Evangelicals: Givers or Hate-Mongers

A giver tends to be other-centered. We call that “love.” Love puts the needs of others first. It is the antithesis of hate.

Are evangelicals are hate-mongers and extremists? According to a letter from Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, even the US military is now associating Evangelicals and Catholics with the Klu Klux Klan and other terroristic organizations. He makes to following observations:

• A Fort Leavenworth War Games scenario identified Christian and Evangelical groups as potential threats

• A 2009 Dept. of Homeland Security memo identified Evangelicals and pro-life groups as potential threats to national security

• The U.S. Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Center released a study linking pro-lifers to terrorism

• Evangelical leader Franklin Graham was uninvited from the Pentagon's National Day of Prayer service

• At the National Cemetery in Houston, Christian prayers were prohibited at the funeral services for military veterans

• Distribution of Bibles was banned for a time at Walter Reed Army Medical Center

• Christian crosses and a steeple were removed from a chapel in Afghanistan because the military said the icons disrespected other religions

However, hate groups do not fit the profile of giving, other-centered groups. KKKers don’t feed the poor and volunteer their services to carry meals to the home-bound. Just today, the most recent Barna survey on giving was posted:

• A person’s religious identification has a lot to do with whether or not they donate to causes they believe in. Evangelicals were far and away the group most likely to donate money, items or time as a volunteer. More than three-quarters of evangelicals (79%) have donated money in the last year, and 65% and 60% of them have donated items or volunteer time, respectively. Additionally, only 1% of evangelicals say they made no charitable donation in the last 12 months. Comparatively, 27% of those with a faith other than Christianity say they made no charitable donation in the last year—a number more than double the national rate (13%). One-fifth of people who claimed no faith said they made no donation over the last year, still noticeably higher than the number for all Americans.

• Interestingly, the difference between evangelical Christians and non-evangelical born again Christians was marked. While 79% of evangelicals made a financial donation over the last year, 53% of non-evangelical born agains [these are respondents who claim a personal relationship with Jesus but don’t ascribe to the basics of the biblical faith] said the same. The number of non-evangelical born again Christians who didn’t make a donation matches the national average exactly (13%), compared to the only 1% of evangelicals.

Ironically, Evangelicals are called the worst of names – “hypocrites,” “bigots,” and “hate-mongers.” However, the stats don’t ever seem to back up these hateful invectives. Perhaps something more is at issue. Even 2000 years ago, Jesus warned:

• "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember the words I spoke to you: 'No servant is greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also.” (John 15:18-20)

Of course, we are miles away from where we need to be, but should this make us objects of persecution? No! How then do we explain it? Oddly, it is this 2000 year old warning that best captures our post-Christian society.

Robert Putnam, Social Capital, and the Decline of the West

 What brings about positive social change? According to Robert Putnam, the answer is not material but “social capital,” – the willingness of people to join their energies together for the common good:

• Putnam has been described as the most influential academic in the world today…He has been the focus of seminars hosted by Bill Clinton at Camp David and Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street. His ideas have popped up in speeches by George W. Bush and William Hague.

Putnam became alarmed by indications of serious social decay. For instance,

• “When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, 75 percent of Americans said that they trusted their government to do the right thing. Last year [1999], same survey, same question, it was 19 percent…what worried me as an American citizen -- namely, the sense that our national experiment in democratic self- government is faltering.”

Putnam observed:

• “A broad and continuing erosion of civic engagement that began a quarter-century ago. High on our scholarly agenda should be the question of whether a comparable erosion of social capital may be under way in other advanced democracies, perhaps in different institutional and behavioral guises. High on America's agenda should be the question of how to reverse these adverse trends in social connectedness, thus restoring civic engagement and civic trust.”

Putnam later supported his conclusions with a broad range of data:

• Political and civic engagement. Voting, political knowledge, political trust, and grassroots political activism are all down. Americans sign 30 per cent fewer petitions and are 40 per cent less likely to join a consumer boycott, as compared to just a decade or two ago. The declines are equally visible in non-political community life: membership and activity in all sorts of local clubs and civic and religious organizations have been falling at an accelerating pace. In the mid-1970s the average American attended some club meeting every month, by 1998 that rate of attendance had been cut by nearly 60 per cent.

