Religious Charity, Commitment and Secularization

Religious Charity, Commitment and Secularization

This paper studies whether denominational charitable organizations accelerate secularization by raising the cost of religious participation. Exploiting the 1854 Dutch Poor Law (\(Armenwet\)), which granted religious charities a statutory monopoly on poor relief, I examine how associational density shaped religious affiliation across Dutch municipalities between 1879 and 1930. To address endogeneity, I instrument for post-1854 charitable capacity using the geographic distribution of Catholic monasteries established before the Dutch Reformation of 1578, whose endowments were transferred to Protestant deaconries following the Revolt. The results show municipalities with greater exogenous charitable association density exhibit persistently higher shares of no religious affiliation and lower religious diversity in the Dutch decennial censuses. These findings are consistent with a commitment-screening mechanism: dense associational networks impose organizational costs that sort out weakly attached affiliates, accelerating secularization while concentrating the remaining affiliated population within the dominant local confession.

• Preliminary work. No draft available yet.