With the Tea Party credited for Republican energy in the 2010
elections, evangelicals, typically a key Republican constituency,
have been overshadowed. Purportedly, evangelical zeal for
Republicans declined with the close of the Bush Administration, and
young evangelicals were trending more liberal, based on their
reputed environmentalism, wariness of war, and distaste for dicey
social issues. Evangelical Left activist and theorist Jim Wallis, a
prominent Obama supporter, is ostensibly the voice of a new breed
of more progressive evangelicals.
White Protestant Evangelicals make up about a quarter of
the electorate. Exit polls showed 75 percent of them voted for
Republican congressional candidates in 2004 and 73 percent in 2006.
In 2008, 73 or 74 percent voted for McCain, a small dip from 78
percent who supported Bush in 2004. But liberal evangelicals like
Wallis made much of this dip, pointing especially to young
evangelicals, who remained strongly Republican in 2008, but less so
than their seniors.
Though polling is a little scarce, evangelicals almost
certainly compose a disproportionate share of the Tea Party. A
recent Public Religion Research Institute polls showed 36 percent
of Tea Partiers are evangelicals. Although the Tea Party does not
emphasize social issues, the poll showed strong Tea Party
majorities are conservative on abortion and same-sex
marriage.
Evangelical Left elites unsurprisingly are alarmed by the
Tea Party’s resonance among evangelicals and insist the appeal is
mostly to oldsters. Or they deride the Tea Party as primarily
libertarian, i.e., materialistic and out of sync with religion.
“The younger Evangelicals who I interact with are largely turned
off by the Tea Party movement — by the incivility, the
name-calling, the pathos of politics,” commented
former evangelical lobbyist Richard Cizik earlier this year.
Calling the Tea Party “irreligious,” he expressed chagrin that some
evangelicals are attracted to it. Cizik, who lost his long time job
with the National Association of Evangelicals for publicly
supporting same-sex civil unions, has since worked for George
Soros’s Open Society Institute. He now works with the New
Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good.
Commanding a larger following than Cizik, Jim Wallis
blasted the Tea Party in a recent news release and devotes the
November
issue of his Sojourners magazine to a Tea Party
critique. Like Cizik, Wallis has also received Soros funding for
his efforts to pull evangelicals leftward. The Tea Party’s rise,
and its appeal to evangelicals, potentially disrupts the
Evangelical Left narrative that evangelicals are reorienting
towards a progressive social justice narrative.
Wallis’ Sojourners critique is headlined “The
Theology of the Tea Party: Can Libertarianism Be Reconciled with
Christian Faith?” Lest readers miss the point, the article is
accompanied by a critique of the late Ayn Rand, with the headline:
“Jesus Shrugged? To Follow Ayn Rand and Her Vision, One Must Give
up Christ and His Cross.” It accurately describes Rand, author
of Atlas Shrugged, as a “staunch atheist.” But the
Wallis/Sojourners attempt to portray Tea Partiers as anti-religious
Objectivists is absurd. The recent Public Religion Research
Institute (PRRI) poll found that 80 percent of Tea Partiers
self-identified as Christian.
In his recent news release, Wallis asked: “Is the Tea
Party Christian?” His answer naturally is “no.” But he lamented
that 25 percent of Evangelicals identify with the Tea Party,
obviously referring to the PRRI poll. “The libertarian beatitude,
‘Blessed are those who are just left alone’ has still not joined
those in the Sermon on the Mount,” Wallis opined. In his
Sojourners piece, Wallis warns that the Tea Party’s
“political commitments are rooted in the libertarian philosophy”
and is a “secular movement, not a Christian one.” Wallis’s
best-selling 2005 book, and his Sojourners’ blog, are
called God’s Politics. The implication is that non-liberal
political stances are inherently NOT God’s politics.
Wallis darkly observes that “some people who regard
themselves as Christians” support the Tea Party, but he emphasizes
“that doesn’t make it ‘Christian.’” Still, he insists the Tea Party
can fairly be judged based on “Christian principles,” which he
proceeds to do, but while wholly conflating libertarianism with the
Tea Party. He highlights Kentucky Republican Senatorial candidate
Rand Paul’s critique of the 1964 Civil Rights Act earlier this year
as one example of how libertarianism “falls short” of “biblical
ethics.”
Not entirely unfairly, Wallis contrasts libertarianism’s
individualism with Christianity’s concern for the “common good.” He
criticizes its emphasis on private charity as falling short of the
“biblical calling” for government to protect the poor. He asks if
an “anti-government ideology” can be biblical, accurately noting
that Christianity understands the state to exercise a providential
role. He chastises libertarianism’s ostensible “supreme trust” in a
“sinless market” and for heeding the Chamber of Commerce over God.
Wallis chides the libertarian “preference for the strong over the
weak,” which contrasts with Christian concerns for the most
vulnerable.
Most egregiously, Wallis ominously wonders if “white
resentment” guides the Tea Party, noting that 89 percent of Tea
Partiers are white, according to one survey. “I wonder if there
would even be a Tea Party if the president of the United States
weren’t the first black man to occupy that office,” Wallis asks.
Does he think the Tea Party would not exist if a President John
Kerry or Hillary Clinton had pursued Obama’s same policies? If not,
it’s not clear why. Wallis also asks if libertarianism is the
“furthest political philosophy from Christian faith.” Further than
Communism, Nazism, Fascism, or theocratic Islam? It’s a silly
question, given the other possibilities.
Wallis’s desire to identify the whole Tea Party with an
extreme, soulless, Ayn Rand-style libertarianism that exalts the
strong and disregards the weak is a stretch. Not all Tea Partiers
are libertarians, much less clones of Ayn Rand. And many Christians
believe in limited government for moral reasons — because human
fallibility makes centralized political power dangerous, and
because big government can displace religion, family and other
human institutions with divine purpose. Wallis’s essay warns
against the free market because of human sinfulness. But he does
not acknowledge that human sinfulness may also argue against his
brand of big government, which, unlike the market, has the power to
tax, regulate, incarcerate, and even kill.
The current economy and political climate, of which the
Tea Party is a symptom, may have neutralized whatever gains
Wallis’s brand of statism had achieved among younger evangelicals.
Evangelical Left elites want to emphasize Global Warming regulation
and government health care, while most evangelicals almost
certainly share Tea Party distress about too much government.
Wallis’s alarms over the Tea Party, and evangelical support for it,
may reveal his own political intuition that the Evangelical Left’s
moment has receded.
