Do God-Fearing or Godless People Give More to Charity?

Does “give money for any cause” include donations which help support the opulent lifestyle of hypocritical preachers? I think that such donations should be assigned a negative value, they are not just neutral.

The problem with statistics like this is that they need to be broken down further. In this case, how many of the “religious folk” are charitable in order to avoid eternal damnation and/or buy their way into heaven? Those aren’t issues for secular folks. I submit that secular folks are more honest about their charity, IMHO.

I really would like to see a source on that stats. I didn’t see one, and its impossible to know how they polled otherwise.

We have some catching up to do.

Do we? Why should we let the behavior of religious people drive our agenda?

The statistic I notice from that link is that in terms of charitable donations, one American is equivalent to 3 Frenchmen, 7 Germans, or 14 Italians. Yet Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians are all better off than Americans. This says to me that donating to charities doesn’t usually solve problems, at best it provides only temporary alleviation. If we want to actually make the world a better place we need a different strategy, one that starts with rejecting the assumption common in religion that donating to charity is a good thing to do and a measure of goodness. The statistics here are just bad metrics, we need better ones.

Even if it is true that religious people donate and volunteer more than secular people, there’s one potential reason for it that shouldn’t be overlooked. (Paraphrased from my response on another thread.)

Religions have had centuries to develop values-based community, while nonbelievers were (*ahem*) discouraged from organizing. Even modern secular societies uncritically defer to religions on questions of values, as though various and contradictory conceptions of the divine will should take precedence over common public interests and civic virtues. As a result, secular people, generally speaking, don’t have established, time-tested, and widely accepted institutions for instilling values in their kids and participating in values-based community, unless they belong to a religious organization.

In other words, *IF* secular people, on average, are in fact somewhat less charitable, it could be because they weren’t brought up to buy into an ideology that included charity (among other sometimes less savory things) and didn’t have a ready alternative for instilling charity (without the other less savory things). As secular adults, we can explain to each other the secular reasons for charity and other virtues, but how much better would it be to have those virtues taught to kids in our secular public schools? Ah, but we can’t do that, lest we step on religion’s precious turf.

There is scan evidence that charities work.

At best, charities paper over the cracks of the failure of a society; I would rather be taxed more and have the state provide the essential safety net required rather than give to charity. Case in point, a national cancer charity in Australia gave one cent out of each dollar to the cause, the rest being swallowed yup in organisational costs. That’s just absurd.

Maybe these stats come from the fact that there’s more religious people than non-religious?

I give a regular monthly donation to three charities. I give blood three times a year and try to drag at least one other person who has never been along with me when I go. I help out with my childrens’ schools’ charities whenever I can commit the time and resources to do so. I participate in work place charity events. If I die I will give my organs away to those people who might make use of them.

As a salaried person in the UK I get no tax incentive for doing any of this. As an atheist I have no otherwordly ulterior motives, only secular motives, for giving.

I could certainly give more and do more but I think that is true of almost every single person who isn’t just struggling to stay alive. I don’t even consider the little I do to be exceptional. Everybody I know does more or less the same as me.

I take this quite personally. I know I shouldn’t because statistics generalise but how dare anyone suggest that I don’t do my part to help others and that secular people are somehow less charitable.

BTW the image comes from a larger document that cites the National Center for Charitable Statistics as a source. Their quick facts page shows “Approximately 26.4% of Americans over the age of 16 volunteered through or for an organization between September 2007 and September 2008″ which is far below even the 39% for secular volunteers for secular causes. I don’t know enough about statistics or their analysis or the source of these figures to judge but the discrepancy makes me doubt their veracity.

Isn’t promoting Rick Warren’s AIDS work in Africa an example of a “secular cause”? In other words, giving money to kill people.

To add to the above, aiding the Bush administrations PEPFAR straegy in Africa, which added immensely to the AIDS death toll there, is another example of “secular” giving which is both likely to be engaged in overwhelmingly by religious people and is highly morally offensive.

An important thing to understand, or even accept is that while we’re not fans of religion, we must acknowledge that it can inspire people to do good deeds to a great degree, as this entry shows. An even more important point though is that we the godless CAN catch up. I say let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Let us get rid of nonsensical beliefs but we can retain the good. There is something more than belief in God in this whole religion thing, and our job is to figure out exactly what it is and maintain it and cultivate that in a secular world.

Ed,

I don’t think it is valid to consider welfare as charity. That’s totally bogus.

Obviously if I pay for my own health insurance that is NOT charity. If on the other hand I pay taxes for my own health insurance then it is still not charity.

