The Art of Tithing
We’ve all heard the old saying that it is better to give than to receive. Oddly, it doesn’t always feel better, but I expect you can remember the pleasant awareness of your own goodness in giving to a charity or church, especially if you gave slightly more than you could comfortably afford. It’s a feeling some churches do everything they can to cultivate, especially in America, where everyone is free to give or not give as they please. Tithing, giving a tenth of your income, is the gold standard of generosity, an ideal to aspire to, and, for a dedicated minority, a living reality.
At first glance tithing is a radiantly simple and attractive idea. What better way to show that you’re sincere in your faith than by giving back to God a tenth of all that He has given to you? For many generous believers, it works. Others can’t stop themselves from asking pesky questions like: Is that 10 percent before or after taxes? What if the minister buys himself a big house and a fancy car – is my tithe really going to God? What if I give my tithe but then declare bankruptcy, leaving my creditors rather less well cared for than the Almighty? Can I be excused from the 10 percent rule if I give generously to tsunami and earthquake victims? On the upside, tithing is a beautiful example of American generosity and selflessness. On the downside, it’s occasionally a source of rancor and litigation.
Advocates of tithing begin with the Bible. In Genesis 14 Abraham, after a victory over the robber-king Chedor-Leomer, received a blessing from God’s priest Melchizedek, in return for which he gave the priest “a tenth of everything.” Later, Abraham’s grandson Jacob dreamed of a ladder from earth to heaven, with angels passing up and down and God standing above, offering him and his descendants the land forever (Gen. 28). When Jacob awoke he promised God that in return, “I shall faithfully pay you a tenth part of everything you give me.”
In Malachi 3, during a tirade against corrupt and corner-cutting priests, the prophet asks: “Will anyone rob God? Yet you are robbing me! But, you say, ‘How are we robbing you?’ In your tithes and offerings! ... Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of Hosts; see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.” The implication is that tithing not only averts God’s wrath but also disposes Him to give you plenty of good things in return.
There are scattered New Testament references to tithing too. Jesus angrily tells the scribes and pharisees (Matt. 23:23) that payment of tithes, though necessary, is not sufficient if done in a coldly punctilious way: “You pay your tithe of mint and dill and cummin but have neglected the weightier matters of the Law – justice, mercy, good faith!” In later New Testament passages the emphasis is on sharing everything with God and fellow Christians, rather than legalistically giving a mere tenth to God. Acts 2:44-45 describes how “those who shared the faith owned everything in common; they sold their goods and possessions and distributed the proceeds among themselves according to what each one needed.” However much you give, let it be given wholeheartedly, said Paul in his Second Letter to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 9:7): “Let each one do just as he has purposed in his heart; not grudgingly or under compulsion; for God loves a cheerful giver.”
Tithing, much discussed by the Church Fathers, has a venerable though somewhat checkered history. In rural England tithes were a compulsory tax paid to the local parish church by every villager, usually in kind: bushels of wheat, baskets of apples, and litters of piglets. Tithing barns, in which parish vicars would store these goods, are among the fine old buildings you can still see in the rural counties of Gloucestershire and Northamptonshire. Before the Reformation, nonpayment could be punished with excommunication. As Luther P. Powell notes in Money and the Church, tithes provoked jurisdictional disputes, as when a man from one parish caught a fish in another and had to pay part of the tithe from this “income” to each parish.
[I]f the parishioner of one parish had his fish in another, the tithes are divided between the parson of the parish where the fisher lives, and the other where he landed his fish; but if the parishioner land his fish in the parish where he himself dwells, then the rector of that parish hath the whole tithes.
Imagine having to give half of a tenth of one fish to two parsons! London clergy had a bad reputation for avarice; they exacted tithes from everyone except moneylenders and prostitutes, and even from these if they expressed penitence.
After the Reformation and the creation of the national Church of England, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Quakers bitterly resented having to pay tithes to a church to which they did not belong. So did the obstinate Catholic minority who had refused to switch allegiances. Even members of the state Church often found their priests keener to collect tithes than to care for their spiritual welfare, as this poem suggests:
God save us from these raiding priests
Who seize our crops and steal our beasts
Who pray, “Give us our daily bread”
But take it from our mouths instead.
Tithe wars broke out periodically in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, as farmers protested against having to pay. Dairymaids sometimes poured a tenth of their milk in front of the altar rather than into the parson’s churn, contemptuous millers flung handfuls of flour at priests, and farmers left tithe grain rotting on the ground.
