It all makes sense when you realize that religion doesn’t inform their culture and politics, their culture and politics informs their religion.
The Christ of the Bible tells them things they don’t want to hear so they make up a new theology that does. That’s how you get people who claim to be adherents to the religion of radical love arguing that empathy is bad.
So may I infer from your use of the word ‘inform’ an intention to imply that their political theology, if I may paint it as such, takes precedence over their religious theology and that to accomplish such a feat, it is their religious theology that has to give?
But as pointed out above, religious belief is the absolute truth that itself demands first place, that we have no other gods before us or so at least the Abrahamic religions teach, I think.
So the question for me becomes, since if this is what you are saying then I certainly agree, what on earth could compel such a willingness to live in such a massive state of hypocrisy. How does one go about setting aside the absolute Word of God for a secular belief, that by doing so condemns them to hell. Such a feat, it seems to me could only be accomplished by massive lack of self awareness and ignorance of facts.
And all of that is exactly what you get if religious conservatism were another manifestation of self hate, a fear of truth that based on the fear of feeling guilt and shame, all feelings originating in being made to experience how you are treated if you are worthless.
Your words lead me to conclude, then, that what makes religious conservatives what they are is that the religious values they absorbed, actually the paucity of them, they don’t really know what their religion teaches despite believing they do, and the fact they have suffered too much pain to willingly take on more via rely reflection, all of which leaves as their only way out, the herd mentality of conformity that requires an us and an evil them to sustain.
I think a profound capacity for hypocrisy requires the experience of pain so profound that only denial and massive repression of remembrance of it allow a child to survive.
What we have in my opinion is a system the finds efficiency by fueling that kind of mental illness. Let’s take all these greedy for self affirmation, worthless feeling individuals and set them against each other in a new war to survive, and let’s make sure that without money, the symbol of success, they will definitely die. Once we do that endless misery will be insured and the system will self perpetuate as nobody will risk loss for the sake of change, especially the ones with power and wealth at the top, thase with the least empathy as the price of entry.