Is the Tea Party movement taking religion out of conservative politics?

I would disagree that “the Tea Party is more Ayn Rand than the Bible.” It’s a big tent and both Ayn Rand-inspired libertarians and Bible-believing Christians are both welcomed and influential. There is a lot of common ground between the two camps. In fact, one of the most visible faces of the Tea Party is Glenn Beck, an increasingly open and outspoken Christian commentator (especially on his radio program).

[Gary Peterson]…one of the most visible faces of the Tea Party is Glenn Beck, an increasingly open and outspoken Christian commentator (especially on his radio program).

Glenn Beck is a Mormon!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Beck

After marrying his wife Tania in 1999, and with the encouragement of his daughter, the couple joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

[Jim Peet]

[Gary Peterson]…one of the most visible faces of the Tea Party is Glenn Beck, an increasingly open and outspoken Christian commentator (especially on his radio program).

Glenn Beck is a Mormon!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Beck

After marrying his wife Tania in 1999, and with the encouragement of his daughter, the couple joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

People who do not exhibit Christian belief or lifestyle are often embraced by Christians and as Christians because of their political or social beliefs and activism. This has long been a problem on the religious left, which a lot of people forget used to originally include lots of people who had orthodox Christian beliefs (example: evolution opponent William Jennings Bryan) but ultimately became fused with liberal theology as well. As far as conservatism goes, the religious right has been one of the main driving forces behind not only ecumenism with Roman Catholics, but interfaith relations with Jews. And then there was the George W. Bush scam, where millions of evangelicals Christians keep insisting that he is a pro-life Christian when he was neither. But regarding Beck specifically, I have to ask why Catholics get to be considered Christians and not Mormons. (During the Mitt Romney presidential run, lots of Mormons challenged evangelicals with the same question, and there were no good answers.) I will also say that Catholics view Protestant Christians and Mormons as 6 of one and half a dozen of the other.

During the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. and a lot of its other “religious” leaders duped their sincere Christian black (and white) followers by appropriating the language and practices of orthodox Christianity and applying it to what was actually a very vicious, subversive socialist movement. When King and his cohorts preached sermons and led prayers, he was following a liberal/liberation theology construct, and those terms meant different things to him - a fellow who rejected the deity, atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ - than his followers. Of course, King and his other cohorts in the Southern “Christian” Leadership Conference didn’t make their true beliefs and interpretations of scripture known, because their foot-soldier followers (the ones who took most of the risks and casualties when facing down state troopers, rock throwers, police dogs, fire hydrants, etc.) would have abandoned him immediately. (Consider that the main reason that the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers never attracted the wide black following that the civil rights movement did was because both required an explicit rejection of Christianity.)

Well, now the same thing has been going on with the religious right. When a Jew, a Catholic or a Mormon, or even a very problematic figure like Rush Limbaugh talks about his or her faith in God, they are speaking of a different god than the one of the Bible, the one of fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christians. Glenn Beck isn’t going to tell you that his god was born a man on another planet who progressed to godhood, and that his jesus is satan’s brother, and that the only reason why his god chose his jesus over satan is because jesus offered a redemptive plan involving free will and satan’s redemptive plan for humanity utilized election and predestination. (No, I am not making this up; http://www.lds.org/library/display/0,4945,11-1-13-6,00.html it is on their own website .) And no one is going to stand up against the religious confusion that Beck and Fox News (basically an outfit for neoconservative Catholics and Jews as well as conservative big business secularists) are spreading because it is bad politics. And the evangelicals who work for Fox News like Mike Huckabee … don’t expect to see them challenge a Roman Catholic, Jew, Mormon or conservative secularist on religious doctrine because they’d get fired immediately, and the same goes for conservative talk radio.

