foster these habits.

From personal experience, I know this can be done. I used to work for a corporation that provided the means to donate part of your paycheck directly to a charity of your choice. Once a year, they asked for a volunteer from each department to give a presentation to their colleagues reminding them of the good causes that are helped by the money donated through this program. They then spent the next month encouraging their employees, almost daily, to sign up and donate part of their paycheck every month for the next year.

This is small beans when compared to the things religious institutions do, but it works. Millions of dollars are raised every year through programs like this—millions of dollars that likely would not have been donated at all without them. I am not afraid to admit that my charitable giving has dropped off quite steeply since I left full-time employment, precisely because I am no longer regularly exposed to exhortations and convenient opportunities to donate on a regular basis. Yes, I know it would take the minimum of effort to go to the website of my favorite charity and start a monthly direct debit from my bank account, but human nature dictates that when we’re not regularly reminded of the importance of donating to charity, we tend to let it slip from our mind.

The Internet has certainly helped when it comes to getting the message out, and for creating ways to make it easier to donate your money and time. And if you wanted to donate a small sum to the Haitian earthquake appeal earlier this year, you only had to tap about 15 keystrokes on your cell phone using the “text HAITI to 90999 service,” but I think it would be foolish to suggest that anything can fully replace the utility of the vast ecosystem surrounding charitable giving that religious institutions have built up over many decades, even centuries.

If there is one hope, then it would be in efforts to give many more people a taste of what it’s like to donate one’s time to charitable works. Study after study have shown that engaging in regular volunteer work can be a great benefit to one’s mental and physical health. It doesn’t matter if the volunteerism is conducted through a religious institution or not, almost everyone who tries it, even for a short time, begins to experience those personal benefits first hand, making it more likely that they would want to continue doing it on a regular basis.

Naturally, it is also important for non-believers to introduce their children to the concept of charity. When I was a kid, the church I attended would hold sponsored walks and other activities that exposed me to such things. I don’t have any children of my own, but my brother and his wife (who are both non-believers) have two daughters, and just this past Christmas, the girls unilaterally decided that they didn’t need all the usual expensive Christmas presents, and suggested that we spent less on gifts to each other and spent the rest on charitable gifts in each other’s names instead. The rest of us agreed to take part, and as a result we must have raised between $500-$700 for various charities just within our extended family.

So there are plenty of ways to encourage charitable giving and instill good habits outside of the auspices of a religious group, though I do not underestimate the scale of the task of matching the charitable work encouraged by and performed through religious institutions. But the key point to remember is that there is nothing mystical or supernatural about the greater generosity of religious people. It is merely a product of the education, indoctrination, promotion, and facilitation carried out by the religious institutions they belong to.