Would you like some values with that tea?
Delaware GOP Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell this weekend attended the annual conservative Values Voters summit in Washington, DC. There, she she emphasized that although she is backed by the Tea Party, she is also a politician who "toiled for years in the values movement," alluding to her longtime work as a Christian activist.
What is the Tea Party? Is it "a recession-era version of the religious right?" Is it something else? And if the Tea Party is not a religious movement, why is it raising up candidates like O'Donnell who has a strong background of religious activism?
The Tea Party winners are the new darlings of conservative political strategists. The "Christian values" group wants to regain their role in political power brokering, as was clear from the jockeying for position at the recent "Values Summit." It's tempting to try to put together folks who have very different motives for their conservatism, but, as often happens with temptation, the reality doesn't work out so well. In fact, this looks like an increasingly unstable and unworkable coalition.
Tea Party fiscal conservatives and right-wing Christian "values voters" do not have agendas that go together easily or well. Of course, that's not exactly new. These two American conservative movements have not gone together smoothly or well for a while now. It is also the case that the Tea Party has taken over from the more traditional fiscal conservatives, and that is another complicating factor.
Some of the more "traditional" fiscal conservatives (but by no means all) have become very alarmed by the role of the religious right in the Republican Party. Not all Republican fiscal conservatives are as erudite as Kevin Phillips, but Phillips' career and writings actually track the developments in American fiscal conservatism from an increasing disaffection with "values voters" to, at least in Phillips case, down-right horror. Phillips was a famous Republican party strategist, and credited with being the architect of the "Southern Strategy" of the 1970's and 1980's. His disaffection with conservatism includes his explicit rejection of "Christian politics," was well described in his work American Theocracy. His even more recent book, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, skewers far-Right Christian theology and its virtually numbing effect on the American voter. "The preoccupation of Americans awaiting the Rapture or the tremors of Armageddon...kept another band of voters essentially unconcerned about budget deficits, peak oil, or the perils of the U.S. dollar." (p. 91).
The Tea Party version of fiscal conservatism is not quite so insightful or informed as Phillips, but it's not about "traditional Christian values" either. At their rallies, Tea Party activists carry signs denouncing President Obama and what they call "Obamacare;" they call for lower taxes, less government spending (except for Social Security and Medicare), and decry "socialism." A common Tea Party sign quotes the Roman philosopher Cicero, "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice," though those making the signs often attribute the quotation to Barry Goldwater. Melanie Morgan, a former talk show host and activist in the Tea Party Express, described the fiscal lens of the Tea Party to USA TODAY. "This is not a movement based on social issues...Many conservatives are involved only because of the fiscal aspect of smaller government, of lower taxation, of an accountability as far as the debt is concerned, the runaway spending by the liberal Congress."
The "Christian Right," the self-styled "values voters," on the other hand, are motivated primarily by their religiously based opposition to abortion, and to equal civil rights for gay people. Their signs tend to quote verses from the Biblical texts of Leviticus, not Roman civic philosophy or the speeches of Barry Goldwater.
"Values voters" were discovered by political strategists like Karl Rove, and used to motivate conservatives to vote Republican, as was done successfully for the election and then re-election of George W. Bush. Young "true believers" like David Kuo, attracted by the rhetoric, ultimately came to believe that his Christian faith was being manipulated for crass political ends. In his book Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seducation, Kuo talks about how he found himself recruited into "helping to manipulate religious faith for political gain." Kuo now blogs about these issues and their complexity.
Temptation, the theme of Kuo's book, is the right word. The Tea Party winners tempt conservative political strategists; the "values" group is tempted by the political power and wants in again, despite their past experiences of being used for votes and cast aside when it comes to policy. Maybe they hope history will not repeat itself.
But temptation works both ways. More prominent conservatives such as Karl Rove or even Glenn Beck seem both tempted and repelled by what the Tea Party is bringing them in the way of candidates. They are tempted by the winning, but they are also clearly repelled by some of the views or practices of the candidates this movement thrusts into the limelight. When it was revealed that Tea Party darling Christine O'Donnell has "dabbled in Witchcraft" and had a midnight picnic on a "satanic altar," Glenn Beck called it "creepy," Representative Mike Pence (R-IN) said "she has some explaining to do," and Karl Rove said the voters of Delaware "are probably going to want to know what that was all about." Michael Gerson put it best, in my view, when he said, "this adds to an aura of oddness."
It's true, politics and religion today have become extremely odd. Will "odd" still equate with "winning"? Who knows?
By Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite
| September 21, 2010;
onfaith.washingtonpost.com |