In colonial Virginia and the other Anglican colonies on this side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, the same rules applied – everyone paid tithes to the established Anglican Church whether they were members or not. No wonder Jefferson’s idea of disestablishment struck a popular chord among the growing Baptist and Methodist minorities. After the Revolution, with religious liberty safeguarded in the First Amendment, no one had to pay tithes any more, but every church needed some sort of income.
The historian R. Laurence Moore argues in Selling God (1994) that over time America became a religious marketplace, in which religious leaders were forced to “sell” themselves if they and their denominations were to survive. Just like the new industrial manufacturers, they had to contend with competitors, each one promising value for money and looking for a distinct niche in the market. Any church that could persuade its members to tithe was going to prosper, and tithing became particularly important when the old tradition of pew rents gradually went out of fashion. The religious sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark show in The Churching of America (1992) that the churches that habitually made the most demands on their members tended to grow the fastest. They had strict rules and created a complete way of life, asking a lot but giving a lot in return.
No church did a better of job of institutionalizing tithing than the Mormons (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). By the early twentieth century the only way to become a full-fledged Mormon with a right to enter the temple was by tithing, a tradition that has continued up to the present and made the organization immensely wealthy. By now Mormon tithing, about whose yield LDS officials are secretive, probably raises around $6 billion every year. The money goes partly to ensure the health and welfare of poor Mormon families, partly to defray the cost of sending out missionaries, and partly to support the building of those handsome LDS temples. Mormon children learn the practice early by memorizing a little poem:
I want to give the Lord my tenth
For ev’ry time I do
It makes me think of all the gifts
He gives to me and you.
He gives us life, this lovely world,
And though my tenth seems small,
It shows my faith and gratitude
To him, the Lord of All.
At the end of every year each family, with all members present, attends a “settlement” meeting. Church officials show father how much he has paid that year, and leave it to his conscience to settle the difference if he hasn’t yet come up to the 10 percent (before taxes) mark.
Among other denominations the tendency is for members of evangelical and Pentecostal churches to be the most faithful tithers. Assemblies of God members and Seventh Day Adventists are much readier to tithe than Episcopalians or Catholics, even though their average incomes are a lot lower. A study in the mid-1990s reported that the average Assembly of God member gave his church $3,254 each year, while the average Catholic handed over $1,032. Many liberal Protestant churches recommend the “liberal tithe:” 5 percent to the church, another 5 percent to deserving charities.
Why are the mainline churches more hesitant to press members on the question of tithing 10 percent? Michael Durall, whose Vital Congregations Group helps churches become financially secure, explains that the theologically conservative churches think of themselves as families headed by ministers, who act in the role of patriarchal fathers and don’t hesitate to preach on members’ duty to tithe. As biblical literalists, they believe the Old Testament rules have the same power today as on the day they were written. Paradoxically, members of these churches who commit themselves to tithing worry less about money than nontithers, says Durall, even as they put their churches on a sounder financial footing.
The more theologically liberal mainline churches, by contrast, see themselves as voluntary societies and shy away from strong clergy leadership. For them the biblical teaching is less binding. Wayne Johnson, pastor of the First United Methodist Church of Atlanta, told me that his denomination is “more cultural than biblical,” and does a better job of cultivating “friendliness to neighbors than faithfulness to God.” The practical result is that, while he and a few members of his congregation tithe, they do so out of a sense of gratitude to God rather than a sense of obligation. David Keyes, an Atlanta-area Unitarian-Universalist minister, drew a similar picture. Members of his tradition had “turned away from everything that reminded them of their Puritan origins,” with the result that they “sometimes threw out the baby with the bathwater.” He hopes to reintroduce the concept of tithing to his congregation, but with cultural rather than scriptural arguments.
Giving a tenth of your gross income may look very generous indeed, but most tithers, especially in the conservative denominations, don’t think “generosity” is the right word for what they do. They take the view that they are just doing their duty, giving back to God a part of what is really His already. The Reverend Stanley Crawford of Atlanta’s Ray of Hope Church (Disciples of Christ) told me, “I feel fine about tithing [but] it’s not being generous to tithe; it’s being obedient to God. Generosity is when you give offerings over and above the tithe, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, to help resettle Hurricane Katrina victims, or aid a family that can’t pay the rent.”
