

and God said Adam 'keep the change'


Paying Up

Two days after publishing my Good Samaritan article, I learnt of an interesting rebuttal against the “religious people are more generous” argument. As I mentioned in an update to that article, researcher and blogger Jerry Coyne notes that almost half of the charitable donations given by American households are to churches. Indeed, many people – like American comedian and talkshow host Bill Maher – believe that such charitable contributions should not even be considered donations.

Instead, such donations are considered as though they’re done to promote the donater’s religion, which is not particularly altruistic so much as self-serving. This is arguably not the point of charity. It’s the same concept as if some after-hours club member donated some of his money to that club. For example, a sports club, etc. Should we call that charity? Writer Roy Sablosky at doesn’t think so:



But we’re here to look at the science, and this next research paper comes from Nottingham University Business School. Malaysians of various religions were asked to do a task that involved sharing imaginary money with someone.

The participants were given an imaginary amount of money and given the option to share with another participant. They were informed that they could keep whatever they didn’t share, or else they could share, and the money they shared would be tripled.

The task was simple enough, and the results were telling. All religious participants – Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists (sorry, no Jewish Malaysians I guess) – were more generous than nonreligious people only in one condition. When participants were told that the person receiving the money so happened to be of the same religion as them, they were more generous. However, when the person receiving the money was not religious or of another religion, there was no discernable difference in charitable behavior among religiosity of participants. Alternet adds this:



More than Just Money

In 1975, a study called “Faith Without Works” looked at the cheating behaviors and volunteering willingness among university students. The good thing about the study is that the cheating and volunteering measures were not determined by self-reports, which are not generally reliable for this type of research:

Students in a large introductory psychology class were given an opportunity to cheat on a class examination. Some time later, they were asked to volunteer to participate in a project designed to help mentally retarded children.

At some point, they asked participants to rate themselves based on their religiosity, and categorized students into four groups among the religious spectrum, from atheist to “Jesus people” (actual wording). As it turns out, not even the Jesus-est of participants were any more altruistic than atheists. Also, even the cheating behavior did not correlate with the volunteering. In fact the only discernable difference the researchers found was that women were more altruistic than men.

Sablosky also mentions an interesting paper on religiosity and emergency behavior:



And let’s not forget about the Good Samaritan study itself, in which religiosity had no effect on who helps a collapsed individual when they’re in a hurry. When it comes to helping your fellow man, religion seems to make no difference.

More Charitable Than the Religious?

In fact, Sablosky has a detailed criticism of the religion-altruism link which is worth the read if you want to know more. But (SH) takes it a step further, arguing that atheists have actually been seen to be not just equally generous, but more generous, depending on the task at hand. Perhaps monetary donations are more likely to be done by the religious, but as they say: “There’s more to generosity than handing over cash to a charity, and there are plenty of other ways to help your fellow humans.”


And that is considering the fact that three quarters of physicians in the US are religious (i.e., believe in god, and 90% attend religious services at least occasionally), according to a study from 2005, also conducted by Curlin. They are, in fact, more religious than the average US population; perhaps because there are so many foreign doctors working in the US. Family doctors and pediatricians are more religious those with specializations, and psychiatrists are the least religious doctors.

But while we’re on the topic of the hospital, let’s change gears. There are people giving blood, and we have data on the effects of religiosity on blood donations. A national survey from America said this:

Previous studies are lacking on a positive relation between religiousness and blood donation. We tested this hypothesis using a national survey of 7611 women and 4282 men aged 18-44 years. In women, positive associations of childhood religious affiliation, current affiliation and attendance with blood donation were seen on bivariate analysis but were no longer significant when socio-demographic variables were controlled for. Religiousness was not associated with history of blood donation in men, with the exception of higher donation rates in Catholic men aged 35-44.

Basically, religiosity had little or no effect at all. As Epiphenom says “By cutting and dicing the statistics, the authors (Frank Gillum at Howard University and Kevin Masters at Syracuse) were able to find occasional groups that seemed to be more generous donors (Catholic men aged 35-44, for example), but I think they have fallen foul of the problem of multiple comparisons. If you make enough groups (nearly 50 in this case) some are going to come out high just by random chance.”

