Coming together In hate and intolerance

Many leaders of the Tea Party movement would have you believe theirs is a secular movement, one based on a free-market vision of the economy forged in the fires of our nation's founding documents. But with control of the Congress up for grabs this November, the secular veil is growing a bit tattered in the tussle for power between Tea Party and religious right leaders. If the speakers at last weekend's Values Voters Summit, an annual Washington conference for religious-right activists, have anything to say about it, Tea Party personalities had better drop that secular talk and walk slowly, with their hands up, toward the church door.

"[A]s I travel around the country, someone will tell me, 'I'm a fiscal conservative, but I'm not a social conservative,'" Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., a Tea Party booster, told the Values Voter audience. "I want to straighten them out a little bit this morning, because the fact is you cannot be a real fiscal conservative if you do not understand the value of having a culture that's based on values."

In truth, these two movements have been intertwined since the dawn of the Tea Party movement in 2009, when Republicans with a religious-right constituency saw a way to seize greater power within their party by playing to the Tea Party crowd. The Tea Party favorites who graced the Values Voter stage are well-known to followers of the religious right: Like DeMint, Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind. (who won the Values Voter presidential straw poll), and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., make frequent appearances before audiences of both the religious right and Tea Party groups.

At last year's Values Voter Summit, any differences between Tea Party organizers and the religious right were downplayed. Then, the religious right was in a waning period, while the Tea Party movement was on the upswing. But as the Tea Party movement became a political force, with a lot of help from large, professionalized astroturfing groups, candidates for political office -- and the experienced campaigners they need -- had to be drawn from somewhere on the right-wing spectrum. And the most hard-core political experience on the right is found among the ranks of the religious.