{"id":85,"date":"2010-10-06T11:53:58","date_gmt":"2010-10-06T11:53:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/tea-party-cw.html"},"modified":"2010-10-06T11:53:58","modified_gmt":"2010-10-06T11:53:58","slug":"tea-party-cw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/tea-party-cw.html","title":{"rendered":"Tea Party CW"},"content":{"rendered":"

The big news from yesterday’s survey<\/a>
\nfrom the Public Religion Research Institute is that the conventional
\nwisdom on the Tea Party is wrong: It’s not a libertarian movement
\ndistinct from the religious right and unconnected to the Republican
\nParty. This really should come as no surprise to those with eyes to see
\n(surveys) and ears to hear (Tea Party adherents themselves). Not to get
\nall smug about it, but last winter your humble servant wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The fact that the Tea Party movement isn’t trumpeting the
\nold family values agenda says more about the politics of the moment than
\nthe membership. These are, after all, Sarah Palin’s people. And Bob
\nMcDonnell’s. The newly elected governor of Virginia has impeccable
\nChristian Right credentials–a degree from Regent University Law School
\nand a perfect record of pushing social conservatism while representing
\nVirginia Beach in the House of Delegates from 1993 to 2006. But in 2009,
\nhe ran for governor as a fiscal, not a social, conservative. \n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The CW came about because journalists paid too much attention to Tea
\nParty manifestos and Tea Party spokespeople and too little to who
\nactually showed up at the rallies. Over the past five years, moreover,
\nthere’s been a strong storyline about the end of the religious
\nright–and having the Tea Party as the Next New Thing fit right into
\nthat. But as has happened regularly since the 1980s, reports of the
\nreligious right’s demise turns out to be premature. <\/p>\n

What I find most interesting in the PRPI survey is the difference of
\nopinion about whether America is, was, or has ever been a Christian
\nnation. Whereas 49 percent of white evangelicals think America was so in
\nthe past as opposed to 43 percent who think it is today, 57 percent of
\nTea Partyers think it is today versus just 38 percent who think it used
\nto be. It looks, in other words, as though the non-evangelical portion
\nof the Tea Party is strongly of the opinion that America is a more
\nChristian nation now than once upon a time. And, by the narrow margin of
\n42-37, the public at large agrees. <\/p>\n

So even as the proportion of Christians in the American population continues to decline<\/a>,
\na plurality of Americans–led by the most potent political force on the
\nscene today–believe the nation to be more Christian than ever. Is this
\nevidence of the religious right’s 30-year run? Or wishful thinking? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The big news from yesterday’s survey from the Public Religion Research Institute is that the conventional wisdom on the Tea Party is wrong: It’s not a libertarian movement distinct from the religious right and unconnected to the Republican Party. This really should come as no surprise to those with eyes to see (surveys) and ears…<\/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-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nTea Party CW - 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\/10\/tea-party-cw.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tea Party CW - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The big news from yesterday’s survey from the Public Religion Research Institute is that the conventional wisdom on the Tea Party is wrong: It’s not a libertarian movement distinct from the religious right and unconnected to the Republican Party. This really should come as no surprise to those with eyes to see (surveys) and ears…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/tea-party-cw.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-10-06T11:53:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Tea Party CW - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/tea-party-cw.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Tea Party CW - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"The big news from yesterday’s survey from the Public Religion Research Institute is that the conventional wisdom on the Tea Party is wrong: It’s not a libertarian movement distinct from the religious right and unconnected to the Republican Party. 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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\/85","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=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}