Right. In the case of Katrina, they could do something that made them "feel good," which is what they're all about, and they knew a lot of other folks would see them doing it.

What a load of crap! There was and is a lot of hard work to be done, and not every local property-owner is able to participate in the recovery, due to age, disability, poverty, exhaustion, abandonment by insurers, etc. When a group of strangers shows up to help, it's a real blessing. Even if some volunteers may be acting from motives that are not purely selfless, the effort they have been making has produced real, measurable, and highly necessary results. Stay-at-home critics, on the other hand, haven't helped anyone.

Take it from an up-close-and-personal witness: Churchgoers of all denominations have made enormous contributions to the home-by-home reconstruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. While government at all levels has succeeded at little more than fingerpointing and profiteering, much of the real and necessary work has been and is being performed by serious and devout individuals who came together in their local churches, and who very often secured funding from larger church organizations (dioceses, synods, etc.).

Plenty of goodhearted secular people have been doing the same kinds of things, but churchgoers are much better organized and thus able to bring themselves to town in much larger numbers. While there are multiple churches in virtually every town and city, similar local assemblies of freethinkers are pretty rare, and therefore have been less of a presence in our local "voluntourism" phenomenon than have church groups.