The question asked in the title of this article has been addressed before. In particular, The Witness: A Black Christian Collective tried to answer that question regarding white Evangelicals. And their answer provided some helpful insights (click here for the article). Their answer revolves around individual responsibility and assigning the cause for our problems on broken relationships, especially our corrupted relationship with God. And thus the more the government steps in to help people, especially the vulnerable, the more it is seen as a denial of those core beliefs.
Now the above summary of the article from The Witness does not do enough justice to the article and so I suggest that everyone should read the article. However, there is more to the alignment of religiously conservative Christians, especially white Evangelicals, with conservative politics and ideology than mentioned in the article. And that commonality has to do with the attributes of the 'conservative' label itself.
Now we should first note that conservatism is relative to the context of its immediate location. What was conservative in the old Soviet Union is still considered to be liberal in the US. And thus, we will narrow this discussion to the US.
Political and ideological conservatism seeks to maintain tradition and the status quo to the extent that the status quo is built on accepted traditions. It resists change especially when change is revolutionary and experimental (click here). Here conservatives exist on a continuum in terms of how much they rely on the past for their understanding of today's world. The more rigid a conservative is in resisting change, the more that conservative exclusively looks at the past in terms of understanding and addressing issues in the present.
The conservative reaction to the Parkland student's gun control activism serve as an example of how conservatives depend on the past. While the experiences of those student with a mass shooting prompted them to ask for something new, new gun control measures, conservatives balked at their demands Why? It was because, according to many conservatives, the problem of mass shootings was not caused by a failure of current gun control laws and the 2nd Amendment. The problem was caused by people rejecting the values that served our ancestors so well. Thus, the conservative solution to the problem of mass shootings did not even include any introduction to any interim gun control laws while we wait for societal values to change. Instead, conservatives demanded that enforcement of current gun control laws be enforced and that society changes its values while rejected any changes in our gun control laws.
Another example of how conservatives look to the past to understand and respond to the present can be seen in how many religiously conservative Christians view Socialism and Marxism. R. Scott Clark, in his most recent article on Marx and Marxists, writes about today's Marxists solely through the lens of what Marx wrote and nations like the Soviet Union practiced. He didn't account for variations and some disagreements that followers of Marx have shown over the years or that many Socialists vehemently disagreed with Lenin's politics (click here for a Socialist's disagreement with Lenin) or Stalin's rule over Russia (see Gorbachev's comments on Stalin in his book, The New Russia). Instead, he presents Marxists as a monolithic group who have never developed from the time when Marx wrote (click here for his article and there and there again for additional blurbs by Clark).
Thus, conservatives tend to live on one end of a continuum where they look solely to the past for understanding the present and addressing its problems. The more that political and ideological conservatives look solely to the past for living in today's world, the more resistant they are to even listening to or considering to try anything new. For these conservatives, their reverence for our nation's Founding Fathers prevents them from listening to anything new and thus causes them to see all of our problems as they view how our Founding Fathers would have interpreted our problems.
Now we come to white, religiously conservative Christians in America. Our belief that the Scriptures are complete for telling us how we should live makes us lean to treating the Old Testament prophets and New Testament Apostles as political and ideological conservative reacted to the Founding Fathers. And because we tend to believe that our nation was founded on Biblical principles, the reverence we have toward the Biblical writers when it comes to understanding life and our relationship with God is then extended to our nation's Founding Fathers in terms of what we need for a healthy political system. Here we should note that there is a certain level of self-exaltation with the view that our nation was founded on God's principles. But regardless, it becomes a reason for why what the Founding Fathers wrote is regarded as a canon of sorts for measuring all that followed in our nation.
So here we should note that what unites white, religiously conservative Christianity with conservative politics and ideology is the shared conservative leaning toward looking SOLELY to the past in order to understand and respond to the present. What follows that tendency is to interpret any modern approach understanding and responding to the present as an indictment on revered conservative sources, on accepted traditions. To use any other approach other than the accepted traditional approach to understanding and responding to the present is to imply that accepted past sources and traditions were either inadequate or flawed.
But what also accompanies a high reverence for the past and accepted traditions is authoritarianism. And part of authoritarianism includes hostile and aggressive responses to any challenges against recognized authorities and traditions. This is what white, religiously conservative Christianity and conservative politics and ideology have in common. Certainly, these conservatives do not form a monolith, they do vary. Some conservatives are willing to look at more than the past to understand and respond to the present. But the scope of their vision to look beyond the past is very limited. And that leaves the rest of the conservatives who look solely to the past to discover today's solutions.
So the common fault of all these conservatives is how much they look SOLELY to the past to understand how to live in today's world. It's not the mere looking to the past for help that is the issue, it is how much one looks exclusively to the past that get us in trouble.
But the counterparts to these conservatives have problems with the past as well. For while conservatives might look solely to the past in order to understand how to live in today's world, those who totally refuse to earn from the past are showing signs of narcissism. For one who believes that they have everything to teach one's ancestors and has nothing to learn from them is guilty of the same character flaw practiced by one's conservative counterparts. So how much we use the past to understanding today and solving its problems becomes a balancing act. To look too much to the past that we ignore new perspectives means that we have exalted those from the past above ourselves. But to never look to the past because we believe that those who preceded us have nothing to teach us is the result of exalting ourselves above all who preceded us, it is a sign of narcissism.
While we can use other insights, such as those that come from The Witness, to understand conservatives, we must also include how conservatives reverence the past regardless of whether we are dealing with a religious or secular conservatives. And though we might rightly find fault with the conservative approach to depending so heavily on the past, we must admit that all of us struggle with how to balance our dependence on traditions and the past with our acceptance or creation of something new to live better in today's world.
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