From the statistics that I have read a lot of charity that comes from republicans/conservatives is from families who are not very rich to begin with. These are largely religious families who take to heart the lessons learned while at services and from the Bible.
Actually, I would guess that this is true for all forms of belief. Those who buy into a me-first attitude would probably not be into donations no matter what their beliefs.

Also churches are a huge source of charity in the US and that money comes directly from contributions. I don’t think you can say the same about any condo association (I don’t know of any shelters, food banks, or soup kitchens started by any at least). So there is no equivalence there as you attempt to imply.
I didn't mention churches in general, I mentioned the only right-leaning one I am familiar with. My point there is that tithing for my example institution is about as optional as the association fees, so it has more to do with inclusion in the group rather than a personal charitable leaning. I have no idea what the standard is for any other right-leaning church, so I couldn't say anything about them.

The worst thing you can do for a person is to give them welfare, because it keeps a person poor and creates a cycle of dependency that lasts for generations.
Actually, poverty does this, too. There was a really interesting book that came out a couple years back where the authors had studied the attitudes of those who were raised in various socio-economic conditions. The attitudes regarding money are really different for the poor, middle class (whatever that is, I don't know the definition of this group used in the study), and rich, though the difference between rich and middle class was not totally clear to me.

You need only look at any big city in the US that has been run by democrats for decades to see exactly what I mean. Things continue to get worse yet people keep voting democrat. That is the cycle of dependency that has been created so people keep voting for more of the same failed policies.

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To tie that in with the previous segment: I live in one of the most conservative states in the nation, and one of the most rural. We hired people from the very bottom end of the socio-economic scale. They voted conservative consistently, and they stayed mired in poverty consistently. There wasn't any welfare that I was aware of, or very little, but the book I referred to earlier did an excellent job of describing their attitudes towards....pretty much everything that affected their personal economies.

My personal view is that the conservative attack on welfare is well intentioned and totally misguided (with just a few groups going after welfare for totally cynical and self-serving reasons). It really doesn't make much difference whether we provide welfare or not as long as the attitudes of the poor remain as they are. These rural folks I worked with, who didn't have any noticeable welfare, were not being held down by the MAN, but by themselves and their own attitudes. They remained mired in a rigid social structure where the men worked and the women married the first guy who would take them or the first one that got them pregnant (seriously, one gal I knew was doing that quite explicitly). The women couldn't be persuaded to get an education, and it largely appeared to be due to a belief that they weren't capable of such, despite some of them being highly intelligent. The men did all right at supporting the lifestyle in good times, but the industry in a rural area is anything but diverse, and the whole region went through boom/bust cycles routinely. Since the men never tried to diversify their options, and the women simply refused to believe that they had options, they were trapped in a cage of their own making.

Blaming that attitude on welfare is very convenient, and in some cases it may even contribute. Welfare will NEVER overcome an attitude like that, but nor will the cessation of welfare. The welfare state is utterly irrelevant to people who have expectations of never being more than poor. You have to replace the lack of dreams with some belief that they are even capable of a brighter future.

On the other hand, I would not characterize the people I knew as unhappy. I wouldn't be able to live like that, but that's probably because I have a different set of expectations, so I wouldn't be happy living like that. They had very limited expectations and appeared to be entirely happy within the context of their own dreams. A few of the older women did express a real disappointment that they hadn't gotten an education, though those regrets, while bitterly stated, were only held among women older than 50.

Aside from the question of whether welfare is good or bad, do we have the right to dictate what standard of living is necessary for happiness? With these folks, it wasn't a question of bringing a horse to water and not being able to get them to drink. Instead, it simply wasn't possible to convince them that there was water, and they were content to be thirsty.