Faith-Based Groups and Companies Drive $1.2 Trillion in Impact, Says Study

Religious faith has not only a spiritual impact on followers but a significant economic impact on America, according to new study.

Congregations, religious nonprofits, and companies either based on or inspired by faith contribute nearly $1.2 trillion annually to the nation, the report states. The figure would make American religious organizations the 15th largest economy in the world, with a gross domestic product slightly ahead of Mexico’s.

The total economic impact includes:

• Religious congregations, which were credited with $418 billion in economic impact, or 36 percent of the total, including just over $91 billion in faith-based schools and day care.
• Faith-affiliated institutions, such as hospitals, colleges and universities, and charities, account for nearly $303 billion, or 26 percent, of total economic impact. Health-care organizations generated more than half of that amount.
• Businesses either based in religious faith or explicitly inspired by its values — such as Tyson Foods, which employs chaplains to counsel its employees of all creeds — were credited with more than $438 billion in economic impact, or nearly 38 percent of the total.

The report by Brian Grim, associate scholar in the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University, and his daughter Melissa Grim, senior research fellow at the Newseum Institute’s Religious Freedom Center, was presented Wednesday at the National Press Club and published in the current edition of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion. The study was commissioned by Faith Counts, a nonprofit coalition of religious communities aimed at promoting the value of faith.

Religious nonprofits may be able to use the estimates to make a new case for support, Mr. Grim said. “If charities were able to put forward the impact of the work they do, not just the spending,” they might draw donors’ interest, he said. “They might go, ‘Oh, when I give $10 to Catholic Charities, it has $50 worth of economic impact.”

‘Look at These Numbers’

The researchers presented three different estimates of the economic impact of religion in America in 2014, of which $1.2 trillion is the midrange figure.

A more conservative estimate, taking into account only the revenues of faith-based organizations, is $378 billion, a figure the report notes is still “more than the global annual revenues of tech giants Apple and Microsoft combined.”

The third estimate, which takes into account the household incomes of religiously affiliated Americans — on the premise that they apply their faiths’ principles, however imperfectly, in their daily lives — puts the value of faith at $4.8 trillion, or one-third of U.S. GDP.

At the Press Club, Mr. Grim was joined by other scholars of religion and social policy, who said the new data could help raise awareness of religion’s positive impact on the economy.

Ram Cnaan, professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice, noted that leaders of religious groups tend to describe their impact with anecdotes. To underscore the need for economic data in describing that impact, he quoted the economist John Kenneth Galbraith: “If you don’t count it, it doesn’t count.”

“Clergy often lack confidence. They’re often apologetic” in describing what they do, Mr. Cnaan said. “I believe every clergy should go on a weekend and say to their congregation, ‘Look at these numbers. You are part of something very big and important. We should be proud of the work we do.’ ”

He also noted that the money given to faith-based groups generally stays in the communities where it is collected. “What is being done with this money?” Mr. Cnaan asked. “It’s helping local economies.”

William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said faith-based programs often have difficulty getting on the agenda of presidents and lawmakers. “Work like this,” he said of the new study, “makes it more likely to be taken seriously in the corridors of power.”