“Interestingly, today, 68.4% of all religious-based non-governmental organizations are either Christian (57.4%) or Jewish (11%). Where the legacy of the biblical tradition is weakest, so is charitable giving. In his recent survey of the data, Who Really Cares: America’s Charity Divide, Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks maintains that:
There is so little private charity in Europe that it is difficult to find information on the subject–so irrelevant is it that few researchers have even bothered to investigate . . . Specifically, no Western European population comes remotely close [to] the United States in per capita private charity. The closest nation, Spain, has average giving that is less than half that of the United States. Per person, Americans give three and a half times as much as the French, seven times as much as the Germans, and fourteen times as much as the Italians.”[1]
[1] The Bible, Culture, and Care for the Poor, Ben Mitchell, http://www.biblemesh.com/blog/ accessed 3/21/12.
