Against duty-based arguments for giving to the local church

by Alex Rattee.

On the Duty of Giving to Local Churches vs. Global Needs

Rather than arguing that donating to one’s local church is the way of bringing about the most good in the world, the most plausible arguments in favour of giving substantial amounts to the local church seem to me to be that the relationship that church members have with their church create specific obligations on them to donate to their churches even if it does not lead to the most global good overall.

Two different accounts from within the EA for Christians community have been put forward exploring the possibility that there is an obligation to donate generated by the relationship a church member has with their church. Joe Tulloch has explored that there may be a duty of reciprocity to give to the local church in response to the benefits it provides the attendee. Separately Dominic Roser has argued that there might be a duty to pay your fair share of the budget for any organisation you belong to, which would include church membership.

If we are going to allow that duties exist as a special normative category at all, then we need to consider the full range of duties that might bind a person. In this post, I defend that even if these two different types of duty exist and operate in church membership cases, it may still not be appropriate to donate to your local church. This is because discharging other types of duties, such as a duty of rescue to others, would have priority, and such duties would likely require you to donate your money elsewhere rather than your local church.

The idea of a duty of rescue is that the requirement to rescue someone from peril often overrides the other duties that bind us. For example, many believe there is a general duty to obey the law, but most people would argue that the duty I owe a dying person in need of hospital treatment ought to be prioritised above certain types of law-keeping. As a result, one can legitimately break the law by speeding in order to rush a person to the hospital if doing so would plausibly save their life. Here a duty of rescue outweighs the duty to obey the law.

Prioritizing Global Needs Over Local Church Donations

Considering Peter Singer’s classic drowning child thought experiment, many people, myself included, are convinced that we ought to use our resources to support those in dire need even when costly to ourselves. I also think that the duty of rescue to those in extreme poverty demonstrated by Singer’s thought experiment will override other duties to give to our local church when it comes to where I should allocate my money. If I have the choice between stopping someone die of malaria through donating to provide bednets or alternatively giving to my local church then it seems to me that the duty of rescue to save the life of the potential malaria victim will outweigh reciprocity or fair share duties.

As such it seems difficult to argue that any duties (fair share, reciprocity or other) which provide some reason for giving to your local church are not going to be outweighed by the duty or rescue we owe to those in dire need.