Why do Christians tend to be conservatives?

[Mary7]

delivering a large voting-block to Republicans. It's been so effective that many conservative Christians can't distinguish between doctrine and policy.

That is what I keep saying. Politics and patriotism have been so mixed with Christianity that being 'American' has become more important than following Christ.

 

[Mary7]

It seems that the large majority of Christians are conservative. What is it about free markets, low taxes, minimal welfare, lax gun control, and strong crime policies that appeals so strongly to Christians? I'm not saying that Christians should be liberal– I'm only asking why those opinions are so specifically attractive to Christians.

I am a conservative Christian = spiritually.
I am more liberal politically, economically etc
2 separate things.
Having been a life long Republican, the only thing that I see GOP has going for it now is being anti abortion. Yet.. they are not really pro life because once a baby is born, they care nothing for it's survival.
I have decided there are more spiritual issues than just abortion (I am against it), so I will not be voting Republican next election.
Like Gov Kasich (only half way good one running) said. 'St Peter won't ask us if we shrunk the government, but did we take care of the poor'.

 

[dysert]

Social conservatism is not the Biblical position? Mind you, I'm not talking about fiscal conservatism.

Let's see, the Bible is:

1] Pro-Life

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, And before you were born I consecrated you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations." [Jeremiah 1:5]

"For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, And my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth; Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Your book were all written The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them." [Psalm 139:13-16]

"But when God, who had set me apart even from my mother's womb and called me through His grace, was pleased." [Galatians 1:15]

"Behold, children are a gift of the LORD, The fruit of the womb is a reward." [Psalm 127:3]
​

2] Anti-Gay Marriage

Matthew 19:4-5
Romans 1:18-32

1 Corinthians 6:9
​

Need I go on?

In the midst of all the noise, I just wanted to point the OP to the answer to their question.

 

[OldWiseGuy]

I am a conservative Christian = spiritually.
I am more liberal politically, economically etc
2 separate things.
Having been a life long Republican, the only thing that I see GOP has going for it now is being anti abortion. Yet.. they are not really pro life because once a baby is born, they care nothing for it's survival.
I have decided there are more spiritual issues than just abortion (I am against it), so I will not be voting Republican next election.
Like Gov Kasich (only half way good one running) said. 'St Peter won't ask us if we shrunk the government, but did we take care of the poor'.

Kasich is my choice. He is the first presidential candidate that I have ever contributed money to. If American passes him we have lost the opportunity for great leadership. And being the "my way or the highway" guy that I am if he isn't elected I will wash my hands of this country (again) until the next election.

 

[myownmynativeland]

It seems that the large majority of Christians are conservative. What is it about free markets, low taxes, minimal welfare, lax gun control, and strong crime policies that appeals so strongly to Christians? I'm not saying that Christians should be liberal– I'm only asking why those opinions are so specifically attractive to Christians.

Those Policies would appear to work best if as Christians believe- all humans from birth are imperfect creatures prone to Sin and Error. OTOH marxist progs (aka 'liberals') tote the idea that man is born a Blank Slate and can be written up Perfectly with just the right form of State and no interfering institutions (Church/Family/Private Associations) between the atomized individual and the All Knowing All Seeing All Caring All Powerful State.

 

[1watchman]

It seems that the large majority of Christians are conservative. What is it about free markets, low taxes, minimal welfare, lax gun control, and strong crime policies that appeals so strongly to Christians? I'm not saying that Christians should be liberal– I'm only asking why those opinions are so specifically attractive to Christians.

Conservatives are not perfect, but they hold to careful ways, rather than rushing ahead. I cannot agree with all the ideas some Conservatives promote to please self, but essentially they seek the good of the nation first, rather than try to please all the people all the time. If the nation does not survive, the people will lose in the end.

