Voluntary Work in America and Religion

“Volunteerism is the name given to that set of activities in which people engage, usually without pay, on behalf of others in need, such as assisting the elderly, providing staff assistance for neighborhood groups, or coaching Little League”[1]

Voluntary work is very much common in America and many people are involved in doing some sort of voluntary work. I found this quite interesting since from the beginning of this semester I have been hearing about American individualism and how ‘I’ is important in American society. Still we do see people volunteering to help one another. However, individualism does not impede voluntary work since it does not mean that you only care about yourself or you are selfish. But, as Dr. Mousavi was once saying these kinds of activities may be done for some sort of self satisfaction. I don’t think this is exclusive to Americans since I myself once felt that all the things I was doing were just to make me feel good and to give me self satisfaction. So I continued doing them just to get that feeling. But, I think the nature of voluntary works differs from simply helping others. You allot your own time and resources to other people and this is not merely done for self satisfaction.

When Dr. Ameli was talking about voluntary work in America, Arezoo asked him why voluntary activities were so rare in our society despite the fact that our religion, Islam, encourages people to take part in such activities. Her question made me think of the role that religion plays here. John Wilson and Thomas Janoski in their article The Contribution of Religion to Volunteer Work state that most religions "encourage altruistic values and behavior" (Fischer and Schaffer 1993:60). It therefore comes as no surprise that "[t]throughout much of our history, religion and giving have been closely linked..." (Wuthnow1990:3).[2] According to Wilson and Janoski, Wuthnow (1991:322) finds that "By a margin of 35 percent to 26 percent, Protestants were more likely than Catholics to be currently involved in charita­ble and other social service activities." Jews, especially those belonging to the more liberal Reform denomination, have a strong tradition of service to the community, while ethnic Jews "lacking denominational identification are much less active in general community voluntary associations" (Lazerwitz and Harrison 1979:662). [3] So, religion plays a great role in the involvement of people in volunteer work.

Voluntary works like community service are a good way of improving societies by reducing the gap between upper and lower classes and increasing the intimacy among people.
Now I wonder why in our society these activities are fading away while after the Islamic revolution and during the years of war between Iran and Iraq, many people were involved in voluntary work. Should we be helpful to our community just in times of trouble? Well, this is the way our society has gone. I don’t know why we changed so much throughout time. A friend of mine believed that today our people don’t trust the government as much as they used to do in the past. Moreover, their demands are not met, thus, they want to get paid for whatever they do. Right or wrong? I don’t know. I just hope that the spirit of help and volunteerism gets back to our society.
1. http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.
2. Ibid

3. Ibid