Religion and finance have rarely been as comfortable bedfellows as they are in Britain today.

Despite its rising pension bill, the Church of England has turned round the management of its £5.3 billion assets since heavy losses in the early 1990s. For Muslims, Sharia-compliant finance is now commonplace. In the Jewish community, subscriptions for synagogue membership bring security and other benefits to religious practice.

To the non-religious public, mistakenly equating the devout life with poverty, merely to speak of religion and finance in the same breath can seem sacrilegious. Catholic priests and monks swear to a life of poverty, and Jesus preached that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

But scholars believe that this contained a joke. In Jesus’s time, the “eye of the needle” was a small door in the walls of Jerusalem that was the only way to enter the city at night. Traders could get their camels through only by stripping them of all their baggage and making them go on bended knee. Jesus was reminding his followers that they cannot take material wealth with them when they die.

As St Paul makes clear in his first letter to Timothy, it is not so much money but the “love of money” that is the root of all evil.

What often gets forgotten in the debate over money and religion is the extraordinary generosity that a faith can inspire in its followers. I interviewed the Dominican monk Timothy Radcliffe a few weeks ago after he won the £15,000 Michael Ramsey prize for his book, What is the point of being a Christian?. In response to my question about what he would do with the cheque, he said he would enjoy holding it in his hands for a few seconds and then pass it straight over to his order.

Most devout religious people donate a substantial part of their net income to the work of their local church, temple, mosque or synagogue. Often it is as much as a tenth, in keeping with the Biblical mandate to tithe. And they also tend to give to other charities, not just religious ones. One survey by the Evangelical Alliance found that churchgoers gave four times as much to charity as nonbelievers.

Britain has not gone so far down the road of the gospel of wealth creation as have some in the US, where accumulation of riches can be regarded as a symbol of God’s blessing. But John D. Rockefeller spoke for many when he explained why he had felt it necessary to tithe more than half a billion dollars during his life. He said: “God gave me the money.”