As one here has already stated: this country was founded on Conservative values and to be a God-fearing nation. The Liberals are generally progressives, and not found to be fundamental Bible believers; and they seek changes always to make life more comfortable, so want to indulge the flesh. Such liberal ways can only survive by taxing the people more and spending more to always feel comfortable. A sound balance is needed for both parties in this country, and seeking to see both sides, but knowing the difference between essentials and non-essential things.

 

[JackRT]

As one here has already stated: this country was founded on Conservative values

You cannot be a conservative and a rebel at the same time.

 

[NothingIsImpossible]

Personally labels ruin everything and cause more harm then good. Republican, democrat, conservative, liberal, black, pro-choice, pro-life, black, white....etc. After awhile its gets so annoying. I'm a christian human who doens't label himself if he doens't have to. I don't vote repub or demo or tea party or independent. I vote for whoever I think will be the best. Its that simple.

When I was growing up republicans and conservative went hand in hand. You knew that those people were usually God fearing christians (or at least close enough). But in todays world both sides sometimes act like the other side so everyeones turned into a republicrat. Aka they are fit on both sides at times.

 

[only a sojourner]

The tendency for white evangelical Christians in the United States to vote Republican and to take conservative positions on economic policy is cultural. (The historical experience of African American evangelicals has in turn led them to support the Democratic Party.) Aside from going to church on Sunday morning many American evangelicals are just as acquisitive, motivated to achieve financially, watch the same programs on television and share many of the the same cultural values as non-religious conservatives in America. The Christianity which was practiced in the first few centuries AD, particularly prior to Constantine, but afterwards as well was in many respects very different from what exists today. Christians were in the world but not of it, adhered to a morality severely at add odds with the prevailing cultural values and were willing to die in many cases for their faith during a time of testing and persecution. Early Christianity at least until Constantine was pacifist. There was a commitment to sacrifice and give to other's within the Christian body who were in need as was foreshadowed in Acts:2-5. Tithing wasn't practiced but instead sacrificial giving. Dying to pride and selfish ambition, a life of surrender to the cross, choosing the narrow path instead of the broad highway- these were the values of the early church.

 

[Spiribala]

It seems that the large majority of Christians are conservative. What is it about free markets, low taxes, minimal welfare, lax gun control, and strong crime policies that appeals so strongly to Christians? I'm not saying that Christians should be liberal– I'm only asking why those opinions are so specifically attractive to Christians.

Think of conservatism as an ideology rather than a group of loosely related interests. Conservatives don't need to be Christian, but Christians do I think, need to have some adherence to conservative principles. As mentioned on here, Christians believe certain things very deeply. They strongly believe that the events on Good Friday and Easter are part of the nature of reality. Jesus is God. Jesus sacrificed for us, died for us and rose again and continues to love us, and the morality he taught and preached is just as valid for us today as it was at any other time. Christians therefore probably do think about previous generations and what they have to teach us, as well as future generations and what we would like to pass down differently than people of a liberal or progressive viewpoint.

People of a liberal or progressive viewpoint are more likely to look at the past and see less of value and more of the power inequalities that are have arose due to outdated traditions and hierarchies. Their is certainly truth to this view, but I do think many Christians are right to be wary about it. Jesus too would have denounced wicked traditions. But when he did, it wasn't due to the fact they were traditional or had a specific notion or morality per se. It was because they had replaced God's purpose for humanity with man's traditions. Liberals and progressives often do not make a distinction between the two - they generally reject both. They generally replace it with a view that prizes a more personal, subjective vision of morality. So while Christians and conservatism can sometimes be an awkward (and an even more awkward match with libertarianism) match, Christianity is right, I think, to see liberals and progressives as actively hostile to it's worldview.

 

[Lance & Rite]

Christianity is sort of like being "spiritually liberal" in a conservative context. If there's no conservative context, Christianity becomes almost completely esoteric. In Christ's time there was no economic liberalism, socialism etc.

