The following article, from theArkansas City Traveler, discusses how conservative Christians feel about the liberal agenda.
Despite the tea party’s well-known fiscal focus, the anti-tax, budget-slashing movement’s most underappreciated energy source might be its evangelical Christians.
I suspected as much when I attended a couple of early tea party rallies.
News coverage focused on the signs, speeches, and slogans that promoted free markets, fiscal responsibility and constitutionally limited government.
But my conversations with participants revealed another widely shared agenda: Stop abortion rights, same-sex marriage and the other social evils in the eyes of the religious right.
David Brody, the Christian Broadcasting Network’s Washington, D.C.-based chief political correspondent, was making similar discoveries.
If it often looks as though tea partiers are driven by something resembling religious zeal, you’ll understand why after reading his new book, “The Teavangelicals: The Inside Story of How the Evangelicals and the Tea Party Are Taking Back America.”
Along with numerous profiles and interviews, Brody recounts polls such as a 2010 American Values Survey that indicated nearly half of self-identified tea party members said they were part of the “religious right or conservative Christian movement.”
For example, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life found 60 percent of registered voters who agreed with the religious right said they also agreed with the tea party.
Some 44 percent of white evangelical Protestants surveyed said they agreed with the movement. Only 8 percent said they didn’t.
Almost two-thirds of tea party supporters opposed same-sex marriage, and 59 percent said abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.
Read more at Onward Christian ‘Teavangelicals’ – Arkansas City Traveler