New research confirms that the Tea Party firmly unites right-wing politics and evangelical Christianity, a fact so problematic that it can make even Christine O'Donnell speechless.
excerpt ..
Tea Party candidates like O’Donnell and Bachmann have campaigned on libertarian economic platforms, leading some commentators to dig into old Ayn Rand novels for the source of this new economic populism. But what they’ve missed is that the Tea Party’s obsession with the size of government has been part of Christian conservatives’ platform for decades. 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.
The extent of the rebranding was confirmed this week by a new survey by David Campbell and Robert Putnam, the authors of last year’s monumental American Grace. Polling 3,000 people before and after the rise of the Tea Party, Campbell and Putnam identified the two characteristics most likely to turn someone into a Tea Partier: being strongly active in Republican politics and identifying with the religious right. A similar Pew study in February found that 69 percent of white evangelicals agree with the Tea Party.
Read more http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/18/tea-party-is-it-the-christian-right-in-disguise.html
Read more http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/18/tea-party-is-it-the-christian-right-in-disguise.html
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