What Joe Biden Puts in the Collection Plate

Tax records show gifts to three churches, two religious charities, a food bank, and more.

Joe and Jill Biden gave $1,000 to St. Joseph on the Brandywine Catholic Church last year, the Greenville, Delaware, congregation where the president regularly receives Communion and visits the graves of his first wife and two of his children. The Bidens gave another $1,500 to the First Lady’s church, Westminster Presbyterian, a Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation in nearby Wilmington.

According to the First Family’s tax records, released by the White House on Monday, the Bidens also gave to a church in South Carolina, a food bank, a fire department, a firefighter association, two Catholic charities that help the poor, a nonprofit that serves military families, and the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children, started after the president’s eldest son died in 2015.

The Bidens reported giving away a total of $30,704 in 2020, a little more than 5 percent of their $607,000 income.

That percentage is fairly standard for American families. Only about half of Americans give to charity at all, according to the most recent study from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. Among those who give to charity, only about 5 percent tithe one-tenth of their income.

Most give between 2.4 and 6 percent, according to the National Center for Charitable Statistics. People who make between $250,000 and $1 million give, on average, about half of what the Bidens did in 2020.

Barack Obama gave away a similar percentage of income his first year in the White House. His charitable contributions rose over the next eight years, however, and he ultimately gave away $1 million while in office—slightly more than 10 percent of what he earned from his presidential ...