Why the Right tends to be more religious than the Left, and what it says about their politics.

I have been thinking for a long about the various and sundry reasons that the political right is so much more religious than the left. Jesus was clearly a centrist if not squarely on the left. Even if there is a case to made for Jesus as a conservative, there is still very clearly a mixed message at best. So what is it that makes them claim such stronger ties to religion than liberals. I think that the answer comes down to faith.

After much thought on the matter I think that it isn't in fact that being conservative makes them religious, I think that they are right in as much as, being religious makes them conservative. To be more specific, the qualities that are reinforced by religion are the same qualities that lend themselves to a conservative ideology. Religious belief is essentially predicated on certain notions. A religious person must be able to rely on faith alone for truth. Evidence and fact are the inherent enemies of faith. To believe in a deeper force behind this life on Earth you must first create a cognitive dissidence between that which is observed and that which you believe. Religion sprang from our attempts to find answers to our natural inquisitiveness. We were trying to explain the world. Now though, to maintain a strict literal belief in the tenants of most religions, you must crush that inquisitive impulse. So many questions of where we came from and how and why have already been answered that you must tamp down the desire for knowledge so you can ignore the answers to the questions that we all ask.

Either that or create a work around.

Now how does this serve a conservative world view. Well from the get go the word conservative indicates an oppositional stance to things which are new. This means that the search for knowledge must be quelled. That search means new things, answers to the unanswered and then new questions to be answered in their turn. It is also (to those who take the Bible and literal truth) the direct byproduct of the original sin. People who don't seek knowledge find it easy to be in lock step with each other because they never have cause to question whether they are right or wrong.

Abandoning the search for knowledge leads one to rely on faith for their world view. Thus you don't need to look at the overwhelming evidence that societies with a smaller wealth gap do better. You can ignore essentially unanimous climactic data and assume that your passing observations of the weather are enough to tell you what is going on in the atmosphere. You can ignore studies that show the benefits of limited population growth because God will stop you breeding when it's time. You can look at the failures of austerity as a curative measure and still preach it and you can see the faults of the past as lost strengths. You can look at a country that is acting in it's own defense and in a manner that your country does and call it an aggressor.

Cognitive dissidence is the key to a fundamentalist world view. You have to be totally devoted to the idea that you know the truth in order ignore all of the other truths out there. This is a hallmark of conservative thought because as the name suggests, it assume that whatever has been before is inherently worth saving.