From the Salmon

A few months back, I wrote a post titled ”Are We As Generous As We Think We Are?” I argued that people in the US are indeed generous but that we generally thought of ourselves as being more generous than we actually were. When polled, most people believed that the US was devoting too much of its budget to foreign aid. At the same time, they dramatically overestimated just how large a percentage foreign aid takes up, believing the level to be 20% instead of the actual level of less than 1%.

In a subsequent post looking at Jeffrey Sachs’ UN Millennium Project, I pointed out that the US and other wealthy countries have pledged to increase their level of contribution to international development aid so that by 2015 each country would be giving 0.7% of their GNP to international development projects. Currently, the US is contributing only 0.15% (last among signatory nations).

This paints a pretty eyeopening picture of US generosity. But it is an incomplete picture, something I admitted in my original posts. In the extensive discussion we’re having in last week’s ”Jesus Is So First Centry” post, commenter Jacke made the argument that these figures don’t reflect the generosity with which people in the US donate to private charities.

This is a fine point to make. People in the US indeed give billions of dollars each year to private charities. And that’s truly a wonderful thing. Americans, as I’ve said before, are indeed generous.

However, this figure is often used to argue that all of this charitable giving must make up for the gap we talked about in US foreign aid. Since the question I’m asking is “are we as generous as we think we are?”, I think we need to dig into this number a bit more to see if that argument holds up.

The most-often-quoted expert for this argument is Carol Adelman, former USAID official and now Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. Her article in the Nov./Dec. 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs is a good one. Her conclusion is impressive:

In the last decade, U.S. government aid has been far outstripped by private donations — from foundations, private voluntary organizations (PVOS), corporations, universities, religious groups, and individuals giving directly to needy family members abroad. There is no comprehensive measure of how much Americans donate overseas, but a conservative estimate, based on surveys and voluntary reporting, puts annual private giving around $35 billion.

The numbers are admittedly rough, but $35 billion is an awful lot of money. Keep in mind, however, that Adelman’s breakdown of that figure later in the article points out that about half of that is made up of remittances — money sent by workers in the US (mainly foreign nationals) to their families in other countries. These remittances are significant, and the US policies that allow foreign citizens to come here to work and send money back home are laudable. But to refer to these remittances as examples of American generosity seems to stretch the term a little.

When you remove the $18 billion of remittances, the amount left is still impressive, but only half as impressive as Adelman would have us believe. So how does this figure stack up against the private giving of other countries?

The Center for Global Development has created a Commitment to Development Index with data from the past three years. The CDI is an attempt to combine the effects of aid, trade, investment, migration, environmental policy, security and technology into a single metric. It’s not without its deficiencies as an overall model, but since we’re just talking about aid at the moment, it gives a decent set of numbers for our comparison.

In an article in the Sept./Oct. 2005 Foreign Policy, the most recent CDI had the US in third to last in its Aid category. For our purposes, the following graphic is most instructive. It breaks down government aid and private aid into a daily amount given per person:

As you can see, US private giving is significantly higher than the private giving of most of the other countries listed. But does it bridge the gap, as we asked earlier? Sadly, it does not. We swap places with Japan, but still trail the other countries by a significant amount.

We can certainly talk about why this is so, but the US is not the most generous nation, even when factoring in public giving. In fact, it’s not even close.

What about churches in the US? Since a large part of our discussion centers around role of the church in alleviating hunger and reducing poverty, I figure we may as well look into that.

The church numbers are a little more difficult to track down in terms of foreign development giving. But what about giving in general? Many churches preach the Biblical mandate of tithing — giving 10% of your gross income to your church (some people include other charitable organizations in this 10% figure). Do churchgoers in the US live up to this mandate?

Here’s a passage from Ron Sider’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience:

John and Sylvia Ronsvalle have been carefully analyzing the giving patterns of American Christians for well over a decade. Their annual The State of Christian Giving is the most accurate report for learning how much Christians in the richest nation in human history actually give. In their most recent edition, they provide detailed information about per-member giving patterns of U.S. church members from 1968 to 2001. Over those thirty-plus years, of course, the average income of U.S. Christians has increased enormously. But that did not carry over into their giving. The report showed that the richer we become, the less we give in proportion to our incomes.

In 1968, the average church member gave 3.1 percent of their income — less than a third of a tithe. That figure dropped every year through 1990 and then recovered slightly to 2.66 percent — about one quarter of a tithe.

Evangelical giving, consistently higher than that of mainline denominations, has fallen from 6.15 percent in 1968 to 4.27 percent in 2001. Sider again:

As we got richer and richer, evangelicals chose to spend more and more on themselves and give a smaller and smaller percentage to the church. Today, on average, evangelicals in the United States give about two-fifths of a tithe.

In 2002, Barna discovered that only 6 percent of born-again adults tithed — a 50-percent decline from 2000 when 12 percent did. And in 2002, just 9 percent of Barna’s narrow class of evangelicals tithed.

These figures are staggering. Churchgoers in the US are falling far short of the bare minimum amount of giving that their Scriptures ask.

Poverty is an enormous problem. The Bible is very clear about how important it is for Christians to meet this enormous need. While we’re certainly giving a lot of money to these efforts, we could be giving more. We should be giving more.

Look, I’m certainly open to arguments that we should rely less on government aid to relieve and reduce the extreme poverty around the world. But you have to prove to me that something else will fill the void. You think that something else should be the Church? Great. So do I.

Let’s talk about how to make that happen.