Why do most religious conservatives support capitalist ideology?

panCatE@lemm.ee to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 283 points –

I wonder why religious conservatives are mostly synonymous with capitalism supporters ? I mean arent most religions inherently socialistic ? What makes conservatives support capitalism , despite not being among the rich?

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The just-world hypothesis plays a big part.

Basically karma ? So do they believe that their actions will reap them benefits ? While they want to discrimiate people on basis of race and sexuality ?

There's an authoritarian theme to it all. They believe their god to be all-powerful and all-just. Therefore, that god must reward good actions and punish bad ones. The reward that our global society seems to run the most on is money. Therefore, any actions that gain you a lot of money must be good actions, thereby justifying the means of capitalism.

Prosperity theology, they call it.

Here's a satirical passage from Terry Prachett's Small Gods that I absolutely love:

There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depended largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and exactly how things should be. After all, those who had achieved success in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God, because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His disapproval. In the same way, the Quisition could act without possibility of flaw. Suspicion was proof. How could it be anything else? The Great God would not have seen fit to put the suspicion in the minds of His exquisitors unless it was right that it should be there. Life could be very simple, if you believed in the Great God Om. And sometimes quite short, too.