For example, how do you reconcile the parable about the master with the good and bad servants (also called the deserving and undeserving poor or servants) with a call to charity when there's arguably no need for freely given charity anymore? Note that the bad servant in that parable is basically a fiscal liberal, someone who refuses to work because his master is supposedly bad. Or does it make sense to say that people should give to charity freely and without coercion when all needs can (supposedly) be met through coerced "charity"?

So basically, what we call conservatism is the context and presumption of Christianity.

 

[Albion]

The Christianity which was practiced in the first few centuries AD, particularly prior to Constantine, but afterwards as well was in many respects very different from what exists today. Christians were in the world but not of it, adhered to a morality severely at add odds with the prevailing cultural values and were willing to die in many cases for their faith during a time of testing and persecution.

So...conservative, then.

Early Christianity at least until Constantine was pacifist.

But only because the government wasn't. When the government became Christian, the Christian community ceased to be pacifistic.

There was a commitment to sacrifice and give to other's within the Christian body who were in need as was foreshadowed in Acts:2-5. Tithing wasn't practiced but instead sacrificial giving. Dying to pride and selfish ambition, a life of surrender to the cross, choosing the narrow path instead of the broad highway- these were the values of the early church.

...which again sounds to me more like a case being made for Christians as conservative rather than the opposite.

 

[Lance & Rite]

It's ahistorical to lump all early Christians together. Christianity wasn't canonized until hundreds of years after its inception. The bible is not strictly pacifist: Christ physically drove the Pharisees out of the temple, had his followers give him an armed escort into Jerusalem (which was later emulated by the crusaders) and discussed defense of the home uncritically. There might be other examples I'm forgetting. What's clear is that seeking wealth for wealth's sake and responding to provocation is not Christian and those two things alone prevent most common manifestations of violence.

 

[GoldenBoy89]

I always thought Christianity, true Christianity, as I understand it... was apolitical in nature.

I don't know... Something about Jesus saying to give up Earthly possessions, to give to Caesar what is rightly his, and give all to the poor and focus on the riches in heaven that await you... Doesn't sound like he's too concerned with how this world is run.

 

[daleksteve]

[QUOTE

As for the social conservative aspects - that's simply the Biblical position.[/QUOTE]

Nonsense...

Jesus stood against everything that conservatism stands for. A true christian is liberal and socialist because that what Jesus teaches.

 

[daleksteve]

I think the Fundamentalist movement in the 20th Century really did a lot of damage to Christianity as a whole.

Fundamentalist right wing Christianity nearly destroyed my faith. I got so fed up every Sunday attending a church full of gay bashing, women hating/oppressing and poor bashing zealots that i had to rethink weather i wanted to be a follower of Christ.

i decided to reject Conservative Christianity and live by the values of Jesus in the bible.

It has made me a better human being and a better christian.

 

[JackRT]

I decided to reject Conservative Christianity and live by the values of Jesus in the bible.

I echo your thoughts. The rise of Christian fundamentalism in the United States during the 20th century is detailed in the essay below:

The Rise of Fundamentalism --- The Five Fundamentals

I remember well an experience I had as a young lad in the late 1930's in the South's Bible Belt when I first heard about evolution. A neighbor was visiting my mother and they were sharing "a dope" (the colloquial name for Coca-Cola in that day, a carry-over from the days when that soft drink contained both caffeine and cocaine). This lady said in her homespun, non-sophisticated way, "I am not descended from no monkey." This conversation took place just 79 years after the publication of Charles Darwin's 1859 masterpiece, "The Origin of Species through Natural Selection." So in the space of just 79 years his thought had trickled down to the rural, working class poor in North Carolina. In the intellectual community Darwin's thought was engaged much earlier. Less than a year after Darwin's book came out, Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce met Darwin defender T. H. Huxley in public debate in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on June 30th, 1860. Wilberforce, feeling that Darwin was attacking both the inerrant Bible and God, employed ridicule that night. He inquired of Mr. Huxley as to whether it was on his mother's side or his father's side that he was descended from an ape. Ridicule is, however, never an effective weapon against truth and the primary result of this debate was to give Darwin's thought a huge boost in the public arena, guaranteeing that his ideas would inevitably trickle down into the common mind. Trickle down they did.

