Taking Stock of Some Shifts

There was a period--back when I first started this blog--when I felt like I had a deep sense of what "the other side" was thinking. Doing research on conservative evangelicalism through the aughts and the early 2010s, I was able to listen carefully. I practiced Krister Stendahl's three rules for religious understanding:

1. Read/listen to the practitioners, not their critics
2. Don't compare your best with their worst
3. Find room for holy envy--aspects of their side that you wish your side had

I immersed myself in conservative evangelical books, podcasts, sermons, websites, blogs, interviews. I bled "conservative evangelicalism" from every orifice.

I published my book, enjoyed the mostly positive feedback--and then watched as, over the next few years the "other side" that I examined morphed into something I didn't recognize. I suppose the influence of early-to-mid-2010s-era trolling, the birth and growth of the "alt right," played a part. A kind of nihilistic irony, a sharpening of the South Park poke-fun-at-every-sincere-belief mentality, wormed its way into the American right's structure of feeling. Cheap, one-sided victories--owning the libs, getting the lulz--came to supplant and eventually replace gains for long-term visions about a shared future.

It's easy to rose-color-tint the early twenty-first-century right. Plenty of cynicism drove the Bush II era's militant patriotism. Yet one gathered that George W. Bush himself actually believed the faith he professed, and that faith--unappealing as I personally found it--gave him some kind of coherent core of sincere values. And yes, I think there were plenty of bad-faith pretenders and grifters willing to mouth churchy platitudes in order to win audience. 

But the first-wave trolls of early Facebook, Twitter, 4chan, Reddit, etc., didn't even pretend to coherent ethical or religious conviction. Instead you had webs of anonymized bullying and chaos for chaos's sake--all for anonymized fame and anonymized approval. These networks granted users a sense of power (I can make people outraged=I have power) and community (likes, lulz). Naturally, such an ethos attracted and intensified parts of online culture who felt themselves in need of power and community (young white men, mainly). This group in turn found a useful (and easily provoked) antagonist in the burgeoning online social justice movement. 

The sometimes brittle sincerity of the online left proved an appealing target for the "just joking" trolls eager to push buttons. The reaction from the left (and everyone else) to such puerile bullying soon crystallized around framing lonely white cishet men as infantile bullies. That framing in turn spurred some trolls to affirm and strengthen their male cishet non-SJW whiteness as a core identity. Thus Gamergate and other flashpoints advanced the polarization of trollish masculinity versus social justice warriors (feminists, Black and brown people, queer folk, etc.). 

Enter Trump as candidate. He and his campaign leaned happily into the trollish joy of provocation for provocation's sake. Trump's own ethos seems grounded in a petty bullying mentality: you're winning if--and to the extent that--you insult the other side. Their being outraged just proves how weak they are. It's shocking and funny at once to his audience. He gets the lulz. No wonder he so often praised his "army of trolls."

Trump II's governance advances this ethos, only without the laughs. Shock and awe--He can't be serious, can he?--defines his style so far. Yes, he really does mean it. Yes, he really will do that thing. The fact you're offended proves he's winning.

All this (and I'm super-simplifying) seems clear enough. The missing player here in my overview so far is the right-wing media ecosphere, a masterful hegemonic accomplishment. Its messages are consistent: Everything Trump does is good; everyone critical of Trump is deranged; only he alone can save us from The Threat. And, quelle suprise, The Threat turns out to be the same antagonists of Gamergate-era trolls: women, Black folk and POC, queer people. It's anyone who would dare to say that their puerile bullying is, well, puerile and bullying. 

And the government. This, I sense, comes more from TEA Party (and then Pizzagate and then Q-Anon) streams than from disgruntled gamergaters. From this source comes the deep-seated distrust and resentment of institutions, especially schools and government agencies. The right-wing mediasphere has over the past few decades supecharged such distrust into a reflexive hatred of complexity of any sort. Elon Musk and his DOGE seem the perfect blend of anti-SJW troll (with a bad boy hacker genius spice) and anti-big-government savior. Their cuts don't need to be smart or well considered, just grandiose and outrageous to Trump's enemies. That those people are getting upset about DOGE must, in this mentality, mean that it's doing something right.

