The Decline and Fall of Charity

The Decline and Fall of Charity

The religious give more than their fellow citizens, but is it enough?

By Clint Rainey,  November 23, 2008 If you think retailers have it bad this Christmas, consider the effect that a slumping economy will have on America’s charities. Even prior to the financial crisis, some of the most renowned charitable organizations in the country were on life support. The American Red Cross borrowed money for the second time in its 127-year history—the first was after Hurricane Katrina, and the more recent $70 million loan facilitated relief for the victims of Hurricanes Gustav and Edouard. The Salvation Army spent more than $1 million on Gustav alone, but raised just $30,000 to cover it.

Budget shortfalls are becoming an across-the-board problem for aid organizations, The Washington Post reported in September. Save the Children spent more than $100,000 on diapers, cots, and bassinets on the Gulf Coast, and has only made up about a third of that. Catholic Charities USA, which spent around $200,000, had, at the time of the Post article, recouped $10,000.

Given recent events, it isn’t surprising that headlines are highlighting greed on Wall Street, and conspicuous consumption at the upper echelons of corporate America. These critiques are on point.

But the lack of compassion for others that so rankles average Americans is just as easily found – as sorry as I am to say it – among regular Americans. Fifty years hence, today's society will be judged, according to the old adage, by how it treated its poor. For that reason, generosity’s moribund status within America's churches is especially troubling.

Studies like those in Arthur Brooks' Who Really Cares routinely show that churchgoers, particularly conservative evangelicals, comprise the most generous slice of society, yet the generosity and volunteerism of these very people are at historic lows. Moreover, plenty of Americans inside the Church and out think the opposite is true; they take it as a given that charitable giving among the religious is happening at the pace it has in the past.

This churchgoer-as-humanitarian meme gets reinforced all the time. Media reports about charity are the rare topics on which religious conservatives get a fair go. President Bush talks about “armies of compassion,” Fox News made Rick Warren’s Rwandan relief work a prime time affair, and images are broadcast of Baptists from Texas volunteering in Banda Aceh. Then there are stats like the Massachusetts-based Catalogue for Philanthropy’s controversial Generosity Index, whose recent ranking of all 50 states by generosity listed New York, at No. 26, as the most philanthropic blue state in the Union.

Given all that, it’s easy to forgive Americans for doubting that their houses of worship are shirking one of their most important functions, or that generosity as a virtue, already at a molasses crawl, is knee-deep in a morass. Whatever the Religious Right’s image problem, most outsiders are nevertheless inclined to think that everyone should give like religious conservatives do.

In fact, fewer than 5 percent of churchgoers actually tithe 10 percent of their income; the average, according to numbers from Empty Tomb, a Christian research group that puts out annual reports on church giving, is now 3.4 percent, or 21 percent less than what dust-bowler counterparts gave during the worst of the Great Depression. Figures show that churchgoer contributions have been cascading downward since the 1960s. Religious conservatives do give more. Problem is, they only give nominally more and other groups give next to nothing.

Of course, even money given to churches doesn’t always find its way to the needy.


Americans gave an estimated $97 billion to churches in 2006, which is nearly one-third of that year’s $295 billion in total charitable contributions, according to Giving USA Foundation, but lots of churches are pocketing that scratch.

And it shows.

Megachurches are widely credited with getting a Third Awakening of sorts off the ground, with lots of excited members and fistfuls of money, but their wealth also makes them the worst charity offenders—and garish, besides. The average annual income for a megachurch is $5 million. Of that almost $100 billion given in 2006, three-quarters was banked by the original church or went to other churches or religious organizations.

Churches understandably want safe Christian atmospheres, but too many want cafés, skate parks, Xbox-jammed arcades, kids’ sports leagues, not one but four JumboTrons, booming THX sound capable of rattling the walls of the nearby AMC Theaters, staggeringly sophisticated Obi-Wan Kenobi hologram projections of the pastors at satellite campuses—the whole shebang. My own adieu from the Dallas megachurch I grew up in was accelerated when it decided to convert, for a nearly six-figure price tag, a small outdoor courtyard into a baptismal sanctuary. During services, baptisms happening in the grotto were taped and fed back into the auditorium on JumboTrons, a (not joking) “LIVE” stamped at the top of each.

