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I asked in the Politics section but no one in there really understand the question - they just seem to feel insulted and yell their mantras through cyberspace. I've noticed that even though the Tea Party started out as a libertarian movement it's now full of Christian nuts. Why do conservative politics and Christianity go hand-in-hand in America? What's the history here?
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Christianity was created as a form of government. They try to use their religion to gain power and it was worked out very well for them all through out their history.
This started with the catholic church and persists to this day. Even in nations that were founded on secularism and tolerance.....
It's all about power, and religion is a very good way to get the masses to rally to your cause.
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I think that it had a lot to do with the "family values" movement that developed in the 80's under Reagan and the push for the GOP to expand its base and distinguish itself from the Democrats who had been largely perceived to have been taken over by progressives and moral relativists. There was definitely a conscious push by the GOP to frame itself as the "values" party, as in Christian values.
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It's annoying to me too because I'm a conservative atheist.
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the government got into the religion and moral business by advocating abortion and gay marriage and removing prayer from school over the outrage from a handful of atheists along with other issues---killing the infirm (Terry Schiavo) etc.
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Ever heard the phrase, Religion is the opiate of the masses? Well in North America that opiate is Christianity. Just like in Pakistan it's Islam. Always the elites use some over-simplified caricature of a popular religion to appeal to the people from whom they want to extract wealth, in one form or another.
And do you think the people in charge adhere to any religion themselves?
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There's a common idea (an incorrect idea) that religion and morality are mutually exclusive. Conservative politicians have seized this as an opportunity to garner support from religious citizens. They make an effort to appear to be strongly religious (their actions tend to be evidence of the opposite) in order to give the impression that they are the candidate with the better morals. It's that simple, really. That's why voting based on religion is unwise. It's something that's very easy to fake. I'm not saying that politicians who claim to be religious aren't. I'm just saying that those who try to make themselves look religious don't tend to be as religious as they would have you believe. For the most part, they're just greedy.
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Religion has always been a political and government tool. It is used to control people and keep them in line and also to keep certain people in power. Those in power do and always have used religion to exploit the average Joe by playing on their fear and curiosity about the unknown.
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It's all about power and money. People who adhere to rigid belief systems are easy marks for opportunistic politicians (civil and religious). These folks use emotion in place of reason, are terribly insecure about any questioning of their faith (which they view as an attack), and are very "cause-oriented" in the sense they are consumate joiners and are fanatically obedient to their cause. It isn't just Christian supremacists that this pertains to. This includes the militant wings of Islam, Hindusim, Judaism, and yes, even Buddhism.
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Easy. Guy named Karl Rove. He noticed this large voting block that had no allegiance to either party, but did have a strong activist agenda. He stuck items from their agenda on the Republican party platform. It earned enough swing vote to win the 2000 and 2004 elections for Bush.
There was a time when mainstream religious in America often voted Democratic, because the social agenda of Democratic politics fit better with Christian charity. Libertarians often voted Democratic too, because Democratic politics were about giving individuals more liberty and more opportunity. That began to change in 1968 when Richard Nixon won on a platform of 'law and order' -- using the idea that the 'joy, love and peace' movement of the 60's had gone too far. (Well, it had; but then it was a backlash to the excessive anti-communist conservatism of the 50s). Then we had the economic crisis of the 70s and the regulation crises of the 80s....
Nowadays every item on the Democratic social agenda is met by Republicans with the twin accusations 'tax and spend' and 'big government', and every item concerning more individual liberty, opportunity and diversity is met with 'anti-terrorism' or 'erosion of the family'. Since the Christian right puts no stress on charity -- because we aren't saved by works -- they see Democratic liberalism as a threat to moral values. Libertarians, meanwhile, ally to Republicans because the Republicans keep chanting 'small government', which is what Libertarians want to hear. But they need to open their eyes as well as their ears. When a Republican says 'small government' he means 'less tax and less regulation for big business' and not anything on the Libertarian agenda.
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Back in 1973 the supreme court ruled that the constitution gave women the right to abortion. On the other side we had conservatives, many who were Christians, who understood the abortion was the murder of an unborn child. At the same time the country was undergoing quite a moral upheaval. Sexual mores were being loosened and our public schools were being used by liberals to indoctrinate children in sex education that was being taught without any moral guidelines. Many parents viewed this as a sexual how to session for their children. Prior to all of this, prayer was banned from the public schools in 1964. About the late 70's the gay agenda started to gather steam and they began to demand acceptance of their lifestyle by our society. It reached a point where people of faith and moral conviction felt like the new immorality was being forced upon them and their children against their will.
In the mid seventies a Christian philosopher by the name of Francis Schaeffer began writing books and lecturing on campuses. His books included "Death in the City", "The God Who is There", "Escape From Reason", "He is There and He is Not Silent", "Whatever Happened to the Human Race", "How Should We Then Live?", and "A Christian Manifesto". A very articulate writer and speaker, he spoke about how western culture was being torn loose from it's Christian moorings and was drifting into secular humanism, a belief that puts man at the center of all things rather than God. Abortion and a break down in morality were merely symptoms of this philosophical shift.
Men such as Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and Pat Robertson of the 700 club, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, and James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, began to echo these sentiments and mobilized foot soldiers from the "silent majority", consisting of conservative Christians, in order to have their moral views represented in the public square rather than just allowing liberals to run roughshod over the values that made America great.
Unfortunately, over time these moral crusades became too closely aligned with the republican party politics, mainly because the democratic party was more interested in catering to the special interest groups for abortion and gay rights rather than taking a stand for protecting life and moral values. Thus being Christian became synonymous with being a republican, and the gospel message was needlessly politicized.
