Where does the money go?
I notice that Classic FM is running a joint promotion in the run-up to Christmas with the theme "The Alternative 12 Days of Christmas". Every day participants can win one of a number of "alternative" gifts ? such as "four chicken coops", "five bicycles" and so on ? to be sent to disadvantaged people in the Third World in the name of someone designated by the winner. Other organisations have similar collections of "alternative" gifts that you can buy for the poor in Africa or South America, such as PresentAid.
On the face of it, this is a great idea. Typically, you buy one of these gifts and get a card sent to your friend or relative telling them that you have given a goat, a well pump or whatever, to someone needy in their name.
I only started getting a little concerned when I looked into who is doing this. PresentAid clearly advertises itself (for example on their ads on Classic FM) as being a project of Christian Aid - fair enough, you know whom you are dealing with. The charity that is doing the promotion with Classic FM, however, is WorldVision, which is also a Christian organisation, though it hides this particular 'light' somewhat under a bushel (it's on the web site).
If you are dealing with a Christian charity - or any religious charity for that matter - there is one question to which you might like to know the answer: how much of the money you give is being spent on 'evangelising' - aka propaganda and more? This question appears almost impossible to answer. Go to the web site of a religious charity whose primary apparent goal is physically supporting people and see if you can find out how much of the money you send goes to the actual recipients and how much goes elsewhere - I promise you it will be very difficult. How many of those films, books and teachers that they also supply to far-off communities spend some or even a lot of their time selling their version of God? Do they withhold support from family planning organisations or those that offer abortions or deal with AIDS?
Obviously every charity has running costs: there is bound to be a proportion of donations that pays for the office, shipping stuff, promotion and so on, and there is nothing wrong with that. However I do think it ought to be a great deal easier to find out how much of your donation is neither keeping the operation going, nor reaching the people in Africa you think you are donating a sheep to. As a non-Christian, for example, I want to know how much of my money would be wasted on Bibles and other Christian propaganda, so that I can consider going elsewhere.
Trouble is, it is not easy to find out. In the US, religious organisations are notoriously exempt from all kinds of normal accounting requirements (and can often put up buildings, for example, without needing planning permission, or avoid having nationally-required standards in schools), and that includes requirements for making their financials public which apply to non-religious charities. As a result you could argue that a charity listed on a site like CharityNavigator (which only lists charities it can assess) will most likely be non-religious - but that is not really good enough, and in the UK the situation is even more difficult to fathom.
If you just want to give to a good cause, with no strings attached, what you really need is a register of charities that don't waste any of your money on religious propaganda. As far as I know, there isn't one. Richard Dawkins' web site (www.richardawkins.net) is apparently working on one, but it's not there yet. The British Humanist Association has a short list of suggestions here, but not a directory as such.
Until such a register exists, or until the law is changed to require declaration of such things (I would like to see it mentioned in advertising for example), the secular charity giver needs to tread carefully and research as much as possible to avoid inadvertently contributing to religious colonisation of the mind.
