Are conservative (or liberal) Christians "not real Christians"? Are they just reading into the Bible what fits with the worldview they already had?

Having seen both sides of it now (I grew up in a conservative Christian home thinking liberal Christians were not really Christian at all; now I'm a liberal atheist who finds a lot more common ground with liberal Christians than conservative atheists), I really feel that both conservative and liberal Christians start with a general side of the political spectrum (you can even take out the conservative/liberal political dichotomy and just call it legalism vs. empathy), and then connect with the parts of the Bible which support that basic worldview. There's too much of the Bible that isn't internally coherent, so the only way to make sense of dozens of books written over hundreds of years by a bunch of different authors is to have some basic starting points to know which parts you accept at face value and which parts you reinterpret to fit with the parts they contradict.

It's easy to say "oh, those people aren't really Christian" (whichever ones you disagree with). I think the reality is that Christians on both sides are earnestly trying to follow half of the Bible and casually tossing out the other half. That isn't something fake Christians do, it's something all Christians necessarily must do, because the Bible is a big book of multiple choice that doesn't have any single coherent worldview. I think an earnest reading of the Bible with a sincere desire to follow what it says makes conservatives more conservative and liberals more liberal. The fact that someone reads it and comes away with ideas like Westboro Baptist Church doesn't mean those people were hateful already and they just read into the Bible what they wanted to see. But the fact that a sincere and devout reading of the Bible can turn people into hateful monsters like that also doesn't mean that liberals reading the Bible and coming away with a bunch of bleeding-heart hippy-dippy love stuff are reading into it stuff that isn't there. Both sides of the ideological spectrum are truly and accurately contained within the disparate lessons taught in that diverse collection of writings.