By 1909 Protestant clergy associated with the ultra-conservative Princeton Theological Seminary had taken up the cudgel against Darwin in defense of what they called "traditional Christianity." To them Darwin was only the latest in a long line of challenges that these devout, but not deeply learned men, felt was eroding "Christian Truth." They also felt a need to refute the rising tide of biblical criticism about which I wrote last week, that had begun to infiltrate America from Europe. It included the New Testament work of David Frederick Strauss in 1834 that challenged the idea that all the details of the gospels were historical and the later Old Testament scholarship of Karl Graf and Julius Wellhausen that obliterated the traditional claim for the Mosaic authorship of the Torah. These Princeton clergy also felt the threat to the dominant Protestant faith in America from the rising tide of Roman Catholic immigrants from Ireland and southern Europe, which began to temper the overwhelmingly Protestant nature of America's religious life. This newly arriving Catholic population also diminished the power of this nation's aristocracy as the labor movement placed a new emphasis on building a just society for working people. These clergy interpreted all of these changes as secular and humanistic and therefore anti-Christian. New religious groups were also arising in America like Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science movement and the Mormonism of Joseph Smith, which they viewed with great suspicion, calling them "cults," and regarding each with fear and even disgust.

Mainline Christian theologians, however, who taught in the great academic centers of this nation like Union Theological Seminary in New York, Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Yale Divinity School in New Haven and the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, busied themselves with the task of incorporating these new learnings into Christianity. In the process they gained for themselves the reputation of being "religious liberals who were no longer bound by core Christian principles." As a direct counter point these conservative leaders became even more aggressive in defending the literal truth of the Bible and especially those claims made for the literal accuracy of such biblical accounts as the Virgin Birth, the miracle stories and the physical resuscitation of Jesus' body as the only allowable understanding of the resurrection. In their minds they were engaged in a fight for God against the infidels. Dubbing themselves the defenders of "Orthodoxy," these self-appointed gendarmes for the Lord organized to fight this growing menace to "revealed truth." Their weapon employed in this war was the publication of a series of tracts designed to spell out in clear detail the irreducible core beliefs of "Orthodox Christianity." Their seemingly quixotic fight caught the attention of conservative, wealthy oil executives in California, who bankrolled this effort. For years 300,000 tracts were mailed each week to church workers in America and around the world. Later the company for which these oil executives worked, the Union Oil Company of California (or Unocal today) financed the further publication of these tracts into permanent books to maximize their impact. It worked.

During the 1920's with pressure arising from this huge public relations campaign, the decision-making bodies of America's main line churches were forced to deal with a growing tension between those supporting this tractarian movement, who came to be called "fundamentalists," and those opposed who came to be called "modernists." At the center of these debates was the issue of the inerrancy of scripture. Clergy scholars in the early 20th century like Harry Emerson Fosdick were vigorously attacked as heretics for denying scriptural inerrancy. Fundamentalist clergy, who at that time constituted the majority of the leadership of the Christian Church, also opposed such liberalizing political measures as giving the ballot to women and women's emancipation. They also, interestingly enough, defended segregation, capital punishment and "traditional morality" (which did not include "flappers" doing the "Charleston"). Their authority in each confrontation was the literal Bible, "the word of God."

Great battles were fought between these two perspectives in the major Christian denominations in the first three decades of the 20th century. Finally the 'modernists,' who dominated the faculties in the centers of Christian learning, slowly but surely were successful in wresting control from the fundamentalists in most of the mainline churches, but that victory would prove to be very costly. In my Church the battle ebbed and flowed. In 1924 the Rt. Rev. William M. Brown, retired Bishop of Arkansas, became the only Episcopal bishop ever to be tried and convicted for heresy. His crime was that he embraced evolution, but people whispered that he was also a communist. At the same time, the Episcopal Church led by such stalwart scholars as Walter Russell Bowie, who served as editor of an influential journal, "The Southern Churchman," defeated attempts to require belief in a literal interpretation of the creeds on pain of excommunication. Other churches experienced similar stress and made similar decisions.

