There’s a real cognitive dissonance there. Their version of Christianity takes a back seat to politics because they’ve been told all these visions of grandeur about how “Jesus is coming back” and how they are the “sheep” and all those godless liberals are the "goats. They’ve been trained to look for reasons to feel persecuted even if they don’t come directly out and say it, even if they don’t realize it themselves. There’s a real “us vs. them” mentality in a lot of those types of churches and they’ll gladly go rub one out to stuff like where Jesus said to his disciples in one of the gospels that if people aren’t for him then they’re against him. Nevermind that one of the other gospels says the opposite. A lot of Christians I’ve come across just have this persecution fetish where any slight inconvenience or call for accountability from pretty much anyone (because their church won’t take them to task over things) turns into a ‘righteous’ cry to their lord about how the godless Philistines around them are normalizing oppression and sodomy and trans rights or whatever and these holy little Christian’s are the only beacon of hope in society even though they insist on treating anyone who isn’t like them like absolute garbage. I’m not a social scientist or anything like that, hopefully people smarter than me chime in. But conservatives treat equity in a community like a zero sum game, you know? If poor people are given a hand up by the government then it’s interpreted by these (at best) middle class Christians as an affront to their hard earned money. They worked for their income but “these filthy poors just get handouts at MY expense?” You can tell by their actions that they have absolutely nothing to do with Jesus regardless of how they try to present themselves. They’re full of crap and they deserve to be treated as such.

Source: Grew up in a very conservative farming community, did all the church stuff, then moved away and found myself.

Also, I know I abused quotation marks but my bad on any grammar or spelling errors or general incoherence. I treated myself to vodka for dinner.

Honestly, it’s because conservative politicians found a group of people who are susceptible to manipulation and uncritical support of anyone and anything that their church tells them to be.

They worship supply side Jesus https://www.beliefnet.com/news/2003/09/the-gospel-of-supply-side-jesus.aspx

Abortion and the “southern strategy”.

Abortion access has been used for 60ish years as a wedge issue to drive religious people to the right wing party.

Right wing Christianity is aesthetically and morally performative and in practical terms, absolutely fascist. The term “bleeding heart” as in the politically perjorative “bleeding heart liberal” is a reference to the image of the crown of thorns on the heart of Christ.

You’re talking about a group of people who intend to use the second amendment to destroy the first. Study the Crusades and you’ll see history repeating itself.

The gambit of American Christianity is just the wildest snarled mess of hair splitting bullshit one can hope to theologically take seriously (there are actual church splits over folding chairs vs pews).

“BROADLY” you can understand American Christianity as being one of two flavors, what you’re observing is Evangelical Christianity, which emphasizes a “born again” experience and a “personal relationship with God”, basically they all but come right out and say that they believe what’s convenient to their already existing worldviews because these are the Christians that derive from trying to preach a religion that holds the story of Exodus as a core myth to slave oligarchs and also to their slaves.

The other flavor of American Christianity is “Mainline Christianity”, this is not to mean mainstream, Mainline refers to how these are the denominations that found the most traction along rail towns. This is the group of denominations closest to what you consider to be what Christianity is meant to be, and they’re currently having severe retention issues because the evangelicals are making the mainliners’ younger members disgusted with Christianity altogether.

Because during the Civil Rights era, the parties flipped ideologies and the new southern Republicans embarked on “the southern strategy” which led to the courting groups like hard-core Christians and racists into the fold.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism

You probably don’t want to read all that so here’s a what I think is the important take away as far as your question is concerned. American Christians have always been a bit different from the mainstream religion elsewhere. The largest Christian group to come to America in the early colonial period were called the Puritans. They believed that the English Reformation did not go far enough. They were staunchly anti-Catholic and were very upset that the Church of England had adopted so much theology and tradition from the Catholic Church.

The Puritans believed that the Bible is the complete revelation of God rejecting the papacy, the concept of continuing revelations, and the related concept of the Divine Right of Kings. They believed that individuals forged their own covenant with God and that their belief and acceptance was all that in required for their salvation. That sin is so pervasive in our corrupt world that it was unavoidable, no person can be “good” or worthy of salvation and so salvation is only available through God’s mercy. They believed that it was their role as Christians to fight against the corruption of the world by spreading their theology and enforcing their concepts of sin and redemption on each other and on the greater community. The narrative is that they fled Europe to avoid religious persecution. The persecution that they faced was that they were not allowed to make laws banning things like alcohol or “revealing” clothing that they considered sinful or forcing people to go to their churches.

