'Tis the Season...

Today's program is held under the auspices of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society here at the Heritage Foundation. Hosting our program on their behalf is Pat Fagan; Mr. Fagan is the William H G FitzGerald Fellow in Family and Cultural issues here at Heritage. He is a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services in the George H W Bush Administration. He examines the relationship between family community and social problems. He also studies urban policy, the breakdown of the family in America, crime and cultural issues. He has served as a legislative analyst for senator Dan Coats of Indiana and before becoming involved in public policy Mr. Fagan was a family therapist and clinical psychologist in the inner city and else where. Ladies and Gentlemen my colleague Pat Fagan Pat. Thank you John. Well today is going to be a real treat. Dr. Arthur Brooks who is the author of our book - "Who Really Cares" the surprising truth about compassionate conservatism which is the subject of today's lecture. We already know we are in for a treat because Harvard's own Harvey Mansfield said this is a remarkable work of practical philosophy in the plane guys of economics. This is subversive economics actually. All right, James Q. Wilson praised quite straight forward, the best study of charity I have read. Dr. Brooks is professor of public administration and Director of the non profit studies program at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. His areas of study include culture, politics and economic life. Actually he is a modern renaissance man. He is a family man, a musician, a writer, a researcher and then a teacher. He is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal's editorial page where he is becoming increasingly subversive in his use of economics and provocative. He has written over 50 scholarly articles or book chapters in the last 10 years, six books in the last five, three of them on charitable giving and volunteering and three on the arts. He is on the editorial board of six different academic journals and is co-editor of the journal of arts, management, law and society a journal that brings different parts of his life together on one place. For the arts are another of his passions, the music in which he is unusually accomplished among his colleagues in the academe. For prior to taking on his doctoral studies he was for 12 years a professional musician, playing the French Horn and a number of ensembles including the Barcelona symphony. He received his PhD in public policy from Rand Graduate School. He is a native of Seattle, Washington and Professor Brooks lives in Syracuse with his wife Ester and three children who are aged three, six and eight. Let's welcome professor Brooks. Thank you Pat for that gracious introduction. Thank you for all of you for coming on your lunch breaks. It's wonderful to see you - it's great to be back at heritage. I am about to talk with you about a book that I had come out about three weeks ago and this is especially meaningful for me to be here today because I started this book project right here at heritage and in in December sorry in February of 2005. I kicked off some of the initial ideas and I gave a speech of what I found were some very provocative and fearful trends that I was seeing and I said I think I am going to write a book about this. I think this deserves a book treatment because I think I found some things about charity in America that are not according to the way we thought the trends were in the past. The result was the book that you see here today which is why it satisfies me so much to be able to come here today and talk to you about what I what I actually found. One element in particular of what I thought I found or what I am sure I did find. I am going to talk with you about faith and charity today and I am going to talk about faith, not just as some social science concept, some instrumental idea but rather as an area of core American values and values of a lot of people around the globe as well. And I am going to talk about charity in the same way, as an area of values not just as one of the economic incentives. And I want to tell you why. For the first six years or so my academic career as an economist, I looked at charitable giving, it was what I was interested in and I treated it very instrumentally, like economists usually do, I looked at tax breaks, deductions and exemptions and what would happen to charitable giving if we got rid of the state tax and or we had a flat tax, which are interesting sort of interesting to economists at least, but there was an elephant in the room with my research which was every time I talked to actual donors, for example, every time I talked to a donor who would give a big gift to my university - he would never say you know that million dollar gift that I gave to university, you know what I love about it, it's that sweet tax deduction. Nobody ever said that and the reason no body ever said that is because that's not what moved the donors. The reason people give has to do with their values. It took me a long time to actually be able to say that charitable giving is about values. Not about economics and it was time to write a book about that. It was time to take the data on charitable giving and look at it through the lens of values and that's what I want to talk about here today. I want to tell you what I think it means particularly in the area of religious life why that is so important to our core American value of charity. I want to start off the discussion with a comparison of of two communities. When I was doing research initially the first thing that I did was I went out and talked to a lot of people about what they felt was motivating American charity and I looked at a lot of data I have lots of data, I am an economist, so I have you know compulsively collected on my on my computer and one of the greatest sources of data on service to Americans and by Americans these days its called the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. It's a survey of 30,000 Americans across 41 communities