Charitable Donations in Conservatives and Liberals

In his article “Conservatives have Answered Obama’s Call,” Arthur C. Brooks examines a survey conducted by Gallup polling organization in May 2008. This survey concluded that those Americans who considered themselves to politically conservative donated, both as a total amount and as a percentage of their income, more money to charitable organizations than their liberal counterparts did. This disparity occurred at a pronounced rate, with conservatives giving on average 3.6% of their income to charity and liberals giving only 1.2%. The name of this article stems from President Barack Obama’s call for a “new era of responsibility” in his inaugural speech and the ironical fact that, throughout history, those of the opposing party have been the ones to more strongly share the new president’s feelings on this issue.

Brooks’ aims in writing this article appear to be many-fold. He first considers two widely held explanations for this disparity and then proceeds to disprove them. These two theories are, one, that because conservative tend to be more religious than liberals, conservatives give more because they are “simply giving to their churches.” The second is that the enormous sum of political donations that liberals give is “crowding out” the “charitable giving by the left.” To refute both these notions, Brooks introduces even more statistical data. Interestingly, though, Brooks never presents his own theory for this occurrence. He then looks, once again using statistics, at a phenomenon that is perhaps more relevant in today’s economical situation: the fact that “conservatives don’t just give more; they also decrease their givings less than liberals do in response to economic conditions.” Brooks warns that the current recession could “exacerbate the giving differences between the left and right.”

Perhaps the most important message of this article is a warning Brooks sends out to “nonprofit executives.” Brooks notes “few environments are less tolerant of conservatives and their ideas than the nonprofit world.” Brooks then presents statistics showing the enormous discrepancy in nonprofit employees’ political contributions between Democrats and Republicans (in some cases 98% to 2% in favor of Democratic candidates). Brooks ends by advising nonprofit executives “to remember that many of the folks they will count on in hard times are not necessarily those who share their political views.”

After reading this article, I felt that a good explanation for this phenomenon was the “compassionate conservatism” philosophy pushed by George W. Bush and his evangelical backers. However when looking at the history of the religious right in William Martin’s With God on Our Side, it seems as if this sentiment of individuals helping out society was not always present; in fact, it is clear that some historic Evangelical leaders were completely opposed to it. Billy Sunday, for example, saw the Social Gospel as “godless social service nonsense” and, according to Martin, “insisted that anyone who made a reasonable effort could succeed in America” (Martin, 9). The popularity of Sunday during his time seems to imply that most members of the general public agreed with the majority of his beliefs, so this transition that has occurred in the philosophy of the religious right is quite interesting.

Going back to the article, the question still remains of why this phenomenon occurs. More statistics and data could shed more light on the situation, but it will still be a very difficult question to answer.