Book Reviewed
by John Scott, Adjunct Professor on Servant Leadership
Who Really Cares: America’s Charity Divide—Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Matters
By Arthur C Brooks, New York: Basic Books, 2006
This book crushes, with hard data, some popular assumptions about who is, and is not, charitable. It is “the best study of charity that I have read,” says James Q. Wilson, a preeminent scholar who advised five U. S. presidents of both parties and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the Foreword, Wilson describes the author, Arthur C. Brooks, as “a rigorously trained scholar” who has combined “careful studies of charity with a direct and compelling way of explaining what he has learned.”
The book is getting a lot of media attention. Brooks has been featured on television’s “20/20” and interviewed on numerous radio talk shows.
However, most of that attention has focused on some secondary correlations. But it’s easy to understand why. Those correlations surprised almost everyone, including the author, who is a lifelong liberal when it comes to politics. The data shows that the term “compassionate conservative” may not be an oxymoron after all.
Conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than liberals. This is an average figure, so it’s not a result of the fact that conservatives outnumber liberals. Individual households headed by conservatives, on average, give 30 percent more money to charity than households headed by liberals. And this isn’t because conservatives have higher incomes, as they actually make six percent less than liberals. Moreover, conservatives give more than liberals at every income level: poor, middle, and rich.
Even when donations to churches and other religious charities are excluded, conservatives give ten percent more than liberals.
Conservatives also volunteer many more hours than liberals, to both religious and secular charities.
Conservatives donate so much blood the author says: “If liberals and moderates gave blood at the same rate as conservatives, the blood supply of the United States would jump about 45 percent.”
When measured by party affiliation instead of ideology, the results are the same: registered Republicans give much more time and money to charity than registered Democrats.
Regarding his initial findings, Brooks said, “I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.”
However, it’s misleading to focus solely on the correlations related to political views. The data shows, and Brooks emphasizes, that the most common motive behind most charitable giving and volunteering is not political. It’s religious. Ninety-one percent of religious conservatives contribute to charity, but nearly as high a percentage of religious liberals do too. Religion trumps politics. Of course the statistical correlations showing that liberals are less charitable include nonreligious people as well. So the total figures reflect the fact that there are more secularists among liberals than among conservatives. But on both sides of the political divide, religious people are much more generous than secularists.
“The evidence leaves no room for doubt,” says Brooks, “Religious people are far more charitable than nonreligious people. In years of research, I have never found a measurable way in which secularists are more charitable than religious people.”
Religious people are significantly more likely than secularists to give food or money to a homeless person, give up their seats to older people on crowded buses, return change mistakenly given to them by cashiers, and help out a relative or friend in need. Moreover, the more religious people are, the more generous they tend to be. For example, people who usually attend worship services once a week give three and a half times more than those who only go once or twice a year. But even the latter give more than secularists. Religious people give more to secular charities than secularists.
“America’s Great Charity Divide,” referred to by the book’s subtitle, is not so much between liberals and conservatives as it is between secularists and people of faith. Of course there are other variables. For example, those who come from strong, intact families are more charitable than those who don’t. But even that can usually be traced to religious faith.
The book also counters the common criticism that “most” Americans don’t care enough to be charitable. The data says otherwise. Threefourths of American households donate money to charities. They give an average of 3.5 percent of each household’s income per year. A majority of American families also volunteer time to charities.
Americans give many times more to charity than the citizens of every country in Europe—whether measured as a percentage of gross domestic product or in absolute dollars. This can largely be traced to the decline of religious influence in Europe.
Brooks also points out disturbing ways both the federal and state governments in the U.S. suppress and discourage charity. This should be required reading for anyone who really cares, and can influence public policy. As a real-life example Brooks tells how difficult and expensive it was for him and his wife to adopt a little girl from a Chinese orphanage. Redundant red tape in the U. S. caused the child to languish in the orphanage an additional six months.
Arguably the most important finding reported in the book confirms something already known from previous research done by many others: Giving and volunteering improve one’s own physical health and happiness. We need to give for our own good.
Brooks effectively calls upon his fellow liberals to put more of their own time and money where their mouths are. On the other hand, he could just as well have urged conservatives to do more about certain needs that will never be met by charity. To cite just one example (not from the book): from 40 to 50 million Americans have no medical insurance, and millions more have grossly inadequate coverage. The book gives surprising answers
to many other questions, too many to list here. But at the end of the day, indeed at the end of all days, the most important question for each of us is not what others are doing for charity. A more important question is this: “Am I doing enough to avoid the risk of having to hear myself asking, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’” (Mt. 25:44).
