Giving Without a Deduction: What Scripture Says About the Motive Behind the Gift
About a third of Americans make cash gifts directly to other people in a given year — covering a friend's rent, chipping in on a crowdfunding page for a neighbor's surgery, quietly sending money to a relative who is between jobs. Research reported by the Chronicle of Philanthropy found that this kind of giving never shows up in the national totals, because none of it goes to a registered charity. None of it is deductible, either.
That is worth sitting with for a moment. A large share of the generosity happening in this country right now carries no tax benefit at all, and the people doing it rarely think twice about that. Giving without a deduction is not a fringe category. For most households, it is simply what giving looks like.
The 2026 rules have pushed that question back to the front for families who do itemize. A new floor removes part of the deduction, a new cap trims its value at the top bracket, and many donors are recalculating. Before running those numbers, it helps to ask an older question: what does Scripture actually say about why we give?
Most Givers Already Give Without a Receipt
Start with the arithmetic most people never see. Before 2018, roughly three in ten tax returns itemized deductions. After the standard deduction nearly doubled, that number collapsed.
According to the Tax Policy Center, 31% of individual returns itemized in 2017 and just 9% did in 2020. For the other nine in ten households, every gift to their church, their food bank, and their kids' school produced no federal deduction at all. They kept giving anyway.
When Stanford researchers sat down with low- and middle-income families to ask how they try to make the world better, the families talked about giving locally, helping neighbors, and showing up for people. The report noted that participants "seldom mentioned tax codes." The deduction was simply not part of how they thought about generosity.
For high-net-worth families, the picture is different. The deduction is real money, and planning around it is wise. But the comparison is useful. If the majority of givers around you are already giving with no tax benefit, the deduction cannot be what makes a gift generous. At most, it changes what the gift costs.
What Scripture Says About the Motive
Here is something that surprises people when they look for it. Scripture has a great deal to say about giving, and nothing at all to say about getting something back from the government for it. What it talks about instead is the heart behind the gift. A few passages do most of the work.
The decision comes first. Paul tells the Corinthians that "each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver" (2 Corinthians 9:7, ESV). The gift is settled before any money moves. Everything else is execution.
The reward is the question. Jesus warns against giving "in order to be seen by others," and says of those who do it, "they have received their reward" (Matthew 6:1–2, ESV). That phrase is striking. The problem with giving for applause is not that it earns nothing. It earns exactly what it was aiming at, paid in full, and nothing more.
Repayment changes the gift. In Luke 14, Jesus tells his host to invite people who "cannot repay you," because "you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just" (Luke 14:13–14, ESV). The deliberate choice of a recipient who cannot return the favor is the point. A gift designed around its return starts to look like a trade.
Proportion matters more than size. The widow's two small coins were worth more, Jesus said, than everything the wealthy put in, because "she out of her poverty has put in everything she had" (Mark 12:44, ESV). And Paul holds up the churches of Macedonia, who gave "beyond their means, of their own accord" (2 Corinthians 8:3, ESV). Neither gift was large. Both were weighed by what it cost the giver.
Reputation is the danger. The story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 is often read as a story about money. It is really a story about image. They sold land, kept part of the proceeds, and presented the rest as the whole. Peter is clear that the money was theirs to keep (Acts 5:4). What they could not do was give part and claim credit for all of it.
Put those passages side by side and a pattern emerges. Scripture is relaxed about the mechanics of giving and very serious about the motive. It never asks whether a gift was efficient. It keeps asking who the gift was really for.
Getting the motive settled first makes every structural question easier. Once a family knows what it wants to give and why, the question of how to give it well is mostly arithmetic.
Want to see what this looks like with your actual numbers? That's exactly what a Clarity Call is for. 30 minutes, no pitch.
So Is the Deduction a Problem?
No. Taking the deduction is not a spiritual failure, and turning it down out of principle is not a spiritual achievement. Jesus told his listeners to "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's" (Mark 12:17, ESV), which implies the reverse as well: what the law does not require you to send to Caesar can go to the work you care about. Careful stewardship runs all through Scripture, and the servants commended in the parable of the talents were the ones who handled what they were given with skill.
The question is one of order. A deduction applied to a decision already made is a stewardship tool. A deduction that is driving the decision is something else. It quietly turns the gift into a transaction, and the reward language in Matthew 6 starts to apply.
There is a practical test for this. Look at the gifts you made last year and ask which ones you would have made if none of them had been deductible. The ones that survive that question are the ones coming from the heart. The ones that do not are worth an honest second look, without guilt, as information about where the decision was really being made.
The 2026 rules make this test more concrete. Under the new 0.5% floor, the first slice of an itemizer's giving each year produces no deduction at all. Every high-income family that gives is now, by law, doing some giving without a deduction. The question is whether that changes anything.
Making Room for Both Kinds of Giving
The families we see handle this best tend to think in two lanes.
The first lane is structured giving. This is where the planning lives: appreciated stock instead of cash, a donor advised fund for timing, qualified charitable distributions after 70½, multi-year commitments to the organizations that carry a family's values. Here, maximizing the tax efficiency of every gift is good stewardship. It means more reaches the work and less reaches the Treasury.
The second lane is open-handed giving, and it is intentionally left unstructured. It covers the gifts that will never generate a receipt: helping an adult child's friend through a hard season, paying for a missionary family's flights, covering a neighbor's bill without being asked. These gifts are often the most personal ones a family makes, and they are the closest match to what Jesus describes in Luke 14.
Here is how a family can put both lanes to work this year:
1. Decide the total before you look at the tax side. Settle what you want to give as a household, in one number, before anyone opens a spreadsheet. 2. Set aside a line with no receipt attached. Budget a portion of that total for giving that will never be deductible, and treat it as seriously as any pledge. 3. Then structure the rest well. For the deductible lane, use the tools that clear the floor and fit your bracket, so the gift travels as far as possible. 4. Talk about motive as a family. Children learn more from why their parents give than from how much. A written family giving mission statement is a simple place to start that conversation.
None of these steps reduces generosity. Most families who try it find they give more, because the decision is no longer waiting on the tax answer.
The Gift Behind the Gift
The tax code will keep changing. Floors will move, caps will shift, and a future Congress will likely redraw the deduction again. A family whose generosity rises and falls with those changes is giving on someone else's terms.
Scripture offers a steadier place to stand. Decide in your heart. Give in proportion to what you have been given. Keep some of it hidden. Let the deduction, when it comes, be a welcome discount on a decision that was already made, and treat generosity as the spiritual discipline it is rather than a line on a return.
The families who give that way rarely regret it. And they are usually surprised by how much more freely the money moves once the motive is settled.
Structuring the deductible lane well is where the numbers matter most: what to give, from which assets, and in which year. Every family's answer is different.
Is your current giving structure doing what you think it's doing? A Clarity Call closes that gap — 30 minutes, your real numbers, an honest read.
Luke Lyles is a Partner at Sage & Main who works with business owners, families, and their advisors to turn intentions on paper into plans that are actually funded.
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