Water is wet, the sky is blue and...

...religious people give more to charity.

Here's the story:

Just as America is often divided between red and blue and rich and poor, a new study shows a similar gap between Americans who give more generously to charity and those who don’t. But the study says almost as much about Americans’ religious participation as it does our willingness to give.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy released a fascinating survey this week on how (and how much) America donates to charitable organizations. One of the most interesting findings shows that those who tend to give the most live in more religious areas. A substantial portion of giving in the U.S., you see, comes in the form of tithing to churches. When religion is taken out of the equation, the charitable landscape alters considerably.

And:

Take away churches as charities, however, and red states no longer dominate the world of donations. Instead, New England – a region that leans Democratic, with far fewer religiously affiliated Americans but with more affluent residents – catapults toward the top.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy found that the South gives roughly 5.2% of its discretionary income to charity– including both religious and non-religious groups – while New England only gives 4%. But if churches are excluded, the South’s percentage drops to 0.9% and New England’s only drops to 1.4%. New York state would be second in the country in giving if religion was removed from the equation, while Pennsylvania would jump from No. 40 into the top 5.

The last two paragraphs seem to be misleading. How are we to know that if religion was "removed from the equation" the charitable states wouldn't give to non-religious charities? Clearly we know no such thing.

Another point is that what religion has going for it is that it creates and sustains a community, which, presumably, is conducive to charitable giving. What the statistics seem to indicate is that when we "remove religion from the equation," some of the charitable impulses are redirected toward non-religious charities, but the overall effect is a reduction of charitable giving.

So, isn't that really the lesson - the less religion there is, the less there is a community, and the less charity we see?

Speaking the Unspeakable.

John Derbyshire questions the morality of governmental aid to Africa for AIDS relief.

Derbyshire raises the uncomfortable idea that we ought to occasionally check back on our charity recipients to determine what good we have wrought, such as in Ethiopia, which, according to Guardian columnist Kevin Myers, is not much, except to subsidize the creation of priapic, kalashnikov-weilding fornicators:

No. It will not do. Even as we see African states refusing to take action to restore something resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us, yet again.


It is nearly 25 years since Ethiopia's (and Bob Geldof's) famous Feed The World campaign, and in that time Ethiopia's population has grown from 33.5 million to 78 million today.

So why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country? Where is the logic? There is none. To be sure, there are two things saying that logic doesn't count.

One is my conscience, and the other is the picture, yet again, of another wide-eyed child, yet again, gazing, yet again, at the camera, which yet again, captures the tragedy of . . .

Sorry. My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there. The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.

What Africa needs is a conversion to a particularly severe form of Puritanism.