New York senator and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was asked last month about Catholic hospitals that do not wish to provide women with emergency contraception, which in some cases can act as an abortifacient.  According to the Associated Press, Senator Clinton replied that “conscience clauses” are appropriate in some situations, but “if there is a justifiable reason for some professional not to offer services, then wherever that professional works, there has to be immediate offering of services.”

In other words, Senator Clinton said she would support certain individuals following their consciences and religious dictates, but not any institution as a whole. So Catholic hospitals would be required to violate Catholic teaching and belief.

Thus did the senator try to play to both sides; she ultimately failed to support those hospitals run by religious institutions that seek to operate within the guidelines of their respective religious faiths.

Send in the straightjackets—Newsweek has cracked up. Of all the stories in the entire world to cover, Newsweek’s website flagged as its “Top Story” on September 13 an insane piece about a woman (complete with photo) who thinks she is an ordained Catholic priest. They found this “woman priest” in Missouri, though had Newsweek reporter Karen Springen walked into the nearest asylum, she would have found some people who think they’re the pope.

Springen’s discovery was Jessica Rowley. Jessica thinks she’s a Catholic priest because some crackpot group said they ordained her. Springen, whose contempt for the Catholic Church is rivaled only by her ignorance of it, not only made snide comments about the Church’s rules governing ordination, she implied that the Catholic Church thinks “it’s a sin to be gay” and excludes divorced people. Springen’s delusional discovery, of course, is pro-abortion and pro-homosexuality—just the kind of person who would make a great addition to Newsweek.

There are so many denominations that would welcome Jessica, but the fact that she has rejected all of them indicates how little regard she has for them. This says volumes about the prestige these trendy religious communities have, even among alienated dissidents. So Jessica would rather play make-believe, pretending she’s a Catholic priest. By Halloween, she’ll no doubt become a bishop.

If “I think, therefore I am” was good enough for Descartes, Newsweek reasoned, then “I think I’m a Catholic priest, therefore I am” was good enough for Jessica. And for Newsweek as well.

The next time someone tells us that we shouldn’t worry about Kathy Griffin and all the other anti-Catholic bigots—”we have a war going on,” they thunder!—we’ll be sure to tell them what passes as the “Top Story” at Newsweek.

Managers of a student newspaper at the University of Virginia, the Cavalier Daily, forced a staff cartoonist, Grant Woolard, to resign last month. This action stemmed from a drawing done by  Woolard. According to the Washington Post, the cartoon depicted “nine darkened figures with bald, enlarged heads, dressed only in loincloths, fighting each other over a tree branch, pillow, chair, boot and stool. The caption for the melee: ‘Ethiopian Food Fight.'”

Minority groups on campus, under the leadership of the local NAACP, showed up at the offices of the Cavalier Daily, demanding that Woolard be ousted. The minority groups were quickly obliged. The paper’s editor-in-chief explained, “The instant the public raised a question about it, we realized it was a mistake.”  In addition, the Post reported that a debate raged on campus over whether the paper’s managing board of editors should have submitted their resignations as well.

The Cavalier Daily’s editors wasted no time in acting on this issue. However, when the Catholic League objected to anti-Christian cartoons that the paper published in September 2006 (one of which was also drawn by Woolard), the editors did not show the same haste. They initially refused to apologize (though they had previously apologized for a cartoon that upset gays) and stood by the cartoons, dubbing them acceptable satire. Eventually, the cartoons were removed from the paper’s website and a statement of regret was posted. But Woolard was not ousted.

It is telling that the management of the Cavalier Daily is sensitive to the concerns of blacks and gays at the University of Virginia, but not to the concerns of Christians. It seems that while racism and gay-bashing are treated seriously on the campus, religious bigotry is not seen as such a problem.

On September 15, Fox’s “MADtv” kicked off its 13th season by featuring a series of some of the show’s past comedy skits. The new season opener, hosted by raunchy talk-show star Jerry Springer, was the first of a four-part “Best of MADtv” series.
Included in the program’s trip down memory lane was one of several past skits by “MADtv” that lampooned the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic priesthood.