The Bottom Line

The following excerpt from SH paints a picture of just how much religious people give to their own religions, which is less altruistic than, say, blood donations.

According to Daniel Chen, an economist at Duke University, some 90 percent of the money that Mormons give to charity goes to other Mormons, while 80 percent of evangelical Christian charity goes to other evangelical Christians. At the other end of the scale are Catholics (at 50 percent), but even Jews, who are the least discriminating in their charity, reserve 40 percent of it for their fellow Jews.

Chen found that this roughly mirrors the differing expectations of support that people expect from their co-religionists if they are ill. Giving money in these cases is less charity and more a kind of social insurance. By way of contrast, blood donations involve making a sacrifice for an anonymous stranger—an act that seems not to be stimulated by religion.

It seems clear, then, that the communities which religious people intend to benefit are often the religious communities to which they are affiliated. It’s with this information that we must consider the definition of altruism. As far as I’m concerned, altruism is doing something because you know it’s the right thing to do, not because you know who it is going to benefit.

There are three points to be concluded from the research above: 1) The argument that religious people are more generous than the non-religious is considerably weak – except perhaps for monetary donations to people of the same religion; 2) atheists, unlike religious people, do not discriminate when donating time, energy, or money; and 3) atheists tend to give just as much non-monetary resources away as religious people, though there are instances where atheists are more charitable, such as how they may not give as much money to charities but are more willing to pay higher taxes in the US, which benefit the whole country – as opposed to donations which benefit a specific (i.e., religious) group.



Annis, L. (1976). Emergency Helping and Religious Behavior Psychological Reports, 39 (1), 151-158 DOI: 10.2466/pr0.1976.39.1.151

Shariff, A., & Norenzayan, A. (2007). God Is Watching You: Priming God Concepts Increases Prosocial Behavior in an Anonymous Economic Game Psychological Science, 18 (9), 803-809 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01983.x

Smith, R., Wheeler, G., & Diener, E. (1975). Faith Without Works: Jesus People, Resistance to Temptation, and Altruism Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 5 (4), 320-330 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1975.tb00684.x

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8 Responses to Are Religious People More Charitable, Generous, and Altruistic than Atheists?

  1. Daniel Clark says:

    This is an interesting opinion, but unfortunately, it shows a very misguided interpretation due to cherry-picking evidence. Every one of the studies that is sighted in this post falls to the dangers of self-report. In a recent book, “Christians are Hate-filled Hypocrites and other Lies You Have Been Told, “sociologist Bradley R.E. Wright shows evidence of how there are no differences that are found for those who self-report as religious. However, for those who actively attend religious services on a regular basis tend to show significant derivations in behavior in the direction of lower divorce rates and higher instances of giving. Economists Robert Putnam and David Campbell make this same argument in their recent book, “American Grace.” Technically it would be more accurate to say that those who self-report as religious are not more charitable, generous, or altruistic.

    • Ryo says:

      Hi Daniel! Thanks for the comment.
      We have some things to discuss.

      While I appreciate the time you took to write this comment, I wish you had spent more of it reading the articles you criticize. In my Good Samaritan piece, I mentioned “American Grace” and how it falls victim to the exact same criticism you erroneously levelled against my article; namely, relying on self-reports.

      May I ask, which study above relied on self-reports? Was it the Good Samaritan study where people were observed based on behavior towards a fallen stranger? Was it the study from Malaysia where participants were measured on money shared? Was it the research that looked at cheating on a test and volunteering? No?

      Well then… was it the ladder study, where prosocial behavior was measured by being in the presence of a potential emergency situation, and seeing if they checked on the potential victim? Or was it the research that measured physician employment and religious affiliation? Or perhaps the blood donation study? No. No it was not.

      While I enjoy being reminded that self-reports are notoriously unreliable (a point I already made in my Good Samaritan article), I’d like to know which of the studies above relied on self-reports, as you claim.

      Also, you said “there are no differences that are found for those who self-report as religious.” The whole point of this and my last article was that religious affiliation doesn’t make people more altruistic, so that’s not really a refutation at all. That was my point.

