In one of the least shocking editorials I’ve read recently, liberals are less charitable than conservatives. No matter how you try to flavor the numbers, they keep coming out showing the same things. One technique to try to explain it away was to attempt to say that many of those donations go to the church’s facade. A few things on that…
1) A huge percentage of church donations are re-donated to church supported ministries both here and abroad, and not to infrastructure or staffing. It’s nice to go to a church that votes on the budget – we are very transparent with this.
2) Even the staffing has a social benefit – who else is going to employ religion people?!
3) From my experience, the most image conscious church that I’ve ever been to was a black baptist church, and I’m not alone in that experience. It’s not as big a problem as I thought when I first got there. Culturally, the church becomes a symbol of the best the community has to offer. The pastor drive a Mercedes, despite the fact that they parishioners sometimes don’t have cars at all – they take pride in the fact that one of their own can look successful when discussing community issues with political figures. This was explained to me that the woman that gave me a ride to church, it’s not one of those opinions that I made up on my own (then sell as fact). Point being? Check the last election results to see where THOSE church contributions skew – what percentage of black church-goers are liberal? If you remove all church contributions and assume they’re from conservatives, you’re not just pulling money out of conservative coiffures.
4) Modern mega-churches, the supposedly socially enlightened branch of Christianity, are the most egregious over-spenders among the predominantly white evangelical community. My old church had a 40 foot high Easter set last time I was there. They have smoke and lights and 15 foot screens with dual projectors – they do a lot of good, but they are image conscious because they think that’s what they need to be to resonate with the world at large to spread the gospel. Don’t get me started, the concept makes me irate. Regardless, young people flock to these churches, and young people skew liberal, statistically at least.
5) I’d like to see where the correlation was stronger, between political affiliation or among religious affiliation. I’d be willing to bet a testicle that the conservative/liberal correlation is a secondary cause – driven by the percentages of Christians who are conservative versus liberal. Disentangle it by splitting between Christian and non-Christian groups, then pairwise compare those two sets. I bet that the disparity is much less intra-Christian and intra-non-Christian. It is the delta between Christians and non-Christians that drives that statistic, not the one between conservative and liberal.
6) If I’m wrong in the previous point, then one could only really come to one conclusion. Liberals want social welfare, but want someone else to do it. What might surprise you is that I don’t think that’s true, I think this is just a poorly designed survery.
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Most of my liberal friends volunteer and give money as much or more than my conservatives friends, but I have been shocked by the numbers of friends who refuse to walk the walk and talk the talk. I love Nicholas Kristof.
Of course on paper liberals aren’t seen as giving to “charity”, because they’re *for* using taxes toward helping others, which isn’t technically considered charity by conservatives, because they would rather everything be privatized. I guarantee the stats boil down largely to exactly that difference in philosophy.
Lara, I definitely believe you, though I don’t think I’d be making too big an assumption when I say that most of your friends in both categories are religious. I was trying to claim that Christian people, irrespective of political affiliation, give more. Just to be clear, the Biblical perspective on this has nothing to do with quantity – it’s all a matter of giving from what you have. Percentage is a better marker or that, but still not a good one. For example, it’s easy to give 10% of your salary when you only need 60% of your salary to live comfortably.
And Bess, if liberals and conservatives had different tax rates based on their party affiliation, I would agree with your point more. Also, if that were the case, you wouldn’t have very many democrats anymore. Why? Because people are, as a whole, selfish…and that’s also irrespective of party affiliation.
Am I an anomaly, then? I’m not Christian but I give to charities pretty often. And I know plenty of others exactly like me.
Yes, according to the article, you an your friends are anomalies. I was defending Christian liberals against the statistics – if you negate that particular defense, then you have to fall back on the statistics in their raw form…and they say that, as a population, liberals are less charitable.
It would be interesting to see how the numbers work out for average percentage of giving. Then you could know if you were really an anomaly, or just unaware of the generosity of others.
Kristof is about as liberal as one can get, which is why I appreciate the article so much. We are often more likely to take criticism when it is from someone coming from our own perspective.