<p>Entrepreneurs are becoming increasingly influential in shaping the philanthropic landscape, yet research has judged their giving as ethically flawed and largely strategic. This ethical assessment is based on a narrow base of elite, post-wealth philanthropists and leaves the much larger population of entrepreneurs outside the empirical frame. Our study broadens the construct of entrepreneurial philanthropy beyond this segment and examines the role of religion in charitable giving. Drawing on longitudinal German administrative tax data, we compare the charitable behavior of entrepreneurs and wage earners. Consistent with resource uncertainty, we find that entrepreneurs are less likely to donate than wage earners. However, religious affiliation mitigates this effect: religious entrepreneurs are more likely to give and tend to give larger amounts, than their nonreligious counterparts. We also identify a spillover effect in which religious entrepreneurs donate not only to religious causes but also to secular ones, a pattern consistent with philanthropy formed before substantial wealth accumulation that persists even as wealth accrues. Our study contributes to the ethics of entrepreneurial philanthropy by broadening the construct beyond elite, post-wealth philanthropists by identifying religion as an external moral anchor that sustains prosocial behavior under economic cost and improving the methodological design of research in this domain. Altogether, our study suggests the conditions under which entrepreneurial philanthropy may in fact be ethical.</p>