As to the main issue being discussed here, it is indeed shocking how so much of the conservative activism now has abandoned the “culture war” for economic issues. Liberals have long asserted that “culture war” Christians were mainly using abortion and homosexuality as “wedge issues” to get elected, and once in office they would ignore the “values voters” and seek tax and spending cuts and a big business agenda. They stated that if these people were sincere, they would join with socially conservative but economically liberal Christians to overturn Roe v. Wade and pass a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, not economically conservative but socially liberal Wall Street/big business conservatives and libertarians. The evidence showed that they were right. Social conservatives stuck with Reagan and Bush despite their putting Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter on the Supreme Court, and only abandoned George H. W. Bush when he broke the “no new taxes” pledge. And they also stayed with George W. Bush despite his oft and explicitly stated religious pluralism and opposition to overturning Roe v. Wade (not to mention his being very accommodating to the homosexual community). That these folks are so willing to dump the “values agenda” (which while isn’t actually the gospel is something that can actually be supported by the Bible) in favor of an economic agenda shows where their hearts always were in the first place, and basically proves the liberals to be right. Remember the vicious treatment that Mike Huckabee, a legitimate social conservative, got from the Rush Limbaugh and National Review sorts who were just fine with pro-abortion pro-homosexual cross dresser Rudy Giuliani?

Bottom line: the religious right is a fraud and a sham. Always has been. If it was a legitimate movement, its leaders would have turned on Reagan after he nominated Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court and thereby saved Roe v. Wade. (Making a nomination to a court that had 4 abortion opponents and 4 abortion supporters, the longtime feminism opponent Reagan all of a sudden decides that nominating the first female justice is such a high priority. This Reagan was the same fellow who signed a Roe v. Wade precursor bill into law AND enacted no-fault divorce as governor of California.) If the Tea Party sticks a knife through the heart of that religious right movement that has deceived so many Christians, then that will be a very positive development indeed.

I encourage and defy anyone to watch this clip of Glenn Beck and tell me that this man is not our brother. And Jim, he addresses and refutes the “but Glenn Beck is a Mormon” argument directly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdqjS9old1w] Clip from Glenn Beck July 13, 2010

I find this clip one of the clearest presentations of the Gospel, and I praise God it went out to millions of Fox News watchers (and more over YouTube). Watch it and see if you don’t agree.

To JobK.: I agree with a lot of what you wrote, especially asking why Catholics get to be considered Christians but not Mormons. I always say that if the Catholic church came about in 1830 it would be considered a cult, too, but it was grandfathered in due to its long history. You’re absolutely correct about Rush Limbaugh, who just married his fourth wife and invited the shameless homosexual Elton John to play at the wedding. Any Christian and/or cultural conservative who still listens to him now and thinks there is any integrity in this man’s words is a fool. He’s just an actor playing a role. I was a dittohead for many years and begrudgingly admit I was duped. I also agree the Religious Right was a sham, more a media-created monster designed to galvanize the left. Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson wrote a book titled BLINDED BY MIGHT that called on Christians to invest their energy in eternal things and not waste it in political squabbles. JobK, please consider submitting your essay to the Front Page. It’s deserving of more exposure than it will receive as a comment here.

Gary,
I saw that Beck episode. While he kinda did address Mormon issue, he really didn’t. Yes what he said about the Gospel was great. But he didnt say anything about the heresy that Job referred to. I bring this up because I have had mormons at my front door say similar to Beck. I ask them about those heresies and they see no incombatibility with that. It is a bait and switch. I hope Glenn is a genuine believer! I hope I share the same Heaven with him. But I don’t think it is possible to be a good Mormon and a believer. Maybe Beck is on a journy out of the church and he is a genuine believer, I hope so.

As far as Rush goes, I used to listen to him all the time, when I thought politics was more important than it should be. BTW, I benefited greatly from Thomas’ and Dobson’s book as well! I dont listen to Rush more than about 10 min a month now. I think it is possible for Rush to be right on some issues and be totally wrong in his personal life. That happens all the time. I am not defending him as I have not been a dittohead for a long time. But I am not sure he is just an actor playing a role either. I think he is probably like alot of unsaved people, very conflicted. He is probably no different than any number of concervative unsaved public figures. I think an example is him having Elton John play at his wedding. That’s what unsaved people do. Back in the day I knew many unsaved people who didnt like John’s homosexuality but loved his music and played it all the time. But is it really different than having another unsaved secular artist play at your wedding? I don’t think so.

