America’s Lack of a Social Safety Net Keeps Churches in Business

Each month, members of Atheists United, a Los Angeles-based affiliate of American Atheists, run a food distribution project. In September 2021, they gave away more than 3,000 pounds of food to 75 families. | Image by Atheists United

It’s almost inevitable. Any time a story about the continued decline of religion in the United States is written, you can expect it to include at least some alarmism about replacing the positive contributions from church groups and religiously-affiliated charities. Or, in any article about atheists and nonreligious people, some commenter will ask “Why aren’t they feeding the hungry or sheltering the homeless?”

Setting aside the distinction between secular providers and atheist providers—and the fact that many atheist groups do in fact provide aid to people experiencing homelessness—this is asking the wrong question.

We should be asking why our government, through our representatives, isn’t prioritizing fully funding social safety net programs that would alleviate the hardship our fellow Americans are facing. Why is the United States the only wealthy Western democracy that relies so heavily on the largesse of churches and religiously aligned charities to help people put food on the table?

According to Duke University’s National Congregations Study, more than half of churches and other religious congregations have food pantries or similar assistance programs. Feeding America, a nationwide network of more than 200 food banks that is the second largest charity in the United States, reports that nearly two-thirds of their 60,000 affiliated food pantries and meal programs are religiously affiliated.

While it’s incredibly difficult to fully account for the amount of money that is funneled through faith-based charitable organizations because of the way the money is distributed—largely in block grants that pass through multiple agencies, subcontractors, and levels of government—it no doubt totals in the tens- or even hundreds-of-billions of dollars.

But it’s not just day-to-day social safety net programs where religious groups play an outsized role.

A recent study published in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health found that 20% of hospital beds were in religiously affiliated hospitals. In five states (Alaska, Iowa, Washington, Wisconsin, and South Dakota), “40% of acute care hospital beds are religiously owned or affiliated.” And in another five states (Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri, Oregon, and Kentucky), that number is 30%.

When natural disasters strike, the individual member groups of the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (NVOAD) help communities clean up and rebuild. Of the NVOAD’s 74 constituent groups, more than half (40) are religiously affiliated.

A Southern Baptist relief group has trained more than 70,000 volunteers in disaster relief. In the wake of Hurricanes Sally and Irma in 2020, the Baptists “prepared almost half a million meals, put nearly 300 temporary roofs on storm-damaged homes, cleared trees from 2,300 more, and provided more than 13,000 showers and more than 7,400 loads of clean laundry” in impacted areas of Louisiana and Texas, according to reporting from Bob Smietana from the Religion News Service.

As membership in these religious denominations continues to wane, will they be able to field the army of volunteers needed to provide assistance at the level needed because our government has failed, up until now, to act? Can atheists and nonreligious communities provide similar structures to mobilize the growing population of Nones?

Unfortunately, it seems like the answer to both of these questions is “no.” While groups like Atheists Helping the Homeless and Foundation Beyond Belief are providing assistance in some communities, they are still under-resourced and nowhere near as numerous as even relatively small and loosely organized religious denominations.

But this shortcoming assumes that our nation maintains the diffuse and informal method of providing direct aid to those in need. That instinct to preserve the status quo and failure to imagine an alternative is widespread across the political spectrum.

During a meeting with the Center for Popular Democracy to discuss congressional Democrats’ spending packages earlier this year, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), the pivotal 50th vote in the evenly divided Senate, reportedly said, “We get so sanctimonious about the separation of church and state.” He claimed that funding churches would eliminate the need for big-ticket safety net programs, since congregations could easily feed and care for children.

I don’t need to tell you why this is a catastrophic idea, but to give just one example: On their way out the door following the 2020 election, the Trump Administration gutted key civil rights protections for the tens of millions of Americans who receive services from religious providers. (We’re suing over that arbitrary and illegal rule change.) But this action highlights just how vulnerable even basic safeguards are to attacks by a hostile executive.

Ryan Burge—a professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, an expert on the growth of the nonreligious, and a pastor—opined, “The average American doesn’t realize all the things that churches do to make society less awful.”

That’s probably true. But relying on churches to be the ones to make society less awful is a policy choice. As churches lose membership, why are atheist or secular community alternatives required to pick up the slack? Isn’t it within our power to demand that our government, acting in our collective interest, make society less awful? Or, perhaps, even make it something better than just “less awful?”

Our counterparts throughout the world seem to have figured it out. And, in making that policy choice, these countries seem to have (unintentionally) reduced the importance of religion in the day-to-day lives of their citizens.

A 2004 study by Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde found a strong inverse correlation between social safety net spending and religious participation. In other words, as nations spent more on providing basic services, interest in and adherence to religion decreased. The researchers conclude that while religion will “still be there to serve the spiritual needs of people seeking answers to the philosophical mysteries of life,” people who primarily rely on the church for the “tangible welfare benefits churches provide will be less likely to participate in religious services once secular substitutes become available.”

Madalyn Murray O’Hair, explaining her values as an atheist to the Supreme Court, said that atheists wanted “disease conquered, poverty vanquished, and war eliminated.” In a country of more than 325 million, perhaps it’s time we try leveraging the power of our political system to have government work on accomplishing those goals, rather than relying on a patchwork of religious providers that too often discriminate and on secular charities that don’t have enough money to get the job done.

And if that means people come to realize that religion isn’t the only place they can turn to in times of crisis, that’s fine with me.