Religious Faith and Charitable Giving

TLDR: The role of liberal secularists in shaping the policies of the American left has been examined by a number of policy scholars over the past decade as mentioned in this paper, who have examined parallel bedrock constituency in America's political parties.

Abstract: There is a time when a Christian must sell all and give to the poor, as they did in the Apostles times. There is a time allsoe when Christians (though they give not all yet) must give beyond their abillity, as they of Macedonia, Cor. 2, 6. Likewise community of perills calls for extraordinary liberality, and soe doth community in some speciall service for the Churche. Lastly, when there is no other means whereby our Christian brother may be relieved in his distress, we must help him beyond our ability rather than tempt God in putting him upon help by miraculous or extraordinary meanes. --John Winthrop, "A Modell of Christian Charity" (1630) OVER THE PAST decade, a number of policy scholars have examined parallel bedrock constituencies in America's political parties. On one side, the Republicans rely on the near-monolithic support of Christian conservatives, a fact that has been documented ad nauseam by political commentators and the mainstream press for more than 20 years. Less well understood, but equally important, is the role of liberal secularists in shaping the policies of the American left. These people are the religious and political inverse of Christian conservatives: They vote for liberal political candidates and hold left-wing views on issues like school prayer and the death penalty. But most saliently, religion does not play a significant role in their lives. As political scientists Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio recently demonstrated in the Public Interest ("Our Secularist Democratic Party," Fall 2002), liberal secularists are at least as influential in molding the platform of the Democratic Party as are Christian conservatives for the Republicans. Secularism is historically anomalous in the American cultural mainstream. The links between civic and religious life were persistent across the American political spectrum for hundreds of years. Indeed, John Winthrop's seventeenth-century statement quoted above would probably not have sounded particularly zealous throughout most of the twentieth century. As many public opinion scholars have documented, however, a dramatic philosophical shift occurred in the 1960s, leaving us to this day with a pervasive secular rhetoric on the political left. Consider how retrograde the words of John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address would sound today: "With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own." An unanswered question is one of causality: Do secularists tend toward the political left, or do political liberals tend to be secular? On the one hand, secularism might be the only hard-headed option for those who see, as Karl Marx did, that "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions." On the other hand, secularists might find sanctuary in liberalism's tolerance for their somewhat unpopular views. Alexis de Tocqueville noted that being a secularist in America was no easy life (at least in 1835): "In the United States, if a politician attacks a sect, this may not prevent the partisans of that very sect from supporting him; but if he attacks all the sects together, everyone abandons him, and he remains alone." Nor is secularism a popular stance among the public at large today: According to a March 2002 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, more than half of Americans have an unfavorable view of nonbelievers. Reasonable people will disagree as to whether this animus owes to simple religious intolerance, or rather to behavioral differences between the groups. Perceived differences leading to hostility might include disproportionately high rates of behaviors discouraged by religious norms (for example, adultery) or low rates of virtuous actions encouraged by them (for example, charity). …