Common sense would tell you that the more time and money people give to their religious groups, the less they have left over for everything else. But common sense turns out to be wrong. Putnam and Campbell found that the more frequently people attend religious services, the more generous and charitable they become across the board.
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beliefs and practices turned out to matter very little. Whether you believe in hell, whether you pray daily, whether you are a Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or Mormon .... none of these things correlated with generosity.The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was [author's italics] how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists.
It is religious belongingness that matters for neighbourliness, not religious believing.
J, Haidt, The righteous mind (2012), 310-311
