Why are most Christians politically right wing?

iluvatar5150 · Apr 27, 2019

Francis Drake said:
Socialism and the left is entirely based on envy and covetousness.

Deut5v21You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house or field, or his manservant or maidservant, or his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

Or today we might say, "You shalt not covet your neighbour's house car salary holidays etc."
Yet that is exactly what the equal distribution of wealth of socialism means, "Vote for me and I will take your neighbour's money and give it to you!"
Socialism panders to the ungodly covetousness and greed in society.

What an asinine and embarrassingly simplistic perception of why most proponents advocate for socialist-lite policies. I can barely fathom how much imagination and how little listening and understanding it takes to contrive such drivel.

As far as I've seen, the attitudes among the left are mostly driven by concern for the poor and less-advantaged as well as more than a little resentment towards how the wealthy have structured things to ensure that they continue to enjoy those advantages at the expense of others. Such attitudes do not remotely constitute "envy and covetousness", but rather hew more closely to "justice" and "fairness".

Your position is also rather hypocritical given that capitalism - particularly the modern incarnation of it - literally cannot work without self-interest. Modern marketing is built on engendering the desire to be as good as, or better than, your peers.

JackRT · Apr 27, 2019

^^^^ Outstanding post^^^^

InterestedAtheist · Apr 27, 2019

DM25 said:
I never understood this because what the right stands for is not even biblical. Two of the things that are absolutely biblical and correct from the right/conservatism are : 1. Anti-LGBT and 2. Pro-Life. And I agree with this, along with general traditional family values and biblical morality. But everything else in the right wing you can argue is completely against Christianity and what Jesus taught. Everything in the right seems to be based on political identity and culture, not Jesus Christ. So I don't understand why right wing politics caters to Christian evangelicals so much.

In a nutshell, the answer is this: they made a bargain with the right wing to support anything they do, so long as they outlaw abortion.

timothyu · Apr 27, 2019

InterestedAtheist said:
In a nutshell, the answer is this: they made a bargain with the right wing to support anything they do, so long as they outlaw abortion.

Seems rather silly considering those they seek to outlaw it made it legal in the first place. It will never be outlawed as long as it can maintain the voter base.

timothyu · Apr 27, 2019

iluvatar5150 said:
As far as I've seen, the attitudes among the left are mostly driven by concern for the poor and less-advantaged as well as more than a little resentment towards how the wealthy have structured things to ensure that they continue to enjoy those advantages at the expense of others.

While this may be true both sides have their good points and equally bad points, where as an example one likes to kill foreigners for profit and the other kills babies for profit and parts.

God was clear that neither side represent Him. Man as a whole cannot 'work without self interest'. It got us kicked out of the Garden. Jesus was clear that we should leave them to their games and not rebel against and instead live a alternate lifestyle to that of traditional man.

InterestedAtheist · Apr 27, 2019

timothyu said:
Seems rather silly considering those they seek to outlaw it made it legal in the first place. It will never be outlawed as long as it can maintain the voter base.

Are you not aware that opposition to abortion is one of the driving forces, if not the driving force, of right wing politics, and that almost all evangelical Christians who vote, vote Republican?

timothyu · Apr 27, 2019

InterestedAtheist said:
Are you not aware that opposition to abortion is one of the driving forces, if not the driving force, of right wing politics, and that almost all evangelical Christians who vote, vote Republican?

Yes but it doesn't change the fact they also legalised it at Nixon's behest in the first place. One of the US's little ironies.

InterestedAtheist · Apr 27, 2019

DM25 said:
I never understood this because what the right stands for is not even biblical. Two of the things that are absolutely biblical and correct from the right/conservatism are : 1. Anti-LGBT and 2. Pro-Life. And I agree with this, along with general traditional family values and biblical morality. But everything else in the right wing you can argue is completely against Christianity and what Jesus taught. Everything in the right seems to be based on political identity and culture, not Jesus Christ. So I don't understand why right wing politics caters to Christian evangelicals so much.

I think Fred Clark (progressive Christian blogger) has some good thoughts on this, so I'll let him explain it:

"Back in the 1970s, white evangelicalism was mired in the disgrace of having been epically, utterly, spectacularly wrong about the Civil Rights movement. They hadn’t just picked the wrong side in a political battle. It was far worse than that. By defending injustice, they had disgraced themselves, surrendered all claims of moral competence, and become disgraced pariahs.

This was unsettling. These were people who thought of themselves as the standard-bearers of morality and rectitude. They read their Bibles and held forth on what those Bibles mean and how others should read them too. They didn’t drink or dance or cuss or go to the movies. They expected other people to honor them as the arbiters and exemplars of morality and “godly” living. But now those others were looking down on them — appalled by their utter lack of morality and decency because they had failed the biggest, clearest and most obvious moral test of their time. They had no excuse, no answer, no recourse.

