What makes conservative christians conservative?

My guess is that what makes conservative Christians conservative is that they interpret their religion as requiring a Strict Father model of the family and Strict Father morality. The God As Father metaphor attributes to God both authority and nurturance. But there are various possibilities for how authority and nurturance can go together. In the Nurturant Parent model, the child's obedience to the parents' authority is a consequence of the parents' proper nurturance. In the Strict Father model, the reverse is true: authority comes first. First and foremost, the child must obey and not challenge the strict father's authority; to the obedient child, nurturance then comes as a proper reward (see References, B3; Dobson, 1992, pp. 20-22).

One's relation to God can be interpreted in either way. On the Nurturant Parent interpretation, you accept God's authority because of his original and continuing nurturance. On the Strict Father interpretation, God is seen as setting the rules and demanding authority; if you obey, you get nurturance. The difference is one of priorities, and, as we have seen, that is an all-important difference.

To place that difference in perspective, I will have to give a schematic account of certain aspects of conservative Christianity, using the metaphor system discussed throughout this work. To do this without anything extraneous clouding the picture, I will have to give the barest of bare skeletons of the religion. I ask your indulgence for my oversimplification, which will of necessity sound like the text of a comic book called, "Christ for Beginners."

I, of course, assume that there are a great many variations on this model, just as there are variations on Strict Father morality and conservative politics (see Chapter 17). Moreover, I realize that one could have a Nurturant Parent model of the family and a Strict Father model of religion, or the converse. What I am describing here are the maximally coherent ideologically pure positions.

Christianity in general associates the nurturant aspect of God with Christ. Christianity works by a moral accounting system inherited from Judaism. Immoral deeds are debits; moral deeds are credits. By moral arithmetic (see Chapter 4), receiving something of negative value (say, suffering) is equivalent to giving away something of positive value (as in paying for something). Suffering is thus a way of paying for your sins: suffering builds up moral credit, just as doing good does. If you have a big enough positive balance of moral credit when you die, you go to heaven; if you have a negative balance, you go to hell. These general notions are shared by most forms of Christianity. At this point, let's look specifically at Strict Father Christianity.

Strict Father Christianity

Being made of flesh, human beings are morally weak. This inherent moral weakness is called Original Sin, as exemplified by the moral weakness of Adam and Eve, which resulted in God's taking everlasting life away from human beings. Because of their moral weakness, everybody starts off with a large moral debit – big enough to guarantee that ordinary people would go to hell.

But God loved human beings so much, he wanted to offer them a way out of this horrible fate which arose from their inherently sinful bodily nature. So he made his only Son a human being who was free of sin, and hence had no moral debits. Then God allowed his Son to be crucified, and in so doing had him suffer more than the total possible suffering of all mankind forever. Through all this suffering, Jesus built up a huge amount of moral credit, much more than enough to pay for the Original Sin of all mankind. Through his crucifixion, Jesus paid off mankind's Original Sin debit. This made it possible for human beings to go to heaven if they were righteous enough.

But there were those human beings who, over the course of their lives, had sinned so much and run up such a moral debit that they were destined for hell no matter what they did for the rest of their lives. But Jesus loved all people so much, including those sinners, that he suffered on the cross enough to pay off their moral debts too. This was an enormous act of love, but not unconditional love. There had to be a condition. It would have been wrong to let wrongdoers get into heaven without doing anything at all to get there. That would have undone the whole point of the moral accounting system, which is to get people to follow God's commandments.

So Jesus offered sinners a deal. If they would truly repent, accept him as their Lord, join his church, and follow his teachings for the rest of their lives, he would pay off their moral debts with the moral credit from his crucifixion and wipe their slate clean. It would be as if they were born again, with no moral debits. That way he would save them from hell; he would be their Savior. The contract was made available to all sinners at any time.

As their part of the deal, the former sinners would have to accept the authority of God and follow his commandments for the rest of their lives. This would be hard. It would require a character one did not have before being born again, a new moral essence – not being rotten to the core, but being rock solid.

To acquire this moral essence, you have to take Jesus into your heart. The heart is the metaphorical locus of moral essence. You have to take the essence of Jesus into you and make it your essence. That is not as easy as it may sound. (It requires building up moral strength through self-discipline and self-denial. It requires obeying moral authority, the moral authority of God, as revealed through the Bible and his church. It requires staying within moral boundaries and not deviating from the path of righteousness. And it requires remaining pure and upright. Jesus' offer was one of love – not unconditional love, but tough love.

Unfortunately, there is a large loophole in this contract. Allowing people to repent at any time and still go to heaven is an incentive to keep sinning as long as possible. Then, at the last minute, you can repent and go to heaven. That's not an incentive to be good; it makes sinning pay off up until you're about to die.

This loophole is closed by the Last Judgment, the idea that, at some time which human beings cannot predict, the world will come to an end and the moral books will be closed. At that instant, you will be judged, and if you are a sinner – if you have more debits than credits at that instant – you will be forever damned to hell. Because the Last Judgment could happen at any time, the only way to guarantee that you will be able to take advantage of the deal Jesus has offered is to accept it immediately. If you truly repent now, you guarantee yourself a spot in heaven. On Judgment Day, Jesus will be your Redeemer: He will pay off your old moral debts and redeem you from the clutches of the Devil. '