Party/ religion/ sect/ cult

Delaware GOP Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell this weekend attended the annual conservative Values Voters summit in Washington, DC. There, 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?

Party/religion/sect/cult. That's a plausible interpretation of the Tea Party and its possible future. But a lot of that depends on the presence of a "prophet." It's pretty straightforward--at least from an academic perspective.

The Tea Party is becoming religious, although not in the way conventional wisdom would see it. The fact that many Tea Party members are Christian--both Catholic and Protestant--does not make the Tea Party religious. That Christine O'Donnell and Sarah Palin are Biblical literalists who believe in witchcraft does not make the Tea Party religious either. Instead, the Tea Party is beginning to resemble a "religion" because its diverse members are coming to embrace a vision of the Constitution and the United States as supernatural, inviolable entities.

A perennially hot topic in Religious Studies circles is how exactly to define religion. Whole courses are taught on how the term can be or has been used either polemically or scientifically. For me, the most succinct definition of religion is: "beliefs and practices concerning superhuman entities." This expands our understanding of religion from "belief in God" to include political systems like Marxism and Fascism, as well as forms of nationalism. The rituals of American civil society fit nicely within this definition, as do aspects of Republican and Democratic politicking that use quasi-supernatural imagery related to America's unique and providential place in history.

In one sense, The Tea Party's mission statement is nothing more than a concise summation of American civil religion with a fundamentalist subtext. There is belief in the sanctity of the individual, with the free market having a unique status not reducible to the human actors who generate economic activity. There is a canon of basic texts (The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights) and an authoritative interpretative framework (the Federalist Papers). While the Founding Fathers are not presented as intercessory supernatural beings, one can easily see such a belief system developing--at least in theory.

Other Tea Party documents display their religious contours more clearly. For example, "The Petition for Recommitment to the Declaration of Independence" has the character of an evangelical exhortation to conversion. "The Petition" conspicuously uses capital letters to articulate basic Tea Party concepts such as "CREATOR," "WE THE PEOPLE," and "TYRANTS"-- presumably to emphasize their super-normal gravity and power. These principles are then implicitly related to the original charisma of American revolutionaries--a lineage to which contemporary Tea Party Patriots have grafted themselves. "The Petition" also makes reference to understanding and defending "the Truth"--another evangelical exhortation that evokes the idea of crusade.

The Tea Party can be called "religious" in the sense that it crystallizes religious aspects American political discourse. But The Tea Party also shows signs of becoming more overtly religious in its view of the uniqueness and continuing power of the Founding Fathers, The U. S. Constitution, and other texts of the young American republic.

We could pursue this religious line of interpretation further and be a little more bold. For example, the Tea Party appears to be a sect. Sects are offshoots of a "church" but have a more suspicious attitude toward the surrounding culture. It would not be too much of a stretch to say that the parent "church" of the Tea Party is the Republican Party: the Tea Party draws upon many of key Republican positions, but has an increasingly adversarial relationship with the party hierarchy which it perceives as self-interested and doctrinally suspect. Sects sometimes definitively break with their parent church, but other times they are absorbed back into it. With the Tea Party and Republican establishment much depends on the outcome of the mid-term elections and whether Tea Party candidates prove themselves to be electable. Power and religion always have had a very intimate relationship.

There are two other options, if we speculate further. Sometimes a sect can seize an opportunity to purge the leadership of its parent church. For example, a crisis like a terrorist attack or a double-dip recession could be interpreted as a chastisement that calls for penance and a return to a purer form of faith. In special cases, sects evolve and become cults--cult not being a pejorative term but a sociological description of a religious group that turns away from society, in upon itself, and effectively becoming something new. The "Lyndon LaRouche Movement" would be "cult-like" in this way. Right now, the Tea Party is far too loosely organized to resemble a "cult" in a sociological sense, however much its critics wish to use the term as a derogatory label.

In the end, however, in religion or in politics, the crucial element is the charismatic leader and how she or he interacts with the faithful. A religion needs a prophet. While there are a number of charismatic Tea Party leaders, no one has yet claimed prophetic authority--at least not explicitly. Of course, only God and prophets know what the future might hold. When the political becomes religious, the "art of the possible" becomes "the art of the impossible."

By Mathew N. Schmalz  |  September 21, 2010; 7:57 AM ET Save & Share:                 
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