[Disclaimer] - I am not an American and I consider myself atheist, I am Caucasian and born in a pre-dominantly Christian country.
Based on my limited knowledge of Christianity, it is all about social justice, compassion and peace.
And I was always wondering how come Republicans are perceiving themselves as devout Christians while the political party they support is openly opposing those virtues and if this doesn’t make them hypocrites?
For them the mortal enemy are the lefties who are all about social justice, helping the vulnerable and the not so fortunate and peace.
Christianity sounds to me a lot more like socialist utopia.
Control and conformity. Pseudo-morality.
The control is pretty standard stuff that goes with the authoritarian nature of religion. They place a person in charge who, like the deity, has all the answers and solves all the problems, so long as you believe and support them unquestioningly. If you’re not smart enough to sort out the system that you’ve been told is deliberately complicated and “rigged” you just listen to the Big Man and he’ll sort it all out for you.
Conformity is making the in-group and out-groups. The in-group demands loyalty and support. The out-groups are anyone else you want them to be. Immigrants. Minorities. Other religious groups. Political opponents. It’s ridiculously blatant in US republicans where even if their wives or themselves are personally insulted by their leader they still support and vote for the group. You must conform. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. Very binary thought.
Religion offers the moral angle as well. Despite American Christians, particularly evangelicals, claiming to support Christian ideals they objectively and subjectively do not. The list is too long to process here, but basic greed, hatred, violence, and all the rest of what most of us would consider anti-Christian values are at the forefront of the more outspoken religious Right. Yet they’ve been raised and told that the “godless Left” have no morals, if you’re not religious you can’t have morals, and whatever other tripe that allows them to accomplish the mental gymnastics they go through to claim moral superiority while doing things like making sure migrants drown in rivers trying to cross illegally into the US.
The hypocrisy and mental gymnastics engaged in by the American Right in many facets of their workings, not just their feigned religion, is mind-boggling. They’ve gone so far past the available superlatives describing their hypocrisy and greed that you just have to throw up your hands in disgust and walk away before it drives you crazy.