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Ask people their opinions and they will freely give them. Ask about money and you will get a more guarded response. Many Americans are downright secretive about what they do with their money. That secretiveness itself suggests that uncomfortable truths may be discovered by following the money.

Jesus thought so. He assessed people's lives less by what they said ("Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord' and do not do what I say?") than by how they responded to him and, in particular, by how they handled money. ("One thing you lack. Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.") "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also," Jesus predicted.

That is why I have been studying financial data—to try to listen to money talk about what kind of people we are. Particularly, I have tried to consider how Americans give money away. Charitable giving is as close as we can get to truly free financial behavior. You are not obligated to give (and lots of people don't). You aren't buying anything you need, like food or transportation or housing, or even anything you enjoy, like vacations or premium cable channels. You get nothing out of giving except the satisfaction of your soul. And so, giving shows something about a person's soul.

Rich Americans
I grew up with a mythology of American small-town life that included "the rich banker." In my child's mind, society was composed of scatterings of poor folks (usually across the tracks), a wide band of hard-working ordinary people, and a very few unusual individuals who were rich. The rich were different from you and me: they lived in a nicer house, wore better clothes, and most of all, didn't have to worry about the price of things.

As a child I understood that there were good rich people and bad rich people, and the difference was generosity. I never knew whether a neighboring carpenter or a farmer was particularly charitable. With ordinary people, generosity or stinginess didn't stand out much. Yet people talked about generous rich people with respect and appreciation. Stingy and grasping rich people, however, like Old Man Potter in It's a Wonderful Life, were scorned.

Guess what? We have become the rich bankers. Compared to most of the rest of the world, ordinary Americans have an abundance. Compared to our own grandparents, we are rich. Sylvia and John Ronsvalle, who have spent years studying church finances, compute that the average American today earns almost four times what the average American earned in 1921, after adjusting for inflation and taxes. Real incomes have nearly doubled just since the late 1950s. Today's ordinary middle-class citizens live like the rich banker in their grandparents' town. We wear better clothes. We own bigger houses (with more closets to put things in). We eat out at restaurants.

How generous are we with our new riches? By comparison with other nations, Americans are very generous. "Total giving to charitable organizations of all kinds, both in absolute figures and as a proportion of income, is higher in the United States than in virtually any other advanced industrial society," writes Robert Wuthnow in God and Mammon in America. (The only possible exception is Israel.)

We have been generous because of our riches, no doubt, but also because of our unique American approach to giving. American colonists reacted against the European system of involuntary tithes. They proposed something new: that churches and charitable institutions be sustained entirely by voluntary gifts. This perilous approach has produced uniquely strong charitable institutions, and a peculiar charitable instinct. It is doubtful that a middle-class European, concerned about health care, would think to respond by giving a donation to a hospital. In America, voluntary giving has long been a major alternative to government action, supporting, for example, some of our best universities and hospitals. We have a thriving independent sector in education, health care, social welfare, the arts, environmental causes, and, of course, in religion.

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May 19 1997, Vol. 41, No. 6