Giving it up

Anyone who's ever travelled much in the Second and Third Worlds will surely have witnessed lots of rosy-cheeked, corn-fed thumpers returning from missions in various exotic and miserable places. Sometimes they seem to just stand around handing out bibles, but they also do a lot of real charitable work. Similarly, I recall doing research on a hedge fund manager who had made huge contributions to things like prostheses for mine victims and a rehab clinic for lower-income women, but then was also a big RNC contributor. In short, born-again Christians seem more apt to volunteer than us secular lefties, showing a real tendency to give despite the fact that they advocate such heinous, xenophobic and morally reprehensible policies.

I'm sure that the there's typically some propagandizing point of delivery, you know, pro-life counseling and thumping lessons for the women in rehab, etc. And that's certainly the key, good works allow for proselytization, and the unit cost for delivery is pretty low. In fact, one can imagine some, and particularly Mormons, who can back-convert ancestors, running complex calculations to figure out where it can get the highest soul-yield per missionary hour. "Send em to Mozambique! They used to have a high birth rate there! We'll get oodles!" Canny subject populations probably sense an arbitrage opportunity and attempt to extract payment for each soul. Payment in kind, admittedly, might be problematic.