The Tea Party Movement is Still Religious and Socially Conservative

Last November I pointed out that a significant faction of the Tea Party is a subset of the religious right and that, despite the perception of the movement being comprised of economically-oriented libertarians, the majority held social conservative views. Although the evidence for these assertions were based on solid data, many people really, really wanted it not to be true.

Those people aren’t going to like the new Pew Research findings either:

A  new analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life finds that Tea Party supporters tend to have conservative opinions not just about economic matters, but also about social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In addition, they are much more likely than registered voters as a whole to say that their religion is the most important factor in determining their opinions on these social issues.  And they draw disproportionate support from the ranks of white evangelical Protestants.

The analysis also shows that most people who agree with the religious right also support the Tea Party. But support for the Tea Party is not synonymous with support for the religious right. An August 2010 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that nearly half of Tea Party supporters (46%) had not heard of or did not have an opinion about “the conservative Christian movement sometimes known as the religious right”; 42% said they agree with the conservative Christian movement and roughly one-in-ten (11%) said they disagree (based on registered voters). More generally, the August poll found greater familiarity with and support for the Tea Party movement (86% of registered voters had heard at least a little about it at the time and 27% expressed agreement with it) than for the conservative Christian movement (64% had heard of it and 16% expressed support for it).