How large is the community of Christians involved in effective altruism?
by Mike Morell.
One way to go about measuring the size of the population of Christian EA’s is the direct route. The Christians and Effective Altruism Facebook Group is one place where this community gathers online. As of September 2018, the group has 427 members.
Since April 2018, we have been running a survey of group members to get a sense of the community demographics. If you’re a member of the Facebook group and have yet to complete the survey, we’d really appreciate your participation; the link is here. And if you have yet to join the Facebook group, we’d welcome you to join here.
So far, the survey has had 70 responses, of whom 64 (91%) self-identify as Christians. If we extrapolate this to the group as a whole (not necessarily accurate, as there may be reasons that the non-Christian members of the group are more or less likely to take the survey), that would be a population of about 390 Christians in effective altruism.
Here are a few other findings of the survey so far:
Geographic distribution: UK 41%, US 25%, Switzerland 12%, and nine other countries totaling 22%. Within the UK, all responses are from England. Within the US, Florida and Michigan are the only states with multiple responses
Gender: 74% male, 26% female
Occupation: 46% are students or professors, and among the rest there is a wide variety of public and private sector occupations represented.
Primary Field of Study: Social Sciences, Philosophy, and Natural Sciences are the top three.
Church Affiliation: among Christian responses, we received 30 different answers; the largest groups were Church of England (29%), no affiliation (19%), and Roman Catholic (16%).
Double-digit responses identified as Evangelical (22), Progressive (15), Charismatic (12), Mere Christian (11), and Born-Again (10).
We received 25 different responses to "how did you hear about effective altruism?", with Personal Friend (33%) being the most common answer.
64% of respondents identify themselves as effective altruists, 6% do not, the rest are not sure yet or gave a more nuanced answer. One respondent noted “I identify with the movement, and agree with the core principles, but do not consider myself and my current actions all that effectively altruistic”. I suspect this person is in good company; Romans 7:14-25 comes to mind.
Poverty was by far the largest “cause priority”, with most responses (39) rating it "Extremely Important" and everyone rating it at least "Somewhat Important". Christian Evangelism showed sharp differences, receiving the most responses for "Not Important" (10) but the 2nd largest number of "Extremely Important" (22). Animal Welfare on the other hand had the fewest number of "Extremely Important" ratings (6), but only one "Not Important", with 61 responses somewhere in between.
Another way to estimate the size of the Christian EA community is to look at the community of effective altruists and at what fraction of that community is Christian. Sizing the EA community as a whole is not a trivial exercise, as discussed here. Should we start with the survey responses to the general EA Survey of 2018 (2,607), or the Facebook group membership (13,407), or the subscription base of the 80,000 Hours Newsletter (76,000)? As far as estimating the Christian share of that population, the EA Survey of 2018 (see here) puts it at 9%. So depending on the base we use there could be a few hundred or several thousand Christian EA’s active online.
I would suggest, however, that the most important measure is not being captured adequately by any of this analysis. That is, how many Christians are out there following (or sincerely trying to follow) Jesus’s ethical teachings regarding loving one’s neighbor as oneself, and the encouragement towards careful thought found in many of His sayings and parables, and in our individual consciences? On this website we’ve been making the case that present-day effective altruism is a very natural application of these teachings.
In this sense, I suspect that many Christians around the world, perhaps numbering in the millions, are supporters of effective altruism even if they have neither heard that term nor been educated in the latest analytical techniques. Personally, I found EA through finding GiveWell, which in turn I found through reading about older incarnations of the EA concept, such as “high impact philanthropy”. And in turn, that search was ultimately inspired by conscience and by the Gospels.