Money spent by the government fails as charity in one other way. The money given is not done voluntarily by the person who earned it. For example, if you are robbed by a poor person that doesn’t count as charity on your part. It’s no different if the government forces money out of you and hands it out to others. Besides the money is not handed out as charity but as an entitlement and with the purpose of vote buying. No one who receives voluntary charity believes they are owed the help, and certainly they don’t get to vote on how much they get.

I didn’t say it was robbery. I said it was involuntary, and therefore wasn’t charity. Charity is freely given, not an entitlement of some kind.

On the separate subject of “Is all taxation robbery?” Well no, just some, and it all depends on how it is spent, and on what. You can’t justify taking my money for things I would never like spend the money on or utilize anyway. There are a few things, like military defense, that can be justified this way. Most others can’t and therefore much of tax collection reflects mere robbery.

No I don’t have any fundamental issue with organized society. That’s baloney.

“The whole point of a society is the redistribution of wealth in some manner for some set of goals.”

Nonsense. We don’t have a military for the purpose of taking from citizen A to give money to citizen B. Using taxes to support the police and courts don’t serve that purpose either. Etc.

“Welfare, or charity, may be one of those goals.”

Charity cannot be a goal of taxation. It generates a contradiction. No more than you can fuck for the sake of virginity. “Welfare”, which is newspeak if I ever heard it, is not charity, it’s an entitlement.

In fact the welfare of minorities went down on many metrics with the expansion of “welfare”.

Taxation is justified on the free rider concept. We can’t prevent them from benefiting from our expenditures in this direction so that justifies our taxation of them. One can be a free rider on military defense. Kinda hard to be a free rider on private charity since it can be withheld from you.

Brian Macker

Obviously if I pay for my own health insurance that is NOT charity. If on the other hand I pay taxes for my own health insurance then it is still not charity.

If you pay someone else’s health insurance then is that charity?

The money given is not done voluntarily by the person who earned it.

That is true to a degree but you still get to vote for the party who promises to spend more on healthcare or more on education. You indirectly decide how your contribution is distributed. No it isn’t the same but it does go to highlight that comparing a higher tax welfare state’s charitable donations with that of a lower tax nation’s charitable donations is fraught with difficulty.

caveat on my earlier statement

When we look at governmental giving and include private giving (secular and religious) to other countries the USA is miserably low on the list. In fact the countries that are doing the most to alleviate suffering (whether or not you want to call it charity) are the countries that are the least religious (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands). Secular societies provide better for the health and well being of their own citizens and apparently the citizens of other countries as well. Call it what you will, what matters most is the reduction of suffering. By this metric, the secular are leading the way.

I hope it is clear from my earlier posts but I will reitterate here, the above quote is only true in terms of percents, the USA does give more actual dollars than any other nation.

We really need to adopt the Canadian voting system, where you can choose the person you really want to win AND the person you wouldn’t mind winning. It might actually give voters some modicum of control over who gets elected, instead of throwing their votes into “the popular choice” because they know their preferred candidate won’t get elected anyway.

As for charity… phuh. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it absolves responsibility (at least until the next bell ringer). As many point out, though, tons of donated money is easily swallowed up by operation costs. For this reason, it’s better to buy and donate clothes, food, and toys than money.

Brian, you’ve clearly given this a lot of thought but your argument that government provided social care programs (health care, unemployment welfare, public disability schemes, social housing, etc) reduces choice and therefore the ability to give to charity assumes that people have a choice to begin with.

If I desire A,b,C,D,e,f,H like you but I can only afford f then I don’t have a choice. By voting for a candidate and party that supports A,B,C,D,E,f,h or a,B,c,d,E,f,h I retain my choice of f and gain a few other things that I would otherwise not be able to have at all. Things that I may have had to rely on the charity of others to provide.

OK, I agree that democracy is far from a perfect system and socialised welfare programs are costly and prone to error. Charity is no substitute for a committed system of support for all members of society though.

George

You cannot count the money given to their church which is most of their giving. When adjusted to remove church giving, the secular giving is greater.

Playing Devil’s Advocate for a moment, why not? If I were to give to a church fund raiser so that the church could set up an inner city youth centre, build a hospital in Africa or start a campaign to educate people on drug and alcohol abuse then aren’t I giving to charity? Even if they skim off half the cash for “administration” I’m still giving to charity.

Brian Macker above argues that taxation cannot be counted as charity when used for the provision of social welfare and social services and you argue that if a church provides this kind of charitable service then that isn’t charity either.

Where do you draw the line and how do you account for charitable giving if you already give through taxation or donations to a church that provides for charity?

Not really trying to get into this argument in a significant way, but I see one point that I think needs to be clarified.

