Chapter 11: Of God and Man in the TEA Party
As part of my TEA Party +15 celebration I am serializing my 2019 book The Rise and Fall of the TEA Party. A chapter will appear each Tuesday until the 15th anniversary on February 27.
“Making people dependent on government as Provider instead of God is one of Satan's most brilliant and devastating tactics. It reduces people to slaves at the mercy of the Father of Lies.” - Jonathan Wakefield, Saving America: A Christian Perspective Of The Tea Party Movement (2012).
In any postmortem of the TEA Party worth its salt, a point has to be made about the impact of the religious Right on the TEA Party. Author David Brody described this group by coining a phrase: Teavangelicals. He contended they were simply occupying their natural political home in the TEA Party but were fine with the libertarian company:
Now it's vitally important to understand that Teavangelicals are not trying to take over the Tea Party movement or co-opt their agenda. Just because evangelical Christians are heavily involved in the Tea Party movement doesn't mean that they are ready to storm the gates and change their stated goals. If you think that, you're missing the point entirely. These are evangelicals who are breaking bread with the Tea Party. They are part of the Tea Party. Think of Teavangelicals as a large subset of the Tea Party movement. The truth of the matter is that Tea Party libertarians cannot win consistently and consequentially without evangelicals by their side. Conversely, evangelicals can't do it alone either. (Italics in original.)1
While survivors of the former Moral Majority and other pro-traditional values groups shared some values with the liberty-oriented economic freedom advocates who initially comprised the core of the TEA Party, sometimes they got along like oil and water. To some observers it was the one example of “diversity” in the TEA Party:
There is… one major dimension along which Tea Party activists show diversity. Some Tea Partiers are social conservatives focused on moral and cultural issues ranging from pro-life concerns to worries about the impact of recent immigrants on the cultural coherence of American life, while others are much more secular minded libertarians, who stress individual choice on cultural matters and want the Tea Party as a whole to give absolute priority to fiscal issues.
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We heard one remarkable story about a local leader who faced so many tensions in her flock that she split the group in two. She now meets separately with “the Christian Tea Party” and the “regular Tea Party.”2
Some of this tension led to the finger-pointing I alluded to for the last several chapters; after all, it could be conclusively shown that questions about abortion – a social issue dear to religious members of the TEA Party but at best a states-rights issue to the libertarians, who more often than not believed the decision should be left to the mother – significantly damaged, if not destroyed completely, the prospects of TEA Party-backed candidates winning at least two Senate seats in 2012.
But more of it was from an honest difference in opinion that started from the very beginning. As I recounted back in Chapter 2, soon after the initial February 27 protests came an offer from Newt Gingrich and his American Solutions group to join the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition – an offer that its leadership warily accepted based on a perceived lack of progress when Gingrich was Speaker of the House in the 1990s.
Even with this potential boost to the movement, it didn't take long for some organizers to become furious with Newt for playing to social conservatives. Wrote Michael Patrick Leahy:
The digital ink wasn't dry on the press release (announcing American Solutions was on board) when Gingrich caused a problem that irritated us all so greatly that there were calls to kick him out of the Coalition. We had labored mightily since the inception of the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition to make sure everyone in the movement understood that we united around the fiscal issues. We would leave the social issues off the table until the fiscal and constitutional issues had been solved…
But Gingrich endorsed the American Family Association's “Tea Party” – which placed an emphasis on social values – the next day. This group had no real supporters within the Tea Party movement, but had instead merely taken the list of local tea parties we had posted at the Tax Day Tea Party website, claimed them as its own, and sent out press releases and e-mails to its e-mail list of conservative Christians touting the national tea party it was organizing.3
Over the last several chapters I've gone through a number of factors that fractured the TEA Party, but one key area that separated the original group of libertarian-minded activists away from the mainstream that adopted the TEA Party as it grew in stature and popularity was the argument over whether there should be a concerted effort or even a call for action on restricting abortion and same-sex marriage. After the TEA Party became the catchall for the conservative movement in the nation, there were obviously going to be those who felt the TEA Party's mandate needed to expand from that of being a strictly fiscal and role of government issues group to one also dedicated to restoring or preserving what they believed were the values befitting the moral nation our Founders envisioned.