in the year 2000. Its an amazing data source for all questions about service and civic life including charity and two of the communities, those that sit right next to each other in the alphabet in these data are South Dakota and San Francisco and as I was looking through alphabetically at the different communities and how much they give, I said wow two communities that sit next to each other in the alphabet actually have the two closest levels of average charitable giving per family. That's not a co-incidence, how about that? So what you see right here in South Dakota where they give approximately $1300 per year to charity per family and they do the same in San Francisco. Well, isn't that curious? Why is it that two communities that are so different give so much alike. Well on reflection you say to yourself well, they don't, the fact is they don't give in a very similar way the reason is because their income levels are dramatically different between the two. It turns out when you look at San Francisco and South Dakota and you compare the sacrifice that these two communities make any similarity dissolves. Here is what happens South Dakota in terms of the sacrifice in income in real income gives 75 percent more per family per year to charity than average families in San Francisco. And even if you look at disposable income which gets rid of taxes and rents and cost of living as everybody knows it's expensive to live in places like San Francisco or Washington or New York even if we get rid of that its still 50 percent more these communities couldn't be more different. Now pondering that the first thing I did was a data analysis and I said well I got to talk to some people. So picked up the phone and for those of you that are interested in research I highly recommend that you talk to humans when you are doing a research because you can find out some very interesting things from the humans. Among them what I found out when I made a couple of phone calls the first place I called was the South Dakota Community Foundation and I talked to the Executive Vice President for programs and I said I got this data, and you are spectacular out there, what's going on I mean there is a big percentage of house hold income, why you give so much? I didn't - that's all I said and she said we are all taught to tie it here okay, now there is the biblical injunction to give 10 percent of your income. We are all taught to tie it here because we are a very religious community and I said, yeah but you know, not every body goes to church out there, only about 50 percent, which is pretty high. About 50 percent of the people from South Dakota go every week to the church. So there is a sort of 50 percent that doesn't what about them they said well, their parents went and they were taught as children to tie it. I said, "Thank you very much" and I hung up. Then I called a big foundation which necessarily remains nameless in San Francisco and I asked the same question. Now I had this natural simpatico with the person from San Francisco as I am a west coast guy myself and it turns out that the person I was talking to was from my neighborhood and we were laughing and I said you guys are disaster out there, what's going on? You don't give very much or why is that she laughed and she said this is just such a godless place. That was the same answer, extraordinary. In other words everything that might you might speculate on or might show up in your data, these people who are the experts in their communities and philanthropy told me in fact was the case. So what does religion really look like in these two communities and how does it matter? This chart gives you a little bit of data and I promise not to commit too many sort of data, bar chart things, I will tell more of a story. But this one actually tells the story in itself. San Francisco is on the left where 49 percent are completely secular which is to say they never attend the house of worship or say explicitly they have no religion. 14 percent attend almost every week. South Dakota, 10 percent say they are secular and 50 percent are religious. I mean these are as mirror opposite which you can possibly get which makes sort of the placement in that alphabet even more interesting. They look a lot of like they are not and they are the opposite of each other when it comes to religion. So here are the questions I want to ask about this. How does religion affect private charity? It appears to; everybody thinks it does, but how much does it and what we can learn from that? Why does religion affect charity so much? Why does it matter and why should we care and what can we do about it in the context of public policy running charities, private values and the ideas that we try to teach? What does it all mean to us? That's what I am going to try to give you an outline of it's a lot of what I talked about in this book. Well, once again at this point, I said, I have got some questions, so I went back to the humans and I said, how do you face a lot of people, the respect and the like? And I said, how do you think charity affects private giving? So I wanted to hear sort of the contours of public opinion on this, at least that at least in an anecdotal level. And most people who are outside of universities, outside the academy, said, people who are religious give more. So how come? This is because they are taught to give more. Their they learn in their families. They learn in their churches. They learn in their culture that is important to give and so it is obvious that they would give more. They would give more of everything. Well, in the academy there is a different opinion. I asked my colleagues and the overwhelming view when I asked my colleagues the same question was they give less. It doesn't matter what they say, they really give less. And the reason is because religion breeds intolerance, it breeds a hostility to people that are outside of groups and that is antithetical to this true spirit of charity. No matter what people say, if you really look at the evidence you are going to find the religious people in America, particularly extremely religious