While many people would expect a program like “MADtv” to cause offense on a frequent basis, a look at the show’s history reveals little along the lines of derogatory treatment of certain demographic groups.

We did research on “MADtv” and could find nothing in the way of complaints about the show from blacks, Hispanics, Jews, gays, or Muslims. One has to go back to 2000 for a sole complaint from an Asian-American advocacy group; in 2003 there was one complaint from postal workers regarding a “going postal” parody on the show.

It’s the same tired old story—in the popular culture, most groups are off-limits when it comes to causing deliberate and habitual offense. But Catholic priests are fair game, and there are repeat offenders in the entertainment world—such as the folks at “MADtv”—who have a hard time giving it up.

Manhattan Mini Storage, owned by Edison Properties, placed a billboard on Manhattan’s West Side Highway in August that showed a large wire hanger with the inscription, “Your closet space is shrinking as fast as her right to choose.”

New Yorkers have become accustomed to Manhattan Mini Storage posting billboards that bash the Bush Administration, but by making the leap from partisan politics to crude cultural commentary, the company stepped on dangerous turf. Why a storage company saw the need to advertise its support for abortion was a story all of its own, but by seeking to depict the pro-life community—which is primarily Catholic and Protestant—as oppressive, Manhattan Mini Storage crossed a line.

Those who like this billboard would no doubt be aghast at the sight of a billboard that featured a bloody baby who survived a botched abortion. They would be even more incensed if the picture were accompanied by the remark, “This is what happens when abortion fails.”

Manhattan Mini Storage was not only guilty of crudeness, but of cowardice. To wit: Why didn’t it have the guts to identify the object of her “shrinking” choice?

We are pleased to report that in a poll of New Yorkers, three of four were on our side. And judging from the feedback we got commenting on our media appearances, it is clear that we got the best of them.

Donald J. Dietrich, Human Rights and the Catholic Tradition. Transaction Publishers: To order, call (888) 999-6778.

Hardly anyone disagrees today about how bad Hitler and the Nazi regime were for the world. Besides unleashing World War II, Hitler had plans to exterminate entire peoples—plans which he proceeded to carry out before the eyes of a too-long unbelieving world in his Holocaust against the Jews and others considered subhuman, and which surely did mark some kind of evil low point even amidst all of the other violence and horrors that characterized the unhappy 20th century.

Nazism was especially bad for the Germans themselves. They lived under it longer than anyone else and suffered greatly from it, even though as a people they also furnished the principal means by which Hitler was able to inflict it upon the rest of the world for a time. German Catholics, in particular, were placed in the unenviable position of living under a government run by elements who only later finally came to be seen as criminals and madmen. While these criminals and madmen were in power, however, they constituted for German Catholics “the governing authorities” to whom St. Paul teaches Christians must be “subject,” since “there is no authority except from God and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom 13:1). The Church has generally interpreted this teaching to mean that good Christians must normally obey the duly constituted “powers that be” where they live—but obviously not to the point of falling into sin themselves.

Thus, living under the Nazi regime did constitute a genuine moral dilemma for Catholics and for the Church. This was especially true at first, when it was not always as easy for people living at the time to see the evil of the regime as it is for us today looking back. As the regime’s evils unfolded, many of them could be interpreted, at least for a while, as mere aberrations or excesses. If the Western powers themselves went on for years trying to “do business with Hitler,” it is at least understandable that Christians living under the regime should perhaps have tried to do the same more extensively and for a longer period of time than we would consider to be wise or even moral today.

So while resisting pretty much from the outset some obvious evils—such as the Nazi takeover of the media, education, youth activities, and the like—the Church did also try to accommodate the regime in other ways. For example, the concordat which Pope Pius XI concluded with the Nazi regime in 1933—it was signed by the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who would later become Pope Pius XII—is much criticized today, but nevertheless provided the legal basis for the Church to try to deal with the regime at all.

