"Tis the season when snailmail and e-mail boxes are filled with exhortations to give to charitable causes of every kind. If you go to religious services at least once a week, you will probably add a donation to a secular nonprofit on top of what you have already given to your church. But if you have few ties to religion (whether you are an atheist or simply a lapsed churchgoer), this may well be the only time when you write checks to charities. Giving "” unless a natural disaster catches your attention "” is an annual event rather than a part of your everyday budget.
As an atheist and secular humanist, I find this scenario basically accurate (although there are many exceptions) because it used to fit me perfectly. I have changed in recent years because, like many secularists, I became disturbed by the gap between my values and my erratic giving. There is no doubt "” although the gap has been exaggerated by some on the religious right to support its view of secularists as morally inferior "” that the nonreligious give less than religious Americans.
The term "charitable giving" is something of a misnomer in America, because it includes every dollar donated to every nonprofit institution. I don't think it really counts as charity to give to institutions "” whether your own church or a foundation enriching your child's secular private school "” that provide services to you in return for the "gift." That's nothing more than self-interested support of organizations that meet the giver's needs (not a bad thing, but not charity).
But even allowing for the fact that most Americans spend most of their charitable dollars close to home, the religious give a higher percentage of their income, and are about 25 percent more likely to give, than do secularists. Indeed, believers are 10 percent more likely than secularists to give to secular causes (although they do not support these programs as generously as they support religion).
The question is why.
Arthur C. Brooks, in a 2003 Policy Review essay on faith and charitable giving, connects liberal secular support for government programs with personal stinginess. Yet Brooks acknowledges that religious involvement, not political ideology, plays the dominant role. Religious liberals are 19 percentage points more likely to give than secular liberals, and religious conservatives 28 percent more likely than secular conservatives.
Secular conservatives "” a minority among American secularists "” are, in fact, the biggest tightwads. My explanation for their behavior is an overdose of the mean-spirited, tendentious novels of Ayn Rand at an impressionable age.
Even if it were true that support for government programs translates into lack of support for private charity, that still does not explain why religious liberals give more than secular liberals.
I am one of those liberals who believes that government is best equipped to meet large-scale, basic social needs. The Social Security system, to cite one striking example, was established in the 1930s because voluntary charity had proved totally unable to provide a decent standard of living for the old. But a government safety net does not negate the need for supplemental programs, like Meals on Wheels, to aid the elderly. In every area of society, the most effective philanthropy creates public-private partnerships "” the model being the secularist Andrew Carnegie's vast 19th-century bequests that became the foundation of America's public library system.
The real giving difference between secularists and regular churchgoers comes from the fact that going to church establishes the habit of giving "” not only because of moral exhortations from the pulpit, but also because of social reinforcement from peers .
Secularism is not a religion, and it does not offer the community that churches offer members. This absence of community fosters a disconnect between proclaiming that one can be "good without God" and giving generously to help others.
Richard Dawkins recognized that dissonance when he stepped up after the Haiti earthquake and offered to personally cover PayPal fees for contributors to two nonreligious relief groups. So did Minneapolis atheist Dale McGowan, who established the Foundation Beyond Belief to solicit online donations from atheists for secular charitable and advocacy organizations.
But the Internet is not the most effective tool for cultivating positive real-world habits. In a disturbing recent article in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell argues that online social networks increase the number of participants because they decrease the personal effort required of each donor. On Facebook, for example, the Save Darfur Coalition has more than 1.28 million members "” who have donated an average of nine cents each.
For a secularist to become a giver, nothing substitutes for personal initiative and direct involvement. The example of prominent atheists like Dawkins spurred me to question my own giving behavior, but the death of my longtime partner was a more powerful motivator. There is nothing like losing the person you love most to make you understand the truth of all of those clichés about the finite time we have to make an impact in this world.
Thinking about giving, I had two requirements. I wanted to support classical music "” one of the passions of my partner's and my lives "” and to give to a program reaching out to children in poor neighborhoods. I found the perfect match in the Sphinx Organization, a national foundation dedicated to bringing music to African American and Latino children whose schools have been stripped of any arts education. Sphinx does everything from providing musical instruments to sponsoring advanced-level training for talented African American and Latino students aspiring to become professional musicians.
I made an annual pledge, asked Sphinx to send me a monthly bill, and "” just like that "” I found myself giving four times more annually than I ever had. Once a year, Sphinx brings hundreds of schoolchildren to Carnegie Hall to experience the talents of musicians whose education was underwritten by the group. Nothing "” I mean nothing "” has ever given me more satisfaction than seeing those children's faces light up at the sight of young men and women, whose skin is the same color as theirs and whose parents never could have afforded music lessons, playing on that grand stage.
It does take conscious personal effort to make giving a habit rather than an undependable, occasional act. But all I have to say to other secularists is: Try it, you'll like it. And since the proportion of secularists and the religiously unaffiliated is growing steadily in this country, the real point is that our fellow citizens, as well as people around the world, need our help.
Susan Jacoby is the author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism and The Age of American Unreason.
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