Christian Army
by digby
Sarah Posner picked up on my post of yesterday about the Tea Party’s social conservatism and added some important information. And she pointed me to this fascinating article by a woman who’s been inside the Tea Party for the past two years. If you have any doubts about what these folks are all about, this should lay them to rest:
When I started going to Tea Party meetings two years ago, I was sympathetic. Just after attending one in North Dakota in August of 2009, I wrote: “Most tea partiers are not bad people. They’re just mad. In many meaningful ways, today’s Tea Party attendees’ lives have gotten consistently worse for the last 20 years, regardless of which party was in power.” I concluded that trying to figure out what they wanted was a dead end because what they wanted was simply to complain—that the Tea Party “is not a group of listen and respond; this is a group of respond and respond.”
Two years of Tea Party functions later, and I finally know what the Tea Party wants: A Christian nation.
She profiles some of the people she met, including a born again politician/children’s book writer, whose latest book boasts this lovely illustration:
It’s quite a story. It may be true that the “Tea Party” brand is no longer the latest fad, but right wing social conservatism has been with us for a long, long time and as Posner points out in her piece:
I’d caution against liberals feeling too complacent about the religious right’s unpopularity. The “religious right is dead” obituary is frequently written but always turns out to be wrong.
If someone like Bachman or Perry make it to the White House they will be the most socially conservative national politicians ever — largely thanks to the army of Christian Soldiers who have devoted themselves to the task for the past 30 years.
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