Donald J. Dietrich is a professor of theology at Boston College and a specialist in German Catholic history. He has written other books, notably on the subject of why some Catholics in Germany supported and others opposed the police state. In Human Rights and the Catholic Tradition, he focuses on the experience of German Catholics as they attempted, in the light of their faith, to deal with the barbarism of the Nazi era and the problems and conflicts brought about by Nazism and the Second World War.

One of the author’s basic premises is the incompatibility of Catholic moral teaching with Nazism. Hence, as the true nature of the regime became clearer, both the Church and individual Catholics generally became more opposed to it and more inclined to mount various forms of resistance to it (although the penalties for resistance of any kind could sometimes be drastic!). But these developments were neither automatic nor particularly rapid. As Dietrich notes, “until it was too late, most Germans…did not realize that the Nazis wanted something totally revolutionary.”

The incompatibility between the Catholic faith and the Nazi regime was real. Dietrich examines and documents how Catholic moral teaching came to be applied to what was actually going on in Germany. His main focus is not on what the Church or the Catholic bishops were doing or reacting to, but rather on what Catholics themselves were doing and reacting to. In particular, he covers in some detail how various Catholic theologians and thinkers gradually came to see, and hence to condemn, the evils being perpetrated by the Nazis.

Not only did these thinkers and theologians finally reject the tenets of the regime. In the course of the Nazi era, they succeeded in developing a new personal and existential theology of the human person—emphasizing the dignity of the human person—which became one of the pillars of the official teaching adopted on this subject by the Second Vatican Council. This new approach proved essential in enabling the Church to participate as a full partner in the debates and discussions concerning democracy and human rights that took place after World War II. Both the vocabulary and the concepts of this new theology were largely developed by German theologians in reaction to the brutality of the Nazis.  Some of these same German theologians also proved to be very influential at Vatican II.

The major achievement and importance of this book, in fact, lies in Dietrich’s survey and analysis of the thinking of a number of major Catholic thinkers and writers who developed this new theology in reaction to Nazism. They include such still well known figures as Karl Adam and Romano Guardini, or, in the next generation, the Jesuits Gustav Gundlach and Karl Rahner as well as the latter’s student, Johannes B. Metz. The degree to which some of these writers at first thought they were obliged to come to some kind of accommodation with Nazism was a surprise to this reviewer—although, of course, that stance did not endure.

The author also includes chapters on Nazi terror, sometime Catholic ambivalence towards the Third Reich (especially at first), the scope of Christian resistance, and resistance in the daily life of German Catholics. Dietrich is not uncritical of the overall Catholic record. He does not think the Church opposed Nazism as vigorously as she should have; this was because she continued to seek “institutional survival” instead. “Nazi ideology was critiqued by the Church when it affected the institution…but accepted when it focused on nationalistic patriotism.”

“Since the churches sought institutional survival,” he further generalizes, “meaningful resistance did not spring from Christian churches but from their members’ attempts to uphold their faith.” He includes an interesting chapter on how average German Catholics in practice often did act on their Catholic and Christian principles, contrary to what the Nazi regime was urging.

Dietrich is especially critical of what he sees as the inadequacy of the general Catholic reaction to Nazi anti-Semitism and aggression against the Jews in particular. He thinks Catholics and the Church tended to see and condemn only “pagan racism,” and hence did not always take the full measure of the evil of the virulent and indeed lethal brand of anti-Semitism which, in the hands of Hitler’s minions, led to Auschwitz and the Holocaust against the Jews.

Though he is critical, however, Dietrich’s book is in no way an attack on Catholics or on the Church in the way that has become familiar in the anti-Pius XII books which have continued to appear; the authors of these books accuse the wartime pope as well as German Catholics of being sympathizers and even collaborators with the Hitler regime. On the contrary, Dietrich himself documents many instances of Catholic resistance even as he also judges that the Catholic resistance could have been stronger. Nevertheless, his own focus is so narrow in this book that he scarcely touches upon the Pius XII question at all, even though this would seem to be almost inescapably related to his own chosen subject matter. The period of German Catholic history with which he is concerned is exactly contemporaneous with the period during which the pope and the Church in Germany have been accused by a veritable legion of critics of having been “silent” in the face of Nazi persecution, if not actually enabling of it.