The big question I have, though, is where conservative Christianity fits in. The evangelical intellectuals whose thoughts and stances I got to know so well--what's happened to them? I'm hardly the first to marvel at evangelicals' fawning over an amoral narcissist like Trump. I recognize that this support has happened. I'm still wondering how and why, which tells me I need to do some listening.

Differences and Deadlines

It's that time of the year again, when a deadline for some research project I've committed myself to looms ever closer. This time it's a mega-conference on performance studies. I've done that thing--that trick I tell my PhDs to try when they need to discipline themselves into working, that trick that I've pulled on myself multiple times, that trick I inevitably kick myself for using: if you need to write a brand-new piece of research, just sign up for a conference where you'll be presenting the work before a group of influential critical scholars. You'll get it done.

It works like a charm--most of the time--but it comes at the cost of some heavy stress when said due date is near and said research product is, well, still in the subjunctive phase. Thus my heavy stress.

The project I've promised to complete involves a brief paper laying out some connections between evangelical proselytism and liberal--anti-capitalist, to be exact--activism. In my work on various modes of evangelical outreach, I've run across more than one present-day evangelist referencing some mid-century evangelicals who noted how committed communists (the Stalinist/Maoist/Castro-esque variety) were to spreading their Marxist gospel of anti-capitalism. Why, plead the evangelists (past and present) can't Christians be at least as committed as the godless commies?

My seed of a contention--as yet untested by the rigors of research and writing--is that the situation in US left-leaning activism has reversed itself. That is, I think the time has come for some on the left to ask if anti-capitalist progressives can't get a little old-time religious fervor for spreading their own gospel.

Yet a quick glance at national headlines suggests that we're currently undergoing one of the most polarized and polarizing times in--well, in my memory, at least. I just watched a clip about the Tea Party protests rallying support to overturn the health care reform bill, to return to a more pro-market system (though, as many journalists and pundits point out, the reform bill itself uses market tools, not socialism). Any religious fervor about anti-capitalism must encounter a similarly passionate set of beliefs from Tea Partiers. There's a fundamental difference here that renders the hopes for conversion to or from either side dim.

I've long been drawn to writers and theorists who deal with the problems of plurality, tolerance, and disagreement. To whit: how shall we disagree? and to what end? In a number of different works, literary critic Wayne C. Booth asks us to consider "the company we keep" in life and in fiction. How do we imagine and interact with the other who passionately holds beliefs at odds with our own?

Booth had some personal experience with this as a dean during the 1960s eras of protests and student-led sit-ins. There he found himself confronted by and engaged with activists who were asserting views--or at least methods--at odds with the stances he was obliged/convinced to take as dean. Such was the intensity of disagreement, he says, that at some points one side wouldn't really launch criticisms so much as merely repeat their opponent's views verbatim ("You believe X, Y, and Z!"), assuming that the restatement stood as an obvious rebuttal of the point itself.

I was caught by that image--the disbelieving repetition of another's thesis as (and instead of) an actual rebuttal. Examples from my own life spring to mind: "You believe that health care should be a right guaranteed by government!" To me, or to an audience of like-minded progressives, such a statement functions as a simple affirmation or a happy discovery. But to others, uttering such a statement would be a call for boos and hisses. It would be formally (though not in magnitude) similar to a let-me-get-this-straight-you-really-believe-this statement that, say, person X thinks that kittens should be ground up into dogfood.

The disbelieving repetition-as-argument (I'll have to see if Booth has a better term for it) depends utterly on shared conventions between audience and speaker (repeater, I should say). It's an anti-manifesto. Rather than stating affirmatively what one's side really does believe, you state your opponents' views so baldly as to throw your own side's views into sharp relief.

It's important to distinguish this rhetorical maneuver from a related but unfair variant--the straw man technique or willful falsification, where someone attributes to an opponent views that the opponent simply doesn't espouse. No, in the kind of speech scenario Booth describes, both sides are able to state the others' views fairly and without distortion. I know exactly what you believe, an activist in this situation says, and I disagree to such an extreme that the belief as such is anathema to me and mine.

