Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] [RELIGION] Fwd: New research on religiosity and charity

["Jonathan King" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

OK, so this book came out in 2006, and I know there has been some back
and forth about it. The good news is that it is genuinely social
science research that seems to be done with some care. The bad news is
that is genuinely social science research, so tiny changes in framing
the problem, choosing covariates, or specifying the model can make a
big difference.

As a side note, religiosity can be a very useful concept, but it's not
necessarily a very simple one. One of the interesting things about it
is that it is reasonably heritable, but not completely stable over the
lifecourse. (If I remember correctly, it's one of the traits where
heritbility estimates *increase* over the lifecourse.)

I will look at the full article maybe tonight when I have more time.

jking

On 1/8/08, Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> I just thought I would feed the usual debates with this article.
>
>
>
> The following article is located at:
> http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2008/001/8.11.html
>
> Books & Culture
>
> A Scandal of the Secular Conscience?
> Who really cares.
> by Jon A. Shields
>
> Who Really Cares
>
> Who Really Cares, The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism
> Arthur C. Brooks
> Basic Books, 2006
> 250 pp., $26
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> But how can this be? After all, presumably those who support income
> redistribution care more about the plight of the poor. The answer seems
> to be that many advocates of redistribution use this position as a
> substitute for making personal sacrifices—that is, they think they are
> already being charitable by taking a particular political position.
> Those who oppose income redistribution may feel more obliged to make
> personal sacrifices on behalf of the poor.
>
> Two other factors influence giving—personal entrepreneurship and being
> married with children. The latter influence is especially interesting.
> After all, in hard economic terms one would expect just the opposite,
> since children are a significant drain on both time and money. But
> apparently either more charitable Americans have more children, or
> having children makes them more charitable. Or perhaps both are true. In
> any case, conservatives are more likely to be situated in traditional
> families.
>
> Brooks ultimately concludes that the contrasts between conservatives and
> liberals are large enough such that they tend to be part of different
> cultures or "nations"—one charitable and one uncharitable. In the
> uncharitable nation reside some 75 million Americans who never donate
> their money and 130 million who never volunteer their time. Meanwhile,
> Americans who give their time and money tend to give a lot of both.
> Thus, Brooks concludes there is a "very bright line" between "Charitable
> America" and "Selfish America."
>
> But if this is right, how can we square Brooks' thesis with Sider's
> claim that evangelicals live just as secular Americans do? A partial
> answer might be that Sider rests his case on more than just data on
> charity. He also examines divorce, racism, and sexual disobedience. In
> addition, he only examines giving to churches both over time and between
> mainline and evangelicals denominations, and never makes broader
> comparisons between the charitable giving of secular and religious
> Americans. And as John G. Stackhouse recently emphasized in these pages,
> Sider is not careful to distinguish nominal from committed evangelicals.
>
> On the other hand, it is not clear that Sider would be very impressed by
> Brooks' data. First, Brooks finds that there is nothing distinctive
> about evangelicals. Thus, religious evangelicals are no more charitable
> than religious Catholics or Jews. What seems to matter is religiosity
> rather than the content of one's faith. Second, it is not clear that
> contributions in the order of three to six percent of one's annual
> income each year can sustain the larger cultural claims that Brooks
> makes. Thus religious citizens may give a good deal more than secular
> Americans do, everything else being equal, but they nonetheless make
> relatively small contributions from their incomes.
>
> However one interprets these findings, one conclusion is indisputable:
> religious conservatives not only bear little resemblance to the
> stereotypes liberal élites ascribe to them, they also compare favorably
> to other Americans. Brooks own work confirms an excellent ethnographic
> study by James Ault, Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist
> Church (reviewed by Julie Byrne in the November/December 2004 issue of
> Books & Culture). Ault, a child of the New Left and liberal culture, was
> amazed by the charity he encountered, especially when compared to the
> more individualistic and atomized culture he knew so well. Other
> studies, such as Brad Wilcox's, have shown that evangelical men are more
> engaged with and attentive to their wives and children than mainline and
> especially secular men. Many other scholars, including Christian Smith,
> Clyde Wilcox, and Mark Rozell, have found that evangelicals are far more
> open to pluralistic values than most élites ever imagine. In fact, my
> own work has led me to conclude that Christian activists often behave in
> much more civil ways than secular activists. Perhaps the pervasive
> charity that Brooks discovered is not completely walled out of the
> public square.
>
> With rare exceptions such as Ault, however, a growing mountain of
> research has done little to alter élite opinion, especially in the
> academy. This is partly because it is simply being ignored. Despite
> Brooks' original data analysis and provocative thesis, his book has
> received almost no attention from left-of-center periodicals or radio
> shows. As of this writing, one exception is a review by Stanley Katz in
> the Chronicle of Higher Education, which dismisses Brooks' book in one
> paragraph without engaging his empirical findings.
>
> Of course, dogmas are often immune to empirical research. But if secular
> élites continue to cling to their stereotypes of evangelicals and ignore
> social science, then they will embrace the very intolerance and
> anti-intellectualism they accuse religious believers of possessing. To
> be so uncharitable toward millions of decent Americans would also be a
> sad vindication of Brooks' argument.
>
> Jon A. Shields is an assistant professor of Political Science at the
> University of Colorado—Colorado Springs. His research on Christian
> conservatives, the New Left, and the politics of bioethics has appeared
> in Critical Review, Political Science Quarterly, and Society.
> Copyright (c) 2008 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books
> & Culture magazine.
> Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
> January/February 2008, Vol. 14, No. 1, Page 11
>
>
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