No Stupid Questions

Fox News. Televangelists. Trump.

Religion can be a very positive tool to bring communities together and support one another, but capitalism means exploitation, and nothing's easier to exploit than blind faith.

The just-world hypothesis plays a big part.

Because "conservative" isn't an ideology, it's a mindset. It's based on the idea that the in-group is good, not because of what they believe but because of who they are. So because they are good, whatever they want is good. It does not matter if their wants are contradictory or hypocritical or irrational in any way. They define the parameters for what is worth preserving, and then anyone who wants to stop them is part of the out-group and therefore bad. The out-group is not bad because they hold bad positions. The out-group could change their positions, and they would still be bad becauae it is part of their identity.

Conservatives also do not require any justification for their wants, but having a religious justification is like catnip. Because of the conservative mindset, they have no problem picking and choosing the religious beliefs that support what they want while ignoring or attacking the ones that don't.

Because they only use the Bible to pretend to be more holy than everyone else. It's just a moral license, they don't actually believe in the teachings of Jesus. They want to be in a holy club where everyone on the outside is inferior.

Because they're generally religious in name only. To them, religion is a tool to be used to get ahead. Networking through your church, appealing to other religious people in order to get votes, etc... etc...

I think what leads one to hold onto their religion and to support the social status quo are the same things: Attachement to what is familiar and reassuring and rejection of what is new and scary. Conservatives often try to appropriate religion to appear as the side of comfy, reassuring tradition, and represent progressives as the side of scary disrupters.

In a term? Dominion mentality. Add a little master/servant hierarchy, a pinch of patriarchy and stir well.

I didn’t check all of the comments, but most of the ones I saw were really poor jokes or just plain wrong. The reason that religion is so tied into conservatism goes back to Nixon, and the attempts made by Roger Ailes and others, including Ronald Reagan, to make sure a right wing president could never be held accountable again. This included a meeting with Reagan and hundreds of pastors in which they literally trained the pastors on how to convert their congregations to the rights hateful rhetoric, a big part of which was the demonization of abortion and the lionization of “the free market”. They’ve since been exporting this hateful rhetoric around the world by force and through traditional missionary style missions.

An important thing to keep in mind is that the practice of religion changes over time alongside culture, and is itself a part of culture. The Christianity of people living in places like Judea and Anatolia in the 1st century CE differs from the Christianity of, say, the Teutonic (not up on my post-Roman ethnicities, so might not be using the right term) tribes of Western Europe in the 6th century. This again differs from the Christianity of indigenous peoples in the Americas post-Columbus. In all these cases, these people had pre-existing cultural and religious beliefs which Christianity syncretised with instead of wholly replacing.

The Bible has been used to endorse slavery as well as oppose it, to condone violence and warfare as well as serve as the basis for radical non-violence. It is not “univocal”, because the various people who wrote and compiled it had their own beliefs and perspectives.

The various sects of Christianity differ in their values, beliefs, and even canon literature, and that’s before you get into Christianity as cultural practice rather than strict religion. Like all religions, Christianity is wonderfully human, encompassing our wide range of idiosyncrasies and contradictions, and that even includes people who don’t read the damn book! So yes, you’re going to find commonly accepted “Christian” practices which seem to clearly contradict the doctrine, but the doctrine contradicts itself, and serves people just as much as people should ostensibly serve it. The conception of Christianity as a unified religion, with 1 canon and 1 accepted interpretation, has never been accurate.

FWIW Early Christians did practice communal living and sharing of property (the New Testament tells us as much), and you can still see these things in practice today, albeit rarely. I also wouldn’t use modern terms like socialism to describe that sort of thing, because the economic order and class structures which Socialism and Communism are a response to literally did not exist at the time.

Important to add that it's really just in the US that this tie exists between religious conservatives (especially evangelicals) and capitalism. In many other parts of the world, religious people are more leftwing, especially to take care of the weakest among us.

They do it because of capitalism's decentralized properties.

First, they fear a government having power over them. This can seem irrational, but they interpreted WW2 as 1.) proof that a government can be used to wipe out people it disagrees with, and 2.) that absolute sovereignty in the hands of man made institutions is a thread to god as the supreme sovereign.

The decentralization of capitalism, and democracy, gives them the ability to disconnect as much as possible from anything they dont agree with. This is why they talk about freedom while doing hateful things in the name of their lord. Theyre economically free (to be hateful).

A lot of this mentality really starts after WW2. First the war is won. Then they push to make America as christian as possible. About 50% of US citizens claimed to be christian in 1950, but it is 90% by the 1970's. In God We Trust is put on US money and added to the national anthem in the 50's. This is important because the US is starting to fight the cold war against atheistic communists. The power of capitalism becomes part of a global propaganda effort to demonstrate the weakness of the godless systems. The republicans align themselves with christianity, locking it in with Reagan's election in 1980, and now capitalism and christianity are intertwined and propagandized to the point of not resembling the original ideas anymore. Give that 44 years, and here we are.

