Conservatives are More Generous?

I'm not sure what the comparison between religious conservatives and secular liberals proves, but it certainly doesn't prove, 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.  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 them (egalitarian liberals) to support state over private solutions and to view at least some sorts of private charitable contributions as wasted money. 

Carl Sagan used to refer to this as the "brick in the toilet" question.  He talked one category of people, who think that environmental problems should be solved by voluntary changes of 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 the question of water conservation as a  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 water conservation.  (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, would support (or vote for) state regulation of water consumption but, in its absence, would 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 Instapundit and Greg, are stingy 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.