There's a generation gap in charitable giving

 I can't help wondering whether this has some link to the de-Christionising of our country:

 "young people are failing to keep up with their forebears in the generosity stakes". It seems the generation from which the "chuggers" who prowl our high streets are drawn is, paradoxically, less likely to give to charity. But, as the report makes clear, they're just the latest participants in a trend – rates of giving have been declining in the households of the under-50s for decades. Why there's a generation gap in charitable giving | Ed Howker:

 Other research indicates that religious people are more likely to volunteer, and I would link volunteering with giving; one's money the other time and effort.

The article, however, posits another issue:

But today they are wrongfooted on two fronts. For the left it is government's role to fix environmental problems, provide healthcare and address poverty. The right, meanwhile, looks to markets to improve health provision, trade carbon credits and raise standards of living at home and abroad. Both models undermine the value of the individual contributor, leaving him or her to wonder "what's the point"?

 I think I'd find this more convincing were it not for the fact that this same generation are not really getting involved in the political processes and, in my experience, seem cynical both of governmental and private enterprise ability to fix things. Perhaps that has extended also to charitable giving too? I think I still come back to the hypotheses that it is simply that most of them have not been raised with the idea that giving money is something to be encouraged or to be regularly intentional about. It's okay for charity fundraisers like Comic Relief but that hardly constitutes a sustained discipline of charitable giving which, frankly, I have learnt from Christian discipleship. Without a sustained encouragement, I contend, people tend (and I empahisise that; it's not a simple binary do or don't) not to 'self tax' voluntarily. I don't discount entirely a sense of passing up responsibility to state or market, but I think that more important is a socially reinforced vision and encouragement to at least counteract some of the worst of our foul-ups or even to try to make the world a slightly better place.