• Informal social ties. In 1975 the average American entertained friends at home 15 times per year; the equivalent figure (1998) is now barely half that. Virtually all leisure activities that involve doing something with someone else, from playing volleyball to playing chamber music, are declining.

Interestingly, many will cite greater tolerance as a positive development of our growingly secular society. However, Putnam found that:   

• “Although Americans are more tolerant of one another than were previous generations, they trust one another less. Survey data provide one measure of the growth of dishonesty and distrust, but there are other indicators. For example, employment opportunities for police, lawyers, and security personnel were stagnant for most of this…In the last quarter century these occupations boomed, as people have increasingly turned to the courts and the police.”

• “Trust (even of one's own 'race') is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer” (Putnam 2007).

All of these factors tend to stifle the development of social capital. Therefore, Putnam became interested in the factors that generate social capital – the mobilization of human energy:

• Putnam has also sought to track emerging, significant generators of social capital - and to examine some of the qualities that make them significant. Religion has been a particular focus - not surprising as in his view religious affiliations account for half of all US social capital.

• “They [churches] have very low barriers to entry - the doors are open, there are folding chairs out on the patio - they make it very easy to surf by. You can leave easily. But then they ramp people up to a huge commitment - at some megachurches, half of all members are tithing [giving a tenth of their income]. How do they get from the low to the high commitment? By a honeycomb structure of thousands of small groups: they have the mountain bikers for God group, the volleyball players for God, the breast cancer survivors for God, the spouses of the breast cancer survivors for God, and so on.”

• “The intense tie is not to the theology but in the emotional commitment to others in their small group. Most of these people are seeking meaning in their lives but they are also seeking friends. The small groups spend two hours a week together - doing the volleyball or the mountain biking and praying; they become your closest friends. These churches form in places of high mobility - people live there for six weeks and the church provides the community connection. When you lose your job, they'll tide you over, when your wife gets ill, they'll bring the chicken soup.”

In a 2011 interview with Faith and Leadership regarding his new book, American Grace, Putnam claimed:

• “Specifically, we find that people who are active in religious communities are systematically more generous, better neighbors. They’re more likely to work on community projects. They’re more likely to give to secular causes as well as religious causes. They’re much more likely to volunteer for secular causes as well as religious causes. They’re more likely to give blood. They’re more likely to let a stranger cut in front of them in line. http://www.faithandleadership.com/qa/robert-d-putnam-americas-grace

• They’re better neighbors and they’re better citizens. But it turns out that -- and we were shocked at what I’m about to say -- that virtually none of that seems to have anything to do with the context of people’s theology.

• That is, it isn’t how strongly people believe in God. How strongly you say you assert your belief in God actually isn’t that related to these good deeds, and it doesn’t depend on whether you believe in justification by faith or justification by deeds. That’s irrelevant to this finding. It doesn’t even depend upon whether you say that you’re a religious person.

• I do not know what it is about religious groups that make the difference. Something does, and it seems that that something is probably not embodied in the beliefs of the individual worshippers.”

However, Putnam dismisses the Christian faith in favor of the Christian community as the social capital engine. But what is it about the Christian community that has made it into such an engine, and why - if social capital is so esteemed – haven’t other groups been able to replicate this on a long term basis? Why had it been that the Christian West was able to surge forward with its mobilization of social capital? Coincidently, Putnam observed that:

• The 1960s witnessed a significant drop in weekly churchgoing -- from roughly 48 percent in the late 1950s to roughly 41 percent in the early 1970s. Since then, it has stagnated or (according to some surveys) declined still further.

This drop is also associated with the rise of secularism and a drop in volunteerism:

• These data show some striking patterns. First, membership in traditional women's groups has declined more or less steadily since the 1960s. For example, membership in the national Federation of Women's Clubs is down by more than half (59 percent) since 1964, while membership in the League of Women Voters (LWV) is off 42 percent since 1969. Similar reductions are apparent in the numbers of volunteers for mainline civic organizations, such as the Boy Scouts (off by 26 percent since 1970) and the Red Cross (off by 61 percent since 1970). At all educational (and hence social) levels of American society, and counting all sorts of group memberships, the average number of associational memberships has fallen by about a fourth over the last quarter century.

What is it about modern secular society that is both so corrosive to church and the production of social capital and why? What does this portend for the future?