You have a very confused notion of choice. It’s not economically sound. What we can afford is always limited. The government cannot magically produce the extra resources, and in fact lowers production.

If you can afford only f and someone else can only afford A, B, and F then that’s all there is. Voting someone else into control who implements a, B, c, d, E, f means a lot less f, and a lot less A, B, and F, and a lot more unwanted a, c, d, and E.

These comments are generally true when the goods in question are production goods. If the economy is producing a certain number of widgets per year, and the gov’t gets involved in producing the widgets instead of private industry, you tend to get fewer widgets and/or higher widget prices. Generally speaking, we don’t want that unless we think there’s some overriding good for which we’re willing to pay in reduced production.

And that’s the key. We don’t only want the mix of goods that would be produced by totally unfettered free markets. There are some goods we want that might not be the natural result of free markets. Even libertarians tend to agree with the need for national security (properly circumscribed) and police (ditto), and thus willingly part with some of their productive income to pay for it. We won’t always agree on what other goods are worth paying for (or how much), but the principle is the same.

Maybe “A” is tighter regulations on industrial waste, “B” is hiring more teachers, and “C” is increased safety standards for automobiles. All 3 would involve some cost, and even if they give back to the economy in some form (such as more teachers training better future workers), there might not be any obvious or measurable direct net gain in production. Some people will decide the cost is worth it, and some will not (or will favor not-A, not-B, and not-C for non-economic reasons). But in any case, people favoring A, B, or C are doing so on economic grounds, and these moves probably wouldn’t be made if gov’t weren’t involved. (Though admittedly, our political system as it currently operates, and large segments of the public not being fully educated on the issues, make it hard to decide issues like these sensibly.)

And, getting back to the original issue, if gov’t were taken completely out of the business of providing any form of charity (however it’s defined), individual charity wouldn’t come close to filling the gap. These kinds of gov’t programs are public goods. Our debate would be about which programs are good, and how they should be run, and how much money would should spend on them.

In other words, when any particular public good comes up, we can argue about whether pro or con is the superior view, taking into account both economics and the other things we value. But if you favor a society in which all public goods are ruled out on principle (except for defense and policing), because they involve taxing citizens more than is necessary for defending their lives, property, and liberty, you’re envisioning a society that I think, evidently, most Americans wouldn’t want.

In fact the government via taxation cannot produce charity at all.

If I understand the other commenter correctly, he was not so much concerned with whether it should rightly be considered charity, but instead with whether it would produce the same outcomes as charity (i.e., relief of suffering). The definitional question complicates the issue that started this post, but doesn’t complicate gov’t policy. We’ll all have different opinions on whether gov’t should alleviate a given type of suffering, and how much it should spend in doing so, but in that debate it doesn’t matter whether it qualifies as charity.

both health care and insurance are productive goods

Yes, but the formation of programs to enable people without those goods to get them is a public good. Such programs are intended to provide a social benefit at a financial cost; they’re not intended to be financially productive. I’m not here to endorse any of the various conceptions of the plans being proposed, but the point I was making is that we live in a society that buys social benefits and taxes us for it, and most Americans evidently want it that way, even as they hold wildly divergent opinions on which social benefits to buy, how much to spend on them, and who and how much to tax for them. You might not want our society to buy so many social benefits and tax you for your share of the cost, and you’re free to speak out and vote accordingly.

Now, before you polish up your reply, I haven’t missed the fact that the gov’t WAS considering actually producing some of the widgets as part of insurance reform: namely, the erstwhile public option. You’ll argue that for the gov’t to start offering insurance would be a net loss to productivity, and at least in terms of the obvious direct costs, I would have to agree with you: a wholly free insurance market will generally be more productive than the same market after the introduction of the gov’t as a player. It’s even possible that the introduction of the gov’t as a player would have some catastrophic (foreseen or unforeseen) effect on the market as a whole, such as putting most of the other players out of business. That’s a serious consideration. But again, our elected officials weren’t considering a public option because they thought it would be beneficial to productivity, but because of the social benefit they thought the public option would provide.

And for the record, as you may know, the gov’t already does provide healthcare and health insurance, through the VA and Medicare, respectively. I don’t know much about those programs, but perhaps it’d be better for productivity to end those programs and let the private sector take over. But as long as most Americans value the social goods they see in such programs, our gov’t will continue to fund such programs and tax us for them.

It’s not theft. The power to tax is in the Constitution, as are the mechanisms for electing the folks who ultimately determine the taxes. A Constitutional amendment limiting gov’t to defense, police, and not much else, would change that. But in the meantime, everyone else is weighing social goods against cost in productivity, or trying to do so and making a hash of it, and forming or advocating policy based on such considerations, so we might as well join the debate.

