Religious Service Attendance and the Effects of Moral Foundations On In-Group Giving

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of innate, lower level emotional-cognitive constructs and God concepts on generous giving toward religious in-group members. Haidt and Joseph’s (2007) five moral foundations are motivational constructs that underlie normative judgments and behaviors by guiding intuitions that have affiliated moral judgments and behavior. These foundations were proposed as possible mediators of the association between religious attendance and in-group giving, and traditional God concept was proposed as a moderator of the relation between attendance and moral foundations. The results indicated that traditional God concept moderated the indirect effect of the fairness/reciprocity foundation in explaining the relation between religious attendance and total giving to the in-group even after controlling for household income. Those with highly traditional God concepts and higher religious attendance reported greater levels of fairness/reciprocity reasoning concerning whether something is right, and they had lower donations to the ingroup charities (Christian) and higher levels of donations to non-ingroup charities (secular and Muslim). This finding is substantial in that it further explains the relation between religious attendance and giving, but not in the way that many researchers would have predicted