This was a time in the game when the TEA Party leadership, such that it was, punted by maintaining their original stance. “Issues like abortion and gay marriage have little to do with our three core principles (fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets), and therefore we leave those issues for other groups to advocate,”4 said TEA Party Patriots leaders Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin.
Yet this separation of church and anti-state wasn't enough for the naysayers. From its earliest stage, the religious Left chastened the TEA Party for its libertarian roots. One example is Christian author and founder of Sojourners Jim Wallis, who wrote this for the Huffington Post in early 2010:
An anti-government ideology just isn’t biblical. In Romans 13, the apostle Paul (not the Kentucky Senate candidate) describes the role and vocation of government; in addition to the church, government also plays a role in God’s plan and purposes. Preserving the social order, punishing evil and rewarding good, and protecting the common good are all prescribed; we are even instructed to pay taxes for those purposes! Sorry, Tea Party. Of course, debating the size and role of government is always a fair and good discussion, and most of us would prefer smart and effective to “big” or “small” government.
Revelation 13 depicts the state as a totalitarian beast – a metaphor for Rome, which was persecuting the Christians. This passage serves as a clear warning about the abuse of governmental power. But a power-hungry government is clearly an aberration and violation of the proper role of government in protecting its citizens and upholding the demands of fairness and justice. To disparage government per se – to see government as the central problem in society – is simply not a biblical position.5
In the eyes of the TEA Party, though, this “power-hungry government” was not acting like it was an “aberration.” Nor does it take cradle-to-grave socialism for a government to function as one “upholding the demands of fairness and justice.” In fact, it's likely a more limited government would do a better job in being a fair arbiter than the one we were laboring under because less was at stake for them.
That was the contention of author and TEA Party leader Jonathan Wakefield, who wrote:
The Tea Party is a small-government movement that supports freedom of religion, not the establishment of one.
Christians like me… believe in the maximum freedom possible under the minimum government required to protect us and our property. This type of system bears no resemblance to a theocracy, which is based on strict and specific religious code. It is God’s – not government’s – role to teach us right and wrong and our role to live by His standards. This is best done in a free society without government intervention wherever possible.6
So as the TEA Party gathered followers from its original cadre of pro-liberty, mainly secular activists, more and more who otherwise agreed with their principles of limited government were also advocating for more governmental restrictions on abortion and maintaining the sanctity of marriage as between one man and one woman through government edict. This wasn't a strictly-held position by any means because there was a difference in scope: one set of TEA Party regulars advocated for a blanket federal ban, such as a Constitutional amendment banning abortion and/or declaring only marriages between one man and one woman to be valid nationwide, while another faction of federalists argued that, once Roe v. Wade was overturned, it should be up to states to determine their own policies toward abortion. (By extension, the same would be true if a future court re-examined the later Obergefell decision regarding same-sex marriage.)
David Brody explains that the moral transformation of the TEA Party was a process, like water seeking its level:
The reason many evangelicals morph into Teavangelicals is because the fiscally conservative message of the Tea Party resonates with them. We often hear about how the Republican Party is made up of social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and national security conservatives, as if somehow they are three distinct groups. Hogwash! Just like the symbol of the Olympic rings, they are intertwined.
(…)
Just because social conservatives might put more emphasis on social issues doesn't mean they don't care deeply about fiscal issues.7
But by the middle of 2010 it was becoming clear that the libertarian roots of the TEA Party movement were being torn out8 by the thousands of evangelicals who were finding the TEA Party to be a comfortable political home – so much so that Judson Phillips, who was making his second attempt at a TEA Party convention, was warned about avoiding a certain venue. "I told Judson [Phillips, of Tea Party Nation], don't hold it in Vegas!" said (media expert Mark) Skoda. "This is a movement with a lot of religious people – they don't want to go to Sin City! Hold it in a place that people can drive to."9 After the Vegas convention failed to get off the ground, Skoda ended up promoting a similar event in Virginia sponsored by a large contingent of TEA Party groups in the commonwealth.
