The Oracle: Stingy Stewards
Lynn Robinson
July 1, 1998
From the moneychangers in the temple to vestry members grousing about the latest church budget-buster, religion and money have always had a love-hate relationship. But how much does your religion affect your wallet? The short answer: somewhat, but less than you might expect (unless you're a sociologist or a pastor, in which case you have low expectations from years of research and hard experience, respectively).
The data in the tables below come from The Economic Values Survey, which was constructed specifically to investigate the intersection between religion and economic life. While it's possible to slice and dice this survey many ways, The Oracle has focused on a few questions that highlight the similarities and differences among Catholic and Protestant Christians, the two largest groups of respondents to the survey. (Alas, Orthodox Christians, in spite of their immense significance in the global church, are too few in number in the United States to be statistically comparable to the other two traditions.)
Compared to the public as a whole ("All Respondents" in the tables), fewer Catholics and high-attendance Protestants failed to put a single dollar in the plate in the previous year (Table 1). But in absolute terms these numbers are still pretty remarkable-between a fourth and a third of the active membership of churches gave no money to religious organizations of any kind. Even granting that personal property rights are important to an efficient economy, these active church-goers treat their property very personally.
Then there is a curious group, the low attending Protestants, over three-quarters of whom give no money to religious organizations-thus proving to be more stingy with religion than the general public that ...
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