For several years, they flailed about, bewildered. White evangelicals had grown so accustomed to assuming their role as the spokespeople for morality that they weren’t quite able to understand how thoroughly they had surrendered any claim to that role. So they chose to keep fighting. They rallied behind private Christian schools as an alternative to the now-desegregated public schools, attempting to relitigate the political battles they had lost. They doubled-down on the shameful defense of injustice, taking to the courts to defend their “religious liberty” to practice segregation. This only made things worse — not just because they were losing the legal battle, too, but because this religious liberty argument loudly proclaimed that the odious, immoral defense of injustice was something they regarded as integral to their faith and their identity.

That legal battle lasted from 1971 until it was lost, conclusively, in 1983, with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bob Jones University v. United States.

But by then it didn’t matter, because by 1983, white evangelicals had found a new strategy to reclaim their rightful place as the standard-bearers of morality. That strategy was simply this: Change the subject.

Failing the clearest moral test of your time and culture is only a problem so long as that moral test is what people are talking about and thinking about. So talk about something else.

If you’ve made yourself a moral pariah because you’ve spent the past three decades fighting a rear-guard battle in defense of systemic, violent, oppressive injustice, then you need to find some other subject on which you can cast yourself as the Good Guy — as the heroic champion of morality. If your position has been exposed as morally indefensible, then don’t even bother trying to defend it. Just go on the offensive instead.

And that’s what white evangelicals did in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. They didn’t change their minds about the Civil Rights movement, but they enthusiastically changed the subject. They started talking about abortion.

This is what abortion politics is for. This is what it was designed to do. This is its function and its purpose. It is — above all — a weapon for reasserting a claim to the moral high ground, and for putting the moral upstarts of the Civil Rights movement back in their proper place as moral subordinates who should have no say in determining right and wrong unless they first consult the rightful arbiters of such things, i.e., us.

Those people, you see, are depraved baby-killers. But how does that change the utter failure of –?

Baby-killers.

But how do you justify defending brutality, inequality, segregation, oppressi–?

They kill babies.

And it worked. It worked so remarkably well that within another decade or so, the disgraced moral pariahs who had so thoroughly shamed themselves by failing the great moral test of the Civil Rights movement had been rebranded as “values voters” — the repository and safeguard of our national morality.

The fantastic thing about this trick is that it worked even though everyone knows that abortion is not the same thing as “killing babies.” That’s part of why it worked. Others might respond by talking about the actual status and personhood of a zygote relative to that of …

See? The rest of that sentence is irrelevant because the subject has already been changed. We’re talking about abortion now, not justice. And this new conversation about this new subject will only be allowed to be discussed in terms of the polarizing caricature of baby-killing. This may be a wholly disingenuous and misleading framework for that conversation, but misleading was the goal here in the first place. This conversation was designed and intended to lead us away. It’s purpose was to change the subject."

Or to put it another way, DM25, you might say that evangelical Christians made a bargain with the devil: give us what we want, and we will give you everything. We will even go so far as to support a thrice-married, twice-divorced admitted sexual predator as President. We will support all of his cruellest and most horrible policies. There is nothing we won't do - just so long as you help us to get abortions outlawed.

They made a bargain with the devil. And they are keeping it.

timothyu · Apr 27, 2019

Isn't it interesting that the Reagan evangelical movement, no wait the political right, waited almost ten years before allowing the religious right to latch onto the abortion thing so that the remembrance of who legalized it had died down.

FireDragon76 · Apr 27, 2019

timothyu said:
Yes but it doesn't change the fact they also legalised it at Nixon's behest in the first place. One of the US's little ironies.

The Supreme Court is non-partisan, it had nothing to do with Nixon. At the time in the public there was also widespread sentiments that existing anti-abortion laws were hypocritical and wrong; families and women with money could obtain safe abortions but poor women could not.

My grandparents on my dad's side were all from Republican families that went back for almost a century, but they were outspoken in their support of Roe vs. Wade. It actually wasn't all that controversial at one time, except perhaps for Roman Catholics.

timothyu · Apr 27, 2019

Roe vs Wade -
Vote - 7 for 2 against

Warren E. Burger - R Presbyterian Nominated by Nixon

William O. Douglas - D Presbyterian Nominated by Roosevelt

William J. Brennan, Jr. - D Catholic Nominated by Eisenhower

Potter Stewart - R Episcopalian Nominated by Eisenhower

Byron White - D Episcopalian Nominated by Kennedy voted against

Thurgood Marshall - D Episcopalian Nominated by Johnson

Harry Blackmun - R Methodist Nominated by Nixon - authour of Roe vs Wade and "a passionate advocate for abortion rights"

Lewis F. Powell, Jr. - R Presbyterian Nominated by by Nixon

William Rehnquist - R Nominated by by Nixon voted against

FireDragon76 · Apr 27, 2019

InterestedAtheist said:
I think Fred Clark (progressive Christian blogger) has some good thoughts on this, so I'll let him explain it:

"Back in the 1970s, white evangelicalism was mired in the disgrace of having been epically, utterly, spectacularly wrong about the Civil Rights movement. They hadn’t just picked the wrong side in a political battle. It was far worse than that. By defending injustice, they had disgraced themselves, surrendered all claims of moral competence, and become disgraced pariahs.

