Ed Vitagliano
AFA Journal news editor
February 2011 – Since the rise and triumph of Ronald Reagan, Christian conservatives have had a hot-and-cold love affair with politics in America. But with Barack Obama’s rise to the White House – along with two straight winning elections for Democrats in Congress in 2006 and 2008 – some predicted the collapse of the religious right.
Of course, that forecast was made simultaneously with grim prophecies concerning conservatism in general and the GOP in particular.
When the historic 2010 midterm elections were over, however, the Republican Party had made sweeping gains in the U.S. House of Representatives and state legislatures, and solid gains in the U.S. Senate. (See AFA Journal, 1/11.)
How did doom-and-gloom turn into a GOP rout? Enter the Tea Party movement, which appears to be the latest incarnation of a still-vibrant political conservative movement and, in the words of one analyst, a clear “game-changer.”
What is the nature of this movement, and are social conservatives a part of it?
Birth of a movement
Many credit frustrated CNBC on-air editor Rick Santelli with triggering the Tea Party movement on February 19, 2009. That was the day Santelli, reporting from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade during the network’s Squawk Box business program, criticized President Obama’s mortgage bailout plan and called for a Tea Party response.
Traders in the background began applauding the comments and shouting approval, and clips of the rant went viral.
Santelli touched a nerve, and the suggestion of a tea party protest seemed to take root and spread across the country.
Some observers, like AFA of Michigan president Gary Glenn, believe social conservatives were instrumental in getting the Tea Party phenomenon off the ground during the initial kick-off events on April 15, 2009.
“A substantial majority of local Tea Party organizations were started by social conservatives mobilized by the special Tea Party Web site posted by the American Family Association,” Glenn said. He noted that while Washington, D.C., “leaders” of the Tea Party movement claimed over 600 local events that day, AFA’s Tea Party Web site posted over 2,000, listing the names of each individual organizer and location of the protest.
Despite the critical involvement of pro-family groups like AFA, however, the Tea Party movement has clearly been driven by economic concerns, such as government spending, national debt and the consequences of President Obama’s health care plan.
According to a Rasmussen poll the week of the election, 82% of likely voters had the economy uppermost in their minds as they went to the polls.
Linked to those economic issues has been the additional concern that the federal government had long ago exceeded its constitutional authority and was infringing on individual liberties. As a result, many have seen strong libertarian impulses in the Tea Party movement.
Another front in the culture war
As is frequently the case, however, such cursory glances sometimes fail to comprehend the breadth of activity boiling underneath the surface. Post-election analysis clearly indicates, for example, that Christian conservatives played a major role in the overwhelming GOP victory in November.
According to a survey conducted by Public Opinion Strategies for the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the largest single constituency going to the polls on November 2 – fully 32% – identified themselves as conservative Christians. FFC said that group “cast an astonishing 78% of their ballots for Republican candidates.”
Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the FFC, said, “People of faith turned out in the highest numbers in a midterm election we have ever seen.”
In the minds of some of these voters were the same moral issues that have driven Christian conservatives in the past.
For example, David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, said in a special white paper issued after the election that 30% of all voters said the abortion issue affected their vote.
Make no mistake – the economy was also on the minds of social conservatives. Yet, for increasing numbers of the religious right, the economy is simply another front in the culture war.
“I think that the social conservative pro-family movement is in the middle stages of a fascinating evolution,” Reed told CNN. He said he expected conservative people of faith to stay focused on their moral concerns while “also recognizing that a big, out-of-control government that is bankrupting future generations is not just a fiscal issue, it’s a moral issue.”
A bunch of libertarians?
Perhaps it is precisely because many social conservatives have come to see the economy in moral terms that so many of them have found a home in the Tea Party movement.
The survey conducted by Public Opinion Strategies found that “52% of all self-identified members of the Tea Party movement are conservative evangelicals,” according to FFC.
This runs counter to the prevailing view of many in the mainstream media who have characterized the Tea Party as mostly libertarians who simply want smaller and less intrusive government.
Results from the third biennial American Values Survey, conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, also contradicted this characterization. In the survey, for example, 63% of Americans who identified themselves with the Tea Party movement said abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, and only 18% said they supported same-sex marriage.
PRRI CEO Dr. Robert P. Jones told CNN producer Eric Marrapodi, “We found actually that among the Tea Party, rather than being libertarians, at least on the issues of abortion and same-sex marriage, they’re actually social conservatives.”
In fact, David Brody, CBN News White House correspondent, sees so much conservative Christian influence on the Tea Party movement that he coined a new phrase: The “Teavangelical Party.”
