The Global Tea Party and Its Enemies
The Tea Party is at once a very traditional American phenomenon — generally known as a “Great Awakening” — and part of a global insurrection. In both cases, the status quo is portrayed as oppressive and corrupt, and the rebellion against it is highly moralistic and flows from religious sources.
There is a considerable scholarly literature about America’s Great Awakenings, most recently by the Nobel Economist Robert Fogel. He describes it thus:
A cycle begins with a…religious revival…followed by (a phase) of rising political effect and reform, followed by a phase in which the new ethics and politics of the religious awakening come under increasing challenge and the political coalition promoted by the awakening goes into decline. These cycles overlap, the end of one cycle coinciding with the beginning of the next.
Fogel writes of four Great Awakenings: the first inspired the American Revolution and the triumph of the ideal of human equality. The second, associated with millenarian convictions, inspired the generation of the Civil War and the women’s suffrage movement. The third, beginning at the end of the 19th century, embraced the notion of social sin, according to which personal misery was not necessarily due to an individual’s shortcomings, but a societal failure. This religious conviction fed into the period of the New Deal and its attendant social engineering. The fourth — current — Great Awakening started in the 1960s and was marked by a revival of enthusiastic religious practices and by “born again” conversions. It drove the Reagan Revolution, and inspires the Tea Party’s tax revolt, the attacks on entitlements, and a return to ethics of individual responsibility after the embrace of collective sin in the previous phase.
The Second Great Awakening was well described by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831, and shaped his view of religion in America. The country was swept by an explosion of faith, spread by impassioned preachers claiming direct contact with the Almighty, and demanding that Americans rededicate themselves to the high moral calling of their religion. As it always does, the Great Awakening surged into public life, producing a new moralism in politics (the Temperance Movement, the Abolitionists, campaigns against the dramatic increase in illegitimate births, renewed concern for the poor and disadvantaged, and several utopian communities featuring a fusion of radical social experimentation and a highly personalized religion). A generation later, the passions, ideals, and language of the Great Awakening defined the Civil War.
Whether focused against British governors, slave owners, captains of industry, or bureaucrats of the nanny state, Great Awakenings combine religion and politics in ways that enrage the ruling elites. Many of the furious denunciations of the Tea Party — from accusations of racism to claims that the tea partiers are “religious fundamentalists” — come from members of the current Establishment, who have abandoned the (similarly “fundamentalist”) religious ideals that contributed so greatly to their own success. This further stimulates the newly awakened, who believe the members of the ruling elites have become corrupt, and abandoned the values that made America great.
Religious revival inspires social and political movements that change America. And not just America.
We are in the midst of a global religious expansion that goes hand in hand with a widespread political uprising against oppression and corruption. It is commonly assumed that the most dynamic faith in the global revival is militant Islam, but it isn’t. The blue ribbon goes to American-style evangelical Christianity. You might not know, for example, that a leading Chinese government economist recently wrote a famous study of market economies, in which he concluded that successful capitalist countries have successful churches, and thus that China should embrace religious organizations. As two sharp-eyed British journalists note in their recent book, God is Back, (Evangelical) Christianity is booming in the People’s Republic (and most everywhere else Christians are free to practice their faith), and the Chinese Constitution has actually been amended to make room for it.
Bah. (Or is “meh” more appropriate?)
I think the Tea Party is just another front group for spying on radicals, both real and imagined. Mostly imagined.
Meh right back atcha. You can only assert that out of your deliberate ignorance of tea party acts and principles. Don’t believe everything you hear in the faculty lounge and NPR and the New York Times.
please, read the rules. no personal insults, let’s stick to issues and ideas, ok?
Ye, right. Another conspiracy theory. A better one is that the Democrats engineered the financial crises to get Obama elected.
Oh my. I am a professional economist. I begin my day reading one of my three favorite pundits covering the work of one of my three favorite economists. I am so pumped I can not imagine a scenario under which my day does not get worse from here on out. Perhaps I should now go back to sleep.
hah! i have a better solution: get a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon. it will make you even happier and help save the economy…
I’m sure that a bottle of Knob Creek Bourbon would make me feel better, too, but that ain’t gonna happen anytime soon.
