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generous?

Red Robin

Well-known member
“It doesn’t really matter what you believe.”
Posted on December 14, 2006 by Jeff Baldwin http://www.thegreatbooks.com
In category: Worldviews Recommended Reads
Or does it? The rallying cry of my generation and the next, “What’s true for me might not be true for you,” has once again been exposed by a bracing dose of reality. As it turns out, what you believe to be true affects the way you behave (as we say at Worldview Academy, ideas have consequences), and your behavior makes reality a better or worse place. You may have the best intentions in the world, but if you act on false assumptions your intentions will matter little. This fundamental truth is revealed in a new way by Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University, in his recently published book entitled Who Really Cares?


As it turns out, the folks who really care are the same people who believe that God requires them to care for the poor and the sick: religious conservatives. Although liberals make a lot of noise about their concern for the poor and the media describe conservatives as aligned with big business, Professor Brooks found that conservative households donate, on average, 30% more money to charities than do liberals (even though liberal households, on average, are wealthier than conservative households). But this isn’t just about money! Conservative families are more generous volunteering their time, and they are more likely to donate blood.

Neither is this ultimately a matter of whether you are a Republican or a Democrat. Secular conservatives are not nearly as generous as religious conservatives, as Professor Brooks notes: “religious conservatives are 28 percentage points more likely to give than secular conservatives, give nearly four times more dollars per year, and volunteer more than twice as frequently.”

To translate: what you believe matters. Not just from a future standpoint (it matters where you will spend eternity), but also in the here and now. Ideas have consequences! And those people with a worldview that exalts humility and charity are more likely to demonstrate those qualities today.

It’s almost a shame to keep piling on the secularists, but they can’t say they didn’t ask for it. When they call for more government programs to assist the poor, they demonize Christians who say that it’s not the government’s role to care for the poor (Romans 13:1-4), wondering aloud how we can claim to follow a God Who is all-merciful while withholding “mercy” from poor families. But it turns out that religious conservatives are already extending mercy, instead of delegating it to the government: “A person who goes to church every week,” says Brooks “and strongly rejects the idea that it is the government’s responsibility to redistribute income will give, on average, 100 times more money to charity each year than a person who never attends a house of worship, and strongly believes that the government should reduce income differences beween people.” One hundred times!

This book should embarass every atheist, and especially any atheist who has ever chided a Christian for not caring about the little guy. No matter what the media have told them, the plain fact is that secularism and liberalism are mired in selfishness. If you want to encounter sacrificial giving, you had best turn to someone who believes that God was willing to sacrifice His only Son for him!

[One footnote: Brooks also compared American giving with other nations including France, Germany and Italy. When I asked a group of high school students I taught last Tuesday which nation they thought was the most generous, none of them voted for America. One of them said simply, “Well, I know it’s not us.” Talk about having a bad self-image! Thanks to the distortions of the mainstream media, many young people assume that America is a selfish nation–when in fact we are overwhelmingly generous. Once more, Professor Brooks: “In per capita private charity, Americans give three and a half times as much as the French, seven times as much as the Germans, and 14 times as much as the Italians.” Though liberals have their own reasons for belittling American values, its those very values that prevent us from falling into the quagmire of selfishness.]
 
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