found online by Raymond
From John Pavlovitz:
Jesus was a progressive.
He came with bold, clear vision, not with vague religious nostalgia.
He started a revolutionary underground movement not a top-down theocracy of privilege.
And he didn’t harken back to some mythical glorious time in the past, he said that the Kingdom had now come; a new counterintuitive way of living and of being in the world marked by goodness.
While some of Mr. Pavlovitz’s more minor points are good and valid, he is generally wrong about conservatism and caring for “least” among us. There was a study done by The Chronicle of Philanthropy a few years back using IRS data to determine giving patterns across the country after the previous presidential election. It showed that by and large the more conservative states that voted for Romney had a much higher percent of income giving rate to charities than did the more liberal states that voted for President Obama. Indeed the top 17 highest giving states were all conservative.
Anecdotally, it has been my observation that when it comes to donating time to helping others, far more conservatives have been at the front lines than have progressives. It is because of these things that I reject the main premise of Mr. Pavlovitz’s article.
For all the self-congratulating by conservatives, we mustn’t ignore the facts. Conservatives and their Republican Party support cutting food stamps and medicaid, while seeking to eliminate or privatize Medicare and Social Security.
Also the Chronicle of Philanthropy study is seriously flawed.
From:
“How America Gives”: The Data Don’t Add Up
Center on Wealth and Philanthropy Boston College
We regret that “How America Gives” contains substantive flaws in the data and methodology. This renders the findings inaccurate and ultimately a disservice to the body of knowledge about charitable giving. The study inaugurates new myths and perpetuates others; it showcases invidious comparisons picked up by national and local media; and, in general, sets back accurate knowledge about the patterns of philanthropy by state, by political orientation, and by financial wherewithal. From the outset, the ratio used in the study is itself inadequate for comparing geographic differences in charitable giving. It is based only on the minority of the population that itemizes tax returns, does not account for geographic differences in tax burden, and fails to account for differences in cost of living between and within regions…
In deriving its measure of charitable giving The Chronicle uses the tabulations provided by the Statistics of Income (SOI) division of the IRS, which provides information for all itemized returns for the nation as a whole, for states, for counties, and for zip code areas. The problem is The Chronicle’s reliance on zip code data for its estimates of charitable giving for states and metropolitan areas, and even for zip code area. Before the study was undertaken, we cautioned The Chronicle that the zip code data were probably invalid for drawing conclusions about states and metropolitan areas and that it should investigate this problem before going forward. Now having examined the SOI data carefully we can confirm that the itemized charitable deductions contained in the zip code data are substantially lower than the value provided by the SOI in its national and state tabulations. Moreover, the bulk of the discrepancy is concentrated in the higher income category…
Our rankings turn out to be the color purple, with neither red nor blue states more charitably inclined.
http://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/research_sites/cwp/pdf/Commentary%20re%20How%20America%20Gives.pdf