people, evangelicals, even fundamentalists give less. Okay. Well, now, obviously you can't square these two ideas. And obviously the data are going to tell the story on this. So this is good. I am after the races with a little bit of research on this. But its - there is a little bit more to it than that, because some folks will say, well, you might find the religious people give more but that's just religious people giving to their churches and so you don't have any reasonable comparison if you just look at the non-religious types of giving and informal giving you will find that people all give the same. Those are the questions I really want an answer. Do religious people give more or less and what they give to you and why does it matter? All right, so first of all, what is it mean to be religious? For decades social scientists have measured religion badly, and the reason they did that is because social scientists don't understand religion typically, now a lot do - I am not it is not to say that there are no social scientists who understand it - poor it's not uniformly understand it, poorly. But a lot of social scientists don't - are not personally in a religious culture. And so the result is to say, uh, yeah, religion, okay. Let's just go ask people if they have a religion. That's how we will do it. And we will say, okay, do you have a religion, which one? You are Catholic? Okay, I am more than a Catholic, Protestant, okay, got it, okay, Protestant, one of those churches, okay, something else, let me mark that down. And the result was that they would do analysis and they would find that in terms of public opinion and social behavior and attitudes, the religious people and non-religious people and certain religions in particular don't behave very differently. Let me give you an example of this. If you just go out and ask somebody if they are a Catholic or not in America today and you ask them their views on abortion, you will find that Catholic's and Non-Catholics have roughly the same views. Now this is typically in the press treated as evidence that Catholics are not more pro-life than the rest of Americans and that's a really big finding, of course. It turns out, it matters how often they practiced, that's where the real action is, and the reason is, because among Catholics in America and other countries, a Catholic who is not been to mass since his first communion still calls himself Catholic irrespective of age. That's the truth. So what does it mean? This means that if you don't correct for whether people are practicing or not, you are going to get the wrong view. It turns out among Catholics who practiced we have the most pro-life group in America and that's entirely different story and those kinds of patterns are are robust across all kinds of behaviors. We have to measure these things right, its all about how you behave, not who you affiliate with. And so let's look at that. I am going to look at Americans and I am not going to ask them, I don't really care what religion I belong to. I'm going to say, do you attend the house of worship or do you never attend the house of worship? Then everybody else is in the middle and everything I'm going to tell you today they are no - there is no slight of hand, it turns out that people who are between every week and never behaved in the middle in terms of charity, so no surprises there. About a third of Americans attend their house of worship every week or more and about 25 percent either never attend or say they have no religion. How do these two different groups behave when it comes to charity? There is no comparison. Now we are starting to get to an answer to the question. You will find that religious people more than 9 in 10 give money every year versus 66 percent of people who are secular. 67 percent of religious people give their time, they volunteer each year versus 44 percent and religious people give about four times as much money away. Now it's interesting to know that the 33 percent who are religious and the 25 percent who are secular have exactly the average annual income, one or the other. There is no difference between them, it's about $49,000 per household in the year 2000, no meaningful difference, this is not the explanation. Now here is another interesting fact. It doesn't matter which religion you practice at all. It turns out that 92 percent of practicing Protestants give, 91 percent of practicing Catholics and Jews, 89 percent of people from other religions. These are statistically indistinguishable differences between them. It has to do it practice, not the religion itself. Now, looking at this my first question is, is this all about religious people giving to the churches or is this a real charitable difference? Now from my from my point of view giving to your church is charity. Okay. Now, I am going to tell you that its my bias and the reason is, because I look a lot at churches, I look at them in not just from a religious standpoint, but as a civic standpoint and a voluntary sacrifice of resources even for a community group is a pretty powerful thing to do and it is truly voluntary. Now a lot of folks who are secular treat religious giving as more or less like glorified country club dues. But most people who are religious say, no, no, no, it's something entirely different, because I don't have to pay, but I am. Now maybe it's because of guilt, maybe because of altruism, it doesn't really matter, its - charity is a behavior, not a motive. But it is different somehow. But fine, let's just still take the arguments seriously and get rid of all of the religious stuff. I am going to get rid of all religious giving and then compare and it turns that we still have a huge difference between religious and secular people. In the data I am going to look at here, I am going to look at explicitly non-religious causes. The only way people didn't get it wrong is, they don't know what they are giving to, okay. And you will find that religious people are 10 percentage points more likely than secular people to give to explicitly secular stuff like the united way. There are 21 percentage points more