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Jayson_Virissimo comments on I want to save myself - Less Wrong Discussion
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To be fair, a significant amount of these religious donations (money and time given through religious organizations) are used in ways that non-religious people would find praiseworthy (like feeding people or providing them with health care).
And to be fair to the Europeans, they have greater state involvement in providing those things, which is one of the reasons European society is more secularised. If you know the state will pay for your hospital visit, you don't need to rely on the Church to subsidise it.
What an extremely fair group of people we are.
That's often quoted as the reason for this, but I believe that a bigger factor is that Americans have a long tradition of "tithing", because many of their churches used to be insular and self-sustained by the local communities. With the secularisation of the 20th century, the same attitude has transferred over to all charities, even the non-religious ones.
By contrast, the vast majority of European churches are or used to be established, and financed themselves primarily through state support, their own income (land ownership and such), or both. You weren't expected to have to feed your village priest; in most Western European languages, "tithe" is a purely historical term.
So, while charity in Europe is something many people do, usually it happens irregularly as a form of impulse spending, or by giving to a specific cause or organisation that you have been helped by in the past. You're certainly not expected to donate regularly unless you're really ultra-rich (and even then, I doubt many would be seriously offended), and vice-versa, to talk openly about whom or what you donated money to would probably come off really, really awkward, like you're bragging about your generosity.
That makes sense too, but I was looking at it from the other side - people know they need to rely on the churches for support in the US, so they stay with them so they have that support network in case of illness or disability. On the other hand in Europe people have felt free to leave churches because their taxes pay for that support.
In the UK, at least, there's even quite an anti-charity stance by a number of people, who consider it the State's role to, for example, provide foreign aid or fund cancer research, and condider donating directly to those causes to be encouraging the State to abrogate its responsibility.
Now I understand a lot of things American conservatives say!