14 DAY TRIAL // Every single week, millions of people in the United States attend their local church, regardless of denomination. They leave behind a lot of money in donations to their respective faiths, and one would expect that the religion they worship worked for them, in the sense that the contributions went to benefit someone or some cause. While general contributions make for a large proportion of a congregation's income, a new study by experts at the Rice University shows that it's not the people who have the most influence on their cults and religions, but foundations that contribute close to nothing.
A newly published book, called “Financing Faith: Religion and Strategic Philanthropy,” deals precisely with these issues. It was authored by Rice Assistant Professor of Sociology D. Michael Lindsay, and coauthored by Princeton University sociologist Robert Wuthnow, and published in the March issue of the respected Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. The book is among the first documents to look at the correlations that exist between the amount of money foundations give to religions, and the amount of influence these organizations have, when compared to that of average folks.
According to the two authors, the reason why private foundations have such a huge say in religion is “because of their institutional independence, financial resources and unique ability to redirect energies within an institutional field.” The two investigators looked at the grants that private foundations had awarded to various congregations between 1999 and 2003, in an attempt to decipher the mechanisms that dictated how these funds were allotted. They found that “directed giving” had a tremendous effect.
A good example in this sense, they say, is Lilly Endowment, an organization that “has infused hundreds of thousands of dollars into the religious sector with a strong preference to developing the leadership capabilities of pastors and church staff members. Over the last decade, the endowment has allocated nearly $500 million to various programs across the country with the goal of recruiting, training and sustaining high-caliber ministry professionals.” In the five years the study covered, Lilly Endowment has remained the incontestable leader of all donations in the US, awarding 1,473 grants totaling more than $677 million to religious organizations.
One of the most important conclusions the new study reached was that the significant amount of strategic resources private foundations controlled allowed them to basically set the agendas of the religious sector in whichever way they saw fit. This type of donations may reshape the religious sector altogether, as the pressure adds to the one already being exerted by rising secularism, religious pluralism and globalization. Funding for the research came from the Aspen Institute. The University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Civil Society also aided the experts in their investigation.