Tag Archives: Giving

News

Romney gave 1,000 times as much to charity in one year as Biden gave in a decade

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From the Weekly Standard:

The release of Mitt Romney’s 2011 tax returns shows that he freely gave away more than $4 million to charity last year (about 30 percent of his income).  In comparison, when Joe Biden was first running for vice president, his tax returns showed that he had given away just $3,690 to charity over the previous ten years (about 0.2 percent of his income).  In other words, Romney gave away a thousand times as much to charity in one year as Biden gave in a decade.

That’s despite the fact that the Bidens earned well over $2 million over that decade.  In fact, their income was $320,000 in 2008, thereby putting them comfortably over the $250,000-a-year line that marks the entry point for “millionaires and billionaires” in Obama-speak.

Last year, Romney freely gave away more than $10,000 a day to charity — an impressive sum by nearly any standard.  Of course, it’s not too hard to beat Biden’s tally.  Over the span of that decade, or 3,650 days, he gave away $3,690 — an average of $1.01 a day.

Should we be surprised by this lack of charity from leftists? Well, Democrats are typically non-religious, as you might expect of people who support killing unborn children. In fact, Obama leads Romney 69% to 23% among non-religious people. So do people of no religion typically give a lot to charity, like the religious Romney, or are they mostly opposed to giving charity, like the pro-abortion secularist Joe Biden?

Consider this article from the Boston Globe.

Excerpt:

States with the least religious residents are also the stingiest about giving money to charity, a new study on the generosity of Americans suggests.

The study, released Monday by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, found that residents in states where religious participation is higher than the rest of the nation, particularly in the South, gave the greatest percentage of their discretionary income to charity.

The Northeast, with lower religious participation, was the least generous to charities, with the six New England states filling the last six slots among the 50 states.

[…]The most generous state was Utah, where residents gave 10.6 percent of their discretionary income to charity. Next were Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina. The least generous was New Hampshire, at 2.5 percent, followed by Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

[…]The study found that in the Northeast region, including New England, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, people gave 4.1 percent of their discretionary income to charity. The percentage was 5.2 percent in the Southern states, a region from Texas east to Delaware and Florida, and including most of the so-called Bible Belt.

[…]The study was based on Internal Revenue Service records of people who itemized deductions in 2008, the most recent year statistics were available. The data allowed researchers to detail charitable giving down to the ZIP code.

To ensure that states with differing costs of living were judged by the same standard, researchers calculated each state’s median discretionary income — the money remaining per household after variable but essential costs such as housing, child care and food are paid for. They then looked at the percentage of discretionary income that the typical household in each state gave to charity.

[…]Of the 10 least generous states, nine voted for Democrat Barack Obama for president in the last election. By contrast, of the 10 most generous states, eight voted for Republican John McCain.

If you think that this is the only life you have, and there is no one out there to hold you accountable, then it’s easy to be self-centered. Unless charity makes you feel good, there is no reason to do it on atheism. And when you don’t have a reason to be moral, then you often won’t be.

Commentary

Should Christians give money to help the poor or to apologists and scholars?

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Here’s a post from Triablogue, the Internet lair of the most fearsome Calvinist bloggers!

Excerpt:

As you make donations over this Christmas season, are you including apologetics ministries in your giving? People will donate many millions of dollars to helping the poor, finding cures for diseases, and other such causes. Governments, universities, and other segments of society will also invest large amounts of money in such things. On an average day, you might hear a few advertisements for charities on the radio, see a few more on television, see a couple others in a magazine, and get an email about one from your employer. Part of the money you earn by going to work will go to government programs intended to do things like providing food and shelter for the poor, in this country and around the world. These efforts involve a tremendous number of organizations and individuals and a tremendous amount of time and money, among other resources. But you’ll rarely be encouraged to give a single penny to any apologetic work.

One of the excuses sometimes cited to justify Christian neglect of apologetics is that God doesn’t need apologetics in order to work in people’s lives. He doesn’t need to use something like a philosophical, historical, or scientific argument.

Let’s apply that same reasoning to other areas of life. God doesn’t need our prayers. Let’s stop praying. Or just let a tiny minority of the church do it occasionally. God also doesn’t need Bible translators and publishers, and He doesn’t need to have you read the Bible. He can just implant the information directly into your heart. He also doesn’t need parents. Or pastors. He’s omnipotent. He can accomplish things without using us. Let’s not just neglect apologetics. Let’s neglect these other things, too, and see what happens.

