The “Tea Party” movement, just two years old, has permeated the mainstream media. With powerful media and political moguls — like Glenn Beck, Jim DeMint, and Sarah Palin — amplifying their actions, you might think a large portion of the American citizenry were Tea Partiers. Well, you’d be wrong.
The biennial American Values Survey, by the Public Religion Research Institute finds that just eleven percent of Americans say they belong to the “Tea Party” movement.
Compare that to these other recent findings:
- Just 26 percent of Americans want to repeal health care law
- 12.9% of Americans are black, 15.8% are hispanic or latino
- 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth
- 78% favor repealing ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’
Heck, many would even say there are more self-identified gays, lesbians, and bisexuals than Tea Partiers.
The report also says that Tea Partiers “are more likely to be non-Hispanic white, are more supportive of small government, are overwhelmingly supportive of Sarah Palin, and report that Fox News is their most trusted source of news about politics and current events.”
No surprise there.
And, of course, “[t]hey are mostly social conservatives, not libertarians on social issues. Nearly two-thirds (63%) say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, and less than 1-in-5 (18%) support allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry.”
The Financial Times writes, “Tea Party members were trying to “redefine whiteness as an object of racial discriminationâ€, said Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, an ordained minister and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think-tank.”
“People who declared themselves part of the movement were overwhelmingly white (80 per cent) and Christian (81 per cent), the institute found.”
David Gibson at Politics Daily says,
One interesting difference between evangelical Protestants associated with the traditional religious right and conservatives associated with the Tea Party movement is that the Tea Partiers are somewhat less likely to attend church than white evangelicals and they are less likely to see the Bible as the literal word of God — though they score higher on both measures than the overall U.S. population.
But though less devout, Tea Party supporters are more likely to say that “America has always been and is currently a Christian nation” — a view held by 55 percent of Tea Partiers vs. 42 percent of the general population and 43 percent of white evangelicals. This embrace of civil religion points to a strong nationalist element that is often evident at Tea Party rallies. DeMint’s vow to “take our country back,” delivered to the Baptist congregation last Friday, was typical.
Tea Partiers are also far more likely than white evangelicals to believe that “minorities get too much government attention” (58 to 38 percent).
To which, Andrew Sullivan adds:
“They are the hardest of the hardest core and the notion that they care about actually cutting spending as a key priority when none of them will actually propose anything even faintly serious as a program of cuts is self-evident.”
“And if you think Sarah Palin’s cultists want to cut defense in any way any where, you need some therapy. “
Just eleven percent of Americans are Tea Party Americans.
Now, why are they getting all this attention?…
(image)