In 2010 and 2011 surveys of TEA Party members, the Pew Research Center found:
In addition to adopting a conservative approach to the economy, Tea Party supporters also tend to take socially conservative positions on abortion and same-sex marriage. While registered voters as a whole are closely divided on same-sex marriage (42% in favor, 49% opposed), Tea Party supporters oppose it by more than 2-to-1 (64% opposed, 26% in favor). Similarly, almost six-in-ten (59%) of those who agree with the Tea Party say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, 17 percentage points higher than among all registered voters. Tea Party supporters closely resemble Republican voters as a whole on these issues.
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According to an August 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Tea Party supporters are much more likely than the public overall to cite “religious beliefs” as the biggest influence on their views of same-sex marriage and abortion. Roughly half of Tea Party backers said their religious beliefs are the most important influence on their views of gay marriage (53%) and abortion (46%). Furthermore, Tea Party supporters who cited religion as a top factor were overwhelmingly opposed to same-sex marriage and legal abortion. By contrast, 37% of registered voters overall cited their religious beliefs as the most important influence on their views of same-sex marriage and 28% cited religion as the primary influence on their views of abortion.10
Since those traditional views on social issues were closer to the mainstream of the Republican Party – which by then had pretty much annexed the TEA Party as a significant subgroup – than to those of the libertarians, many of the former Ron Paul acolytes departed, grumbling as they left about how the theocrats took the TEA Party away from them. In that respect, the TEA Party leadership began to lose touch with its roots and indeed became more of a GOP mouthpiece. As I've stated before and will again, the TEA Party wasn't going to go form a third (or fourth, or fifth) political party so they accepted the more common GOP platform on social issues and thus expected dozens of questions about abortion, same-sex “marriage,” etc. For a Republican candidate, this was part of the on-the-job training needed to be a politician because social issues were the new third rail.
With the massive influx of socially-aware voters bumping into the public perception that people were pro-choice and for same-sex “marriage,” some just pegged the TEA Party as a continuation and extension of Focus on the Family and other religiously-based groups:
The Tea Party was just a new name coined by clever activists and the media – a rebranding that has made it much easier for Christian-right candidates to run for office without having to air their views on social issues, which are increasingly viewed in a negative light by the general public.11
It was no surprise that the Left called the TEA Party “theocrats” for their Biblically-correct stances:
To a remarkable extent, today’s theocrats have stopped thinking of “social issues” like abortion or gay marriage as isolated from or in competition with fiscal or economic issues, and started thinking of them as part and parcel of a broader challenge that requires the radical transformation of government itself.12
On the other hand, Jonathan Wakefield more properly defined the left's “theocrat” term:
So while the Tea Party advances small-government principles, wanting to leave citizens free to make their own decisions and reap the benefits or suffer the consequences accordingly, the left pursues a system of big-government command and control. They then turn around and accuse the small-government Christian Tea Partiers of attempting to impose a theocracy in America, when it is the left’s plan that is often indistinguishable from theocratic rule.13
Granted, some of those who were elected with TEA Party support delved deeply into religious issues, particularly at the state level,14 but it's obvious the liberal writers of these pieces weren't very aware of the libertarian origins of the TEA Party, assuming it was a monolithic group that was already extant and forgetting the original protests had little to do with social issues. Also, as mentioned earlier, and unlike those who joined up based on the simple premises that government taxed and spent too much taxpayer money, those TEA Partiers who were most heavily into the social issue aspect may have also agreed on the basics of stopping abortion and the rush toward same-sex marriage but couldn't agree on a single solution.
TEA Party scrutiny also extended to character. It didn't matter which party they were in, but back in its infancy the TEA Party didn't have a lot of tolerance for misfeasance or malfeasance in office. While the original idea was to keep those who were of unsound moral character out of politics, as time went on and the TEA Party became more closely identified with the GOP, the foibles of one side aroused much more interest than the transgressions of their political allies. We heard a lot about the character issues of Barack Obama from TEA Party regulars, which could be expected when Obama went to extraordinary lengths to hide parts of his past and a lapdog media didn't call him out on it. Yet we haven't since seen that same level of condemnation regarding Republicans – perhaps they assume the mainstream media will cover these issues for them.
