The Tea Party's religious roots exposed by Sarah Posner

[Shallah Kali]

The Tea Party's religious roots exposed

The Tea Party is not a secular movement – as a new poll confirms, it is driven by the fervour of the religious right

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/oct/12/tea-party-religious-right

Although Paul ran as a Republican, he later endorsed the nominee of the Constitution party, Chuck Baldwin, a pastor and activist who convened a "black-robed regiment" of rebellious pastors before Glenn Beck did. The Constitution party's platform declares, among other matters of Christian governance: "The goal of the Constitution party is to restore American jurisprudence to its biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its constitutional boundaries." Sharron Angle, the Nevada senate candidate and Tea Party favourite, once belonged to the Constitution party's state affiliate. The Constitution party was founded by conservative icon and Christian reconstructionist Howard Phillips. Christian reconstructionists – who have informed the religious right, its political leadership, the home-schooling movement, and now the Tea Party – believe that the federal government has exceeded its God-ordained authority. They believe that it is in fact "tyrannical". And some believe it needs to be challenged, or even overthrown.

The PRRI survey found that the Tea Party movement is dominated by social conservatives: 63% said that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, and only 18% supported gay marriage. This should provide an obvious enough refutation to the purveyors of the theory that the Tea Party movement is disinterested in "social issues". But looking at Tea Partiers' concerns about sex and sexuality just scratches the surface of the Tea Party/religious right alliance. The shared view on government is far more instructive.

To be sure, Christian reconstructionists (and those influenced by it, even if they don't realise or admit to it) are adamantly opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage, and indeed to rights for women and LGBT people. But to understand why the Tea Party resonates with the religious right and vice versa, one must understand how the anti-government rhetoric of the Tea Party movement is driven by a fundamental tenet of Christian reconstructionism: that there are certain God-ordained spheres – family, church and government – and that government has exceeded the authority God gave it, to the detriment of church, family and the individual, whose rights, both Tea Partiers and religious right-ists maintain, are granted by God, not the government.

This notion that the federal government – not only godless, but in flagrant violation of God's will – is "tyrannical" and needs to be overthrown resonates from militias to the John Birch Society to the podiums of religious-right gatherings where Republican presidential hopefuls jockey for the support of the faithful. To fail to see the religious roots of the Tea Party mantra – or the ways in which it reverberates as a divine imperative – is to blind oneself to a fundamental feature of American conservatism

http://religiondispatches.org
http://theocracywatch.org
http://talk2action.org
http://rightwingwatch.org