The Tea Party Isn’t a Political Movement, It’s a Religious One

[cbayer]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/13/the-tea-party-isn-t-a-political-movement-it-s-a-religious-one.html


Mark Graham/The New York Times via Redux

Jack Schwartz

POLITICS 07.13.14

Obama is the Antichrist, Republicans are heretics, and compromise is unholy. Politics can’t explain how the right acts.

America has long been the incubator of many spiritual creeds going back to the Great Awakening and even earlier. Only one of them, Mormonism, has taken root and flourished as a true religion sprung from our own native ground. Today, however, we have a new faith growing from this nation’s soil: the Tea Party. Despite its secular trappings and “taxed enough already” motto, it is a religious movement, one grounded in the traditions of American spiritual revival. This religiosity explains the Tea Party’s political zealotry.

The mark of a national political party in a democracy is its pluralistic quality, i.e. the ability to be inclusive enough to appeal to the broadest number of voters who may have differing interests on a variety of issues. While it may stand for certain basic principles, a party is often flexible in applying them, as are its representatives in fulfilling them. Despite the heated rhetoric of elections and the bombast of elected representatives, they generally seek consensus with the minority in order to achieve their legislative goals.

But when religion is thrown into the mix, all that is lost. Religion here doesn’t mean theology but a distinct belief system which, in totality, provides basic answers regarding how to live one’s life, how society should function, how to deal with social and political issues, what is right and wrong, who should lead us, and who should not. It does so in ways that fulfill deep-seated emotional needs that, at their profoundest level, are devotional. Given the confusions of a secular world being rapidly transformed by technology, demography, and globalization, this movement has assumed a spiritual aspect whose adepts have undergone a religious experience which, if not in name, then in virtually every other aspect, can be considered a faith.

Seen in this light, the behavior of Tea Party adherents makes sense. Their zeal is not the mercurial enthusiasm of a traditional Republican or Democrat that waxes and wanes with the party’s fortunes, much less the average voter who may not exercise the franchise at every election. These people are true believers who turn out faithfully at the primaries, giving them political clout in great excess to their actual numbers. Collectively, this can make it appear as if they are preponderant, enabling their tribunes to declare that they represent the will of the American people.

more at link

[AtheistCrusader]

1. Wrong.

The 'Tea Party' has three major factions, and dozens of affiliated and unaffiliated sub-factions. It is not one homogenous movement. Some elements of it are religious. Some elements of it are hyper-antireligious.

Multiple major factions of the 'Tea Party' are infused with high concentrations of libertarians, who actually trend left on the issue of religion.



I wish that graph showed the RNC general membership. This is an important issue, and the TP is important to correctly understand if it is to be effectively countered. As it stands, the TP has been, and remains a Lernaean Hydra.

[longship]

3. That's an interesting chart.

I wonder how they broke this down. It is undoubtedly self-report data.

"Unaffiliated" can mean any number of things. For instance, my neighbor claims to be unaffiliated, but is a fairly devout Seventh Day Adventist. Wouldn't he be considered an evangelical? I guess with self-report data, one has to take the data as it is. But I am always a bit leery about such religious categories in these polls. That's not saying that this is suspect, just that the error bars are likely wide.

[trotsky]

2. Why can't it be both?