      Based on the tone and content of your comment, I assume that you essentially skipped to the very last paragraph of my article and made up your mind about the rest of the article, focusing mostly on my #3 conclusion, which was more of an afterthought than a primary thesis. “There are instances” doesn’t mean “all the time.” As I also stated in #1, there are instances where religious people are more charitable too. I didn’t expect “it depends on the circumstances” to be a radical assertion.

      In other words, there’s a good chance that you and I are actually agreeing with the same point (i.e., studies suggest that religiosity has no effect on prosocial behavior) but there may just be a miscommunication or misinterpretation.

      Finally, I am not familiar with Bradley Wright’s work, but if you are suggesting that divorce rates have anything to do with charity or generosity, I would suggest you rethink your definition of altruism.

      I hope this rebuttal does not dissuade you from commenting in the future. If you have any research that refutes the points in my article, I strongly encourage you to leave another comment with that URL, as I have done above for the research I cited.

      Thanks again for the comment, Daniel.

  2. Daniel Clark says:

    Thanks for the response, I’m happy to have the conversation. I think too many people are too afraid. It seems like there were a couple of miscommunications.

    I mentioned Wright’s book because it is palpable for non-researchers. For the research minded, A recent set of articles in a 2012 issue of the academic journal “Psychological Bulletin” reviewed much more evidence on the subject. Not surprisingly, his discussion is much more complex than these classic studies from the 1970’s. He mentioned the distinction between self-reported religious affiliation and religious attendance.

    “Separating belief from factors relating to group participation is crucial in the religious prosociality literature because the religious variable often most robustly related to prosocial behavior is be- longing—social and group engagement—not personal conviction or metaphysical beliefs, although this distinction is often elided in coverage of the “effect of religion” on prosociality. In the studies of charitable giving and volunteering mentioned earlier, church attendance or social factors in religious organizations are typically stronger predictors of these forms of prosociality than is personal devotion (Brooks, 2006; Monsma, 2007). For example, Reitsma et al. (2006) demonstrated that church attendance was predictive of charitable intentions, whereas other religious variables (frequency of prayer, religious experiences) were nonsignificant. In another example, Gallup survey results (B. G. Smith & Stark, 2009) indicated that the differences in generosity when measured as a function of religious importance were smaller than those measured as variation in religious attendance.” (Galen, 2012).

    Although I disagree with Galen’s subsequent interpretation of this distinction, I think it is an important distinction to note that personal religious affiliation rarely correlates with any type of behavior. In contrast, religious belonging does appear to correlate with behavioral differences in the direction of morality (such as altruism or marital fidelity).

    P.S. I read the samaritan post and thought it was interesting. I have been reading “epiphenom” for a while, but this is the first time I have stumbled upon your blog. I am a former student of Dr. Beck’s (the author of “Experimental Theology”). Although I rarely have the patience to indulge his long blog posts, he was a great teacher.

  3. morganism says:

    I also want to point out that many i used to know that have CPA’s do their tax returns, recommend they inflate their tax deductible “donations” as tax right offs.
    So self reporting cash donation tithes may not be correct either.
    Might have to only take checks, as balances….

    I also have never gotten hate mail from atheist, agnostics, or even devil worshiping warlocks, but have gotten three pieces of hate mail telling me i will rot in hell and am a subhuman sinner, for being an artist.
    It wasn’t personal, they delivered em to every PO Box in town.
    Now that is Junked mail.

    • Andrew says:

      Whoever sent you and everyone else that is obviously either mentally unstable or is involved in a very odd sub-religion aka Cult. Either way, make sure you don’t take your whole view of that religion (i assume Christianity) just from that incident.

      Also, are you an artist? Or did they just assume everyone was?

  4. Eric Sotnak says:

    Collecting offerings is standard practice in almost all churches. Regular church members can have this recorded so that they can deduct it from their taxes. I wonder if regular offerings are included in the data set. If so, there is a problem, since there are considerable social pressures (and even explicit appeals by church leadership) on people to keep up or increase their giving. A strong argument can be made that it isn’t religiosity that is the primary motivator here, but psycho-social and situational pressures. This is a slightly different point from the one made by Sablosky; it isn’t just that giving to churches serves sectarian interests, but that it may be largely an artifact of situational factors rather than individual religiosity.

  5. Manuel says:


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