They chose the wrong side about opposing gay rights, too. This has already seriously damaged them as a social movement. I don't see any new rabbits they can pull out of their hat, they've sort of played all the moral panic cards, so I expect they will simply double down on abortion. We are sort of seeing that, especially with the 2019 film Upnlanned, a masterpiece of propaganda that would make any Soviet commisar proud.

For several years, they flailed about, bewildered. White evangelicals had grown so accustomed to assuming their role as the spokespeople for morality that they weren’t quite able to understand how thoroughly they had surrendered any claim to that role.

Click to expand...

Evangelical fundamentalists were never that respectable as a moral authority before the double hitter of Billy Graham and Roe vs. Wade, they actually hit it off big-time with abortion, and allying with Catholics. It was a masterful strategy, actually, because to many people in the public at large, their basic worldview was repugnant.

I'm sure you've seen the early 1960's film, Inherit the Wind? Fundamentalist religion simply wasn't all that respectable in the 20th century, people understood implicitly it could be crass and mean-spirited, and went against the sense of social trust most Americans believed in. It took people like Billy Graham with his charisma and sincerity, and moral issues like abortion, to create an aura of serious moral deliberation and deep spirituality. They actually were somewhat succesful in turning things around, for a while, until they chose poorly again.

Shiloh Raven · Apr 27, 2019

timothyu said:
Isn't it interesting that the Reagan evangelical movement, no wait the political right, waited almost ten years before allowing the religious right to latch onto the abortion thing so that the remembrance of who legalized it had died down.

Speaking of the Religious Right, the following article has some intriguing history to share about it.

The Real Origins of the Religious Right

akaDaScribe · Apr 27, 2019

DM25 said:
Socialism isn't bad though. I would rather my tax money go back to me than on military spending. Public programs and spending on health care is not evil. Jesus is in support of this, rather than spending on bailing corporations out and nuclear weapons and other shady stuff... So democratic socialism isn't bad.

As for communism, if you mean no more rights for people and complete authority, then yeah that is bad. Same as fascism though, the left don't support that. My parents lived in communist Yugoslavia and despite Tito being a corrupt guy they said they enjoyed it and the system set up benefitied the people and it was good. I'm not up to date with the conspiracies and I don't know if communism is the end goal for the evil beast system. But my parents said communism worked for them, so older communist systems may have not been that evil. Most people in Yugoslavia were Christians, but either Eastern Orthodox or Catholic mostly.

I will put forth one argument against communism. People risked their lives and many died tried to escape communist countries. People risk their lives trying to in to republics.

In relation to socialism: The problem is that when you allow the government to take care of you like a nanny state, you become more and more dependent on the government until you can no longer take care of yourself. At that point, the government owns you on a whole different level.

The problem with our country is not capitalism, it's secularism. When people no longer act with a conscience the government ends up having to step in.

Companies are out of control because they no longer regulate themselves. The government is taking over charity because people do not feel a moral obligation to do it. The chasm between the rich and the poor is increasing and the middle class is dwindling because there is no conscience making people recognize when they have enough.

The solution is not to keep giving the government more power. The solution is to be disciplined enough to start holding companies accountable as a collective people. We don't have to choose between being compassion-less or being morally corrupt. We choose to pretend that it has to be this way.

FireDragon76 · Apr 27, 2019

timothyu said:
Roe vs Wade -
Vote - 7 for 2 against

Warren E. Burger - R Presbyterian Nominated by Nixon

William O. Douglas - D Presbyterian Nominated by Roosevelt

William J. Brennan, Jr. - D Catholic Nominated by Eisenhower

Potter Stewart - R Episcopalian Nominated by Eisenhower

Byron White - D Episcopalian Nominated by Kennedy voted against

Thurgood Marshall - D Episcopalian Nominated by Johnson

Harry Blackmun - R Methodist Nominated by Nixon - authour of Roe vs Wade and "a passionate advocate for abortion rights"

Lewis F. Powell, Jr. - R Presbyterian Nominated by by Nixon

William Rehnquist - R Nominated by by Nixon voted against

7 to 2 is hardly a close call. It represents a firm, but not unanimous, consensus, that mirrored the educated opinions of the public at large.

The representation of the court, religiously, was typical at the time for educated Americans. I don't think it factored into the decision.

