Do Christians Give More to Charity?

                     When atheists respond to my videos they often say,, “We are just as moral as Christians.” The fact that they are using Christian standards of morality escapes them. Nonetheless, are they? Are they just as moral? There is at least one area where they do not appear to be. Generosity. Christians give more to charity.

Arthur Brooks was head of the American Enterprise Institute for a number of years and is now a professor at Harvard. He has done research on philanthropy for more than two decades.   His research showed that church attendance had a great impact on charitable giving:  people who practice their faith regularly—which is to say, they attend worship services every week—91 percent give to charity each year. Of people who don’t attend every week, 66 percent do.  In his book, Who Really Cares?, Brooks argues that conservatives are far more generous than liberals. And of course the Christian component in all this is decisive.

Ryan Burge weighed in on this recently with a fascinating statistical analysis of charitable giving. Burge examined tax return data. He looked at giving all over the nation by county. And he calculated which counties, and states, gave the most to charity. Utah was number 2 because of giving to the Mormon church. I grant that Mormon giving comes with an asterisk. In the Mormon religion if you do not tithe your income then you are shut out of what the Mormons call “temple work.” This not only affects your earthly religious life but also your eternal destiny. So Mormons cannot be credited with mere generosity in their charitable giving. But Utah wasn’t the most charitable state. Arkansas was. And if you look at Burge’s map the most generous counties are dominated by the Bible belt. The upper Midwest also makes a strong showing. Who is the stingiest? The liberal states of the American northeast.

So between Arthur Brooks and Ryan Burge being a Christian goes with being much more generous in charitable giving.

Let me make a few further observations: America is by far the most generous nation in the world. British historian Paul Johnson said America’s Marshall Plan after World War II, rebuilding Germany and Japan, was the greatest single act of national generosity in the history of the world. When international disasters occur it is just assumed that the Americans will soon be on the scene to lend a helping hand.

The average American citizen gives away three-and-a-half times more money each year as the average French citizen, seven times more than the average German, and 14 times more than the average Italian. Brooks noted that American charitable giving exceeds the entire income of Sweden. The missiologists at Operation World say that America is the nation most influenced by the Bible in the history of the world.

Brooks came up with another fascinating discovery. He called it counterintuitive: He found that when people give more money away, they tend to prosper.  There was a positive correlation between giving and material prosperity.  And it wasn’t just the case of people with more money giving more money. No. He argues that giving itself actually increases your income.  No surprise to those who read the Bible.  In Luke 6:38, Jesus said: give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.”

Let me comment on Ryan Burge’s research. He is using data from people who itemize their tax deductions. Hence, these are people who have high incomes. If you could look at lower income people I think the charitable giving would be even more pronounced. Christianity has a huge representation in the lower classes. And my guess is lower class Christians are far more generous than their lower-class counterparts. In other words, Burge’s data understates the gap between Christian and non-Christian giving.

When they were running for president and vice-president, Barack Obama and Joe Biden released their tax returns. I looked at the category for charitable giving. My mother, living mostly on social security, gave more to charity than those wealthy politicians. Not percentage wise, but in total dollars. When confronted with his giving or lack thereof, Biden explained his behavior by claiming that although he did not give a lot of his own money to charity he voted for measures that were generous with the poor and needy.

When it comes to actually giving your own money, the followers of Jesus Christ exceed everyone else.

Have a merry Christmas everyone. Let’s rejoice in the God who has given us every good gift.

More: Transcript of a speech by Arthur Brooks in which he summarizes his research on the relationship between religion and philanthropy: https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/arthur-c-brooks/giving-matters-2/

Arthur Brooks: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56962

Ryan Burge: Are Religious Areas More Charitable? https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/are-religious-areas-more-charitable?utm_campaign=email-post&r=ljoms&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&triedSigningIn=true