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The belief that religious conservatives are less charitable and more hard-hearted than secular liberals has seemed so obviously true as to require little empirical investigation. In fact, conservatives themselves have helped fortify this view by accusing liberals of possessing "bleeding hearts" and by amending conservatism with "compassionate." Religious believers have fared little better. Even serious evangelicals, such as Ronald J. Sider, conclude that Christians live just like the secular world despite their convictions.
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But as the ink dried on Sider's The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, Arthur C. Brooks' Who Really Cares soon followed with a starkly different conclusion. Drawing on some ten data sets, Brooks finds that religiosity is among the best predictors of charitable giving. Religious Americans are not only much more likely to give money and volunteer their time to religious and secular institutions, they are also more likely to provide aid to family members, return incorrect change, help a homeless person, and donate blood. In fact, despite expecting to find just the opposite, Brooks concluded: "I have never found a measurable way in which secularists are more charitable than religious people."
Consider some examples. Religious citizens who make $49,000 gave away about 3.5 times as much money as secular citizens with the same income. They also volunteered twice as often, are 57 percent more likely to help homeless persons, and two-thirds more likely to give blood at their workplace. Meanwhile, those who insist that "beliefs don't matter as long as you're a good person" are not as good as those who do think beliefs matter. The former group gave and volunteered at much lower rates.
Yet even these findings tend to obscure the impact of religion on charity. This is because some of the survey respondents that Brooks classified as secular are indirectly affected by religion if they were raised in a religious household. Consider two secular Americans, identical in education, income, and other such measures, only one of whom was raised in a religious household. The secular citizen with a religious upbringing is nearly twice as likely to give to charity.
Because religious and secular citizens tend to cluster in different communities, some parts of the country are far more charitable than others. For instance, Arkansas (where citizens give away some 3.9 percent of their income) is among the most charitable states, while Massachusetts (where citizens give away 1.8 percent of their income) is one of the least charitable. Likewise, the citizens of South Dakota give away 75 percent more of their household income than those in San Francisco.
Overall, conservative-leaning states are much more charitable than liberal-leaning states. Of the 25 states that gave a percentage of household income above the national average, 24 went to Bush in 2004. This striking result, however, should not obscure an important fact about the charity divide. It is not that liberals are somehow inherently less charitable than conservatives. Rather, the lifestyles and beliefs that contribute to charity are simply more likely to be found in conservatives than liberals. In general, religious liberals are no less charitable than religious conservatives; there just happen to be three times as many religious citizens who are conservative.
But religiosity is not the only influence that tends to make conservatives more charitable than liberals. Citizens are also more charitable when they oppose greater income redistribution and less charitable when they support it. Opponents of income redistribution are about ten percent more likely to give to charity even after controlling for socio-economic variables such as income, religion, and education. They are also more likely to return change to a cashier, give food or money to a homeless person, and donate blood. In fact, the blood supply would decline by about 30 percent if we were a nation of government aid advocates.
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