Warning: This review is very long and will likely span several more posts. This is pretty much "what I'm all about" folks. 100 Thing Challenge cynics should really dig in here, if you want to question what I'm up to.
If you are a Christian or seriously religious person living in the United States, the book Passing the Plate by Christian Smith and Michael O. Emerson, with Patricia Snell is a must read. It might very well be life changing. It could be church changing. And if it is at all taken to heart by most Christians in the United States, it ought to be world changing.
Even for non-religious Americans (and non-Americans) the contents of the this suburb study might be of interest. The book's audience is clearly Christians in the United States. And yet the first chapter especially might be worth pondering for anyone concerned with the needs of the world. It is simply staggering what a modest amount of generosity spread out among many people can produce in terms of good. Smith and Emerson are some of the best sociologists around, and so I trust their calculations. They estimate that generous -- but not extravagant -- giving among most Christians in the United States alone would add an additional $133 billion a year in charitable donations. It takes over ten pages to speculate what some of that money could be used for. Reading the first chapter of this book alone should cause jaws to drop. Most of us simply never work with numbers in the billions. We don't see a balance sheet that spends $100,000,000 and yet still has $132.9 billion left to allocate.
Sure there are complicating factors when it comes to philanthropy. Often times the countries most in need of charity have governments that resist or abuse charity. And yet, as even the least cynical observer will recognize, money buys political power. According to Smith and Emerson, Christians in the United States produce a combined income of $2.4 trillion. That means that if they were a country, they would be invited to sit with the G8. Could some of their charitable $133 billion buy some political cooperation? Uh, yeah it could.
Passing the Plate finds some conclusions you might expect. On the whole, Christians are more generous in giving than non-Christians. Since financial charity is a key component of Christian teaching, it is not unexpected that data would show that conclusion. And yet, Christians should not get too comfortable. As a group, non-Christian religious Americans give more than Christians. Moreover, the median (not the mean) Christian giver only gave 0.62 percent of median annual Christian income. While many biblical scholars question the rigidity of a 10 percent tithe, no one reading the Bible would conclude that half a percent of annual income was what Jesus had in mind for his followers' generosity. Moreover, by any measure (the author's use several), Christians become less generous the more they earn. Perhaps the most disturbing of these figures is that after making adjustments, in real dollars Christians gave more generously during the Great Depression than they do today. Hold on, there are data more damning than that. By several measures, Christians in America give 98 percent of their charitable donations to themselves. Only about 2 percent of Christian giving makes its way outside of the church walls, denominational headquarters, and local communities of believers. Almost all Christian giving in the United States goes to support operations and buildings and programs that benefit American Christians.
There is much more that could be said about the data in the book. Perhaps I'll return to more in another post. Most likely I'll post again about the authors' conclusions. They highlight American consumerism as the first and foremost roadblock to generous giving:
This next observation about American consumerism that the authors draw is one of the best descriptions of the problem I've ever read. They correctly identify the systematic nature of consumerism in the United States:
In fact, so rooted do they see the economic model of mass consumerism and waste that they believe that if Americans did not continually give themselves over to mass consumer behavior "then the economy would slow down and eventually collapse." (A conclusion I disagree with.) Despite the clear frustration that Smith and Emerson have with the negative effects consumerism has on Christian charity, they see no alternative for the economic system of the United States.
As increasing numbers of observers note, we must find a solution to this seeming dependence on the economic system of consumerism. While I'll have a few critical observations when I review BillMcKibben's book Deep Economy, he makes the perfectly true point that the world (environmentally and culturally) cannot sustain the continued growth of American-style consumerism in the United States alone. The trouble is that China, India, and Brazil are fast approaching and on the way to exceeding the growth of American-style consumerism. It is inevitable that there would be massive environmental and cultural collapses in the coming decades. And, no Jeffrey Sachs, technology will not adequately ameliorate these problems. There is a very real difference between putting a handful of astronauts on the moon after a few years of trying, compared to providing the water and food and most-minimal living standards necessary to support billions of people. I'm a huge fan of technology. Technology will be a continued and important aspect of the solutions to the world's problems. But technology is not capable of handling the damage that American-style consumerism has done to the world. Period.
What is perfectly clear is this. Christian generosity could easily -- without even getting into "sacrificial" levels of giving -- solve the world's problems. Christian giving, if it were simply generous and even comfortably within the means of American Christians alone, could fund the volunteerism, technology, education,health care , more needed to solve the world's most pressing problems. It's ridiculously convicting. It ought to change Christian financial activity forever.
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