I’m convinced that one of the most significant weaknesses of the modern church is a neglect of apologetics. And we’re living in an information age, when apologetics is even more important than it was previously. What if God sometimes allows us to suffer the normal consequences of our intellectual carelessness? What if, instead of constantly supernaturally intervening in order to make up for our neglect, He sometimes lets us suffer the natural consequences of our bad choices?

Ideas have consequences, and persuading people to hold one belief rather than another can have major significance. It’s something that can “greatly help” (Acts 18:27-28). If you give money to alleviate something like poverty or a disease, then why not give money to uproot ideas that produce those symptoms? We’re often focused more on shallow solutions than ones that are deeper and more lasting. We give money in response to poverty, a tsunami, or the spread of a disease, but we give much less, if anything, in response to the false ideas that surround us. Instead of feeling guilty for giving money to an apologetics ministry rather than something like a ministry that helps the poor, we ought to feel guilty for giving such a low percentage of our donations to apologetic work. If you give all of your donations to non-apologetic causes and none to apologetics, the world will applaud you. But we should be judging things by a different standard.

That’s a perfect post, and I left some of it out. The Triabloguers also give a list of charities that they support, and I support those too.

But here are the ones I personally like best: (in alphabetical order)

Jim Wallace is a bit of a neat case, because as far as I can tell, he doesn’t accept donations. But I list him here anyway, because I respect him highly.

And by the way, if you know any Christian scholars who are busy getting their undergraduate and graduate degrees, why not fire them a book or two? I have five good friends on Facebook who are working hard on their degrees, and it’s a good thing for us to take an interest in their progress.

UPDATE: Justin Brierley, the force behind the recent Reasonable Faith UK Speaking Tour, writes this in the comments:

Well since we’re in a generous mood… follow the link below to contribute towards funding the production of the videos from the UK Reasonable Faith Tour!

http://www.bethinking.org/what-is-apologetics/introductory/helping-fund-the-reasonable-faith-tour.htm

Not a bad idea. Getting the recordings of those debates out there is good work, and deserves funding.

News

New study: frequent Bible reading leads to charity and openness to science

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From the leftist Huffington Post.

Excerpt:

Franzen speculates the reason so little research has been done on the effects of reading Scripture may be because “the ubiquity of references to the Bible promotes the idea that we all know what it says and, consequently, reading it is simply a habitual and ultimately meaningless activity.”

But that is not true, according to his study using data from Christian respondents to the 2007 wave of the Baylor Religion Survey.

In many cases, Franzen found frequency of Bible reading was one of the most powerful predictors of attitudes on moral and political issues. Consider some of the findings:

  • The likelihood of Christians saying it is important to actively seek social and economic justice to be a good person increased 39 percent with each jump up the ladder of the frequency of reading Scripture, from reading the Bible less than once a year to no more than once a month to about weekly to several times a week or more.
  • Christian respondents overall were 27 percent more likely to say it is important to consume or use fewer goods to be a good person as they became more frequent Bible readers.
  • Reading the Bible more often also was linked to improved attitudes toward science. Respondents were 22 percent less likely to view religion and science as incompatible at each step toward more frequent Bible reading.
  • The issues seemed to matter more than conservative-liberal tags. In the case of another major public policy debate, same-sex unions, nearly half of respondents who read the Bible less than once a year said homosexuals should be allowed to marry, while only 6 percent of people who read the Bible several times a week or more approved of such marriages.

Among other issues, more frequent Bible readers also were more likely to oppose legalized abortion, the death penalty, harsher punishment of criminals and expanding the federal government’s authority to fight terrorism.

[…]But the results are consistent with some past research.

In a 1998 article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, sociologists Mark Regnerus, Christian Smith and David Sikkink found that data from the 1996 Religious Identity and Influence Survey suggested that, contrary to “conventional wisdom,” conservative Protestants were among the most generous Christians in giving to the poor.

Surprise, surprise – reading the Bible makes people more moral.

I think we need to be open to letting our ideas about goodness, God and science be determined by what research shows, instead of what our feelings are. If science shows that atheists are generally more irrational and more amoral than believers, then we have to go where science leads. Not every atheist is irrational and immoral, but we have to believe what science tells us about atheism.

This study showing how authentic Christians get divorced less often than average is also interesting.