The Soul of the Tea Party

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This is the title of a recent Newsweek article on the relationship between libertarians and the Christian Right within the Tea Party.  There is a lot of overlap between the two groups, but as author Colin Woodward notes, this marriage will soon break-up over differences of opinion on the role that government should play in legislating morality.

Woodward writes:

The activists—including statewide coordinators from Arizona, Florida, Ohio, Nebraska, and Maine—had begun to worry about a social-values coup. In the days after the midterms, Senator Tea Party, as Jim DeMint of South Carolina is called, had been on Fox News saying, “You can’t be a fiscal conservative and not be a social conservative.” (The Washington-based Family Research Council backed him up, calling on “one million Americans to pray on a regular basis for Sen. DeMint” as he faced his critics.) On Nov. 3, 65 leading conservatives—including Family Research Council head Tony Perkins, Eagle Forum leader Phyllis Schlafly, Tea Party Express chair Amy Kremer, and Edwin Meese III—wrote Rep. Boehner, Sen. McConnell, and Republican Governors Association chair Haley Barbour urging them to renew their “commitment to restoring traditional moral values” by banning abortion and same-sex marriage.

And so, the fight is on for the soul of the Tea Party. On one side: libertarian-minded grassroots activists. On the other: the leaders of the wealthy, powerful, and better-established Christian right, who’ve dominated conservative populism in the United States for decades. Roughly half the people who say they support the Tea Party also say they are part of the religious right. Christian conservative leaders have long espoused limiting government intrusion in the economy—Jerry Falwell regularly condemned social programs and praised Milton Friedman—making the Tea Party attractive to their followers. But many of them also want government to enforce moral standards—banning abortion and gay marriage, for instance—a notion that’s anathema to libertarians who want government off their backs. “Principled libertarians aren’t going to like Big Religion telling them how to act and are going to have to draw the line,” says Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
At issue: whether the amorphous grassroots movement can wield the sort of influence on congressional leaders that it did on congressional candidates, or if it will be drowned out by old alliances. “In a battle royale between the religious right Tea Party and the libertarian Tea Party, I would have to bet with the Christian conservatives,” says Lynn.

What strikes me about the Christian Right is their insistence on connecting fiscal conservativism and social conservatism without making a strong intellectual or theological argument as to why they are so naturally compatible.

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  1. Tom Van Dyke says

    Actually, it's been the judiciaries imposing their values on society. Rather ignored by the media was that the voters of Iowa threw out 3 Supreme Court justices who had forced same-sex marriage on the state.

    I suppose it's who gets to frame the issue, John.

    I was amused that Newsweek cited for its “outside” experts Huffington Post contributors Barry Lynn and David Gushee, who despise the Religious Right and the Republican party, and I'm sure don't dig the Tea party much either.

    What did we expect them to say, that the Tea Party will abide the rather mild social conservatism, and stick with the GOP as long as it's faithful to fiscal responsibility?

    Heh. Newsweek proved once again that the liberal-left is openminded, always willing to look at both sides of the same side.

    As for theological consistency, there's always been a healthy strain of Protestantism [esp Calvinism] that opposes the encroachment of government into the overlapping but separate sphere of “civil society,” whether it's imposing same-sex marriage or The Book of Common Prayer.

    And of course, in Catholic theology, there is no theological conflict atall between the right to life and “subsidiarity*.”

    As for the “soul” of the Republican Party, the Tea Party is a welcome reform, to hold the GOP to its small-government rhetoric. But fiscal responsibility alone is not soul, it's political philosophy and technocracy. For the GOP to take Barron and Dodge's advice and drop its opposition to the continued “modernist” assault on marriage and the family would be to lose its soul. And that's not worth trading just to maintain control of congress.

    Indeed, it may not even be necessary, or it might not even be enough. To add an irony to Mark 8:36, the worst thing in the world is to sell your soul and not get nothin' for it.
    ____________

    *The principle of Subsidiarity states that government should undertake only those initiatives which exceed the capacity of individuals or private groups acting independently.
    Pope Leo XIII developed the principle in his AD 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. The principle was further developed by Pope Pius XI in his AD 1931 encyclial Quadragesimo Anno.

  2. J. L. Bell says

    I suspect the libertarians of the Tea Party will be in for disappointment as they discover that its energy in 2010 came not from true “small government” conservatism, but rather from emotional “the way (I think) things used to be” conservatism.

    The latter is not based on an intellectual model of government, like libertarianism, but rather a mosaic of genuine traditions, creaky myths, and self-interested preferences.

    “The way things used to be” conservatives will resist not only liberal changes, such as health-insurance reform and a black President, but also libertarian ones, such as cuts in Medicare, quick withdrawal from foreign wars, and fewer drug laws.

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