The Religious Right and their “Perverted” Gospel

 Anyone who seeks social respectability and identifies himself with the Religious Right has to be nuts. This much maligned group is held in contempt by the secular culture and even by other Christians! Even our youth try desperately to distance themselves from this stigma, and it’s no wonder.

Roland Martin, a syndicated columnist, author and self-identified Christian, also thrusts his pen against the despised Religious Right:

• What has happened over the last 30 years is the religious right has perverted the Bible to fit its narrow view of what Christians should pay attention to. Abortion and homosexuality. Nothing else matters.

• Well, my Bible is bigger than that. My faith is bigger than that. And my Jesus Christ cares about more than abortion and homosexuality. Please, make your case about those two issues. But don't talk to me, Rev. Graham, Franklin Graham, or any other right-wing evangelical, about the sanctity of life when you are silent about such things as Trayvon Martin being gunned down or police brutality taking the lives of innocent Americans.

Martin is right about a number of things. Christians have a biblically-mandated duty to pursue justice and to care for the needy. In fact I’ve never heard a Christian deny that the Bible mandates these things. Nevertheless, Martin suggests that evangelicals are relatively insensitive to the plight of the poor and needy. However, the stats indicate something else:

• In 2001 American evangelicals gave a mean of $3,601 per capita to nonprofit organizations, which is high when compared to other demographic groups.

• From 1968 to 2000, members of U.S. evangelical Protestant denominations gave larger dollar amounts and larger portions of income to their churches than did members of mainline Protestant denominations.

• In 2001, American evangelicals gave four times as much, per person, to churches as did all other church donors in 2001. Eighty-eight percent of evangelicals and 73 percent of all Protestants donated to churches.

This certainly doesn’t mean that evangelicals should pat themselves on the back. Admittedly, we fall far short of our calling. But how do evangelicals compare to the least religious? Robert Putnam and David Campbell, in their book American Grace, conclude that “religious Americans are more generous.”  Here is some of their evidence, drawn from national probability samples:

• The most religious 20% of Americans give an average of more than $3,000 a year to charity, the least religious 20% give about $1,000.

• In terms of percentage income, the most religious Americans are four times as generous as the least religious, giving about 7.5% of their income compared to about 1.5%.

• The most religious Americans give more money to religious causes (obviously) and to secular causes. In particular, they favor organizations that benefit the needy and young people.

• The most religious volunteer more often, to both religious and non-religious causes.

Admittedly, Christians understand their responsibility to the needy in a different way than the secularist or even Martin. They assume that the government should have the prime responsibility for the needy, and we need to agitate for reforms. However, there is indisputable evidence that entitlement programs have caused dysfunction to their target population - marginalizing the bread-winner, destroying families and creating a permanent underclass.

Sadly, the government has claimed this turf for itself, displacing providers that had one time filled this need. However, where these displaced providers had been able to exercise the necessary humanity and discernment – something essential for helping people – the government has instituted bureaucracy, inefficiency, inhumanity, red tape, and everything else that would encourage an entitlement mentality. It is therefore no wonder that evangelicals aren’t campaigning for more government control.

Martin censures the evangelical for not marching on behalf of Trayvon Martin, also censuring us for having “perverted the Bible to fit its narrow view of what Christians should pay attention to.” Of course, we have a biblical mandate to pursue justice! Admittedly, the white evangelical church was largely absent in the Civil Rights movement, and this neglect grieves many of us. However, if we don’t know that an injustice has actually been done, as in the case of Trayvon Martin, it is foolhardy to take action.

Ironically, when evangelicals do raise their voice in opposition to a clear injustice, like abortion, the media and the universities become livid with contempt, claiming that we are pushing our religion upon them – legislating morality. Darned if you do; darned if you don’t!

However, I am cheered to see many evangelicals promoting causes where the injustice is blatant, like in sexual trafficking.

Martin also cites the evangelical church for its silence regarding “police brutality.” I had been working for the New York City Department of Probation for 15 years and had heard a number of probationers complain about police brutality. However, I was in no position to assess their claims. I could only deal with issues where I had firsthand or verifiable knowledge. And sometimes this knowledge brought me into sharp conflict with my department.

Martin seems to assume that because we have not pursued institutional change in this area, we therefore have “perverted” the Gospel. Although we evangelicals are far from perfect, I find his charges grossly unfair. Do I get an “amen?”