I’m over 55 and have over thirty years’ IT experience. Since the market collapsed in 2008, I’ve updated my skills, but can’t get another job in IT. So I’ve been working in retail sales, and expect to be doing so until Obama is out of office, Obozocare is repealed, and the h-1B and other job-killing visa programs are finally ended.
Suffice it to say that I’m as good at retail sales as I was in IT. But it doesn’t pay much, and there’s no way I can justify spending what little money I have on Knob Creek. Four years of my life are going down the drain as a result of underemployment and the Obama Depression. Underemployment is a cruel waste of the talents and efforts of hard-working and highly-skilled Americans.
I feel your pain…its amazing who the jobs are going to…almost by design.
I’m suspicious of any argument that posits a political tendency as innate. Politics itself — the peaceable attempt to persuade significant numbers of others to adopt a particular attitude toward the use of force — may be innate; at any rate, it’s certainly preferable to bloodshed. But political orientations and mechanisms, like religious affiliations, appear to be fluid.
Certainly, such things can be influenced. There are social trends at work at all times, and in every democracy or quasi-democracy. More, there is some evidence for a “pendulum effect” that counteracts social and political trends over longer spans of time. But “movement” politics is something that comes and goes on an irregular schedule. If it’s “imbedded in our national DNA,” what accounts for the large spans of time from which it’s absent? What accounts for the many millions of Americans who appear indifferent to it?
I think we are talking about human nature, not politics. Us humans tend to be passive much of the time and will tolerate a great deal of minor injuries from our neighbors or our government – until they become intolerable and we are roused to action.
That action often seems to an overreaction to some small injury (the complaints of the American revolutionaries seem pretty minor by today’s standards) but there is a long road of earlier injuries behind it.
Big government has been torturing us with small cuts for decades now. We are fed up and we will tear it down.
right on Old Soldier,
Could it be that once the looting gets to a certain level people understand they need to do something to make it stop. This isn’t the first time the puplic fisc has been looted and it won’t be the last, but enough people are saying “enough”.
Political tendencies are certainly not innate, but longing to know God, feeling in by not of the world is innate, placed in each of us by God. And by God, we all want to be free to pursue our worldly and otherworldly dreams.
Only an academic could miss the point so thoroughly.
One thing that secular humanists will never understand: the reductionism of the human to mere biological creature in service to the ruling class —-politicians frantically outbidding each other to “take care the people”
The Chinese had enough of that.
This represents an enormous opportunity for global freedom. It is, after all, failure in the battle of global ideas that ultimately leads to hot wars — totalitarians being successful with the “big lie.” The “big lie” being the religious/ political ideology that justifies totalitarian power— to become as gods among men. These demigods often become insatiable for more and more power, which leads to war.
I am reminded of what newly arrested Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about a cellmate (executed shortly thereafter), who emphatically and clearly told him “thou shalt have no other gods before me” — but at the time, Alexander still being Marxist, really didn’t comprehend what the cellmate was trying to communicate at that time.
Citizens and voters must always be on their guard against attempts by the media and other propagandists to set up politicians as false gods. Remember all of the photos of Obama that showed him posed in front of some light source or image that created a fake halo around his head? Sickening.
This is what Obama, and his family background, and his associates, are REALLY like.
This has nothing to do with religion, it is revulsion caused by insane politicians and media which have firmly and completely created an anti-universe where the meaning of “cut”, “reduction” and “lower” means the opposite.
It is people driven insane by reprehensible stooges talking about women and children dying and starving because of massive spending “cuts”, and not having a single politician, republican, independent, or democrat, nor any major media screaming bloody murder at this damnable lie. Instead, this lunacy is actually discussed as if it were actually a cut by both parties and the media.
Hear! Hear! SW! You have hit the proverbial nail exactly on the head!
Hope you don’t mind if I “plagiarize” your quote here to some of my political audience. Those who disagree with you (and I) have an agenda for this society that greatly represents a BS “Utopian” world that simply does not exist. Every civilization and society through the eons of history have failed at this miserable attempt to elevate the conscious of man. We are still and will always be a miserable lot. That is why the Ancient ones left us to our own devices thousands of years ago. We have evolved civilly in some cases but for the most part we are only more effective killers than our barbarian ancestors.
