Dimensions of Religiosity, Religious Residue, and the Philanthropy of the Formerly Religious

This article develops a framework to better understand philanthropic donations and volunteering among those who have left religion by testing interactions among four dimensions of religiosity (i.e., beliefs, values/morals, spiritual practices/rituals, and meeting attendance/community) and using religious residue theory, which suggests that people who leave religion occupy a middle space between the religious and those who were never religious. I find that beliefs like belief in God, values like generalized trust in others and subversion to authority, and spiritual practices like yoga, meditation, and being in nature interact with attendance at religious services to predict donations and volunteering beyond what any of these variables do individually. This framework is helpful for understanding giving behavior among the religious, the formerly religious, and those who were never religious, as most people fall within the spectrums of these four religiosity dimensions.