Other tithing Christians, mindful of the text in Malachi, see tithing as a form of spiritual investment, believing that “blessings” will come back, in the form of health, wealth, or just a sense of spiritual well-being. Leah Stevens, a member of the nondenominational Victory World Church in Norcross, Georgia, attributes her recovery from a severe personal crisis to tithing. A single mother, she was heavily in debt and forced to declare bankruptcy when she joined the church and began to tithe. Working two jobs, she was able to repay her creditors in full after eight years, all the while feeling wonderful about it. “I learned to put God first, not me first, and to line up with the Word of God.” “Tithing is a heart issue,” she adds, “and my heart hurts for those who don’t tithe.”
Tithing brings a sense of religious or psychological well-being and teaches financial responsibility in a society full of temptations. Internet entrepreneur Greg Gianforte of RightNow Technologies told Forbes earlier this year that tithing had liberated him from an excessive attachment to possessions. “I don’t hold on to things as tightly any more,” he says. As a result, he is more willing to take chances in business, adding that, “entrepreneurial risk is less terrifying.” Best of all, he says, “tithing requires discipline, but that discipline begins to show up unexpectedly in other areas of my life.”
Anne Willingham of Atlanta’s Episcopal Cathedral of St. Philip, agrees that tithing teaches financial self-discipline and admits that it can be a struggle. She was surprised, on marrying into the Episcopal Church in the 1960s, to find the tradition weak there. She had been raised a Southern Baptist and suggested tithing to her husband. “He said, ‘We can’t afford to,’ but I said, ‘We can’t afford not to,’ so we agreed to a six-month experiment. At the end of six months we were as well off as before, so we continued to tithe. He died two years ago, and by then we had tithed continuously for forty-three years, while sending all six of our children through private school and college.” She adds, perhaps a shade ruefully, “In all those years, we never had an argument over money, because there was never enough money left to argue over!”
There has never been as much wealth in America as there is today, but neither has there ever been as much overspending and consumer debt. “We live in a debt-ridden society, and the churches have not done enough to prevent people from getting into debt, which means that they just can’t tithe,” says the Reverend Wayne Johnson (United Methodist). Relatively few members of his congregation tithe, and he hesitates to emphasize the issue from the pulpit. Conservative Protestants are more forthright. Disciples of Christ minister Stanley Crawford agrees that America today is a consumerist society full of temptations to overspend. In his denomination, he says, “we teach you how to get a handle on your finances so that you can avoid debt, be free from stress, and then move on to do the Lord’s work by helping the unfortunate.” New members of his church undergo an orientation course that includes a section on stewardship. At first not all members are willing to give a full tenth – “There’s a growth process,” he explains – but he says that most members eventually come to see a tenth as the necessary minimum. Darrell Mims, pastor for financial stewardship at Victory World Church, takes the same approach, emphasizing that the justification for tithing has to be learned a bit at a time in stewardship classes.
Everyone I spoke to on the issue remembered with dismay the televangelist scandals of the 80s, when Jim and Tammy Bakker exploited viewers who were generous to the point of credulity. Jim and Tammy made themselves rich with contributions sent in by believers, while preaching that to give money would magically bring the givers more cash than ever. No one in the Atlanta area comes closer to preaching a straight “prosperity gospel” than the aptly named Creflo Dollar, minister of the World Changers Church, whose “World Dome” is the biggest church building in the metro area. “You can be rich, healthy and trouble free. Jesus was rich and God wants you to be rich,” says Dollar, owner of a Rolls Royce and a Lear Jet. The World Changers representative I spoke to recently said that tithing establishes the “covenant connection” by putting you in touch with God. He affirmed that Jesus wants us to prosper. Unlike wealth, which can go hand in hand with misery, “prosperity is the whole package; money, health, well-being and living right; that’s what Jesus died for on the cross.”
One disillusioned ex-member of World Changers reports that church members are put under intense psychological pressure to tithe, and are warned that failure to tithe will lead to car accidents, sickness, and tragedy. If they do tithe, by contrast, they will soon be rich too. Marque Payne, author of a critical account of World Changers, wrote that “it is literally another gospel....The Bible makes it clear that you cannot serve two Gods – God and Mammon – Mammon being greed and the desire for materialistic things above everything else.”
