In 2006, Arthur C. Brooks published a book called Who Really Cares: America's Charity Divide. In it, Brooks cited several studies and surveys that appeared to demonstrate that secular Americans give less to charity than their religious counterparts. He proposed several reasons for these results, namely that secularists are just naturally less generous; that as a largely liberal group they had higher expectations of government welfare programs; and that they lacked a centralized institution such as a church that codified and encouraged giving.
However, later critics have pointed out that it is not entirely clear whether the religious are more generous than the non-religious; other studies have shown that the real situation is far murkier.
Identifiable Religious Charities
Critics of Brooks's analysis were quick to point out that religious charities are usually clearly labeled as such, making it far easier to track the religious affiliations of the givers. Secular charities, by contrast, receive donations from religious and non-religious alike, with no particular distinction being made between the two.
This might serve the purpose of "concealing" charitable giving by secular Americans. Recent efforts to establish pointedly secular charities — like the Richard Dawkins-organized Non-Believers Giving Aid — have been very successful, but by definition secular charities act very much like secular individuals in being non-discriminating with both their donations and their disbursement.
Government Welfare and Social Programs
There is some truth to Brooks's contention that seculars — who tend to lean liberal — for the most part would prefer that welfare programs be administered more equitably through government agencies rather than being left to the whims of private charity. And as far as it goes, more secular Europeans, as individuals, give far less to charities than Americans do.
However, this is not the entire picture. When the amount Europeans pay in taxes to fund social programs at home and abroad is factored in, their charitable giving far outstrips that of Americans. In highly atheistic Denmark, for example, ninety cents per capita flows from tax coffers to foreign aid; in the U.S., the figure is only fifteen cents.
Non-Cash Charity and Dictator Games
Studies of religious belief and generosity that focused on non-cash giving found another interesting result. In terms of donating blood, the religious belief or non-belief of the donors made absolutely no difference at all to the frequency or amount donated. Likewise, a survey of American doctors who were willing to forgo lucrative medical careers in order to work with the poor in the U.S. or overseas showed negligible differences between the religious and the secular, with 35% of the selfless doctors self-identified non-believers, as compared to 28% Catholics and 26% Protestants.
In further studies of generosity using more controlled methods, no difference was found between religious and non-religious subjects. Instances of the "dictator game" — where one subject is given money and asked to divide it (or not) with an anonymous other player who knows nothing of the particulars of the transaction — found religious subjects no more generous than their secular counterparts; indeed, most people who played the game gave the anonymous player half or nearly half of the money, regardless of belief or lack thereof.
Self-Reporting Errors
As in most research of this type, there is a danger of relying too much on people's self-reporting of their behavior, especially where something as admired as charitable giving is concerned. Some studies, including one done in 1973, seemed to show that the religious were more likely to want to be seen as generous and therefore more likely to inflate the amount they gave to charity.
Tom Flynn, in a Free Inquiry article, exemplified the self-reporting dilemma by pointing to the oft-cited statistic that 40% of Americans report having attended church services in the preceding week, then explaining that when researchers actually went out to a large sampling of churches and counted attendants, the figure was closer to 20%. He suspects that the true discrepancy between religious and secular giving, if any, can never be definitively known as long as self-reporting is the main means of data collection.
Sources:
Flynn, Tom. "Are Secularists Less Generous?" Free Inquiry Aug.-Sept. 2010: 9+. Print.
Rees, Tom. "Atheists Are Generous — They Just Don't Give to Charity." Free Inquiry Dec.-Jan. 2010/2011: 14+. Print.
Jenny Ashford - Jenny Ashford is a writer and graphic artist from central Florida. Her main area of interest in her Suite 101 articles is science, with a ...
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