I think I might remember one: a recent Terry Goodkind book whose title I disremember. Unfortunately, it seems to be a caricature taken straight out of Ayn Rand. Our Noble Hero is enslaved by a woman committed to charity since childhood, and who is in turn a willing servant of Our Villain, who is using a quasi-religion based on charity to oppress his power base. Of course, Our Noble Hero shows the woman and the Villain's home city the virtues of good honest work, and thereby leads a revolution and persuades the woman she was wrong.

Frankly, I wish that someone who writes stuff like that would live in my shoes for a day. I have an autistic son. In order to take care of him year after year, my wife had to quit her job and I had to curtail travel and unusual hours in my job as much as possible. With full support, neither would have been necessary, so failure to help probably cost society $200K per year (estimating our likely differences in salaries if our son wasn't autistic), while full support would have cost $100K a year. So "charity" under whatever form not only can pay for itself, but in this case has nothing to do with "good honest work."

I can also note the relative effectiveness of that help: state/local government was most effective, despite our really bad experiences with school bureaucracy; a Catholic school was less helpful (my son got slapped by a nun, among other things); and business was least helpful (a for-profit behavioral school that used a market monopoly to do cheap, ineffective, stressful experimentation on my son; some business contributions to local autistic groups; and business' frequent inability to be flexible about my and my wife's needs).

I would also note that France and Sweden, which provide a lot more services of those types, have been doing just fine economically since WWII, despite cogent criticisms of their model from the likes of Lester Thurow and Thomas Friedman.

Anyway, getting back to religion, recent studies have suggested that more and more Americans are "faith-hopping". The fact that charity persists across the denominations may suggest that there is indeed a pre-disposition to charity, since one of the ways faiths can compete for faith-hoppers here is "less tithing."

Yet more thoughts :)
 

When I read your post I was reminded of a David Brin short story "The Giving Plague", which I did find very interesting.

I can't think of other examples. The books that do incorporate charity usually use it as a foil against corruption, rather than as a first class element of the plot.
 

One of the things your post reminds me of is all the time I have spent in non-profits.

Some of that time, as is always the case, was spent on grantwriting.

Whether or not one competes for money for one's department, programs or just one's non-profit as a business entity, though, there is a common thread: You are competing for money to run your organization.

And where does one get much of the limited amount of funds out there? Foundations and the government.

Since the system that has evolved did evolve, in large part, from charitable actions arising from faith-based organizations, which actions became spread into other arenas as society morphed and changed, it is easy to see why there is still such a large percentage of the monies available being given to that section of non-profitdom first.

It is at this point that the money is both distributed - and re-distributed.

And since the pool is generally of a certain size range in any particular city/county/state and such, the shifts of what goes to whom is pretty well known, including who gets the money which is re-granted.

If org. X gets money from faith-based charity M, then they're not going to get the money directly from business Q, since Q already gave money to M that year. It would be considered double-dipping.

At this point, it's not that there is a roughly 1/3 amount of the total money going to the faith-based charities, rather that nowadays, ONLY that amount is, as opposed to the well-nigh 100% given to them before.

But then, you could look at it this way, too: A friend of a friend of mine died a few weeks ago. He had a line, when it came to the glass being half full, or half empty. He always asked, "Is anyone drinking this?" and drank it up. LOL.