Now this is fundamental difference. Many of the critics I draw on regularly--Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Ranciere in particular--insist on the value of this level of difference to the operation of democratic politics. Mouffe sees a great deal of danger in the will to mute or smooth over disagreements through the search for consensus or moderation. Honest antagonism--or as she would prefer agonism--is in her view the fuel for the democratic motor.

My problem? I agree intellectually with Mouffe that fundamental disagreements are inevitable and ought not be rationalized away as malfunctions to be repaired. But emotionally, such conflict--the kind of conflict Booth recalls--makes me queasy. I know it's odd for a scholar of theatre to say this, but I hate conflict.

I'm all the more impressed, then, by people such as Booth who make it their life's work to begin at the fundamental disagreement scenario ask "What now? What's the ethical thing to do?" Much of Mouffe's work (and I suspect much of Booth's) involves not so much advocating an exact, silver-bullet answer but warning against the will to give up, to dismiss the other totally and--on that pretext--pursue their destruction.

To restate--what attracts me to present-day evangelism as a subject is how it, too, very often begins from an assumption of fundamental difference--those who believe on the risen Christ and those for whom the gospel is foolishness--and refuses to give up. I'm intrigued especially by worldview evangelisms that enjoin Christians to educate themselves so fully in other (i.e., non-evangelical-Christian) beliefs so that the evangelists could in fact state those beliefs fairly and clearly.

I'm not yet convinced that the capitalist/anti-capitalist disagreements going on in this country (which for the most part are more like very-strict-capitalist versus slightly-less-strict-capitalists) have reached even the point at which either side can state the other's point of view clearly and fairly. I wonder, then, if there isn't the potential for anti-capitalist progressives like me to be the first to show empathy for the other's worldview as a first step to progressive evangelization...

Hm.

More later,

JF

Leaderless Activism and the Tea Party Movement

OK--one more Tea Party post, and I'm done for a while. Maybe.

Frank Rich, one of the New York Times's more liberal pundits, devoted his Sunday opinion piece to--well, let me specify. I read it because the headline was "The Great Tea Party Rip-Off." In actuality, the piece was mainly about Michael Steele's recent tirade against Harry Reid's ill-chosen words about President Obama's race as a factor in the last election. The Tea Party gets mentioned a bit at the end.

Rich, predictably, uses the Tea Party as a platform from which to launch further attacks on Steele and other conservatives. More interesting, though, was his link to this post by Erick Erickson of RedState.com, "I'm Afraid Sarah Palin Might Be Ruining Herself Unintentionally." Erickson writes specifically the upcoming "National Tea Party Convention" in Nashville, which charges $500 (that's just the registration fee). Like many commentators right and left, Erickson notes a bit of a tension between the idea of an organization ostensibly dedicated to advocating for not-so-rich folk to charge such exorbitant prices. But Erickson takes a harsher tone, admitting that he thinks the convention (and not, as Frank Rich intimated, the tea party movement in general) "smells scammy":

"Let me be blunt: charging people $500.00 plus the costs of travel and lodging to go to a 'National Tea Party Convention' run by a for profit group no one has ever heard of sounds as credible as an email from Nigeria promising me a million bucks if I fork over my bank account number."

I'm a little vague on just who exactly organized this convention. As far as I can tell from the Convention web page, it's a group called Tea Party Nation, which seems to restrict access to info beyond its home page (even stuff like FAQs or Resources) to members only. I guess the only way to find out if you agree enough with the group to join it is to join it to see if you agree with it. Not exactly a scam in itself, but frustrating and fishy all the same.

Erickson's larger point, though, concerns his cooling passions for the tea party movement in general. He touches on one of the features of the movement--its "leaderless" quality--that continues to fascinate me.

The progressive left has for some time been playing around with less top-down models of activism that might be called "leaderless." The more sophisticated cases for such tactics tend to invoke an idea like Barbara Epstein's "prefigurative community," in which groups adopt a guiding principle that their activist tactics--planning, organizing, implementation--all mirror the features of the "better society" they wish to create. They seek, in other words, to make the means and ends resemble each other.