likely to do volunteer for it for explicitly secular charities like the PTA. Lot of them, 21 points. Bottom-line is that we are not for secular, for religious people in your community, your PTA would shut down for that moment that amounts to they give more money away. But now let's look at some really informal stuff. Let's go outside to giving and volunteering, because compassion and charity go beyond money, gifts and volunteering - don't they? We have all kinds of informal acts in our lives that we can engage and then express our charity. And when I started this research, I thought, I am worried that people who give formally and people who give informally in terms of helping friends and family and giving to a homeless person on the street or giving up their time to somebody they know, maybe those are two different groups in which case simply people give it different ways and I don't have a comparison. It turns out people who give money and people who volunteer formally are the same people who do the informal things, either you do it all or you do nothing. And about 25 percent of Americans do nothing, that we are able to measure as it turns out. Okay. So let's see how religious people do those informal things. On the left there are money and time and on the far left the blue bars are religious people, the percentage of religious people that give money. On the far - on the right or the yellow bars are secular people, and the middle is everybody in the population and it is going to be between the two. What you find is no matter what you look at religious people give more than secular people. I have never found a measurable way in all of my research in where secular people give more than religious people. And it doesn't matter how you measure religion, I am going to tell you about that in a second. Money and time, I had already talked about that. Blood - religious people are twice as likely to donate blood than secular people. Now that's a really secular gift isn't it, right? I don't know anybody who gives blood to their church. And not to mention the fact that every body has got the same endowment of it right? I mean more or less, I mean there are smaller and larger people. But you get the idea. People who are religious are more likely to give a sandwich to a poor little homeless person. They are more likely to give out their place in line. Can I can I cut in. Depends the ask a religious person - if you want to cut in. They are more likely to give back mistaken change given to them by a cashier. That's amazing, isn't it? So in another year at Wal-Mart you are buying something, you get back a couple extra quarters - if you are religious you are a lot more likely to give it back. And if you are religious person, who is giving to your church or other charity, you are overwhelmingly likely to give it back. Now, I showed this to a colleague who said, "You know may be cashier's at Wal-Mart make more mistakes with religious people." Only a social scientist could come up with that explanation, right? There's got to be a reason, right? No it it can't be religion, right? Now the it is. It's religion. All of these things stand up to other explanations. So what I am showing you these big group differences - well one of the things that I did, and I talk about a lot in the book is it doesn't matter what you control for. So for example, let's take take the case of giving blood. And you've got two people, one is religious and the other is secular. But they are exactly the same demographically, they have the same income, and they have the same politics, they have this they are from the same region of the country, the same race, the same age, the same educational background, everything of relevance. You will still find that the religious person identical to the other is far more likely to give the blood than the secular person. These are in - this is, resisted to other explanations. As a matter of fact it swamps every other possible explanation, it eats up everything. Religion is really the key what we are talking about here. Okay. In the in the in 2001, the Indiana Center on Philanthropy which is a wonderful source of - you know, data gathering - there were great team for this, so undertaking a survey or America Gives. And it started in August, this big survey in August of 2001, asking people whether charitable giving patterns and you know blood and time and money and all that stuff. And then September 11th happened when they had collected half their data, and the team said, "Oh!" You know this is going to change, everything because national emergencies always change, sure we are getting patterns. We got to start the survey again. We got to wait a year until this thing calms down. And some bright researcher there said, "Are you kidding?" It's a natural experiment, its perfect, you get this environment in which something big happens, and now we can compare the people who gave before and after with and with, what happened because of the event and all this social science stuff that gets us all exercised. It's kind of like a drug test you know get your control, and your treatments and all these kind of good stuff. And what you find, when you look at those data is that the big explanatory factor and people who gave and or did not, to 9/11 related causes was faith. That's where the action was - you find that, a lot of Americans gave to 9/11 related cause, that was a big deal. It was an extraordinary response to a national emergency. It was the silver lining around the cloud and it stimulated a lot of non-givers to give for the first time. The data say that a lot of those people wont' stop, which is huge for them and good for us. This is one of the only good things that happen when we have a crisis. As the people started giving for the first time to the immeasurable benefit of their communities and to the causes they support. But even here, you find that religious people gave a lot more than secular people to these completely non-religious 9/11 related causes. 