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Compassion, religion, and politics.

Article Excerpt
AS FILM director Mel Brooks once said, "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." Of course, he was talking about the darker side of the comedian's art. But to listen to the American news media and many of our most prominent opinion leaders, you would think he was describing political conservatives' outlook on life. The Right, so the thinking goes, is baldly uncompassionate. One would almost get the impression that they reveled in their schadenfreude. For example, after 20 years, the most frequent criticism of Ronald Reagan's presidency appears to be its lack of compassion: for AIDS victims, the homeless, racial minorities, and the list goes on. Whether or not this is an ad hominem substitute for a substantive policy criticism, it is still strikingly common to hear in the elite mainstream news media, as a Boston Globe columnist recently stated, that Reagan's presidency was "the most antipoor, antiblack, and antidisadvantaged in the latter half of the 20th century."

The same invective follows conservatives today, and especially religious conservatives. Syndicated columnist Molly Ivins calls President George W. Bush an "uncompassionate conservative," deriding in particular the "religiosity, anti-intellectualism, and machismo" of his Texas roots. Indeed, compassion appears to have become the Achilles heel of religious conservatives, who face the title "uncompassionate" with fear and loathing--so much so that it has produced President Bush's self-proclaimed "compassionate conservatism." But this only acquiesces to liberal bias by setting up the two labels as if they were naturally contradictory.

The argument that conservatives are naturally less compassionate than liberals is easy to follow: It proceeds straightforwardly from stereotypes about the views of each on the appropriate role of government money and power in helping the disadvantaged. Conservatives' traditional discomfort with the salvific role of government toward all social ills exposes them (justifiably or not) to the criticism that they simply care less than liberals do about the plight of those afflicted.

In contrast, the relationship between religion and compassion is more complicated. On the one hand, we might be tempted to assume that faith--at least in some whole-some, mainstream religion--should create a positive propensity to behave morally and empathetically toward others. Indeed, there is nothing new about this assumption. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, admonished the nation not to "indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion." On the other hand, this may be precisely wrong, in spite of its intuitive appeal: People may be compassionate in spite of religion, not because of it.

Taking the measure of compassion

What do the data tell us about how compassionate different political and religious groups are? In particular, are religious conservatives more or less compassionate than others, such as secular liberals? What do we know about religious liberals...

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