+1 to SW comment #5
Agree and then some. You could add a lot more about how this is a reaction to the excesses and abuses of our political elite and the growing legions of people who unfairly take from the state, er, “the rest of us”. A desire to reverse this and re-establish personal freedom and responsibility as the basis for our nation is what is driving the Tea Party. Very little of it has anyting to do with religion. In fact, I suspect that the opponents of the Tea Party just love this theory because it insures that they will never lose the support of the millions of Americans who fear religion-based social intolerances far more than they fear economic abuse and catastrophe.
SW, you’ve hit the nail on the head. This do-good feeling of “I am sensitive to the wants and needs of my fellow man” is what drives liberals, to the exclusion of all else, which justifies lying. Anyone who disagrees is perceived as an hateful enemy. Being wrong is just a bump in the road on their way to Nirvana and Utopia. No need to admit it and apologize. You can see it in the faces of the Moores and Pelosis.
I contend that it DOES have something to do with religion.
I attend Tea Party meetings and rallies. I post Tea Party web links on my blog. Tea Party people are primarily concerned with taxes, regulation, spending, and the economy. But that isn’t all. The Tea Party is all about limited government and respect for the Constitution.
That is why we are also concerned about government interference with our Constitutional rights of free exercise of religion, in the name of “tolerance” or “multiculturalism” or “political correctness” or other Marxist drivel.
Much of this anti-Christian appeasement is being foisted upon us out of fear of offending Muslims who should never have been allowed to immigrate here in the first place.
Historically, it has been religion that gives people the strength and the courage necessary to bring about positive change.
It’s all about controlling the people and taking their money and freedom!
I believe that the presentation of the 4 is right on. The Tea Party is only the vehicle of ideas and ideals which are causing the spread of the movement to return to the basics of who and Whose we are.
I would also mention Glenn Beck: his rally in Jerusalem had both a deeply religious side and a global goal. He does intend to build a real movement of global proportions.
Sarah Palin’s repeated references to “Providence” and its blessings is lifted straight from the lexicon of the Deists, Freemasons and radically purist Protestants who founded this greatest of nations.
Small wonder Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann’s stump speeches resonate widely. Their effect on this American Jew is heartlifting. May the Lord of Israel bless them and the Founding Fathers who continue to inspire us.
I am glad that Christian Evangelicals and politicians such as Bachman and Palin support Erez Israel. But my hope is that this support will not be limited to them. Anyone, of any religion, or of any system of belief be it atheism, agnosticism or any other ism who truly (not for political expediency) believes in the absolute and incontrovertible right to individual freedom and justice must, by definition, supprort Israel or otherwise be labeled as a hypocrite.
Very tangy indeed. I couldn’t agree more.
The lefties try to discredit and discount Americans at every turn. There is nothing religious about the Tea Party; it is just Americans using Yankee drive, energy and intelligence to try to overcome left wing, marxist criminality.
If you want to criticize a religious movement, then go after the left’s apotheosis of a dumb, shiftless, incompetent, mendacious Kenyan!
I just read David Horowitz’s “Unholy Alliance – Radical Islam and the American Left”.
Horowitz gives a very insightful analysis of leftist psychology. The Leftist is just like a person deluded by irrational, destructive religion. The underlying tenet of faith being that capitalism, traditional morals and values are evil and must be destroyed, and that people that hold Leftist ideas are morally superior. Any facts that disprove the basic tenet are ignored.
I highly recommend this book and have decided to read more of his work.
It doesn’t take a lot of smarts to figure out that BO is an ideological nut job. He sat in that crazy church for twenty years, where they praised Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. When Wright said, “God damn America” the huge crowd cheered ecstatically. None of this matters because Leftists believe they are morally superior. Only conservatives are subject to criticism.
Thanks Mr. Ledeen, for this new (to me) perspective and context.
Bit of a nitpick, but I believe Geert Wilders is an agnostic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geert_Wilders#Personal_life
Still though, he does say that he considers Dutch Christians his allies.
FREEDOM!