This Republican alliance proved troubling to religious arbiters like Wakefield:
I joined the Tea Party in part because I hate politics. They disgust me, as they do the vast majority of Americans. The power structure that the two major parties have erected is largely responsible for our current crises. Because politicians are more interested in preserving and expanding their power than in serving the American people, we are where we are today.
The Tea Party wants nothing to do with this.
The Big Government Disciples try and convince you that the Tea Party is merely an arm of the Republican Party, but that's a lie. If it were true, then why is the Republican Party trying to amputate that arm?15
Yet if you consider another statement by Wakefield in this context, the idea of their original TEA Party involvement comes more into focus:
If you ever questioned whether or not the Tea Party addressed the moral issues, question no more. Selling our children's future to China – where they limit the number of and even kill their own children – is the moral issue of our generation.16 (Italics in original.)
This is a political style and charge which befuddles people who are anywhere left of center and are either agnostic or go to a church befitting their feelgood religious beliefs:
While a traditional political party may have a line that it won’t cross, the Tea Party has a stone-engraved set of principles, all of which are sacrosanct. This is not a political platform to be negotiated but a catechism with only a single answer. It is now a commonplace for Tea Party candidates to vow they won’t sacrifice an iota of their principles. In this light, shutting down the Government rather than bending on legislation becomes a moral imperative. While critics may decry such a tactic as “rule or ruin,” Tea Party brethren celebrate it, rather, as the act of a defiant Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple. For them, this is not demolition but reclamation, cleansing the sanctuary that has been profaned by liberals. They see themselves engaged in nothing less than a project of national salvation. The refusal to compromise is a watchword of their candidates who wear it as a badge of pride. This would seem disastrous in the give-and-take of politics but it is in keeping with sectarian religious doctrine. One doesn’t compromise on an article of faith.17
Writer Jack Schwartz concludes the TEA Party is “a challenge to both religion and democracy.”18
Maybe it's a good time to remind readers that our Founding Fathers, while often categorized as Deists or otherwise less than pious, are considered so only in the context of their time, not that of the present day when church attendance hovers near all-time lows and religion is considered a subject that should be confined strictly to church on Sundays. No secular group of today would even consider the concept of being endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; instead, they would figure that rights were defined by what the government decided to give out on a particular day, and fewer of them would be given to those who are white, male, cisgender, or voted for a Republican in any election since 1956.
So a TEA Party with such reverence for our founding documents, and knowing the context of the time, was probably going to have to make room for those who believed in the God of the Bible. Perhaps the precursors to the TEA Party that existed before February, 2009 would not have cared when the “Rainbow Mafia” targeted a particular restaurant chain because its CEO espoused opinions on same-sex marriage – statements he later regretted making from a business standpoint19 – but the TEA Party of 2012 was more than willing to back up Dan Cathy's statements and pack Chick-Fil-A for a day to show their support of his traditional values.20 (I was one of them.)21 And furthermore I would contend that it was an evolution which had to occur for the movement to remain true to the principles of liberty – particularly on the issue of abortion – because in order to have liberty you must have life.
And sometimes fighting for life makes sense from a fiscal standpoint. Such was (and remains) the case with defunding Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider.
Now, it is true that most national Tea Party leaders stayed away from the defunding Planned Parenthood debate because, in a nod to staying on message, they simply don't want moral issues to creep into any fiscal issue whatsoever. But that really doesn't matter because this isn't about what national Tea Party leaders think. You can't stop an organic, bottom-up movement. This issue gives you insight into why conservative evangelicals are joining ranks with the Tea Party. They see both the moral and fiscal dimensions of an issue.22
I am convinced the concepts of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were placed in that order intentionally to place life paramount among them.