As this example suggests, urging church members to tithe may sometimes stray over the line into threatening them if they don’t. It might also be unbiblical, and for fundamentalists that’s a dismaying possibility. One line of argument against tithing from within the conservative churches is based on the teaching that Christ, by his resurrection, nullified the law, so that Old Testament rules are no longer binding. Dean VanDruff, an online evangelical commentator from San Jose, takes exactly this view. “Tithing is no more appropriate for believers than killing a bull in our front-yards next Saturday as an ‘offering’ with the idea that, ‘Hey, it is commanded in the Bible, isn’t it?’” (Isa. 66:3). He reminds readers of the more radical demands made by Christ and the early Christian community in the New Testament, and of the need to be a “cheerful [voluntary] giver.”
Are there other ways in which tithing can be divisive in a congregation or nourish the sin of complacent pride? When the protithing Reverend Dennis Rouse of Victory World Church preached on “God’s Economy and the World’s Economy” recently, he cautioned tithers in his congregation against making their sense of righteousness too obvious: “Tithers, I appreciate your enthusiasm when I preach this, but please keep it to a minimum because it really irritates the nontithers.” His caution elicited nervous laughter, as did his remark that he can always tell who’s a tither when he shakes hands at the church door after preaching about stewardship – those not yet tithing won’t catch his eye.
Tithing has provoked other problems. An act that looks generous from one point of view looks recklessly irresponsible from another. For example, Leland Collins, a Texas Baptist, fulfilled his duty as a deacon by giving his church its annual tithe in the 80s and early 90s, but was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1992. At the time he owed Bill Gregory, operator of an air-conditioning business, $23,000. Gregory sued the church to get the money he was owed, and the court ruled in his favor, arguing that Collins’s tithe was legally a gift, since the church had not given anything of equivalent value in return for the money.
The minister of Collins’s church was indignant when the court told him he had to hand over the money, pointing out that if Collins had “gambled the money away in Las Vegas, squandered it on a cruise, or consorted with a prostitute,” nobody would have been able to reclaim it. He also felt that the principle of religious liberty was in jeopardy and went on to appeal the court’s decision. Meanwhile, Congress had become aware of the danger that out-of-luck creditors might start raiding churches to get money they were owed, and unanimously passed the Religious Liberty and Charitable Donation Protection Act of 1998. As a result, a higher court found in favor of the church, safeguarding tithes and similar payments for the indefinite future.
When all is said and done, how many people actually tithe? Mike Durall of Vital Congregations says that 15 percent of church members throughout the U.S. claim to tithe, but that probably only 5 percent actually give as much as a tenth of their pretax income. His job is to help churches with fund-raising and he believes strongly in the power of tithing, not least because so many tithers tell him how much their lives have been enriched by the practice. “When I ask them what they had to give up when they began to tithe, they don’t really understand the question, and in fact deny having given up anything. Again and again they tell me, ‘I used to have to worry constantly about money but now I don’t, and my life has been enriched,’ or that ‘being generous is one of life’s great privileges.’” He teaches churches how to introduce tithing to their congregations, starting with a smaller annual percentage and moving up gradually to 10 percent over a three- to five-year period. In the case of some Unitarian congregations, whose members are leery of biblical justifications, he jokes, “I tell them that if they’re uncomfortable with the 10 percent mark, they can be reassured that 11 percent has no religious meaning whatsoever, but is an acceptable giving target!”
Durall points to another reality. Churches need money, perhaps now more than ever, because they have lost what used to be a reliable source of unpaid labor – female volunteers. In the 1950s the minister’s wife was a dependable source of unpaid work, but now she has a career of her own or demands a salary. Diane Davidson, a Colorado Episcopalian, told me that her church “didn’t show much interest in tithing until women started entering the paid workforce. Then the pool of free ecclesiastical labor gradually drained away, and that event was followed by a ‘theological’ emphasis on tithing.”
In America today, a few churches are growing, mainly those with strong, charismatic leaders. Most have reached a plateau of wealth and membership, or find themselves in gradual decline, anxious for money to maintain their ministries and missions. They all depend on members’ voluntary contributions, even those churches with endowments and a tradition of bequests. Tithing, with all its problems and pitfalls, is surely the most potent form of fund-raising and will guarantee a secure and vigorous future for those churches that can stimulate the generosity of their members.
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Patrick Allitt was born and raised in England and graduated from Oxford University. He is now Professor of American History at Emory University in Atlanta. His most recent books are Religion in America Since 1945: A History and I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student: A Semester in the University Classroom.
