Is the evangelical right actually conservative?

What does it mean to be a religious conservative? Our minds may go to an ironclad commitment to the Republican Party or the Christian America thesis or the Second Amendment. Certainly many religious conservatives oppose abortion and advocate for marriage as being solely between a man and a woman. Six-day creationism, Fox News, and an American exceptionalist foreign policy also animate religious conservatism for a lot of folks. The list could continue.

When we think of religious conservatism, we likely think in terms of slogging through the trenches of the great American culture war. But does the culture war serve as a useful paradigm for understanding religious conservatism? Unfortunately, it would appear so, whether one identifies as a religious conservative or not.

I consider myself to be one. I am pro-life, I own guns, and I have a moral and biblical problem with gay marriage. Still, I am not comfortable with every so-called conservative position in the culture war. I identify myself as a conservative not because I am fighting a war, but because I am committed to a worldview. And I’ve grown in my understanding of that worldview after years of careful intellectual and spiritual consideration.