The Bible and the Constitution

More information on the conjunction between the Tea Party and the Religious Right:

Many tea partiers, like religious right activists, find the roots of their thinking on government in the Bible.

According to Julie Ingersoll, associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, this view on government's limited role is based on Christian Reconstructionism, a fundamentalist movement that advocates for the rule of Biblical law (which includes imposition of notions of "traditional family") and which holds that God ordained government with limited (essentially law enforcement) authority. Some activists, ranging from religious right figures to pro-gun and militia groups and secession advocates, emphasize a divine edict to rise up against what they characterize as the federal government's "tyranny" when it exceeds the authority God granted it.

At his conference, Reed said in a speech, "people have not only the right but the have the duty and the obligation to overthrow that government, by force if necessary," if government violates those God-given rights. Reed quickly backtracked, claiming he wasn't advocating a government overthrow but rather voting in the midterms.

At both the FFC and VVS conferences, speakers, including 2012 GOP presidential hopefuls Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee, claimed that America was founded on biblical principles, and that individual freedoms are given by God, not the government. The rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights (but not in other amendments to the Constitution), the argument goes, are ordained by God. The proof of this, advocates maintain, is in the words "endowed by our Creator" in the Declaration of Independence, a document Michele Bachmann told the Value Voters Summit "goes hand in hand with what we know the truth to be."

Mat Staver, chairman of the Christian right legal advocacy group Liberty Counsel and dean of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University School of Law, both co-sponsors of this year's VVS, told me "there are rights that come from God" and "when government doesn't protect [those rights], it's our duty and responsibility to change it, worst case scenario, throw it off and start over." He added that the federal government has "tyrannical aspects" and that the healthcare reform law in particular "is worse than the 1765 Stamp Act that the revolutionaries got upset with or the Boston Tea Party."

Katy Abram, who also spoke at the VVS tea party panel and is an organizer of the Lebanon, Pennsylvania 912 Project, told me that 350 activists in her group are receiving educational training on the Constitution from the Institute on the Constitution. The IOTC, founded by one-time Constitution Party presidential candidate Michael Peroutka, offers a twelve-part course on the "biblical" basis of the Constitution. The Constitution Party was founded by Christian Reconstructionist Howard Phillips and claims its goal is "to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries." Once considered a fringe of the conservative movement, the Constitution Party and its adherents are becoming more visible in the tea party era.