67 percent to 56 percent and once again, it had nothing to do with income or race or region of the country, this is a question largely, of faith. Okay, now I've been measuring religion in kind of this Ham handed way, where people go to church and they don't go to church and so - I just wanted to make sure. Am I doing something wrong here? So I found these this evidence that asks people very interesting questions about their religious views. It asks them for example, "Do you spent a lot of time worrying about your your spiritual life? Do you spend a lot of effort on your spiritual life?" People say, "Yeah or No". Then it turns out that yes or no is an even bigger explanatory factor and charitable giving than this going or not. Now this is important, because there are lot of people don't attend their house or worship regularly - who spend a lot of time in their spiritual lives, who belong to a non-traditional religions for example. Those people are the people just like the traditionally religious people who spent time with their spiritual lives, who are the big givers. There is a 42 percentage point difference in likelihood of giving the charity each year, secular and religious charity between people who say they spend time on their on their spiritual lives versus those that say the don't spent time on their spiritual lives. This is also true for people who belong to house of worship the bottom-line. It doesn't matter how you measure religion, it doest matter how you measure measure charity, you get the same results, this is where the action is when it comes to charity in America today. Why? What's going on here? Now, it's interesting enough that there is this big difference and we can all speculate on what it is. But the explanation for why religious people are so different - it really gets people exercise as it turns out and there are two major kinds of explanations out there. Some people will say its nature, and some people will say its nurture. And, it's interesting because I speak to a lot of academic groups, and I speak to a lot of religious groups. Well, a lot of religious people would say, "Well, you know the difference between charity between religious and non-religious people. It's a higher authority." In other words, God makes you religious and god makes you charitable. "You need a PhD to figure that out?" This is is what people ask me. I guess suppose that's a rhetorical question. But that's a very strong statement because people who are secular or even semi-secular will say to themselves, yeah, but I bet there is this learning element to that, I bet people who learn to give, now, I've been looking at evidence of charity from - for years now and it is true that once people get a taste, they keep giving. Once people learn from somebody else they admire, they keep giving which is support for the notion that people learn to give. And I want to see what the evidence tells us us about that. So, let me give you a a provocative idea on, in in each regard. Nature versus nurture. The first is a body of evidence that looks like identical twins. Some of you have heard of a bunch of social science studies from identical twins that were born between 1935 and 1965, who were adopted to separate families at birth. Now that's extraordinary I mean think about it. And this could not happen except before (indiscernible) way - right? Unwanted pregnancies of identical twins I mean, they are like - that's happened probably eight times since the since the early 70's. So what happened hundreds of time between the mid 30's and the mid 60's and they separated the twins at birth now the interesting thing about that is they are carbon copies of each other genetically, but they have different environments and that gives you a perfect opportunity to see how their behavior and their attitudes and their interests differ and are similar, and you can see which part is because of their upbringing and which part is because in the genes. And the the studies from from psychologists - from the psychological researchers of the University of Minnesota and else where, are finding that a shocking amount of behavior and attitudes are due to genetics. One of the things that they tell us for example, is that between 50 percent and 80 percent of your baseline, life happiness is due to genetics, think about that. Up to 80 percent of your outlook on life and how cheerful you are is because of your parents. Maybe you knew that. If you are unhappy, it's your parents fault and I have got the data to show that's true. That means, incidentally there is 20 percent in place, so use it wisely - of your happiness, of course do the right things. It also shows that between 20 percent and 50 percent 25 percent and 50 percent of religiosity, the tendency to be religious and to go to church is based on on genetic patterns as well. Very provocative and interesting research given these findings which are cut across criminality and alcoholism and and extra-version and everything else. Why would it not be the case, there are certain amount of charitably would also not be inherited. I mean that, and I and and I asked that as a research question that I have not been able to answer yet because it turns up they didn't ask the identical twins how much they gave, silly you know. But I may be I'll get in touch with the identical twins myself for the next book. But there is also evidence that not just that it that charitabilty is genetically acquired but also there is evidence that is learned. And, let me give you an example of the interesting evidence on this. I want to take a group of adults that's completely secular which is to say they never attend or have no religion at all, this data is from 1999. And I am going to split them in half. Half of them went to church when they were kids and half of them didn't go to church when they were kids. How does that explain their giving? They answer is a lot. The percentage of secularist adults who donated charity was 47 percent if they went to church every week as kids. It was 26 percent of that didn't go to didn't go as kids. And these are all secular adults. They all have fallen away from their faith if they once had faith. They are all behaving in the same way. But they didn't behave