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In its report on the controversial new book by Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, The Chronicle of Philanthropy highlights some of Dr Brooks’s more polemical comments:
"If liberals persist in their antipathy to religion," Mr. Brooks writes, "the Democrats will become not only the party of secularism, but also the party of uncharity."
. . .
"There is not one measurably significant way I have ever found in which religious people are not more charitable than nonreligious people," Mr. Brooks says. "The fact is, if it weren't for religious people in your community, the PTA would shut down."
Dr Brooks’s small but powerful volume presents evidence that religious believers who hold politically conservative views are more generous by any measure—charitable donations, volunteerism, blood donations, etc.—than politically liberal unbelievers. He criticises Democratic leaders who downplay or even disdain the value of charitable works and says his purpose is not to celebrate the religious right, but to issue a call to action to liberals and leftists.
He also compares giving by the working poor and by households receiving welfare. For households with the same income levels, welfare recipients give an average of one-third as much as the working poor.
Below are the charity map and the political map presented in the book and reproduced in the Chronicle of Philanthropy article. On top is the charity map which highlights the 25 states that, in 2001, donated a share of income higher than the national average; the political map, beneath, highlights the states carried by President George W. Bush in 2004. Of the states shaded on the 2001 charity map, all but one voted for Bush three years later.
The article also summarises Dr Brooks’s suggestions on how to increase charitable giving.
Earlier this year, the Pew Centre released a study showing that Republicans are happier than Democrats. It identified several dimensions in which happiness differed between member of the two parties, but offered no specific reasons to account for the discrepancy. Dr Brooks’s research sheds some light on that question, I think.
h/t: Arts & Letters Daily
Previous related posts:
[...] Is it just coincidental that relatively uncharitable Quebecers live in the jurisdiction with the most generous and highly developed welfare state in North America? Probably not, according to the controversial research of philanthropy expert Arthur Brooks, who found that small-government conservatives give more to charity than do liberals who favour higher taxes and spending. Says a colleague of Dr Brooks: "When you compare the giving rates between Quebec and Alberta [where average donor rates are $500 a year, the highest in Canada], they look like two very different countries," says David Van Slyke, a professor in the department of public administration at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, who studied at McGill University in the late 1980s. [...]
[...] So, the two reasons offered by the president of Calgary United Way have been shot down. Well, then, what might account for the greater charitable giving by Americans? Philanthropy expert Arthur Brooks, whom this blog has mentioned several times in the past month or so, has an answer. [C]onservatives who practice religion, live in traditional nuclear families and reject the notion that the government should engage in income redistribution are the most generous Americans, by any measure. [...]