Not only is all this scarcely mentioned or even referred to, but Dietrich actually includes references to such anti-Pius authors as Susan Zuccotti, Michael Phayer, David Kertzer, and even Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, as if the biased, inaccurate, and agenda-driven “scholarship” of these writers merited serious consideration. Meanwhile he seems totally unaware of the considerable and formidable body of work produced by Catholics over the past decade in defense of the unjustly slandered wartime pope. This is a serious deficiency, considering the author’s subject matter.

Again with his narrow focus, Dietrich also seems oblivious to the fact that another Holocaust is currently going on before our very eyes in the current war on the unborn being waged by means of legalized abortion. He correctly draws the conclusion from the Nazi period that “dehumanization…does seem to be the crucial component needed for sanctioned murder.” Yet he also refers at one point to what he calls “the pro-choice culture of today” as if this were a wholly neutral fact and not another case of “state-sanctioned murder.” Yet the great value of this book lies in how it brings out the way German theologians grew in their understanding of the evil being done around them and reacted creatively. Should we not be doing the same in the face of the Holocaust that confronts us?

Kenneth D. Whitehead is a member of the Board of Directors of the Catholic League. His survey of the recent books on the Pope Pius XII controversy can be found on the League’s website: www.catholicleague.org.

Beginning in the spring, and ending over the summer, the Catholic League was able to persuade Random House to make substantive revisions to its Fodor’s Travel Guides. Deleted were several objectionable references to Catholicism, remarks that should never have appeared in reference books.

As far back as 2000, we received complaints about the Fodor series. At that time, the book on Italy featured a joke about Mary and Jesus and, more important, described the Catholic Church as “in apparent decline and no longer obsessed with political power.” Bad as these remarks were, they were mild as compared to what has been published since.

What started things rolling this time was a complaint we received from a Long Island priest about the Fodor’s Mexico 2007 travel guide; the book contained a disparaging remark about St. Juan Diego and the Catholic Church. Sensing that there might be additional problems, we decided to launch an investigation of the Fodor series.

What we found were wholly inappropriate comments made about Catholicism in the books on Ireland, Italy, France and Portugal, as well as Mexico. The remarks were snide, tendentious and sometimes historically inaccurate. Then we investigated how Fodor’s treats other religions. But in the travel guides on Israel and Thailand, for example, we could find no objectionable statements about Jewish synagogues, Buddhist temples, etc.

Tim Jarrell, the vice president and publisher of Fodor’s Travel Publications, responded to us by saying he would authorize an investigation of our complaint. When we didn’t hear back, we pressed him again, and this time he came through.

Jarrell acknowledged the veracity of our complaints. His response was very professional: there was none of the “if you were offended” kind of nonsense. Instead, he offered a straightforward account, detailing the kinds of changes he deemed appropriate. To see what we objected to, and how he handled it, see “Fodor’s Agrees To Changes.”

While we are very pleased with Random House, it just goes to show the ubiquity and invidiousness of anti-Catholicism these days. We have come to expect anti-Catholicism in Hollywood, the media, the arts and the academy, but when travel guides in the publishing world become infested with Catholic bashing, it proves what we’re up against.

In any event, now that our objections have been addressed, there is no reason for Catholics not to buy the Fodor’s publications. We trust that an important lesson has been learned and that we will not have to revisit this problem again.

As expected, Amnesty Inter-national, the group that monitors human rights around the world, approved an abortion-rights policy at its biennial conference in Mexico City; the policy was first adopted this past spring.

Responding to criticism from the Vatican, as well as from American bishops, Amnesty issued a news release on June 14 saying that it does not promote abortion as a “universal right” and “remains silent on the rights and wrongs of abortion.” More recently, Kate Gilmore, Amnesty’s deputy secretary-general, criticized the Church’s opposition, holding that “our purpose invokes the law and the state, not God.”

We branded this response as “simply dishonest,” pointing out that abortion is a human rights issue, not a religious one.

In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, wherein it said, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” In 1959, the same body issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and in the Preamble of Resolution 1386, it said, “Whereas the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth….” (Our emphasis.) And in 1989, the same entity proclaimed that “every child has the inherent right to life.”

