Tea Party America and the Born-Again Politics of the Populist Right

On August 6, 2011, thirty thousand evangelicals gathered in Houston’s Reliant Stadium for a time of prayer, preaching, fasting, and singing. The event planner’s hopes for a momentous turnout were fulfilled. Performers petitioned God for help in rebuilding society and, with each plea, intensity grew. The crescendo came when the event planner—Texas Governor Rick Perry—appeared. With the gestures of a preacher—head bowed, hands clasped, and voice reverberating—the governor beseeched divine authority. “Father,” he entreated, “our hearts break for America…. We have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us, and for that, we cry out for your forgiveness.” Perry delivered scripted biblical injunctions, yet his listeners knew that politics were at stake. As one reporter surmised, by the close of the revival it was clear that Perry’s crusade “had turned into something bigger and more complicated: a righteous rollout for one of the latest-starting presidential campaigns in recent history.”¹

Perry’s extravaganza and the Tea Party movement that brokered his presidential candidacy remind us that “born-again” politics are as potent as ever. They are driven by a theology of small government, free enterprise, family values, and Christian patriotism, and backed by a phalanx of politically charged churches, corporations, and action committees. Baptists and Pentecostals who share Perry’s gospel have found in the Tea Party a vehicle for mobilizing nationally. Thus far, analysts have underappreciated the ecclesiastical weight behind this mobilization. While still tending to see Perry’s Pentecostalism as a marginal force, they have been prone to write off the Tea Party as an “extremist” faction “with no adult supervision.”² All the while they have explained this movement’s endurance as largely a secular phenomenon driven by economic angst with only haphazard tie-ins to the church. Yet the truth is that evangelical impulses inspire the Tea Party. And that same Tea Party fundamentalism now “wags the dog” of the GOP.³

This shift in the Republican Party’s center of gravity has been underway for decades. Since the 1930s, in fact, evangelicals have sparked several “tea parties.” They have assembled over moral concerns certainly, but also over issues like taxation and employment practices, labor rights, and government spending. In the face of Franklin Roosevelt’s welfare programs, evangelical preachers and businessmen excoriated the New Deal as an affront to sound Christian economics. They began articulating a free enterprise doctrine, and quietly organized behind the scenes to roll back Roosevelt’s Keynesianism and pro-labor policies. Strip bare the union of laissez-faire capitalism and fundamentalist Christianity and replace it with a secular, bureaucratic state, they warned, and one was sure to see the dismantling of an entire ethic based on individual responsibility to family, church, community, commerce, and—above all—God.

Begun in the shadows of the Great Depression, evangelicalism’s activism intensified amid the anxieties of the Cold War. In the 1940s, evangelicals created a political clearinghouse, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), with the intention of destroying the “terrible octopus of liberalism” before it opened the door to more nefarious forces like “godless” communism and Satan himself. In language that resonates today, one complaint hinted at the group’s overriding fears:

There are bills classified under the high-sounding phrase, “Fair Employment Practice Commission.” F.E.P.C. bills…would open the way for large numbers of bureaucrats, “Investigators,” to pry into one’s personal business. It is class legislation of the worst kind…If this bill passes you can anticipate the arrival of that day when the government will tell you with whom you must work, with whom your children must attend school, whom you must hire.⁴

Conservative Christian businessmen of all ranks, from oil tycoons like J. Howard Pew and H.L. Hunt to middle-managers who frequented Christian rotary clubs, spent the 1950s and 1960s marshaling their fellow church folk in fights for right-to-work legislation and the deregulation of industry. Fearful of organized labor’s expanding authority, these church...