Excellent article, Mr Ledeen.
Canada is outstandingly secularist. It is therefore very Canadian to sneer at American enthusiasm and religious interests. It is one way to feel superior to y’all. Actually, given our reliance on American military strength, we have little to be superior about, except of course, the Oil Tar Sands, which can as easily be sent east (to China) as south (to the US).
Also, one relative is outraged at the loud debates now occurring throughout the USA, preparing for 2012. Well, I note that this loud debate over important issues were carried on in Athens; and the latter was not notably weakened by this.
Your point is further bolstered by the fact that of all Christian denominations the Islamic regime of Iran has singled out the Evangelicals as their evil enemies and will not allow them iniside the country and has forbade all contact with them. Also, in a previous response I posted a link to an article in which the clergy had ordered all Bibles to be burnt since they believe that the existence of the Bible is what has led to the mass conversion of the Iranian youth to Christianity, a crime punishable by death under the apostasy rules of Islam (Irtidad). I find it odd that I have a love-hate relationship with the Islamic clergy in Iran. I hate them for obvious reasons. Yet I do love them for doing what the Pahlavis were not able to do despite their noble efforts; that is do drive the people away from fundamentalism in particular and Islam in general. Think about it! By enslaving the Iranian people they have actually liberated them. As Dr. Ledeen once said “La madre degli idioti è sempre incinta”. Thank you morons.
The Tea Party members are everyday people tired of politicians and the media interfering with the rights given by the constitution to every day people. Also, the members are tired of law after law being passed, to reduce the rights of citizens to subject status. Tea Party members believe in the constitution and the fact that the constitution is written in black and white, requiring each and every person, including the criminal politicians and media, to honor and follow the constitution to the letter of the law. Nothing else is acceptable.
“Geert Wilders, an outspoken Christian…”
Wilders is an atheist, so no religious revival there.
When it comes to the threat of Islam, Christians and atheists, and everyone else for that matter, have common cause.
Interesting thesis. I can’t say that Mr, Fogel is not on to something, but I am someone raised on Evangelical Christianity, and I’ve noticed different strains of politically expressed religiosity through the years. The churches I attended when I was quite young had detectable remnants of both the liberationism of the Civil War days as well as progressive Republicanism left over from the days of Roosevelt. Both of these strains supported an active central government as well as an aggressive foreign policy. Some churches or parts of their membership have carried this on to an embracing of big government social gospel and have gone from emphasizing Luther’s idea of sola fide to an unacknowledged emphasis on works. The congregations dominated by conservatives and populated by an increasing number of libertarian-leaning members are those that provided foot soldiers for the religious right in past years, and are more inclined toward having a non-interventionist rather than religious government like they were in that recent past. Many of those who twenty years ago thought it best to have an actively religious government now think it best if government remain small and un-threatening. Besides, many of the old soldiers of the religious right are waiting for admission to nursing homes now. The big threat now is not an immorality that we can’t do anything about, it is the gauntlet of reality our kids and grandkids face after the foolishness of the past hundred years. They are the new objects of charity and concern, and what we fight to defend. In other words, it is still Onward Christian Soldiers (Roosevelt’s favorite hymn), just a different war.
When the term Evangelical is expanded to include Roman Catholics, as it is sometimes, what could it posibly mean? Maybe people of the Book.
Michael,
What you write fits perfectly into the Democrat plan for 2012. I’ll give you some stats and let you figure out what is coming.
Blacks constitute 13 percent of all drug users, but 35 percent of those arrested for drug possession, 55 percent of persons convicted, and 74 percent of people sent to prison.
And your point….!
Since blacks commit a overwhelming disproportionate amount of crime, law enforcement concentrates a lot of effort in the black community. Is there something surprising about your numbers?
what was the name of the chinese study?
http://www.willowcreek.com/events/leadership/2010/speaker_zhao_xiao.asp
This article is correct: the British called what is now called the American Revolution “The Presbyterian Revolution”. You have to scratch under the surface of historians’ misinformation to find the truth about the recent past.
Mr. C.S. Lewis addressed this years ago. If people would simply read more some perspective might be gained.
