We suggest that you begin exploring this question by becoming better acquainted with some of the early nineteenth century Americans who argued about which “rules” of giving should guide future generations. The story of this four-sided debate is told in the essay, Resource 4.2,  Republic of Benevolence.

Despite their disagreements, most of the combatants assumed that giving was a duty, an obligation that every right-thinking person would understand. Today, we suspect, such “duty” talk would be more controversial and less acceptable in some quarters. Various contemporary commentators have commented on the shift of assumptions over the course of the last two centuries. For instance, pollster Daniel Yankelovich declared in the early 1980s: “Throughout most of this century, Americans believed that self-denial made sense, sacrifice made sense, obeying the rules made sense, subordination to the institution made sense. But doubts have set in, and Americans believe that the old giving/getting compact needlessly restricts the individual.” [Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 231.]

No scholar has yet fully described the ways in which the popularity of talk about “self-fulfillment” has shaped current perspectives upon giving. Robert Wuthnow, professor of sociology at Princeton University, has come the closest in his explorations of “caring for others.” Much of what he reported in Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves might well apply to current ways of interpreting giving. “Fulfillment is also the handle on caring that fits most comfortably in our cultural grip. In the past one might have felt compelled to be caring because of religious injunctions or because it was befitting one's station in life.” But now “good feelings become the acceptable alternative for justifying our compassion.”

We encourage you to read Chapter 4, “Finding Fulfillment” in Robert Wuthnow , Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). [The quotations above are on p. 115.]

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that present-day preoccupations with “fulfillment” have erased all signs of that earlier four-sided argument. Why is tithing still popular as an image of the good giver? And what is my “fair share?” Those questions were still alive in the twentieth century.