‘Yes, but the formation of programs to enable people without those goods to get them is a public good.’

No it is not a public good.

Sorry, brevity over clarity on my part. What I meant is, if a program reduces the number of people who don’t have health insurance (for example), that’s a benefit that some people would think is worthwhile, and which the free market isn’t providing. Whether such a program would be successful or cost too much, or cause offsetting harms, are fair questions. But the people who favor such a program are demonstrating that they value expanding the health insurance safety net, if it can be done effectively and at (what they consider to be) a reasonable cost. They can imagine themselves in the position of those people who’ve been unable to get health insurance, and they would want such a program in place for them in that situation.

There is absolutely no need for government to get involved in the kinds of things you are advocating.

I think I made it clear that I’m not advocating anything in particular, nor arguing that government needs to get involved in these kinds of things. All I’m saying is, many people [1] would value certain improvements to the conditions in our society, according to what they would think of as improvement, [2] recognize that free markets probably won’t create those improvements, [3] are permitted by law to elect a government that will attempt to create those improvements, and [4] are willing to pay for those improvements through their taxes, if the price tag seems reasonable to them. Now granted, there’s A LOT of misinformation and cognitive dissonance in people’s formulation and debate of these judgments. People want more gov’t programs and less taxes, politicians push for the addition or continuation of programs favorable to their constituents, etc., etc. It’s a big, hyper-partisan, soundbyte-driven mess. Maybe the answer is radical reduction of the scope and power of gov’t (or rather, of the power of the people to elect such a gov’t), but I’m not convinced that it is, and I’m even less convinced that it’s ever going to happen.

You join together with everyone else who wants your ’social benefits’ and leave me out of it. You can create a friendship society, ‘tax’ your membership, and dole out the benefits.

I don’t think this would work on anywhere near the scale that most Americans would want. I understand the principle you’re advocating: the people who want a public program should be willing to pay the full cost of it rather than sharing the cost with the people who don’t want the program. Well, maybe things would be better that way. Obviously, that’d mean a lot of the economic safety net, environmental protections, public safety regulations, anti-discrimination laws, etc., would go away. Most people wouldn’t want that. And the free rider argument won’t work on them, because the idea of just watching someone wallow in preventable suffering is intolerable and inhumane, even if the sufferer chose to risk that suffering by opting out of paying for gov’t programs, one of which would’ve saved him. People know that hardship could strike any of us at any time, and they wouldn’t think that anyone should be permitted (don’t shoot the messenger) to leave themselves unnecessarily exposed and at risk. Inevitably, some disaster would strike, and the people who wanted to help would discover that their collective individual charity work isn’t enough, and they’d start saying there ought to be a gov’t program standing ready to help in situations like this.

Frankly, rather than maintain the status quo OR trash the whole edifice, I’d be tempted by a middle approach. Starting small, but continuing throughout the levels and departments of gov’t, I’d be interested to see what could be done with outsourcing of gov’t activities to independent organizations (nonprofit and/or for-profit) led by entrepreneurs and efficiency experts. Yes, I know there’d have to be some balance between the risk of CEO’s milking the system for unjust enrichment and the gov’t tendency to hyper-regulate, but I don’t see any reason to think the problems would be insurmountable, or worse than the problems we have now. In the long run, we could have a similar mix of gov’t programs at a significantly reduced cost. (Surely, some consultants somewhere have done, or could do, some projections to assess feasibility on a case-by-case basis.) This may seem a farfetched outcome staring out from the swamp of our present circumstances, but I suspect it’d be easier to get people to vote for it than for tearing down the safety net.

Voting is a notoriously bad way to make decisions, and especially when there are multiple decisions being made. Voting dilutes and distorted the desires of the participants and interferes with plan coordination.

Welcome to Planet Earth, which doesn’t revolve around your desires and wants.

That’s why we are a republic not a democracy.

Wrong. America is a democracy – just not a direct one. Each branch of government gets its power from majority rule or approval, better called a “representative democracy.” This is to prevent mob rule AND to prevent elected officials from ignoring the wants of the public.

Every four years I am presented with two choices, A) or B) for president. Yet, these two choices are supposed to represent my desires on hundreds of issues that have little to do with organizing society. Most societal organization is done via free markets.

You can vote for whoever you want, not just the choices presented to you. The government IS the people AND society – it is a reflection of what society has chosen (via voting) for their country. Is it perfect? No, but please find me a better option – something not mixed up with libertarian propaganda and fantasies.