Our Outrage as Christians Is a Window Into Who We Are

[phkrause]

I grew up as a conservative Christian. I pastored for the majority of my adult life in conservative churches. I have always heard staunch advocacy for the lives of the unborn—yet such advocacy seems to stop with the unborn alone.

https://atoday.org/our-outrage-as-christians-is-a-window-into-who-we-are-and-where-our-priorities-stand/

[Gustave]

He must have been in a pretty messed up Faith Tradition and appears to have identified it with conservatism and therefore determined that Liberal politics is really what Jesus wanted. 

[bonnie1962]

5 hours ago, phkrause said:

I grew up as a conservative Christian. I pastored for the majority of my adult life in conservative churches. I have always heard staunch advocacy for the lives of the unborn—yet such advocacy seems to stop with the unborn alone.

https://atoday.org/our-outrage-as-christians-is-a-window-into-who-we-are-and-where-our-priorities-stand/

The author is really to be pitied. After reading the article maybe his disappointment in the churches he pastored is a reflection on him

[bonnie1962]

Republicans give more to charity – but not because they oppose income redistribution : Democratic Audit

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By Democratic Audit UK 17/11/2017Read More →

Republicans give more to charity – but not because they oppose income redistribution

 

Who gives more to charity – Republicans or Democrats? Michael Sances (University of Memphis) and Michele Margolis (University of Pennsylvania) found that conservative Americans donate more, even when socio-economic differences are taken into account. Could this be because they support a smaller role for the state, or as an effort to signal their philanthropic credentials? In fact, it is because Republicans attend church more frequently and donate through their congregations. If Republicans and Democrats are culturally divided, these divisions appear to have little if anything to do with disagreements about public policy.

Photo: Joshua Morley via a CC-BY 2.0 licence

 

It seems as if Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on anything, even when it comes to decisions that have nothing to do with politics: where to live, what television shows to watch, and even what to name children. How far do these differences really extend, and to what extent are they driven by policy disagreements? In a recent article in Political Behavior, we explore these questions by looking at partisan differences in an important, yet relatively unexamined apolitical activity – charitable giving.

Over three-quarters of US charities’ revenues come from donations by individuals, and we used these individual giving decisions to learn about differences in “apolitical” behaviour by partisans. In three surveys, we asked whether Republicans and conservatives give more or less to charity than Democrats and liberals. While political identity and giving are measured slightly differently across the surveys, the results are consistent: Republicans and conservatives report donating between $60 and $160 more per year to charity than Democrats and liberals. This result holds even when we account for socio-economic measures that are correlated both with political identity and charitable giving. The baseline difference in giving behaviour comports with what others have found: partisanship is a dividing line not only in terms of choosing candidates and policies, but also in how partisans spend their disposable income.

Having established the difference, we next wanted to know why a partisan gap in giving appears. We tested three potential explanations – religious identity, political beliefs, and economic status.

We found the strongest support for the religious explanation. Republicans are not only more likely to attend church than Democrats, but church attendance – among Democrats and Republicans alike – is strongly associated with charitable giving. Gaps in giving, therefore, are linked to differences in the social composition of the parties, in which the average Republican is more religious than the average Democrat. Moreover, the overall giving gap emerges because Republicans donate more to their own religious congregations, rather than nationally active religious charities. Republicans and Democrats give roughly equal amounts to religious organisations aside from their own congregations, and we also find some evidence that Democrats donate more to non-religious organisations than Republicans. In other words, the baseline difference in charitable giving emerges because Republicans are more religious than Democrats, and religious people donate generously to their religious congregations.

We find no support for the claim that political beliefs drive differences in giving. It is possible that Republicans donate more to charity due to their ideological beliefs – indeed, conservative politicians in the US often claim that the government should get out of the way and let the charitable sector provide services. Republicans on our surveys might signal their opposition to income redistribution and support for private service provision by donating to charitable causes, substituting donation behaviour for support for government redistribution. Borrowing from Ellis and Stimson’s distinction between symbolic conservatives – those who merely call themselves conservative, but do not oppose government redistribution – and operational conservatives – those who hold conservative beliefs about the role of government – we find no evidence that political beliefs explain why Republicans donate more than Democrats. Republicans who are strong operational conservatives, and therefore oppose government redistribution the most, do not give any more or less to charity than Republicans who support government redistribution. Thus, Republicans do not donate more to express their preference for private service provision over large government social service programmes.

