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.