“Here’s the bottom line: conservative evangelicals see fiscal issues as moral issues. Does that mean the abortion and traditional marriage issues are a thing of the past? Hardly. It just means the focus right now is on runaway spending,” Brody said. “But remember, if the Tea Party is successful then that will translate into the Republicans being in power. If the GOP comes into power, they will (supposedly) promote and attempt to put in place pro-family policies, which works perfectly for social conservatives.”
Freezing out the religious right
Not so fast. Proving that social conservatives played a huge role in the Tea Party movement over the last two years is not the same as saying everyone in the Tea Party movement is a friend to social conservatives.
Just the opposite appears to be true. There is already a movement within the Tea Party community to freeze out social conservatives and focus solely on economic issues.
In an open letter to GOP leaders following the 2010 election, a handful of Tea Party groups and the homosexual Republican group GOProud asked the GOP to drop social issues from its agenda entirely.
“The Tea Party movement is a non-partisan movement, focused on issues of economic freedom and limited government,” said the letter. “Already, there are Washington insiders and special interest groups that hope to co-opt the Tea Party’s message and use it to push their own agenda – particularly as it relates to social issues.”
GOProud’s co-founder and chairman Christopher Barron struck a clear libertarian pose when he told Politico that his group and the tea partiers are part of the “leave-me-alone coalition.”
Others are warning that sticking with social issues will cost the Republican Party support among political independents. In an interview on FOX News, Michael Barone, senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, said part of the erosion of support for the GOP in America’s suburbs over the last 15 years or so has been the party’s perceived link to these social issues.
There was, he argued, “a sense that the Republican Party was tied to Southern Christian conservatives, and that was out of line with the more liberal views of suburbanites there.”
Barone applauded the call last summer by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels – a Christian and a social conservative – for “a truce on the so-called social issues” while the nation deals with economic problems. Barone said such a truce would bring in more of the independent voters who “are focusing on something else: the size and scope of government.”
Still others see an outright incompatibility between the economic concerns of tea partiers and the moral concerns of social conservatives.
“[W]hile their agendas often overlap – foes of abortion and big government alike opposed the health care overhaul – the small-government impulses of the new conservative grassroots groups have sometimes come into conflict with the desire of religious conservatives to give the federal government a moral role,” said Ben Smith and Byron Tau in Politico.
Married to social conservatives
This is a misrepresentation, however, of what the social conservative movement of the last 40 years has been seeking. The religious right did not arise because it wanted the federal government to take a moral role in our culture. Instead, most social conservatives entered the culture war because it was the government that entered the moral realm first – whether it was the U.S. Supreme Court removing school prayer or legalizing abortion, for example, or the distribution of condoms in schools.
Despite how noble it sounds for GOProud’s Barron to claim to be a part of the “leave-me-alone coalition,” most social conservatives would undoubtedly love to be ‘left alone,’ too. It is groups like GOProud, however, which push their own culture war agenda on conservative Christians – such as the group’s past push for, among other things, the repeal of the military’s ban on homosexuals in the military.
Of course, the struggle between fiscal and social conservatives for control of the GOP is not new. In the past, the two groups have often seemed to play amiably on the same team, even while competing to have pet issues rise to prominence.
However, social conservatives have also sometimes felt more like the player who keeps getting benched when the time comes for the big game.
Mark Rozell, a public policy professor at George Mason University who has written extensively on the relationship between religion and politics, told the Washington Post: “I can foresee the whole same scenario yet again [after GOP success on November 2], with new leadership telling religious conservatives to sit down, be quiet, your time will come eventually.”
That’s probably not going to be good enough for social conservatives this time around, and it would be a tragic mistake for the Republican Party to heed the short-sighted advice contained in GOProud’s letter to Republican leadership.
In the first place, the Tea Party movement is far from monolithic – after all, it has no central headquarters or official spokespersons. So how can someone claim that the movement has been co-opted?
“No individual or group of individuals can speak for the Tea Parties as a whole. The movement is diverse and decentralized,” said a response letter, penned by representatives from other Tea Party groups and social conservative groups, to those same GOP leaders. “We urge you to discount advice from social liberals who purport to speak for the tea parties and claim that this loosely organized coalition wants you to ignore the unborn, marriage and the family in formulating a legislative program for the next Congress.”
Furthermore, while it is certainly true that economic freedom and limited government provided the blood-fire that drove the Tea Party movement leading up to the 2010 midterm elections, this isn’t an either-or proposition, it’s both-and.
If the GOP says it wants only tea partiers who are for smaller government but not any of those loony social conservatives, Republican leaders will undoubtedly discover that many of the latter are also part of the former category.
There is simply no way to separate out the social conservatives who have found a home in the Tea Party. Reed argued that the Tea Party movement and the religious right “are inextricably intertwined and there is an enormous amount of overlap.”
Whether or not they like the idea, tea partiers are now married to the religious right. And as Reed insisted, “Those who ignore or disregard social conservative voters and their issues do so at their own peril.” 