Allow me two final quotes before I close this chapter: one from Jonathan Wakefield and one from David Brody. As you may be able to tell, their books were instrumental in putting this chapter together – although it was always the plan to include a look at this topic, these volumes helped me greatly in defining the similarities and differences. I'll start with Wakefield.
(T)he Tea Party movement isn't Christian in nature – it includes people of all faiths and of no faith – and is politically focused. I contend, though, that our movement transcends politics. The principles we espouse are not, in fact, political but are moral, as they align with the Bible and are intended to liberate our fellow citizens from the oppressions of an Almighty State by placing power with a people instead of its government. If I did consider the Tea Party a political movement, I never would have gotten involved, because I have no use for either the Republican or the Democratic Party.23 (Italics in original.)
Brody:
While they're praying on the (Iowa Tea Party) bus and seeing God's hand during their Tea Party rallies, the event outside also begins with prayer. At the Ottumwa rally, organizers made sure to thank God first before getting on to Tea Party business.
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All around America the Bible is out and heads are lowered in prayer at these rallies. The prayers are a mix of evangelical language and Tea Party manifesto. In short, it's a Teavangelical prayer.
(…)
The Americans who are praying at these rallies are not doing it for show. It's the real deal. Their love and passion for God and country is with equal zest. While fiscal issues dominate the conversation at these rallies, they don't check their faith at the door.24
Just as liberty would not be possible without life, rights such as the TEA Party attempted to restore would not exist without a Creator. Thus, it was impossible for them to have the impact they did without some moral compass to guide them – fortunately, one benefit of our founding documents was their acknowledgment of this fact. This difference created a key distinction between the TEA Party and the secular-based groups that the Left regularly created to serve as a counterweight or foil to the TEA Party; the subjects of my next chapter.
Notes - bearing in mind some of these links may now be dead ones:
1 David Brody: The Teavangelicals: The Inside Story of How The Evangelicals and The Tea Party are Taking Back America (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012) p. 15-16.
2 Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson: The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) p. 35-37.
3 Michael Patrick Leahy: Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement (New York: Broadside Books, 2012) p. 230-231.
4 Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin: Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2012) p. 23.
5 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-wallis/how-christian-is-tea-part_b_592170.html
6 https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2012/08/the_progressive_lefts_secular_theocracy.html As you'll see, Jonathan Wakefield is an author I will cite frequently in this chapter as a prominent example of a Christian TEA Party leader.
7 Brody, p. 20-21.
9 http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2010/10/08/ virginia_tea_party_patriots_convention_lou_dobbs_and_the_next_tea_party_convention.html
10 http://www.pewforum.org/2011/02/23/tea-party-and-religion/ TEA Party regulars were also more hardline conservative on immigration and gun control than their registered voter counterparts overall.
11 https://www.thedailybeast.com/tea-party-is-it-the-christian-right-in-disguise
12 https://newrepublic.com/article/91661/tea-party-christian-right-michele-bachmann
13 https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2012/08/the_progressive_lefts_secular_theocracy.html
14 https://www.thedailybeast.com/tea-party-is-it-the-christian-right-in-disguise For example, as of the date this was published, “more than 80 anti-abortion laws” and an “unprecedented blitz of measures aimed at getting creationism into public schools” were introduced.
15 Jonathan Wakefield: Saving America: A Christian Perspective Of The Tea Party Movement (Houston: Crossover Publications, 2012), p. 148.
16 Wakefield, p. 86.
17 https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-tea-party-isnt-a-political-movement-its-a-religious-one
18 Ibid.
19 http://www.myajc.com/business/chick-fil-keeps-growing-despite-uproar/9Qtv5hIeJUc59lFUfxZQ3L/
20 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/content/freedom-never-tasted-so-good/
21 http://monoblogue.us/2012/08/01/a-show-of-support/ Accessed February 2, 2018. Years later, Chick-Fil-A still gets a steady stream of business (and employees) from our church and its youth group.
22 Brody, p. 52.
23 Wakefield, p. xxvi.
24 Brody, p. 87-88.
Next Tuesday will continue my series with Chapter 12: The Sincerest Form of Flattery.
In the meantime, you can buy the book or Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now. And remember…