In short, Amnesty International has betrayed its mission by violating the most fundamental right of all—the right to be born. We urge Catholics to withdraw their support of this phony organization.

William A. Donohue

In New York City schools, it is legal to ban the display of a Christian nativity scene while permitting depictions of the Islamic crescent and stars. There are no vouchers or tuition-tax credits for Catholic parents who elect to send their children to parochial schools, but a taxpayer-funded Arabic school has opened in Brooklyn. And the disparity is not confined to New York, or to elementary schools: it’s a nationwide phenomenon, and it’s happening in grades K-college.

The Khalil Gibran International Academy is New York’s first Arabic-themed school; it will serve grades six through twelve, beginning with grade six this year. Named after the Lebanese Christ-ian poet, the school is expected to immerse the students in the Arabic language and culture, without teaching religion. But already there are serious problems.

The woman chosen to run the school, Debbie Almontaser, was pressured to resign in August due to her initial response to a terrorist T-shirt that was being hawked by some of her friends. The T-shirt, which read, “Intifada NYC,” was a call to Muslim violence against New York City. When asked what she thought about the shirt, Almontaser played a lawyerly game by instructing New Yorkers that the word “intifada” originally meant a “shaking off” of oppression. But she knew very well that the current meaning is an inflammatory call to arms, which is why she had to apologize after the public uproar. Days later she quit.

The courts are responsible for emboldening these militants. For example, last year the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a decision by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in favor of a California public school that allows Islamic education.

In that decision, the judges said it was not unconstitutional to require seventh-grade students to wear Muslim garb, adopt Muslim names, memorize verses from the Quran, pray to Allah, give up something for a day, simulate fasting during the month of Ramadan and play “jihad games.” It is sickening to note that these same judges said it was unconstitutional for public school students to say the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.

What is worse is what the students are being taught—not only in these schools, but in all schools. In 2003, the American Textbook Council issued a report on the coverage of Islam in seven widely used world history textbooks used in grades seven through twelve. What it found was shocking.

“Textbooks make no distinction between sharia [Islamic] and Western law,” the report said, “and they pretend that women are making great strides in the Islamic world, when all the evidence indicates otherwise.” The report flatly said that “Social studies textbooks ignore the global ambitions of militant Islam. They fail to explain that Muslim terrorists seek to destroy the United States and Israel. They omit geopolitical goals that include theocracy and world domination by religion.”

To show how mainstreamed this propaganda is consider Scholastic publications; they are used in many schools. In the Teacher’s edition of Junior Scholastic magazine last year, a recommended resource listed “Ten Things to Know About Islam.” One of the things listed was, “Is Islam Intolerant of Other Religions?” To which students learned that “theologically and historically Islam has a long record of tolerance.” They also learned that “Muslims did not try to impose their religion on others or force them to convert.” However, “No such tolerance existed in Christendom….”

All of this is a lie, and the authors, publishers, principals and teachers know it. If they don’t know it, they should be fired for incompetence.

Why is this happening? Because of multiculturalism, as well as the reality of something more sinister—fear.

According to the theology of multiculturalism, anything associated with the U.S. or Europe is considered suspect at best and fatally flawed at worst. Moreover, anything associated with the non-Christian nations is something we must respect, if not revere. Pope Benedict XVI rightly labels this pathology self-hatred.

Fear is the other factor. When the media refused to reprint the innocent depictions of Muhammad that appeared in the Danish cartoons last year, they said it was because they did not want to offend Muslims unnecessarily. Only the Boston Phoenix told the truth: the publisher was afraid Muslims might kill someone on his staff.

Earlier this year, we raised serious questions about public monies being spent on footbaths for Muslim students at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. The rationale for the footbaths is that it is unsanitary for these students to wash their feet in sinks. Agreed. Which is why I recommended that someone introduce them to shower stalls.

The public sector is obliged to accommodate religion, but it is not obliged—indeed it is wrong—to sponsor it. What we need is equal treatment, and this includes the way religions are treated in textbooks, not just in law.