But calling out specific churches misses the point. The buzzwords of the new Religious Right are supposed to be things like “cap and trade,” “hunger relief,” “AIDS antiretrovirals.” But if the younger churchgoers are going to treat the old-style generosity necessary to adequately fund those programs like a cultural curio of inconsequence, like Grandma’s needlework, the future of the Church and country is bleak. Taking a cross-section of church contributions nationwide right now, you’d see they nosedive as you move down the age spectrum. We can only hope that’ll change as today’s youth get older and wealthier, but it isn’t unreasonable to wonder about the cultural implications of sixty-year-olds who are 10 percent more likely to give to the church than are still not-so-youthful churchgoers in their forties and fifties, who, in turn, are 30 percent more likely to give than are those in their thirties, who are then 30 percent more likely to give than are twentysomethings, fewer than a third of whom give anything at all.

Peruse Outreach Magazine’s list of the nation’s 100 largest churches, and the top third, each with at minimum 10,000 members, are almost identical in their selection of country-club-caliber amenities. They stock bookstores on site with souvenirs—tees, key chains, visors, bumper stickers—and their own imprints, and they sell sermons and praise albums on iTunes, all accounting for a chunk of the billion-dollar “Christian capitalism” sector refashioning them as de facto retailers that also profit off the (until recently, anyway) hyper-spending American consumer.

Big-tent accommodation is the new thing, shaped around the theory that if you build it—and the bigger, the shinier, the costlier and the more technologized, the better—then they will come. This is partly to the churches’ credit, insofar as “they” are the disaffected, the lost, the outliers, the “street Christians” with no church home.

But the result is that churches have become institutions, invested with their own lifeblood in the same way that corporations are. One 2007 study found 85 percent of church dollars are spent in-house, doing up the environs to snag more “seekers.” In another, Protestant pastors were asked what they would do with an unexpected financial windfall, and 31 percent said they would build a new building. The Leadership Network, a nonprofit that tracks church trends like these, hazards that in a mere “few years,” 30,000 churches could tout video venues. For every dollar evangelical churches now spend, they give about two cents to missions, an amazing statistic when you consider that funding missions was once paramount to evangelicals.

Abstemious for others and munificent toward self, the new and re-prioritized churchgoer facing economic recession has in fact shown a few areas where his checkbook is not hermetically sealed. Debt is one. Forty percent of churchgoers say they pay more than $2,000 a year in interest payments. Another 40 percent admit to significant spending overages every month. Shopping’s another: many have a view of charity that says it’s okay to give less, sometimes by a factor of two, to their church than they spend per year on presents for friends and family.

And the other category of spending?

Over the past months, as headlines like “A HAIL MARY PASS, BUT NO RECEIVER IN THE END ZONE” described the Fed’s bailout of AIG, churchgoers in droves funded Proposition 8. In the run-up to Election Day, the amount California churchgoers unloaded in support of the measure, which banned same-sex marriage statewide, was $18 million, a record for state-ballot campaigns, surpassed only by the Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin campaigns. Pastors gave pro-Prop 8 homilies, and members dug deep into wallets. The Family Research Council bought airtime for ads. In October, a $1 million gift came from Alan Ashton, grandson of the Mormon Church president.

These numbers were high enough for Ellen DeGeneres to plead with Prop 8’s financiers to find other humanitarian pursuits. “There are so many people that need money right now,” she said on The Tonight Show, “and if you’re raising millions of dollars, give it to those people, please, because you don’t need to promote hate.” Social conservatives will justifiably dispute everything after “because,” but if they think about the rest, they might also have to admit she makes a point of sorts: Why this, but not charities?

Altogether, American churchgoers bring home $5.2 trillion per year, with $850 billion in disposable income. Most reasonable people agree that, irrespective who it comes from, a fair amount of good ought to come from $850 billion. (Bailing the Red Cross out of its $70 million hole, for example, would only have required 0.0000832 percent of that amount.)

Aging Baby Boomers will eventually pass on an estimated $130 trillion — the world’s largest-ever generational transfer of wealth — and it’s mostly going to go to their children, a generation that gives even less than their parents. Worrywarts will argue that the repercussions reach beyond the walls of American churches, and they’re right: In America’s market-driven culture little will ever be done, inside the Church or out, to inconvenience the American consumer.

So a cultural paradigm shift continues apace. Americans and even the churchgoers among them grow ever less generous, spending their disposable income on goods that reflect a self-detached apathy toward the less fortunate. This shift will soon have real and immediate consequences—in fact, it has already.