Once I had a membership card in the Moral Majority and my wife listens to Dr. James Dobson.
We work at Biola University, a flagship university for conservative Christians in the United States.
Recent media reports about our fear of the Tea Parties certainly describe our feelings . . . though they underplay the terror and loathing that fills our souls as we think about these acts of rebellion against the Leviathan.
As members of the Religious Right, we have long supported the growth of government, because traditional Christians have seen the positives of large governments in the twentieth century. Millions of members of our own church received martyrdom at the hands of the state in just one nation alone! A growing Tea Party means that our children and grandchildren will have no chance of facing a powerful state and dying for their faith.
The media is right when it suggests that we cannot separate any of our goals and work for one without ignoring the other. It is true that we are passionately right to life and support traditional marriage. The fact that the Tea Party is advancing another long-term goal of conservatives, a smaller state, is confusing to us.
We no longer go to work, because we fear that advancing our families financial goals will distract from our support for an end to legalized infanticide. We no longer work on strengthening our own marriage, because doing so distracts us from preventing gay marriage.
In fact, we no longer go to church, because most weeks abortion and gay marriage are not mentioned from the pulpit.
We are as the media suggests, simple folk, who can keep only one (or at most) two thoughts in our heads at once and those thoughts are only ending abortion and saving marriage.
Perhaps most offensive to us is that not everyone at the Tea Party agrees with us on everything. Ignore the fact that the abortion and marriage movements themselves are diverse. Ignore that we long have made common cause with those that disagree with us on important issues.
Ignore LDS and evangelical cooperation on marriage.
We can only cooperate with those who disagree with us on two issues. On any other issue of importance to us, assuming there were any other issues, we can only work with co-religionists.
As members of the religious right we never consume movies, books, or anything not approved by Dobson or our leaders. We have no atheist friends. We cast aside any family member who leaves our churches.
We would move to a compound in Idaho or Texas, but it would disrupt our pro-life work in California.The very fact that some libertarians might be at a Tea Party makes us tremble in fear . . .because no evangelicals are libertarians.
None.
The media is right. We fear the Tea Parties, because they are broad and diverse and so many of us are going to to them. We loathe them because we have always secretly supported governments that control what we buy and sell, because they Bible speaks so kindly of such future states.
Thank God that the truth of our hatred of the Tea Party movement is at last known.
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