On Christian Soverignty, written by an influential christian just after WW2 https://providencemag.com/2020/07/christian-view-sovereignty/

Because it's remarkably similar in form:

"each one takes care of himself and god takes care of all"

Vs

"Everybody pursues their own gain and the market takes care of everything"

PS: "the lord works in mysterious ways" Vs "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/306397/

Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" goes into how protestantism cradled capitalist growth. But I think it's a bit heavy handed to say folks support capitalist ideology. You don't really support ideology. The ideology is what supports capitalism or is capitalism itself. But Protestantism is generally has individualistic beliefs. No longer does the clergy intermediate relation to God. Protestants believe individuals have a personal and individual relation to god. This sense of individualism can overlap with capitalist mentalities of individual success and profit.

But I think your use of ideology is too vague and understanding of religion is too generalized. You really need to talk about particulars of specific religious beliefs and particulars of specific attitudes towards capitalism. There's not much to really comment on with such broad and vague brushstrokes.

Religion is not the goal of conservatives, it's a tool to preserve hierarchy in the society. Capitalism is another tool that achieves that.

The people that aren't wealthy but are conservative benefit from hierarchy enforced by religion. It ensures that they're not on the bottom of society - that place is intended for various minorities.

Hypocritical self interest I think. Many people who claim to be Christians don't understand or care about the teachings of Christ. Religion is used by these people more as a social boon than a means of philosophical/spiritual teachings.

Check out this comic strip 'the gospel of supply side Jesus' to understand the version of Christ they truly worship

https://imgur.com/gallery/bCqRp

Conservatism is based on ignorance. They don't even know what capitalism means.

This is about the Americas, yes? I believe its original roots was in Calvinism, that is, the brand of Christianity in the reformation era that was brought over to the Americas by early European settlers/colonisers as proposed by the theologian John Calvin. It's something about how God chose its people and gave them the grace of worldly wealth. Wealth is good because it comes from God, so it follows, that poverty is due to a lack of God's grace = immorality (laziness, lack of personal qualities, wickedness).

I think I read about this in a book about US American economy a couple of years ago, but I can't remember which book it was.

This is not a an easy answer. Part of it is Prosperity gospel. Basically what if god showed you who was righteous by making the righteous rich. Why are you not rich, because you are not righteous. It started in the early part of the 1900s and quickly moved to tevevalgelism, even back during the days of radio.

Combine that with a string believe in the great man theory of his troy. Something right wing people are more likely to strongly believe in. Add to that a need for a social hierarchy that clears say "These are the better and by divine right they should rules and these are the lesser to be ruled over" you have a powerful mix. God is at the most top point of a hierarchy and below must be the best people, the real great men who will shape history. How so I tell who these great men are? The rich, if they are righteous then god will reward them with riches.

Then add a very distinct American version of Christianity. If it the christian thing to do then America will do and if Amercia does then it must the christian thing to do. America is capitalist therefore it is christian to be a capitalist.

These circles of logic all feed into the one conclusion of hyper christian national capitalism.

Besides some of the other good points brought up here, I'd like to say that it's because communist countries typically were/are anti-religion, so it makes sense that religious leaders in capitalist countries would oppose any form of government that seeks to limit organized religion. So, they support capitalism because it's the opposite of communism.

Plain brainwashing. They're used to being coerced into believing stuff by fear mongering

I'd assume same reason most politicians are. In a capitalist society, those that pool the most money will tend to gain the most power and influence. So the churches that talk to the rich man and say "of course god is blessing you because you are such a good person" get more money, and thus more influence, than the churches that pay attention to the "It's harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven". "Succesful" religious leaders become the ones to teach the next generation of religious leaders. Causing more drift into the same idea.

Then of course the pro-corporate candidates also do really good virtue signaling. Because when the religious leaders do not want to focus on the Rich, they still need a bad guy to rally against, and since nobody needs the church to tell them murderers and thieves are bad... the church takes a more strong stand against things that are accepted by society that they can consider against their faith. (abortion, LGBT etc...)

Because capitalism helps enforce a hierarchy, and conservative L's love hierarchies. Religion is just another tool used for this since it generally preaches obedience with a consequence for not following the right "rules". Most religion has nuance to that aspect, but if you erase the nuance it's an effective tool for enforcing those hierarchies those people love so much.

I’d recommend checking out “Jesus and John Wayne” it’s a book that digs into a lot of these ideas.

Because conservatism is more important to them than religion, essentially.