There is a palpable sense of pride coming from a conservative Christian who proudly confesses that his values and worldview are based on the Bible. These kinds of beliefs are relatively common depending on the location and all, whether they've read any of the Bible or not, see a firm connection between their familial and political life and their religious values. The reality is, however is that the values that are so common among conservative Christians are not necessarily Christian values in any meaningful sense.
Christianity, including in equal degrees its Protestant varieties is built more in the shape of cultural traditions than in the wording of the Bible. When any lay-Christian of any familiarity with the religion is asked as to the origin of Satan, they should with most certainty reply with the story of the archangel Lucifer, who rebelled against God, swayed one third of God's angels in his rebellion and was cast to Earth after a war in heaven. This story is of course not Biblical at all, it is based on apocryphal writings, Jewish "fanfic" if you will, shortly before the birth of Christ; the tale acquired an apparent legitimacy and popularity with its cultural "canonization" in Milton's Paradise Lost many centuries later. This is to say nothing of the similar conflation of Satan with the tempting snake in the garden (a late development) or the idea of a non-physical heaven and hell (a very Hellenic and neoplatonist development).
The specific story of the Catholic Church is one all the more shaped by sanctified folklore; the veneration of Mary, and the ideas of her own miraculous conception, sinless life, eternal virginity and ascension were originally blatant embellishments of the common people gradually made into foundational Catholic beliefs. The pantheon of saints and quotidian holy days are ever present reminders that Catholicism is more based on the history of the institution of the Church with Paganesque allusions than the life of Jesus.
It should be little surprise then that over the centuries, Christian thought, custom and doctrine have been subject to the common whim and to confusion with what we might liberally call "conservative values." It would not be too much of a stretch to say that generally all cultures share relatively similar ideas of a conservative society: that would be one in which marriage is stable, eternal and fertile, sexuality is morally limited and rapidly anti-social behavior including individualist violence, frequent intoxication and disloyalty are punished with sentences quite more severe than those of today's norm.
The error in thinking is to attribute these values to Christian teaching, not only because they are not remotely unique to the religion, but because many of them, however confidently professed by the "Christian" mouths of today explicitly contravene many aspects of Christianity as realized after the days of Christ.
When proponents of traditional values look for a writer to defame promiscuous sex, homosexuality, debauchery or any of the conventional, safe punching-bags, their best option is to turn to the writings of Paul, who condemns frequently all the above. Nevertheless the everlasting bachelor Paul apparently has a great deal of unmasked contempt and contempt for marriage, telling the church to refrain from marriage unless one's sexual desires are simply too burning to keep away from sin; Paul imagines best the world where all are unmarried as he. Of course if we take that as a moral imperative, what that tells us is that all married Christians either burn with uncontrollable lust or simply don't follow the Bible as their first priority (probably a combination of both).
For the quite apocalyptic Paul, the Kingdom of God was inevitable and hence procreation would be absent on the list of needs for the Christian community. The key idea of the "Body of Christ" metaphor is that of a familial and complimentary body of believers that does not mirror the biological family, but replaces it. Social communion is based on a reborn and spiritual nature, rather than in the house of the traditional Pater Familias. That leads one to a more precise understanding of the seemingly confusing verse of Luke 14:26 in which Jesus says, "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."
The ultimate piece witness as to the root of conservative morality in non-Christian or pre-Christian sources is the simple fact that Biblical teachings are always followed with extreme selectivity. Our “conservative Christian values” constitute distaste for homosexual behavior, but no congressman or preacher has ever decried the equally forbidden act of touching menstruating women. Divorce is a constant target for conservatives, but none have I heard demanding that a younger brother marry his brother’s wife if he were to die (a mandate which God enforces with death in the Bible). Western Christendom never took to Paul’s order that women be veiled in churches, likely because the practice had never existed beforehand in the west, nevertheless the accompanying prohibition against males wearing any kind of head covering in churches continues to this day (although oft disregarded).
What should be peculiar to modern readers of the Bible with their modern morality is that so much "sin" goes unpunished or simply unnoticed by God. In reality it's simply true that the conservative values of today do not match the value of the Bible. Lot never receives a word of chastisement for sleeping with his daughters (although one might easily say they raped him), nor does Jacob gain any fault for founding the very Twelve Tribes of Israel on children born to multiple women not married to him. Solomon's fault was not the fact that he had slept with 1,000 women on record, but the fact that some of his wives and concubines were foreigners.
Critics of religion and of the Bible like to point to the conquest of Canaan as a deplorable time when God constantly ordered the unreserved genocide of others and destruction of their property. I think more important is the fact that even more Israelite infighting and unsolicited conquest occurs, culminating often in bloodbaths and massacres without God so much as flinching or batting an eye at the alleged moral uncleanliness of it all or attempting to punish these behaviors which would now certainly fall under our definition of immorality.
The text of the Bible is entirely irrelevant for Christians’ interpretation of it; their contemporary morality is simply based on a conservative feeling only loosely drawing from Biblical demands. Imagine the surprise of King David or Solomon or any other Biblical character upon hearing the surprising meme now thought to fully summarize Christian marriage: that marriage is in between one man and one woman. Moreover the fact that we now consider prostitution to be adultery would certainly shock the cast list of the Old Testament.
Some liberal churches have gotten to the point of ordaining women as priests and preachers; although this is not explicitly forbidden in the New Testament, it would be difficult to properly follow as women are told to be kept totally silent in the houses of God as Paul orders.
It would usually be said that these churches are bending doctrine to fit their own values, they are, but no more than any fundamentalist church might retroject their own conservative burnings onto the Bible. After all, same-sex sex is a sin punishable by death in the Bible, but it never explicitly forbade homosexual marriage. To not stone homosexuals is a greater violation of the Bible than to marry them.
At the heart of it, there may be a "culture war" afoot in America, but neither side is one truly based on the value system of the Bible, despite one's pretensions. An American conservative is far more closely accompanied by the conservatives of the Islamic world, China, Russia and for that matter all the tribal societies of the world than by the moral word of the Bible. What is attributed to the Bible is more often than not nothing more than tradition or hazy associations with stern morality.