High-net-worth millennial and Gen Z Americans are significantly less interested in donating to religious organizations than their older counterparts, according to a new Bank of America study.
Just 18% of respondents ages 21-43 have prioritized giving to religious causes and organizations, compared with 41% of respondents ages 44 and older. That gap is the largest generational discrepancy among preferred causes to support.
Bank of America surveyed more than 1,000 individuals, each with at least $3 million in investable assets.
“What will social services look like when religious organizations are no longer as supported as they were in the past?” Bill Jarvis, a managing director and philanthropic executive at Bank of America Private Bank, told Crain Currency. “Religious organizations are frequently vectors for the provision of relief of hunger and poverty, basic needs, food, clothing, shelter.”
While religious giving is not a priority among younger donors, they are nearly twice as likely (41%) to prioritize giving to homelessness causes than the older generation (21%). Younger generations also prioritize social justice (33%) more than do older individuals (18%), along with climate-change causes — 32%, compared with 17% among older generations.
Bank of America’s survey found that the older and younger generations have relatively aligned interests in giving to address hunger and poverty, health care, education, animal welfare, and special-needs causes.
The only other category to have a double-digit gap was cultural and artistic conservation, which was prioritized by 22% of older individuals versus 12% of the next gen.
“You look around the country at classical music venues, symphony orchestras, opera houses, museums — these places are all having big financial problems because the next gen are just not interested,” Jarvis said. “Starting in the 1980s in the U.S., because of increased emphasis in public schools on reading and writing scores, many public schools across the country simply discontinued arts and cultural education. And so you have now a generation and a half that’s grown up without exposure to this.”
The survey found that 90% of respondents ages 44 and older engaged in direct giving, compared with 49% of those ages 21 to 43. The younger respondents, who are often inheritors of wealth, are instead far more likely to give through vehicles such as charitable trusts (36% younger versus 7% older), family foundations (25% versus 3%) and donor-advised funds (22% versus 8%). The younger crowd is also twice as likely to partake in fundraising (29%) versus older (14%).
“With donor-advised funds, we have seen in our own private wealth practice that although many families do have private family foundations as the public face of the family’s philanthropy, there may also be a situation where each adult member of that family has their own donor-advised fund,” Jarvis said. “That enables giving on a more impressionistic basis, a more personal basis and sometimes anonymously if they choose to.”