{"id":7,"date":"2010-06-07T08:55:54","date_gmt":"2010-06-07T08:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/religion-and-the-tea-party-movement.html"},"modified":"2010-06-07T08:55:54","modified_gmt":"2010-06-07T08:55:54","slug":"religion-and-the-tea-party-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/religion-and-the-tea-party-movement.html","title":{"rendered":"Religion and the Tea Party movement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is the Tea Party a religious movement? Over at Religion Dispatches, Louis Ruprecht says no<\/a>, it’s an old-time rebellion against taxes and centralized government authority–as in the original Boston Tea Party and the post-Revolutionary disturbances in Western Massachusetts (Shay’s Rebellion) and Western Pennsylvania (The Whiskey Rebellion). On the contrary, responds Joanna Brooks; at least in her Mormon neck of the woods, the Tea Partiers seem motivated<\/a> by traditional LDS views of the Constitution, resentment of the ir ownchurch establishment, and perhaps as well<\/a>, a desire to recover some of that old Mormon fire-in-the-belly.<\/p>\n

I’m with Brooks, and not just with respect to the followers of Joseph Smith. We know from polling data that the Tea Party movement includes a disproportionate number of white evangelicals. And while taxes and big government are the manifest motives, virtually all the politicians supported by the movement are on board with the agenda of the religious right.  <\/p>\n

If we’re looking for historical precedents for the conservative, anti-establishment populism of the Tea Party, I’d propose the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s. Officially called the American Party, it was a semi-secret movement arrayed against the existing political powers-that-be (Whig and Democrat). While their agenda varied from state to state, the Know-Nothings shared a deep hostility to the Roman Catholic immigrants who had begun flooding into the country from Ireland and Germany. They called themselves Native Americans, and they represented a white Protestant longing for the imagined stability of their forebears’ pre-industrial communities. For them, religion was of part-and-parcel of the program.<\/p>\n

Mutatis mutandis<\/i>, the Tea Partiers are the Know-Nothings of today: latter-day Nativists who long for an imagined past of small government (with Medicare, to be sure), of Christian values, of heterosexual white people running the show and people of color knowing their place. Yes, Virginia, it’s a religious movement.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is the Tea Party a religious movement? Over at Religion Dispatches, Louis Ruprecht says no, it’s an old-time rebellion against taxes and centralized government authority–as in the original Boston Tea Party and the post-Revolutionary disturbances in Western Massachusetts (Shay’s Rebellion) and Western Pennsylvania (The Whiskey Rebellion). On the contrary, responds Joanna Brooks; at least in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nReligion and the Tea Party movement - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/religion-and-the-tea-party-movement.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Religion and the Tea Party movement - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Is the Tea Party a religious movement? 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Over at Religion Dispatches, Louis Ruprecht says no, it’s an old-time rebellion against taxes and centralized government authority–as in the original Boston Tea Party and the post-Revolutionary disturbances in Western Massachusetts (Shay’s Rebellion) and Western Pennsylvania (The Whiskey Rebellion). 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}