I grew up Catholic and go to church occasionally, sometimes on vacations(thus not only my church), and I only know about tithing academically. I have never been asked to tithe let alone been “pressured pretty heavily”to do so, in a systematic way.
Now I drop into the collection plate, but nowhere close to ten percent. I have also worked with the total, and less than five percent of checks are over twenty dollars.
I spent decades as a pretty serious Christian (Church of England, in the UK; the CoE encompasses multiple styles of Christianity, and I was towards the evangelical end). There were from time to time sermons etc. encouraging us to give money to the church, but tithing as such was seldom mentioned and never regarded as an obligation.
My wife is still Christian and active in a church (also Church of England, also in the UK, kinda middle-of-the-road in theology, style of worship, etc.) and I’m pretty sure its donations are far less than 10% of the congregation’s total income.
The Church of England gets about £400M in donations per year. Average weekly attendance at CoE services is about 1M. If we guess that 80% of those are regular attenders, and that all donations come from regular attenders, that in line with national statistics 64% are of an age to be employed and 80% of those actually are employed at an average annual salary of £26500, then that suggests a total income from possible givers of about £14B/year, hence donations at about 3%.
Most of the figures in the previous paragraph are guesses or poor approximations, so don’t take this too seriously. There are in any case considerable demographic and religious differences between the UK and the US.
[EDITED to fix a stupid factor-of-10 error in the middle of a calculation.]
I grew up Catholic and go to church occasionally, sometimes on vacations(thus not only my church), and I only know about tithing academically. I have never been asked to tithe let alone been “pressured pretty heavily”to do so, in a systematic way.
Now I drop into the collection plate, but nowhere close to ten percent. I have also worked with the total, and less than five percent of checks are over twenty dollars.
Just a data point.
Another couple of data points:
I spent decades as a pretty serious Christian (Church of England, in the UK; the CoE encompasses multiple styles of Christianity, and I was towards the evangelical end). There were from time to time sermons etc. encouraging us to give money to the church, but tithing as such was seldom mentioned and never regarded as an obligation.
My wife is still Christian and active in a church (also Church of England, also in the UK, kinda middle-of-the-road in theology, style of worship, etc.) and I’m pretty sure its donations are far less than 10% of the congregation’s total income.
The Church of England gets about £400M in donations per year. Average weekly attendance at CoE services is about 1M. If we guess that 80% of those are regular attenders, and that all donations come from regular attenders, that in line with national statistics 64% are of an age to be employed and 80% of those actually are employed at an average annual salary of £26500, then that suggests a total income from possible givers of about £14B/year, hence donations at about 3%.
Most of the figures in the previous paragraph are guesses or poor approximations, so don’t take this too seriously. There are in any case considerable demographic and religious differences between the UK and the US.
[EDITED to fix a stupid factor-of-10 error in the middle of a calculation.]