Religious giving is not the same thing as New Testament sharing

Came across an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today that looks at how religious charitable giving has remained pretty static amidst the economic downturn compared to non-religious charitable giving. From Charity's Religious Edge...

Along with jobs and 401(k)s, a major casualty of the Great Recession has been charitable giving. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, America's charities report an 11% drop in contributions in the past year alone. There's one big exception: Charitable contributions to religious groups dropped by only 0.1% from 2007 to 2009.

Americans are generous people. In 2006, as detailed in our recent book, "American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us," 80% of all Americans reported having made a charitable contribution in the previous year. But some—the religious—contributed more than others.

Of the most secular fifth of Americans, two-thirds said they gave money to charity in the previous year. That's an impressive number, but it pales next to the 94% of the most religious fifth who reported making a charitable donation.

We find the same pattern when we examine how much people give. On average, those in the most religious fifth donate $3,000 to charity annually. Those in the most secular fifth give approximately $1,000. The story is the same when we consider charitable giving as a fraction of household income: By this measure, religious Americans are four times as generous as their secular neighbors, even as they are a little less affluent than secular Americans.

The point is apparently that religious people are more generous than non-religious people, even when times are bad, and doesn’t that make us swell (and by implication better than those unbelieving and stingy heathens). I see these sorts of surveys all the time. It is without question that “religious” people give a greater percentage of their income in tax deductible contributions than non-religious folks. Apparently we are supposed to feel good because we give more than those secular people. Not so fast my friend. There are two problems with this line of thinking.

First, when we give as the church a huge percentage of our giving goes directly into the operating budget of our local church to keep it running. Ministerial salaries, building expenses, various programs, organizational hierarchy all eat up enormous amounts of the resources we contribute, both in terms of money and in terms of time. It is a vicious circle. The church needs money so it spends a lot of time trying to solicit donations from the membership to meet budgetary targets to that the church can survive to….solicit more donations. We give to the local church to keep the local church functioning, something that is utterly foreign to New Testament sacrificial and communal sharing.

The second problem is perhaps even more troubling. I don’t see anywhere in Scripture where our standard for giving is what unbelievers give to charity. If we think our benchmark is the world and anything above and beyond what the world gives makes us pious, we have a serious misunderstanding of our calling as Christians with regard to money. Giving in the New Testament was truly sacrificial to the point of being absolute. I don’t think Christians are called to eschew any private property at all, that isn’t the point of the applicable passages in Acts 2 and 4, but we certainly need to change how we view possessions and money so that we are willing and eager to give so that none among the Body of Christ have need while others have excess. I would hope we are not satisfied with being marginally more sexually moral than the world but we seem quite satisfied with being marginally more sacrificial in our giving than the world.

Let me go further. If I have in excess of what I need and my brother is in real need and I don’t seek opportunity to share with him, am I not sinning? As great a sin as sexuality immortality? While the Bible is clear about the grotesque sin of homosexuality and equally clear about the importance of marriage, it doesn’t address opposition to gay marriage but it does speak strongly against those who refuse to give to their brother in need or caring for widows and orphans or one Christian eating and drinking gluttonously while another goes without. The Bible doesn’t address “gay marriage” being recognized by a secular state in even one verse but the human authors of Scripture under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit expended a ton of ink (I think they used ink?) on wealth, money and possessions.

I am not just talking about responding to the request of a brother in need, I am talking about seeking opportunity to share sacrificially. This is so hard to think through dispassionately because it screams out against our American assumptions. In the American economic model embraced and adapted by the church you work hard to earn a living and consume and save to your hearts content as long as you give a little something on Sunday morning. That worldview is what we know and accept by and large but it is far more in line with what the world thinks than what we see modeled in Scripture. The way we ignore the Bible’s admonitions about money are every bit as grievous as Thomas Jefferson infamously cutting out the supernatural passages from the Bible to turn it into a book of moral guidelines.

There is nothing that makes American Christians squirm more than talking about money and personal finance in light of Scripture but there are few areas that are equally important to our witness to the world. We need to come to a place where we put money and possessions in their place in the right perspective in the church. In order to do that we need to have constant conversation and study about the topic even though it makes us uncomfortable. Perhaps it is better to say that precisely because these topics make us uncomfortable and cause such a visceral reaction that we need to talk about it.