They adopted most of there theology from a reformist movement called Calvinism that sought to expand the Protestant Reformation further stripping away the power of the clergy and empower believers to enforce theology. Calvinists adopted an extremely socially conservative interpretation of the Bible and supported strict adherence to their moral ideology and severe punishment for violations of their concept of morality.

The modern Christian movements that trace themselves back to that foundation are still the largest Christian groups in the US. In the 1960’s the Republican party began the “Southern Strategy” which was shift of political focus to conservative social issues and attacking secular institutions. Republicans used this strategy to unite the philosophical descendants of the Puritans under a political ideology that is strongly focused on conservative social issues and on pushing their concepts of religion and morality into all aspects of society enforcing adherence through government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology

Prosperity theology is a newer theological concept that was popularized by Oral Roberts, has been embraced by the Republican party, and allowed the rise of the megachurch and celebrity preachers. Basically Prosperity theology gives an answer to the question of how you know that that someone is “living right” and a solution to the problem of evil. You know that someone is “living right” because God rewards their righteousness with material wealth. Evil exists as a punishment for the corruption of the secular world. Bad things primarily happens to the unholy but evil spills over to the righteous because secular corruption is so pervasive as to make sin unavoidable in our fallen world. Poverty is the primary form of punishment God visits upon the unholy.

You say you are from a predominantly Christian country so I assume that you are sufficiently familiar with the Gospels to recognize that this is a significant departure from the teachings of Jesus as presented in the Bible. I dare say that the departure is significant enough to be called an outright rejection of the teachings of the purported source of their morality and salvation.

If you look closely you’ll notice republicans are only fervent about certain things that they have linked to the christian religion but the link is usually tenuous, sometimes the subject not mentioned specifically in the bible at all. Jesus supposedly said “live by the sword, die by the sword” - those were not instructions but a warning. And other things in the christian religion they fully ignore. I posit that they are not fervent christians at all but rather wolves in sheeps clothing.

If you want to see really fervent christians, there are many in Africa and Asia. Being actually persecuted, or even just poor in education tends to ratchet up the ferventcy in true believers.

Conservativism is not an ideology, it is narcissism wearing the skin of a stoic. They believe they are inherently virtuous, and therefore anything the conservative thinks, does, says, or wants will be righteous.

Christianity feeds this by reinforcing the idea that the conservative is personal friends with the Almighty Creator of the Universe and Final Arbiter of Absolute Justice. They claim to speak for the divine, and therefore they are divine.

This is all the justification a conservative requires for whatever they want to do. Bigotry? No, God is the one passing judgement. Selfishness? No, it is God’s plan for me to hoard wealth. Violence? My arm is the right arm of the Lord. And when I sin, I shall be personally forgiven by the only person who matters: myself.

It is not possible to be a hypocrite, because whatever the conservative does is justified by their identity. When they do something, it is good, and when they do not adhere to their own stated ideology, it is good. When the “other” does anything, it is bad because the other is not the self and the self is good. So therefore the other is evil.

When the other does the same thing as the self, it is bad when the other does it and good when the self does it.

You don’t have to be religious to be a conservative, but it helps.

They’re not. But they’re leaching off of Christians money

A lot of people are answering half of your question: offering theories about why conservatives are Christians, or vis versa.

I’ve always been curious about the “fervent” part: why do the liberal Christians out there (statistically there are lots) seem to be so much less passionate and outspoken about their religion and its tenets?

So, there is a lot of history here, but basically back in the day, there was an extreme sect of christanity known as the Puritans, and they were basically chased out of England, facing religious persecution and ran to the (at the time) new colonies in North America. This underpins why there is a separation of church and state in the US, but also why an above average number of the christians over here are insane.

A group of people raised from birth to not question what they believe and why is going to be incredibly susceptible to being lied to.

I’ve seen both kinds of people from both parties. Joe Biden and John F Kennedy were the only two Catholic presidents, the other forty-four have been Protestant. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did communion on the moon. Every talk show host has spoken about holding faith. Most singers and football players blend their divine devotion with who they are in public. There is no strict dichotomy like you describe.