Every now and then I read a book that makes me want to stand up and cheer. The latest entry is Who Really Cares by Arthur C. Brooks, professor of public administration at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. We’ve become e-mail “pen pals,” and I’m happy to say that Arthur is Roman Catholic.

Brooks has put together one of the most incredible indictments of the finger-pointing left-wing secular elites in recent memory. The same people who never stop lecturing the rest of us on our alleged greed, we learn, turn out to be the stingiest of them all. Others may have said this before, but no one has presented the data like Brooks. His evidence is overwhelming.

Who Really Cares pairs nicely with Paul Johnson’s 1988 best-seller, Intellectuals, and Peter Schweizer’s more recent book, Do As I Say (Not As I Do). Johnson detailed the unbelievable hypocrisy of some of the West’s greatest minds, from Marx and Rousseau to Sartre and Lillian Hellman; Schweizer did the same with today’s celebrities, from Michael Moore and Hillary Clinton to Barbara Streisand and Edward Kennedy.

Unlike the Johnson and Schweizer contributions, Brooks doesn’t focus on the big names—he makes comparisons based on demographic groups—but his rendering is similar: the reader walks away feeling a genuine contempt for the duplicity and arrogance of the lecturing class. And what will be of most interest to the readers ofCatalyst, Brooks makes plain the wholly unearned reputation that secular liberals have in caring for the poor. They may have mastered the rhetoric of caring, but it is religious conservatives who are the champions of actually doing something to help the dispossessed.

Brooks is nothing if not honest. He approached the subject of charitable giving through the lens of his graduate-school years, i.e., he took it as axiomatic that because secular liberals expressed greater interest in the poor, they were necessarily more generous. But as he learned, the data do not support this conclusion. Hence, he changed his mind. The “hence” should not be read flippantly: it is a rare scholar, in my experience, who allows the evidence to affect his conclusions; most are so ideologically driven that they do not let the evidence get in the way of their conclusions.

There are several myths that Brooks explodes in his book. One of them is that the American people are a selfish lot who turn their backs on the poor. Not true. “Private American giving could more than finance the entire annual gross domestic product (GDP) of Sweden, Norway, and Den-mark,” Brooks writes. And contrary to what many people believe, charitable giving cannot be explained by tax breaks afforded by the IRS. Only 20 percent of those who give to charities do so because of a tax deduction; 80 percent give because “those who have more should give to those who have less.”

Charitable giving, as Brooks informs, should not be measured simply by writing checks. Using available data, he calculates time, as well as money. More than half of all Americans, for instance, volunteer their time to help some cause. Others, often the same people as it turns out, give blood; others may baby-sit for a neighbor. And so forth. Interestingly, those who give also appear to be more tolerant and maintain less prejudices that those who do not.

It is commonplace in the halls of academia to assume that conservatives are greedy and liberals are caring. But, in fact, it is conservatives who are by far the most generous—not only with their money, but with their time. It is not as though they are richer: as Brooks shows, “liberal families earn on average 6 percent more per year than conservative families, and conservative families [give] more than liberal families within every income class, from poor to middle class to rich.” Similarly, Republicans give more than Democrats.

Why is the conventional wisdom wrong? Because liberals get brownie points for talking about the poor more than conservatives, even if their idea of “helping” the indigent is through government transfers. Quite frankly, they love to play Robin Hood with other people’s money, having never found an income redistribution scheme they couldn’t endorse. But as Brooks correctly notes, “Government spending is not charity.” (His italics.) The data also allow him to conclude that “People who think the government should redistribute income are less likely to donate to charity than people who don’t think so.”

All of this reminds me of Marx and Rousseau: Marx, the father of socialism, fathered a child out of wedlock (he impregnated his maid) and never gave his child a dime; Rousseau, another radical egalitarian, fathered five illegitimate kids and walked away from his responsibilities (though this didn’t stop him from writing a book on child rearing). For a modern day example of Brooks’ point, consider the Clergy Leadership Network founded by Rev. Brenda Bartella Peterson.