Driven by these defeats, fundamentalism retreated from mainline churches into rural and small town America, especially but not exclusively in the South, and developed denominations that featured congregational control with little loyalty to a national headquarters. Building their own seminaries the more sophisticated of them sought to escape the image of fundamentalism, which was in some circles identified with closed-minded ignorance, by calling themselves 'evangelicals.' Evangelical Christianity thrived in this relatively unchallenged rural or Southern atmosphere and began to dominate those regions. They built seminaries committed to teaching "fundamental Christian truth" unencumbered by either the intellectual revolution of the last 500 years or the rise in critical biblical scholarship during the last 200 years. As the main line churches became more open to new interpretations and therefore, "fuzzier" on core doctrines, the fundamentalist movement grew more isolated, more strident in its proclamations and even more anti-intellectual. This division was hidden politically for years, in part because at least in the South the tensions over the civil war and issues of race had made the South staunchly Democratic. After all the Republican Party was identified with Abraham Lincoln, Civil War defeat and "carpet baggers." That, however, began to change when the Democrats nominated a northern Roman Catholic as its presidential candidate in 1928. Later Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces and defeated the southern wing of his party, led by Strom Thurmond, in the election of 1948. Next the Supreme Court, filled with appointees from the Democratic Roosevelt-Truman era, forced the desegregation of public schools in the 1950's, and then Democrat Lyndon Johnson cajoled Congress into passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Racism has always been an ally of fundamentalism. Yesterday's victims of the literal Bible were blacks, while today's victims are homosexuals. Fundamentalism always has a victim.

The foundation of this Southern-based right wing, fundamentalist Protestant religion had been laid out between 1909 and 1915 in those Unocal distributed tracts. In time these core principles were reduced to five in number and they came to be called "The Fundamentals."

1. The Bible is the literal, inerrant Word of God.

2. Jesus was literally born of a virgin.

3. Substitutionary atonement is the meaning of Jesus' death on the cross.

4. The miracles of the New Testament are real. They literally happened.

5. Jesus rose physically from the grave, ascended literally into the sky and would return someday in the "second coming."

The wording of these "fundamentals" varied slightly from document to document, but the battle lines were clear. The Northern Presbyterian Church adopted these fundamentals as defining what was required to call oneself a Christian at a national gathering as early as 1910. That vote did not end the debate, however, for this church had to reaffirm them again in 1916 and in 1923.

One cannot understand present day church tensions without being aware of these roots. Every major church dispute today rises out of a conflict created when new learning calls traditional religious convictions into question. Evolution vs. Intelligent Design; birth control, abortion and women's equality; homosexuality and the Bible, all finally come down to a battle in the churches between expanding knowledge and these five core principles. Critics of every new church initiative claim that in their opposition to "modernism" they are supporting "the clear teaching of the Word of God" or fighting a "godless humanism." It is time to expose those fundamentals for what they are.

--- John Shelby Spong

 

[daleksteve]

I always thought Christianity, true Christianity, as I understand it... was apolitical in nature.

Should always be careful when mixing politics with religion as it can lead to some very nasty things.

The one thing we don't want is a right wing fundermentalist christian state otherwise we will end up locking up and executing gay people, locking up women for having abortions and other crazy and nasty stuff while justifying all this with the bible.

 

[daleksteve]

I echo your thoughts. The rise of Christian fundamentalism in the United States during the 20th century is detailed in the essay below:

I live in the UK and Christianity has not become quite as fundermental yet as it is in the united States by its rapidly heading in that direction.

 

[JackRT]

I live in the UK and Christianity has not become quite as fundermental yet as it is in the united States by its rapidly heading in that direction.

We have largely avoided it in Canada too.