I know you didn’t come here for a debate, so I’ll keep my response as brief as possible.

You ask who we are to say that the “old rules no longer apply to our lives?” We’re the ones who have to live under the rules; why should we be beholden to the desires of a bunch of dead guys?

The women who fought for their right to vote, the strikers who brought us weekends and paid time off, the slaves who escaped their bondage, and the people who were driven out of their homelands by religious persecution all decided that the old rules were oppressive and in service of an elite who didn’t have their best interest at heart.

Take this passage from Mark 2 for example:

One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?”

He answered, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.”

Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”

It illustrates the point that the rules are here for us, and that we should really think about the implications of what we are restricting.

The Republican brand of Christianity seems to be the opposite of everything that Jesus preached. From Matthew 25:

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

The GOP has been cutting food aid (EBT) to desperate families, medical services to the poor and elderly (Medicare & Medicaid), splitting up families of people who came here to seek asylum (ICE), starting unjustified wars (Iraq & Iran), demanding schools give Christians special treatment (display religious texts, fund private Christian schools with public school money), and funnelling money to the very richest people in society for fifty years (the US has the highest wealth inequality of any country in the developed world)… all wearing the Christian religion as their mantle. That’s why people hear “Christian Conservative” and think about all of this reactionary nonsense. The Christian Nationalist movement is about power, not tradition. Rather than having a pluralistic society, the Christian Nationalist thinks that they should get the sole right to decide how things are done.

Take the bathrooms that you mentioned: why is this a thing that people want the government involved in? Why should the government be able to tell you who can use the bathroom in your business? Shouldn’t that be up to the business owner? Isn’t that the “conservative” solution?

The rules are here to serve us; therefore, there’s no better set of people to determine what those rules should be. Conservatism is about maintenance of the status quo, and most people in the country are unhappy with the status quo. Isn’t that a good enough reason to change it, and to move away from an elite who doesn’t have our best interests at heart?

I look at conservatism as a concept that preserves the experiments that worked

Basically conservatism = traditionalism in my mind.

That’s a progressive perspective on conservatism, and expressing it as such places you further Left than most Democrats in office.

America’s self-described “Conservatives” are mostly christian nationalists who don’t seek to conserve key American traditions like multiculturalism, but rather to impose their moral ideals on those who they see as “degenerates” in society.

This is obvious when you consider that “Conservatives” are more offended that trans people like myself might use a public restroom than the fact that ICE is running concentration camps and separating families from their children.

Actually Conservative Christians are anti-Capitalists that care most about serving the needy and destitute. The self-proclaimed christians who voted a pedophile into office do not seek to conserve tradition, merely to preserve their own social status.