in the same way when it came to their faith as children. The secular charity, 40 percent versus 29 percent every week versus never. What you find is the more you go to church as a kid, the more you give as an adult. Not withstanding your actual religious behaviors as an adult which is evidence that people learn that they get wired for charity, because of religion when they are kids. Interesting finding when you think about it. It is also very encouraging if you're a parent. People - parents I talked to a lot, they worry about the religion of their kids, you know, my kids going to practice or they're going to fall away. It turns out for a lot of the pro social behaviors that you want them to have, because of the religion. Well, they are going to have in any way. In other words, you plant the seed and the kids will they will blossom in their behaviors largely, this is what the data tell us. Okay, so there is evidence that this is learned, maybe it's genetic, maybe it's learned, maybe it's both. So who cares? Why this is really matter? Now, if this were just a question of finding a difference between secular and religious folks out there which translates into some things I want to tell you about here in the second that would be a little bit of culture versus entertainment, right? I mean then you would say, yeah, religious people they are more virtuous than secular people, we always knew that blah, blah, blah. I would've written a book, that's boring as far as I am concerned, because we knew that to a large extend - we know a lot of these things about social behaviors and religion out there. What I wanted to know was, why do we care when it comes to running a charity? Why do we care when we were trying to formulate public policy? That's where the action is, as far as I am concerned. And let me tell you why I think it matters. Charity follows political lines in this country and they are because largely of the religious gap I just told you about. Conservative families in America give about 30 percent more money to charity each of the liberal families while earning about six percent less income and it is true that they give more across every income bracket even with lower education and education is a big determinant of charitable giving. Now, in others words, conservatives tend to give more. You know, on most measures of charitable giving and if you - you can look at it geographically too which is an interesting thing to do, the map that you have got up in front of you - the map on top is the electoral map from 2004 and to make this less controversial I have made it grey and white instead of, say, that's clever me isn't it? At the bottom map is a map of the above average and below average charity States, that's as a percentage of income, right now. That's uncorrected for cost of living which is an important thing to do depending on what you want to look at. This is just raw stuff for simple look at it and in other places I talk about when you want to look at different maps and all like and stuff, I am not going to bother with that. Just look at the simple map here, same map, what you find is that above average giving States largely are the red States in America - sorry, the grey States in America today. As a matter of fact of the 24 States that went - of the 25 States that are above average charitable giving, 24 went for Bush in 2004. There was one that went for Kerry, that's above average charitable giving that's Maryland. So those of you who live in Maryland, good for you. Okay now, is that because of politics? The answer is no. I have found no evidence the conservatives are inherently more generous than liberals. What you find is that conservatives are a lot more religious than liberals and that's explaining the difference between the groups here. Here is - sorry about this, don't look at this. Let me tell you what it says, religious conservatives and religious liberals give at largely the same rates and the same amounts. There are more than three times as many religious conservatives as religious liberals in America today. Further more, religion religious conservatives are proliferating, they are having more babies and I want to tell you that they are actually getting converts and religious liberals are shrinking. I mean not the religious liberals themselves, the group of the - the group of religious liberals is getting smaller is what we find now. That is to say there is no virtue gap between religious liberals or religious conservatives. We have a numbers gap between them and that's what's inflating what appears to be a charity gap between conservatives and liberals today. It is largely a question of religion. The smallest groups or the lowest giving groups are secular liberals and secular conservatives. At the very bottom are secular conservatives is a matter of fact there just aren't that many of them. Secular liberals they aren't that many of them - sorry, that's the largest group of of liberals out there and there is evidence that liberals are secularizing, conservatives are becoming more religious and that is driving differences in charity today. Okay. So, largely what looks like a huge political conclusion is nothing of the sort. It has to do with underlying values. Now, here is why it's going to get worse well depending on your point of view, better or worse. The population of religious liberals in America today is shrinking for two reasons, one has to do with demographics and the other has to do with attrition. The average religious liberal is three and a half times more likely to change parties over any two year period than the average secular conservative. Now religious liberals and the secular conservatives are the odd men out in their parties, right because they are actually the groups that are least in sync with the party politics that we see here today. You find the secular conservatives do not change parties, religious liberals do change parties and at relatively substantial rates. Why? Well, these days fewer than 30 percent of the Americans believe that the American Democratic Party is friendly to our religion and there is evidence that