For Peterson, “paying taxes is a way of loving thy neighbor,” and for her clergy organization, slashing taxes is “inevitably an appeal to our greed, not to our generosity or compassion.” In other words, those who want to keep the money they’ve earned and spend it the way they choose (often on others) are the greedy ones. Those who want the government to pick the pockets of the rich are the altruists. They actually believe this!

The conventional wisdom is also wrong with regards to the generosity of the faithful vs. the faithless. It is a staple of liberal thought that secularists are more charitable than churchgoers, but the evidence shows just the opposite. “Religious people are far more charitable than nonreligious people,” writes Brooks. Indeed, he says that “In years of research, I have never found a measurable way in which secularists are more charitable than religious people.”

What Brooks found was that the faithful are more charitable across the board. “Religious people are more charitable in every measurable nonreligious way—including secular donations, informal giving, and even acts of kindness and honesty—than secularists.” They give more blood and are 57 percent more likely to give to the homeless than secularists. What is really astounding is that in the aftermath of 9/11, “People who never attended church were 11 percentage points less likely than regular churchgoers to give to a 9/11 cause (56 to 67 percent).”

Brooks drives his point home by comparing the charitable giving of San Franciscans to South Dakotans. Families in both groups give away about $1,300 a year, but because the former make 78 percent more money than the latter, “The average South Dakotan family gives away 75 percent more of its household income each year than the average family in San Francisco.” There’s a reason for this disparity: “Fifty percent of South Dakotans attend their houses of worship every week, versus 14 percent of San Franciscans. On the other hand, 49 percent of San Franciscans never attend church, but the statistic drops to 10 percent for South Dakotans.”

Could it be that those who are religious earn more than secularists, thus accounting for the discrepancy in giving? Not at all. Brooks details that “an average secularist nongiver earns 16 percent more money each year than a religious giver.” (His emphasis.) Yet secular liberals “are 19 percent points less likely to give each year than religious conservatives, and 9 percent less likely than the population in general.”

Family life is also an important explanatory variable. Married people give more than single people; they are also happier. And happiness is “strongly associated with high levels of giving.” To top it off, “American conservatives consistently report higher levels of subjective well-being than liberals.” These factors are all related. “Conservatives tend to enjoy more traditional, religious, and stable families than liberals,” says Brooks, and “these types of families bring ongoing happiness for most people.”

Brooks concludes that “religion, skepticism about the government in economic life, strong families, and personal entrepreneurism” are the four most important qualities that account for charitable giving. Because the poor actually are the most generous of all socio-economic classes—they give proportionately more than the middle class or the upper class—Brooks recommends that their charitable giving be given a tax break even if they don’t itemize. This makes eminently good sense.

As I said at the beginning, it is the non-stop lecturing we get from the educated talking heads in the classroom and in the media about the compassion they have for the poor—unlike those religious conservative types—that galls me most of all. Their idea of helping the poor comes down to higher taxes and soup kitchens, neither of which extracts a whole lot from them.

In the 1970s, I taught in an inner-city Catholic elementary school in Spanish Harlem during the day and went to New York University at night for my Ph.D. in sociology. In one class, after listening to hippie students blaming Exxon for the low achievement of inner-city students (I still haven’t figured that one out), I commended them for their interest in servicing the poor and then asked if they wanted to spare some time on a weekend tutoring my black and Puerto Rican students. No one spoke.

There is more than hypocrisy involved. These hand-wringing leftists are quick to condemn the pro-life community for its alleged fixation on the unborn, yet it is the faithful who are more generous to the poor than the faithless. Yet all Castro has to do is don his fatigues and talk compassionately about the oppressed—all the while grinding his boots into their faces—and he is a saint in their eyes.

Ronald Reagan once defined a conservative as someone who sees someone drowning from a pier, throws him a rope, but intentionally throws one that is a bit short, thus making the needy one work a bit before he’s rescued. A liberal, by contrast, throws a rope that is plenty long enough, and when the needy one picks up his end, the liberal drops his and then goes off to help someone else.

Reagan would have loved Brooks’ book. You most certainly will.