Try Mr. Lewis’ ‘Mere Christianity’ if you’re a newbie to this argument. If he fails then what you need is time.
God Bless,
AS
PS Chesterton is good too.
This thesis is bizarre. I see nothing remotely religious in Tea Party philosophy or activity. It’s entirely practical, a realization that the financial numbers on which modern “blue model” society floats simply don’t add up. It should perhaps be called the Mathematically Exact Party rather than the Tea Party. There are of course social conservatives who also consider themselves Tea Party members, but that hardly makes the two movements the same. And as we’ve seen over the past few years, leftoid news commentators strive mightily to conflate the two, but that’s for the purposes of smearing by association.
Tom, the people in the Tea Party are religious people because religious people, (not Political Islam, thank you very much) know that their rights come from God, not some self-centered, corrupt politician.
Proper perspective of history paints a very practical picture of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The whole thing starts when God calls Abraham and tells him to leave his people. Unfortunately, there is some very important information missing. Abrahams people routinely practiced human sacrifice. This information helps one to understand we God gets so angry about the worshiping of other “gods” and the story of God testing Abraham to see if he is willing to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham’s people were quite used to this sort of thing.
We have come a long way since then. The four “awakenings” and the Tea Party movement are a continuation of the story.
Interestingly, human sacrifice was also often a form of government control and intimidation.
As an addendum to this theme, I wonder if historians have recognized that the reason South Africa transitioned peacefully out of apartheid to a new, inclusive government without massive bloodshed is that the nation is deeply religious. People of all ethnicities attend church or other places of worship, and put the teachings into practice.
RE previous comment: The leadership on both sides in South Africa led the way in the peaceful transition, of course. Both main leaders are respected by the other side. It was a miraculous time in history.
People, being the avericious creatures they are, do things for two reasons: the good reason and the real reason. Your article gives us an insight into the various good reasons behind observed behaviour; I mean, who but Dawkins and Hitchins can/would bother to argue against noble piety? If you want to know the real reason why all the shit you describe happens, you need to follow the money, man, follow the money!
I have been wondering if seeing Tea Parties on al Jazera was an eye opener and exemplar to many people in the world. This is the first time I have seen it written, though.
I can’t think of a single nation or society that has had real personal freedom that wasn’t a Christian nation over the past two thousand years. I guess we would have to go back further and consider the Roman republic, Israel and Greece before the Christian era. Our rights do indeed come from God and the Christian message is one of personal responsibility which engenders a free society.
Islam and marxism as its ever been practiced are very compatible in their societal structure, a ruling elite that is beyond question. Liberalism is quite at home with Islam and of course liberalism is marxism renamed.
It only makes sense that the teaparty worldwide has a huge Christian component.
This clearly explains why the current manifestation of the “Tea Party” did not suddenly arise in response to Barack Obama, as so many claim that it did. Obama was just the spark that finally lit the fuse….
Excellent thesis but, unfortunately, not applicable to the world of the Quran. Fortunately, China has not inherited a ‘Revealed’ book that could compete with the Bible.
Let us graciously welcome Tony Blair, a liberal, into the International Tea Party (Earl Grey with milk and digestives in his case).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/sep/09/tony-blair-regime-change-iran-syria
Michael,
Excellent article. Would I be correct to assume that the MSM is ignoring it?
Does God want people to be poor? Or rich? I believe he wants everyone to be rich.
I don’t believe the Tea Party is the answer to the nation’s problems, though it can make some valuable contributions to public debate.
A major part of the Tea Party’s perceived philosophical basis (think Ayn Rand) is overtly hostile to Christianity. From the website of the Ayn Rand Institute: “Christianity asserts that reality is governed by supernatural forces, that knowledge is based on faith and that the highest moral virtue is self-sacrifice. …Christianity cannot be practiced consistently, destroys the integrity of man’s mind, and is incompatible with living successfully and happily in the real world.”
Since when does “being a good person” and “doing the right thing” have to be a religeous attribute? Shouldn’t these things be a basic HUMAN attribute?
To me, the Tea Party is the “Stop overspending!!!!” party. I think that a lot of people wish that it was something else, because then they could address that something else, instead of what it is. But wishing that doesn’t make it so.
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