The Tea Party's "constitutional scholar"

But the good news in all this is that  the Tea Party fire is pretty much burned out and we don’t have to worry too much about this crazy stuff, right? After all, today they’re just a group of libertarian isolationists who want to work with the left to take our country back from the wealthy elites. (And, who knows, maybe there really are a few like that out there.) But the makeup of the Tea Party remains the same as it ever was; it is simply the latest iteration of the far right. And as religious right expert Sarah Posner adroitly observed:

[T]o understand why the Tea Party resonates with the religious right and vice versa, one must understand how the anti-government rhetoric of the Tea Party movement is driven by a fundamental tenet of Christian reconstructionism: that there are certain God-ordained spheres – family, church and government – and that government has exceeded the authority God gave it, to the detriment of church, family and the individual, whose rights, both Tea Partiers and religious right-ists maintain, are granted by God, not the government. 

This notion that the federal government – not only godless, but in flagrant violation of God’s will – is “tyrannical” and needs to be overthrown resonates from militias to the John Birch Society to the podiums of religious-right gatherings where Republican presidential hopefuls jockey for the support of the faithful. To fail to see the religious roots of the Tea Party mantra – or the ways in which it reverberates as a divine imperative – is to blind oneself to a fundamental feature of American conservatism.