I want to expound a little bit more on this video because I think @InnuendoStudios is more right than he knows.

First, please watch this video. If you aren't aware of the Alt Right Playbook, take a moment to watch all of it. It's worth your time.

There's a lot that Ian says in this video that is great, but there's one thing he touches on that I think runs deeper than many people know.

It's the white evangelical understanding of the purpose of the Law. (Capitalized purposefully for reasons we'll get into).

Around 7:25 Ian says: "[to the religious reactionary] the law isn't about shaping society, it's about who gets punished."

And when I first heard him say that I had to pause the video and yell.

This is the missing answer to the question "Why are evangelicals Like That?"

See, the idea of the law's purpose being to punish and convict isn't some implicit result of a bunch of different sinister ideas, it is an explicit and required belief of white evangelical christianity.

They teach it to children as early as possible.

The Law (meaning the old testament Mosaic law) and The Gospel are contrasted ad nauseum so that you believe two things:

1. The Law exists to punish people externally and convict people internally so that they without a doubt know that they are bad need a savior.

2. Because "we" (meaning conservative Protestant Evangelical Christian's and conservative Protestant Evangelical Christian's only) believe The Gospel, "we" are no longer bound to the Law and thus no longer guilty.

To quote a former pastor: "The sermon on the mount is not a list of things we need to try and be or do, it is a description of what we, the church, now are *because we're no longer under the law*"

(this sentence is one of the things that shocked me enough to leave the faith)

The entirety of White Evangelical Christianjty rests on this idea.

The law exists to punish and convict people, and can absolutely never be used to save, because if the law could make people better than no one would need Jesus.

This is why, as Ian notes, they aren't trying to take proven action to lower abortion, and instead are trying to create a punitive system that punishes and convicts women.

They believe that only through that punishment and conviction can we be saved from hell and ourselves.

The idea that the law could encourage good behavior for most people intrinsically is an existential threat to the belief system, they are actually incapable of believing it because to do so would require throwing away their foundational understanding of the universe.

To close, I'll disagree slightly with Ian.

He cautions that we shouldn't see this as representative of any belief system, but rather a perversion of them.

He's not completely incorrect, but the perversion is evangelicalism itself.

It *is* required dogma there.