Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds comments on a new book purporting to show that religious conservatives are more generous than secular liberals because they donate more to charities. Reynolds spins this into the following comment:
ARE CONSERVATIVES more charitable?
“The book’s basic findings are that conservatives 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. Conversely, secular liberals who
believe fervently in government entitlement programs give far less to
charity. They want everyone’s tax dollars to support charitable causes
and are reluctant to write checks to those causes, even when
governments don’t provide them with enough money.”
Apparently they’re not big on paying the taxes to support those entitlement programs, either: “Bono demands more of the taxes he won’t pay.”
Greg Sisk, at Mirror of Justice, also touts the book’s findings here. It’s only a matter of time before this meme obtains CW status, like the women who get rich off welfare by having baby after baby. It’s just too rhetorically useful to let truth or sound analysis get in the way.
I’m not sure what the comparison between religious conservatives and
secular liberals is supposed to prove, but it certainly doesn’t establish, to quote
Instapundit (quoting beliefnet), that conservatives are more generous “by any measure.” At
most, it shows that religious conservatives are more generous donors to
private charities than secular liberals. But, if I define “generous” to encompass, say,
support against one’s financial interest for social programs funded
through redistributive taxation, then wealthy liberals (secular or
religious), who generally support such taxes and such programs, do well
and conservatives (religious or not) don’t look so hot.
I have not yet read the book (though I certainly will), but before drawing any conclusions, I would be interested to know whether the “private charities”
canvassed for the study include the religious conservatives own churches. I’d also like to see the magnitude of the differences, especially on some of the non-monetary measures noted in the beleifnet article, such as blood donation. Finally, I’d want to see the numbers for secular conservatives and religious liberals, since the presence of religious involvement is a potentially conflating variable in this analysis that cuts across political orientation.
To be honest,
though, I’d be fairly unsurprised to see that conservatives as a whole donate more to
private charities than liberals. Given egalitarian
liberal views about the role of the state in solving certain widespread
social problems, one would expect liberals to favor state over private
efforts and to view at least some sorts of private charitable
contributions as wasted money.
This may be a variant on what Carl Sagan used to refer to this as the “brick in the toilet”
question. He talked about one category of people, who think that
environmental problems should be solved by voluntary changes in individual behavior. Others, he said, think that many such problems
require a level of coordination that can only be accomplished through
the state. He used water conservation as his
hypothetical. People in the former group might put a brick in their
toilet to save water with each flush but oppose centralized regulation
aimed at ensuring broad-based compliance with water conservation efforts. (These are your
religious conservatives, if you will, who will give money to private
charities but oppose state intervention in the service of social
justice.) On the other hand, people in the latter group, who favor
state intervention to compel water conservation but are skeptical of
the effectiveness of voluntary action in this regard, might support (or
vote for) state regulation of water consumption but, in its absence,
might not bother to put the brick in their toilet because they view the
action as pointless without the broader coordination offered by state
action. (These are your secular liberals who favor redistributive
policies, even to their own financial disadvantage, but who, according
to the book, are marginally stingier with their donations to charity.)
Whether this story supports saying that people who put bricks in their
toilets are the “true” environmentalists (or religious conservatives
are the truly generous) and the people who do not but who vote for
environmental interests are hypocrites strikes me as unanswerable apart
from one’s views about the substantive merits of the beliefs underlying
their decisions.
The relevance of Bono’s behavior for all of this strikes me as too
far-fetched to be worthy of comment and bordering on (or, on second
thought, crossing well over into) the realm of intellectual
dishonesty. (Not surprising for Instapundit.) Suffice it to say that
if we want to get into comparing the anecdotal evidence of hypocrisy
among prominent individuals within the ranks of our respective
political movements, religious conservatives are living in a glass
house. In the same way that meth-purchasing, male-prostitute-hiring
evangelical ministers don’t say anything about the bona fides of
conservative Christians, or the merits of their beliefs, Bono’s tax
evasion adds nothing useful to this conversation.
UPDATE: Over at Mirror of Justice, Rick Garnett takes issue with my attempt to redefine “generosity” to include willingness to pay higher taxes to support programs for the poor. He says:
After all, whether they support redistributive policies or
not, religious conservatives pay their taxes, just like “wealthy
liberals”; they just give away more on top of that.
Fair point. Except that, in the states where religious conservatives predominate,
taxes are lower (as are government services). In states were “wealthy
liberals” live, taxes (and services) are higher. Compare, for example,
South Dakota (45th highest tax burden) or Alabama (46th) or Tennessee
(47th) or Oklahoma (40th) with, say, New York (2nd) or Hawaii (3rd) or
Rhode Island (4th). So it’s not clear to me at all, to quote Rick,
that “religious conservatives” pay taxes “just like ‘wealthy
liberals.’” As long as the increment that religious conservatives
donate to charity does not exceed the difference in tax burden between your typical red and blue state, then I
believe my point stands. Interestingly, nothing in the descriptions of
the book I’ve seen on-line says anything about the absolute magnitude of
the giving we’re talking about. It’s all about the relative rate of
giving between religious conservatives and secular liberals. (As an
aside, I’ve never seen any data suggesting that conservatives are more
likely to evade taxes, but, if the Bush administration’s policies with
respect to IRS enforcement are any guide, there appears to be a
constituency for tax evasion among wealthy Republicans.)
UPDATE II: Apparently, Brooks found in an October 2003 article that religiosity has a much greater impact on charitable giving and volunteering than political affiliation. (I can’t find an on-line version of the article, but you can find a shorter version of it here.) In fact, Brooks says that intensity of political feeling matters more than what one actually believes (e.g., strongly conservative and strongly liberal give more than more wishy washy types). If religiosity trumps politics, then this strikes me as altering some of the fundamental meaning of the book’s findings. It suggests that the most significant factor at work is religiosity and not ideology and that the comparison of religious conservatives to secular liberals is a red herring intended to stir up debate (and publicity for the book), but does not tell us much about either conservatives or liberals. In any event, I’ve ordered the book from Amazon and will report back when I’ve had a chance to read it.