A digression from the Beck/Mormonism discussion: how can one assert substantial overlap between Objectivism and Christianity? The former is individualistic, self-promoting, temporally-focused secularism and the other is corporate, self-denying and self-sacrificing, eternally-minded, obedience to the one holy God. I’d suggest that most of the overlap between Randian libertarians and Bible-believing Christians results from misapplying the tenets of one or the other of these diametrically opposed religions.

Here’s a link: http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Articles/ByDate/1979/1486_Th… Ethics of Ayn Rand

I’m a big Rand fan, though not an adherent. Her portrayal of many social-political messes is spot on to me. I read Atlas Shrugged wishing she could only have grasped the missing link in the whole thing: Christ.

From my uneducated perspective, she didn’t get the altruism part, of course, nor was she able to address creation and God’s sovereignty.

The world really seems to operate like her villains. Christianity has some of the characteristics of her heroes.

Is the Tea Party more Rand than Bible? Probably. It’s a social thing and idealistic, and sure sounds like Rand to me. I have heard some Christian overtures on the radio, but mostly it sounds like rhetoric in attempts to keep Christians’ attention and loyalty to the party. So far, I’ve not heard anything positive come from a church regarding the Party.

The Tea Party movement isn’t inherently Christian or non-Christian, and its roots are in a dissatisfaction with big gov’t and bailouts. People don’t get involved with the Tea Party because they think it is or isn’t part of the ‘Christian Right’, (whatever that is). People see a way to make their individual voices heard by banding together with others who have a shared belief about the limits of gov’t. Perhaps they think their beliefs about gov’t are founded on Scripture, and maybe they read Atlas Shrugged and were moved enough to take action, but plenty of people involved in the Tea Party aren’t Christians and have never heard of Ayn Rand, but they know what they think when they hear about the gov’t spending trillions on programs that damage our economy and demolish the free market.

I don’t agree with this tendency to try to label political parties as ‘Christian’ or ‘anti-Christian’. The only ‘organization’ if you will, that I belong to and is inherently Scriptural, and that ‘defines’ me as a Christian is the church. However, how far I go with a political candidate or party does depend on how consistent their stand is with Biblical principles and how far down the road I can walk with them before my conscience tells me to part ways. Whether or not they claim to be Christian is of no consequence to me, because whatever their claims are, their spiritual state isn’t something I can know, so therefore it isn’t a consideration as to whether I support their platform.

[Jack] A digression from the Beck/Mormonism discussion: how can one assert substantial overlap between Objectivism and Christianity? The former is individualistic, self-promoting, temporally-focused secularism and the other is corporate, self-denying and self-sacrificing, eternally-minded, obedience to the one holy God. I’d suggest that most of the overlap between Randian libertarians and Bible-believing Christians results from misapplying the tenets of one or the other of these diametrically opposed religions.

This is a great question. “Diametrically opposed” belief systems are capable of overlap. In fact, they just about all overlap.. consider how many religions have their own version of the ‘golden rule,’ for example.
What Rand gets right is unapologetic belief in self interest. She takes the concept way, way too far and crowns it king, but as an answer to collectivism, she speaks insightfully against much of its folly. The Bible assumes self interest and appeals to it often as a motive (while always calling us to a higher motive of love for our Lord). But “no man ever hated his own flesh” and “love your neighbor as yourself” do not make sense unless it’s OK to “love” ourselves. Christian thought says that we care for self as a stewardship, because we have been bought with a price (and created before that… so we are owned twice over).

Collectivism, on the other hand, emphasizes the idea that the public, acting in concert will seek the good of society and advance toward a better and better order. Usually “the public” means the government. Lots of utopianism is often mixed in for good measure. Folks who do not understand the philosophies behind collectivism and socialism see a superficial similarity between the call to “think of others” and the Christian call to do that and think—see, there you go; this is more Christian than free enterprise or freedom in general.
But the similarity between various forms of progressivism and Christianity is actually far thinner than the similarity between Rand and Christianity when it comes to political philosophy.

But Rand is not a true conservative and I would love to see more folks like Beck wake up to that.

In short: radically different belief systems are capable of arriving at similar ethics and similar political philosophy on major points.

A book I can’t recommend enough—and includes some observations about Rand—
Money Greed and God (Someone recommended the book to me in another thread a while back… whoever that was: thanks! Great read. Will probably write a review for SI soon)