The Tea Party Folks Are Mostly Just Christian Soldiers
"Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek 'deeply religious' elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government."
—Much as we described to you in vivid detail yesterday, the hard data also shows that the Tea Party has little to do with economics or politics: its goal is just to put Jesus Christ front and center in schools, the workplace and the government.
Well, the government would be a lot smaller with God in it. Because He could just do EVERYTHING, with His God-magic.
(Except pass real universal health care. I mean, let's not be absurd.)
I don't know many Tea Partiers, being in DC and all, but I get the impression that they are primarily Protestants who wouldn't be into the whole Sacred Heart imagery. Does anybody have a specific breakdown on their religious backgorund?
@Smitros Palin and Bachmann are both hardcore dominionists (i.e. scary Christian fascists), so I'd go with that.
@DMcK My dominionist and I have a safe word.
(it's "Hallelujah")
@DMcK Haha!
@DMcK: Thank you. Also interested in the sociological recruitment of the foot soldiers.
@Smitros: Yeah, they are overwhelmingly Protestant, and some believe the Catholic Church is the Beast mentioned in the Book of Revelation and that the pope is the Antichrist. So no, not so down with the Sacred Heart.
I'm afraid of how tea partiers see us jews. When Glenn Beck referred to himself as a jew at the "Christians United for Israel" conference I died a little inside. On further contemplation that there even is such a conference…I died even more.
@Dana Leiner@facebook It sure ain't good! Tea Partiers are big on Zionism because they consider the formation of the state of Israel to be one of the precursors to the End Times (and also they hate Muslims more), but they're not big on actual Jews. There's a lot of coded anti-Semitism in a lot of their rhetoric, with the vilification of Paul Krugman/Ben Bernanke/George Soros/the liberal media/Hollywood/etc.
But Christian Zionism is weird and creepy and totally real.
@Moff: Thanks. I was wondering about that. And I thought it was all about some people not being able to handle a Black man in the White House.
Required reading: http://www.amazon.com/Onward-Christian-Soldiers-Religious-American/dp/0813344530/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1313652994&sr=1-1
Once you read it, you get a sense for the historical context of the TP movement (as the latest incarnation of the Charismatic Protestant / ultra-conservative axis created by a shared fear of atheist communism, dating back some 100 years or so). By feigning primary interest in the economy and reasserting their claim to a hopelessly warped revisionist history of the US, they've come back in full force.
It's interesting, I first started getting that feeling when some site (was it this one?) had a little piece on how most grassroots Tea Party organizations spontaneously died after the mid-term elections. Populist social movements (of which the religious right are a textbook examples) tend to surge and wither with surprising abruptness, but they never really die. The sudden visibility of Islamic terrorism brought back the fundie dream of an Evil Empire fated to bring the world to Armageddon, which had been dormant since the USSR dissolved.