Third, we tested whether Republicans donate more than Democrats due to a differing desire to signal high economic status, which is one of the explanations for the differences in baby names cited above. But we find little evidence that changing economic evaluations cause changes in levels of anticipated giving in the short term. Using the 2012 presidential election as a natural experiment, we show that Republicans’ perceptions of their economic status, as well as their reported spending on vacations, declined following the re-election of Democrat Barack Obama. However, giving behaviour was unaffected by the election, reinforcing our conclusion that differences in giving come from differences in religiosity, not politics or economics.

Our findings have important implications for how we think about politics and charitable giving. It is a fact that there are differences in giving patterns between Democrats and Republicans. However, these differences stem from underlying differences in the social compositions of the parties, rather than from differences in ideological beliefs or a desire to signal status. In particular, the partisan gap appears because of a difference in a very specific type of giving, donating to one’s own congregation or house of worship. We find no conservative advantage when it comes to non-religious charities, or even religious charities beyond one’s own congregation. The large religiosity gap that exists in American politics today, coupled with the tendency of religious Americans to donate to their own churches, helps explain the overall partisan difference in charitable giving. To the extent that Republicans and Democrats are culturally divided, these divisions appear to have little, if anything to do with disagreements about public policy.

This post represents the views of the authors and not those of Democratic Audit.

---

Michael Sances is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at the

[bonnie1962]

You do have to have a certain amount of compassion for the left. There are online support groups springing up.  Monday morning armchair therapists offering support for children that are disowning their toxic parents for voting for Trump. And the left is the party of tolerance. Seems like the readership of Atoday is also active in the hysteria over the election. 

This poor pastor tho as disiilusioned as he sounds he should spend a little time in my area. Very active in various outreach programs,both liberal and conservative lend a hand. But the very active churches tend to be more conservative than liberal. And that is in intolerant liberal MN

[bonnie1962]

I think the pastor in this topic should have paid more attention to what was causing his outrage. It takes a "special" kind of person to become a hero to libs

 

McDonald’s is under attack from the woke mob for this scary reason

Dec 13, 2024

 

Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

 

McDonald’s is one of the great brands in all of America.

That’s why the Left wants to destroy it.

And McDonald’s is under attack from the woke mob for this scary reason.

 

Democrats celebrate suspect arrested for allegedly killing healthcare CEO

Luigi Mangione is the newest folk hero for the American Left.

Leftists cheered Mangione allegedly assassinating United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of New York City.

Mangione allegedly fled New York and ended up in a McDonald’s restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

An employee in the restaurant alerted police to Mangione’s presence and officers arrested the 26-year-old.

 

Axios’ Sara Fischer told CNN’s Brianna Keilar that the brave employee’s quick thinking led to leftists review-bombing the Altoona McDonald’s with nasty comments across social media out of revenge.

“Anywhere where you can leave a review about a business, they’re going there. So it’s Google Reviews, it’s Yelp. They are mentioning to your point before that this person who called the police on the shooter is a “rat,” Fischer reported.

“They’re making comments such as, ‘There’s rats in their kitchen. You can’t trust that you’re not going to get food poisoning there.’ Now, the tech companies are put in a really precarious position here because in one end, you want to never meddle with reviews, right? You want them to be organic,” Fischer added.

“This fast food restaurant houses a traitor among its employees… The working class has betrayed humanity,” one such review read.

 

The irony of Democrats condemning big healthcare companies and their highly paid CEOs for betraying the working class is Mangione hails from one of the wealthiest families in Maryland and was the valedictorian at a $40,000 per year private school.

Why Mangione became a hero to the Democrat Party 

The Democrat Party has spent decades trying to destroy private health insurance in America so they can force all Americans into government run health plans.

Mangione published a manifesto prior to allegedly killing Thompson in cold blood.

In the manifesto, Mangione repeated the Left’s usual lies about healthcare in America as well as the capitalist economic system.

 

“A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but [h]as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it,” Mangione stated.

But embracing gunning someone down on a city street is generally not a winning political move.

The Left is so far gone on this issue that they are claiming to be the champions of the working class while at the same time trying to put a local McDonald’s out of business because an employee did the right thing and alerted police that a murder suspect was on the premises.

Murder remains unpopular in America.