DM25 · Apr 27, 2019

akaDaScribe said:
I will put forth one argument against communism. People risked their lives and many died tried to escape communist countries. People risk their lives trying to in to republics.

In relation to socialism: The problem is that when you allow the government to take care of you like a nanny state, you become more and more dependent on the government until you can no longer take care of yourself. At that point, the government owns you on a whole different level.

The problem with our country is not capitalism, it's secularism. When people no longer act with a conscience the government ends up having to step in.

Companies are out of control because they no longer regulate themselves. The government is taking over charity because people do not feel a moral obligation to do it. The chasm between the rich and the poor is increasing and the middle class is dwindling because there is no conscience making people recognize when they have enough.

The solution is not to keep giving the government more power. The solution is to be disciplined enough to start holding companies accountable as a collective people. We don't have to choose between being compassion-less or being morally corrupt. We choose to pretend that it has to be this way.

It's not about power at all. It's about the people. Socialism is for the people, not for the government. I'm sure the government doesn't like spending its money to go back to the people and would rather raise salaries for their public servants... So that common argument doesn't work. And a lot of what you write is pure assumption and emotion, like "being too reliant on the government and not yourself", etc. It's pure psychological speculation and emotion. People still have free will whether you have socialism or not and can choose to their own path while giving back to the needy through wealth distribution. Your argument is very common but it's all based on fear of what may happen and emotions and psychology rather than facts. You should consider the socialist policies and how they work, not make assumptions and using extreme examples of what it can lead to for the sake of being against it. Because I can use the same extreme examples for capitalism and how it can tarnish a civilization. But socialism as a system itself is something that would work well. It just needs to be implemented correctly. In countries like Sweden and Norway, social democracy works very well. We don't need to go to the extreme and claim it will lead to authoritarianism. Political leaders are the problem, not socialism itself.

akaDaScribe · Apr 27, 2019

DM25 said:
It's not about power at all. It's about the people. Socialism is for the people, not for the government. I'm sure the government doesn't like spending its money to go back to the people and would rather raise salaries for their public servants... So that common argument doesn't work. And a lot of what you write is pure assumption and emotion, like "being too reliant on the government and not yourself", etc. It's pure psychological speculation and emotion. People still have free will whether you have socialism or not and can choose to their own path while giving back to the needy through wealth distribution. Your argument is very common but it's all based on fear of what may happen and emotions and psychology rather than facts. You should consider the socialist policies and how they work, not make assumptions and using extreme examples of what it can lead to for the sake of being against it. Because I can use the same extreme examples for capitalism and how it can tarnish a civilization. But socialism as a system itself is something that would work well. It just needs to be implemented correctly. In countries like Sweden and Norway, social democracy works very well. We don't need to go to the extreme and claim it will lead to authoritarianism. Political leaders are the problem, not socialism itself.

I agree that the problem is not the system, but the fact that people are corruptible. A dictatorship can work with the right dictator.

But given that we are dealing with people, it is about power. Let's be real. Based on what I've seen, every socialist country is heavily steeped in secularism and imposes that world view upon it's society. Maybe it's because it's goal is to replace God with government.
Marxist–Leninist atheism - Wikipedia

Pommer · Apr 27, 2019

akaDaScribe said:
I agree that the problem is not the system, but the fact that people are corruptible. A dictatorship can work with the right dictator.

But given that we are dealing with people, it is about power. Let's be real. Based on what I've seen, every socialist country is heavily steeped in secularism and imposes that world view upon it's society. Maybe it's because it's goal is to replace God with government.
Marxist–Leninist atheism - Wikipedia

[Bolding mine]
“I am against socialism because it would be harder to be a Christian under such a system”?
So what?

akaDaScribe · Apr 27, 2019

Pommer said:
[Bolding mine]
“I am against socialism because it would be harder to be a Christian under such a system”?
So what?

I'm not sure why you are putting quotes around something as if that is what I said, but-

If you don't understand why I am opposed to a system that is out to destroy my religion and make the government my god...

I'm not really sure how to respond to that.

SoldierOfTheKing · Apr 27, 2019

timothyu said:
Capitalism plays on greed saying envy and work enough and you too can be a good little consumer and have all the toys while we amass the wealth. But capitalists need to draw attention away from that fact, so they take a word and redefine it to create an enemy because they can't use communism any more.

Such is the self serving world of man that since the Garden redefines what is good and bad to suit their own deeds. Talk about ungodly covetousness and greed in defending the ways contrary to God.

Take note the question I was answering. I'll be more specific. After World War II, international Communism had made itself a world power, one which was unprecedented not only in its bestial atrocities but also in its persecution of the Church. Many Christians were understandably concerned about it. However, organizing against it politically necessarily entailed working with the political Right.

Why are most Christians politically right wing?

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