Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Saida, Lebanon, this paper focuses on situations in which concerns about sectarianism or secularism lead humanitarian NGO workers to step back and explicitly reflect on their giving practices. Discursively, secularism is not the only – or even the obvious – alternative to “sectarianism.” I thus explore the, sometimes convoluted, connections between sectarianism and secularism within the field of humanitarian giving. I show that although both a donation and zakat, or the annual religious tax on one’s wealth, in their monetary forms can appear to be the same sort of contribution, in practice they are radically different. In each case, the ethics of giving changes, and there is a shift from the civil laws that govern NGOs, to the authority of religious opinion. The handling of these different forms of money can raise concerns about whether charitable workers are being properly secular and/or non-sectarian. This paper thus examines secularism, sectarianism – and non-sectarianism – as practices that are negotiated through moments of ethical rupture that have been catalyzed by deliberations surrounding money. As the research for this paper focuses on Saida city, it examines how certain practices come to be perceived as alarmingly “sectarian” within a predominately Sunni Muslim setting.