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.
Yesterday, there was a rally at the State House in Boston involving the failure of the General Court (the Massachusetts legislature) to vote on the question of a Constitutional Convention that could have a substantive effect on the Supreme Judicial Court's decision in the Goodrich case. The news report of the Boston Globe is HERE . I find Professor Friedman's argument, referred to in the article, that the Governor is wrong quite interesting. But then, the Professor did file an amicus brief in the Goodrich case that appears to agree with the court's majority ruling in favor of homosexual marriage. At this stage, it also appears that the legal and political issues addressed in the Globe article could generate future discussion and interest among MOJ contributors and readers. RJA sj
Ever since Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority began making headlines in the 1980s, it has served the purposes of certain conservative activists and their ideological foes to exaggerate the influence they wield among evangelical Christians. In fact, it is both a strength and a weakness of evangelicalism that the “movement” lacks a center. Yes, a significant majority of evangelicals voted for George W. Bush. Big deal. At the moment, it appears unlikely that a Republican of any stripe will win the White House in 2008, though the Democrats may yet find a way to squander their advantage. So much for theocracy.
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."
Here is a story about the recent votes by the vestries of Truro Episcopal Church and The Falls Church -- two large congregations in the D.C. area -- to separate from the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Virginia. Watch for interesting property and church-autonomy disputes . . . .
"Turkey's Unique Brand of Secularism Means Firm Government Control of Religions," the Catholic News Service reports. Here is a bit:
One of the most difficult issues Christians, Jews and other religious minorities are facing is their lack of recognition under Turkish law, particularly as it applies to their ability to acquire and own property for churches or synagogues, schools and hospitals, he said.
Running seminaries is evening more difficult, Oehring said.
"In 1971, the government decided there would be no more private religious schools offering higher education," so the Greek and Armenian Orthodox seminaries were closed, he said. The Jewish community already was sending its rabbinical students abroad, and the Latin-rite Catholic seminary remained open since it was housed in the compound of the French consulate in Istanbul.
"The Muslim schools had already been closed in 1924 and were reopened as government-run high schools or faculties of divinity in Turkish universities," so the state controlled what the students learned, he said.
While many people recognize the continued closure of the seminaries as a problem, he said, "the Kemalists and secularists say if you give Christians the possibility of opening schools, Islamic schools not under state control also would have a right to open."
Dimitri Cavalli, in the Wall Street Journal, on a recent round of religious-display litigation, and on the proposed Public Expression of Religion Act. Sigh. (Thanks to Amy Welborn.)
Anyone interested in law-and-religion or church-state work will probably want to check out this new paper, "Religion and State: Some Main Issues and Sources," by my colleague, John Finnis. (Thanks to Larry Solum for the link.) Here is a bit:
Any discussion of religion and state derails from the outset if it presumes that, as Brian Leiter puts it, “religion is contrasted with reason” – a theory for which Leiter, if he felt inclined, might summon as a supporting witness the first definition of “religion” in Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (New York 1992). And the discussion equally derails if it presumes that no religion’s claims about God and man, world and society are reasonable, or that no religion’s claims are even discussable within the domain of public reason, that is, of the discourse that one should find in universities, schools, and legislative and other political assemblies, including discourse about what laws and public policies to adopt.The discussion derails, again, if it presumes that the philosophically neutral, default, baseline or otherwise presumptively appropriate framework or basis for the discussion of religion and state is that no religious claims add anything -- whether content, certitude, or probability -- to what is established in moral or political philosophy, or in natural or social science or social theory.
It derails, too, if it holds or presumes that religion’s status is nothing more than one way of exercising the “right” proclaimed as fundamental and “at the heart of liberty”, in Planned Parenthood v Casey (1992): “to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”Or again if, as Ronald Dworkin says, the basis of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom is simply that “no one can regard himself as a free and equal member of an organized venture that claims authority to decide for him what he thinks self-respect requires him to decide for himself.”These celebrations of the right to “decide for oneself” and “define one’s own concept” trade, as we shall see, on an important truth.But they abandon reason when they assert that the relevant intelligible and basic good in issue is not the good of aligning oneself with a transcendent intelligence and will whose activity makes possible one’s own intellect and will, nor even the good of discovering the truth about some meaningful and weighty questions, but rather the good of self-determination or self-respect.For these are no true goods unless the goods around which one determines oneself deserve the respect due to what is true, rather than self-interested make-believe.
By the way, it seems to me that the paper's opening sections work as -- even if they are not billed explicitly as -- a response to Brian Leiter's recent essay, "Why Tolerate Religion?"
Today's New York Times Magazine has an interview with Katharine Jefferts Schori, the new presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. There is much worth commenting on in the interview, but I was particularly struck by this exchange:
How many members of the Episcopal Church are there in this country?
About 2.2 million. It used to be larger percentagewise, but Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children.
Episcopalians aren’t interested in replenishing their ranks by having children?
No. It’s probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.
I guess this can be read charitably as a creative way to spin the Episcopal Church's dwindling ranks: "Our denomination is shrinking because we're better educated than those baby-crazy Catholics and Mormons! In fact, God wants us to shrink -- it's called stewardship!"
