[skissane]

You mention many of the ideals valued in contemporary society, especially by people who identify as liberal/progressive-and you seem to think they are “ideals of Christ”-but how likely do you think it really is that a 1st century CE founder of a Jewish apocalyptic sect would have actually agreed with those contemporary ideals? Even if you are convinced that they are entailed by his (reputed) teachings - how likely would he have been to agree with that entailment if it had been presented to him? And do you approach any other pre-modern religious leader in the same way?

[feet]

There was the whole eye of a needle thing about rich people, loving thy neighbor, feeding the poor...

[skissane]

But what did they see as the answer to social problems? Changes to government policies, or divine judgement in the afterlife and at the end of the world?

Rather than being a religion of the poor and downtrodden, early Christianity spread primarily among the middle and upper classes - and while it encouraged charity, and personal decisions to voluntarily renounce wealth, it never presented that as mandatory for its followers - if it had, it would never had succeeded as it did.

[feet]

So why are there people who call themselves Christians who want to make the US a theocracy? The people that those vote for enact incredibly harmful policies in the name of religious morality

[skissane]

A theocracy is a political system in which religious leaders have formal control over the state, and the state directly favours the doctrines of a particular established religious sect–it is standard in a theocracy for the head of state to be a cleric (bishop, mullah, ayatollah, lama, etc). Among internationally recognised sovereign states, there are only three contemporary examples of theocracies – Afghanistan (whose de facto head of state is the Supreme Leader of the Taliban, Hibatullah Akhundzada, an Islamic scholar); Iran (whose head of state is its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei); and Vatican City (whose head of state is, of course, the Pope). I'm not aware of any significant movement advocating the adoption of such a political system in the United States.