it is not substantially that the American Democratic Party is not substantially represented by religious people. In 1996, the democratic national convention had 60 percent of its delegates who are completely secular compared with about the 25 percent of the American population. That's extraordinarily high number when you think about it and what it means is not that there is hostility, it simply means that there is less representation and some people feel some of you may feel that that's represented policy. It is also the case that the religious conservative population is raising because they have a lot more children. One of the things that you find is if you just look at conservative versus liberal, conservatives in America have on average 41 percent more children than liberals in America today and over a generation that not only flips elections but that changes the contours of what religion means in America and for the purposes of this study it changes the contours of what charity means in this in this country. Charity is becoming a political issue because of faith. All right now what does it need for policy? We can expect to see foundation regulations disproportionately on one side of the isle this is a big deal because congress obviously just flipped, we can expect to see more regulation on philanthropic organizations, we can expect to see less support for tax credit report filers. So what is that all about, that's kind of long key language for people what people in my job do economists, which is to say you can't take a tax deduction if you are not itemizing deductions on your tax form, you can't do it and the reason is because you are not filling out the paperwork to take it off but to make it part of your your income, charitable giving or anything else for that matter and that's disproportionately people on the bottom income percentiles. Only 30 percent of Americans get a tax deduction. So there has been a lot of conversation out there about figuring out a way that people could take a tax deduction for charitable giving even though they don't go through this tax rigor and that disproportionately the support for that kind of policy initiative has come from the right. Why? Because these are the bigger givers not because of politics but because of faith. We will we can expect to see less support for something that equalizes treatment of charitable giving in the new regime unless something has changed. And finally the idea of faith based initiatives and public private partnerships between government and charities will be seen with a more jaundiced eye, because there is less of a sense of the role of nonprofit particularly philanthropically involved nonprofits in society. You know, this is the these are predictions that might not be right. But they would follow according to the evidence that we have seen so far Now, what what does it mean if you are running a charity? What does it mean if you are running a heritage or my university? What does it mean? Well, let me show you what it means for one major nonprofit out there. This is a very large international humanitarian aid organization that has an extremely progressive staff - politically progressive staff and what they said was - you know, we are dealing with poverty overseas but we got to deal with the root causes of poverty, not just poverty. So I am tired of passing out rice, I want to deal with gender equity, because that's what they believe, that's what's behind a lot of poverty overseas. So let's explicitly change our message. Root causes, equality, we want to we are going to get in bid MSC International and talk about injustices where they occur. We are going to try to give more quality between men and women. All the stuff that a lot of progressive organizations are very involved in and so their direct marketing firm did a little experiment and it said; okay let's do two versions of a fund raising letter. The old kind, were just asked for money to feed people and the new kind re-deal with root causes from a progressive basis. Then I am going to get two list of people to sent these things to, a list that has no political affiliation that we are aware of and one that are disproportionately on the political left. What they found that the progressive message to the progressive list performed by far the worst, 12 0.12 percent of the people that were approached sent back any money on this list versus 0.83 percent of the people with the neutral message on the neutral list of donors of potential donors that you find out, now that's the big difference, that means many, many millions of dollars. Why is that happening? That is happening because they were not hitting the people that have become the biggest donors in America today. There was fishing in a pretty weak pool. Now, it doesn't mean that their message was wrong, it meant that it meant that they were hitting people with the message that was not appropriate according to to to try to separate people from the resources. The politically left message is not working very well. That means that if you are a human resource agency you got to take this seriously. That means that you are in trouble if you are trying to politicize messages from one particular point of view. Now from my vantage that's a pity and that's a pity because we should be able to talk about what we truly think is important and it should not be dictated by the fact that people who are most congenial to a particular political message are less likely to give, that to me is a big problem. This organization should be able to say what it wants what it truly thinks is important without paying a price, but they are not getting less that one quarter as much money as it otherwise would have, yet that is what we are facing and that is what the stakes are. The politicization of charity is a terrible shame in my view and that all boils down to the some of the fundamental values in America today and the root largely is faith. I am going to stop there because I think it would be nice to to have more of a discussion here. I thank you for your attention, I thank you for your interest in coming here today.