Dale McGowan was raised in what he calls a “nominally Christian home” and sampled about nine Christian denominations before concluding as an adult that he identified as a secular humanist. However, he says, “I was always interested in the questions” that theology raised about life’s purpose. Four years ago, he left his career as a college professor to focus on writing, producing two books devoted to raising children without religion, Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers.
Through his books and workshops, he has achieved widespread name recognition among like-minded parents. And so, like many people who have earned a measure of fame, he wanted to “do something valuable,” he says, with his bully pulpit.
In January Mr. McGowan started Foundation Beyond Belief, an organization in Alpharetta, Ga., that seeks to spur charitable giving by atheists, secular humanists, and others who do not follow organized religion.
Thirteen percent of Americans claim no religious identity, according to a Gallup poll last year. And many studies have shown that people who identify as religious or attend a religious institution regularly tend to give more to charity overall than people who identify themselves as secular. Foundation Beyond Belief seeks to help remedy that situation. For a $9 annual fee, the group presents members with an array of charities it has vetted and allows donors to earmark gifts for organizations from that lineup, either in automatic monthly payments of $5 to $250 or a one-time contribution of any amount.
So far, Foundation Beyond Belief, which gathers donations from its members entirely online, has raised just over $12,000 and admitted 316 members, with a goal of raising $500,000 and signing up 4,000 members by the end of this year.
In addition to wanting to give nonreligious donors a community that highlights and encourages their giving, Mr. McGowan says he was motivated by studies that show a steady drop in overall church attendance among Americans. For example, in 2009, Gallup pollsters found that 63 percent of Americans said they belong to a church or synagogue; in 1999, 70 percent said the same.
“That struck me as a potential crisis for philanthropy in America,” he says. “If that continues to be the case, and nonchurchgoers give less, then something had to step into the gap.”
A Philanthropic ‘Nudge’
In 2005 the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, in Indianapolis, conducted a study in which it asked heads of households about their religious practices as well as their charitable giving. The study found that 56 percent of the respondents who did not report a religious affiliation said they gave to charity. By contrast, 72 percent of people who did report a religious affiliation said they contributed to charity.
People who attended religious services at least once a week were 11 percent more likely than other households to give to secular causes and gave $160 more per year to those organizations.
The strong correlation between religious practice and philanthropy has many roots, says Una Osili, the Center on Philanthropy’s director of research. “Could be there are more opportunities: You might get asked a lot because you’re in church,” she says. “Or it could be the teaching of that particular faith.” Or, she says, faith itself could be entwined with the impulse to give to charity.
Mr. McGowan is not convinced that religious believers give more because they are inherently more moral than secular donors—they are simply “part of a community that encourages a culture of giving,” he says. The “nudge” of having a collection plate passed before a person every week, he adds, creates an incentive to give at all times, not only when attending church.
“It has nothing to do with belief, it has nothing to do with virtue,” he says. “It has to do with a systemic opportunity to give.”
Indo Soeding, a Chicago father who works as a management consultant, is a longtime fan of Mr. McGowan’s child-rearing advice and became a member of Foundation Beyond Belief after learning about it on Mr. McGowan’s blog. He sees his involvement in the foundation as a way to be more “proactive” in his family’s giving, as opposed to the more “reactive” giving he and his wife do when they contribute to friends’ bikeathons and the like.
Mr. Soeding, who identifies as a humanist, says both he and his wife grew up Catholic, and he agrees with Mr. McGowan that the culture of religious institutions—“a peer pressure in the most positive sense”—prods members to give.
Another factor, he says, might be attitudes toward private philanthropy among the nonreligious: “Nonreligious people tend to be more in favor of government-sponsored social programs,” he says. “We think that we as a society should take care of people who have certain needs and aren’t able to fulfill those themselves, and mistakenly think that those needs are being fulfilled through some other channel.”
But also, he says, “some of the religious charities have a clear ulterior motive.”
And while a proselytizing, overtly religious mission may spur believers to give, he says, it can just as easily turn off secular donors who might otherwise support a charity’s humanitarian work.
Choosing Charities
Foundation Beyond Belief selects beneficiary charities in each of 10 categories, including animal protection, child welfare, education, environment, health, human rights, peace, poverty, and the “big bang” fund, which focuses on small charities of a variety of missions.
The 10th slot, Mr. McGowan says, will always be held by Foundation Beyond Belief. The group, which expects to receive official charity status from the Internal Revenue Service later this spring, is running on a projected budget of $92,000 this year, largely derived from a grant from the Institute for Humanist Studies and one-time donations from individuals. As executive director, Mr. McGowan is the only full-time staff member, though the group also employs four part-time workers.
Among Foundation Beyond Belief’s designated recipients in the first quarter of 2010: Refugees International, War Child UK, and the Wildlife Trust.
Also included was the tiny, $232,000-budget Smart Recovery, which provides “science-based” support groups for recovering drug and alcohol addicts, an alternative to the more spiritual approach favored by 12-step groups like Alcoholics Anonymous.
For now, says Mr. McGowan, Foundation Beyond Belief is focusing on recipients with budgets under $10-million to ensure that its members’ gifts make a big difference to the charities they support. One clear condition is that no recipient can “have an active proselytizing program.”
Marking Their Gifts
Thus far, the organization has promoted itself mostly via social media and blogs by atheist and secular-humanist writers. Adam Lee, a software engineer in Queens, N.Y., joined Foundation Beyond Belief after interviewing Mr. McGowan for Mr. Lee’s blog, Daylight Atheist.
He likes the opportunity Foundation Beyond Belief provides to make charitable giving by secular donors more visible.
“Most religious groups have a charity that works in their name—there’s Catholic Charities, and Lutheran World Relief, or groups like that,” he says. “And when you contribute to a group like that, it’s obvious who’s contributing, what their budget is coming from, what their world view is.”
When nonbelievers give, he notes, “there’s nothing to mark our donations as coming from atheists.”
As Foundation Beyond Belief moves ahead, some observers point to potential challenges.
“Dale has bitten off a lot right from the beginning, in terms of the range of causes they’re supporting,” says Mr. Soeding.
He appreciates the choice it gives donors but is concerned about how recipients will be vetted as new charities join the lineup.
Foundation Beyond Belief’s small size may offer challenges as its philanthropic program matures, as hidden expenses, such as bank fees, crop up, says Sherry Rook, coordinator of the Skeptics and Humanists Aid and Relief Effort, or Share, at the Center for Inquiry, a nonprofit secular humanist organization in Amherst, N.Y.
Mr. McGowan’s group, she says, “may run into, ‘Well, how do we cover these extra costs?’”
Share often runs drives for disasters in the United States and abroad and has raised just under $103,000 for Haitian earthquake survivors, according to Ms. Rook, who also serves as the Center for Inquiry’s vice president for development. All money raised for Haiti was donated to Doctors Without Borders.
Ms. Rook notes that 50 percent of the donors to Share’s Haiti drive were new to the Center for Inquiry’s e-mail list, a sign of an untapped market, she says.
“There’s a lot of room for people who are not religious who now see the value of giving as a group,” says Ms. Rook.
Giving by Secular and Religious Donors
- Thirteen percent of all Americans claim no religious identity.
- In 2009, 63 percent of Americans said they belonged to a church or synagogue.
- Ten years earlier, that figure was 70 percent.
- In 2005, 72 percent of households that reported a religious affiliation said they gave to charity.
- In the same study, 56 percent of people who did not report a religious affiliation said they contributed to charity.