For many of these progressive activists (most visibly in the world-wide anti-globalization movement), the "better society" looks like a voluntary, anti-capitalist, and non-violent anarchism in which small groups make decisions via consensus, share property, resist individual profit at the expense of others, etc. Activism built on this model tends to involve a number of otherwise distinct groups who join together around a common cause on a contingent basis, pooling resources to mobilize peaceful protest against a visit of the World Trade Organization meeting, for example. It's a "movement of movements" that highlight the spectacle of mass, non-violent direct action over more long-term, single-focus movements whose work often calls for working within the extant system (e.g., lobbying, electing candidates, fund-raising, letter-writing).

In my scholarly work, I've argued that the "movement of movements" trend offers a novel way of intervening in/resisting globalized capitalist oppression as well as presenting a productive challenge and critique to more "traditional" forms of social change organization. I question, however, how effective the movement of movements can beyond producing a singular event (i.e., a protest). Grounding myself in more old-school political theorists like Antonio Gramsci, I am incredulous toward the tactic of opting out of traditional politics entirely. A dream of utopia, of a better world, may be necessary for social change, but the dream alone isn't sufficient to realize that change.

Tea Party advocates, always eager to tout their leaderless, grassroots qualifications, are thus in my view latecomers to this tactic. They are also, from what I've seen and heard, less interested in the kind of meta-awareness of their movement that lets them see the plusses and minuses of quasi-anarchist structures.

The Convention offers an intriguing case in point here. On the one hand, tea partiers want to be leaderless--the better to criticize the elected leaders (politicians) in Washington. Yet in order to make any political gains, they must by necessity offer up, rally behind, and elect leaders themselves. Yet elected leaders eventually have to define themselves on the basis of any number of political decisions; a senator or representative is obliged to be a great deal more specific about her beliefs than "less spending and fewer taxes and more rights!" Inevitably, these specifics will reveal internal divisions: "You mean you're for X program and against Y legislation? What about Z issue? You've betrayed us!"

Indeed, you can see such divisions already, as "leaders" struggle to explain this or that frightening or racist or otherwise wackadoo stance or sign or slogan that appears at a tea party rally. The numerous references to violent action (e.g., openly displaying firearms, calling for a second American revolution) are particularly striking. I do not suggest that everyone or even that most people at a tea party gathering say such things. But enough do at enough tea parties that I think partiers disingenuous when they simply deny the existence of such sentiments. "Well, we're a leaderless movement," stammer the leaders (odd how tea partiers at once identify as and disavow the existence of leaders and spokespeople), "so we can't control who comes to our rallies. I can assure you, though, that the sentiment there doesn't represent us."

But there's the rub, no? A leaderless, totally grassroots organization has no "us" to speak of. It's a mass of people--powerful in its destructive force but less effective at getting anything productive done (Jose Ortega y Gasset famously compared masses to lava--powerful, destructive, directionless). I side with Gramsci here, who argues that masses eventually have to become parties, obliged to play the game of politics, where definitions of in and out have to be devised and where appeals to the base have to balance with concessions to other groups.

Complicating all of this consideration, for me, is the question of where evangelical or otherwise Christian-identified motivations and groups figure in the tea party setup.

More tomorrow,

JF

The What About Me Ethos: Tea Parties, Health Care, Haiti, and Avatar

Odd, isn't it, how seemingly unrelated bits of information, when juxtaposed, often resonate?

This last week I've written about three almost completely unrelated news items: 1) the Haitian disaster and Christians' response to it; 2) the Tea Party movement; and 3) some evangelical leaders' queasiness at the James Cameron movie Avatar. I had really no notion that these would link to a common theme at all until today, when I read news reports about the Massachusetts election on Tuesday to replace Sen. Ted Kennedy.

In a traditionally true-blue state, a Republican candidate, Scott Brown, now seems neck-and-neck with the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley. At stake in this election is the Democrats' tenuous hold on capitol hill power. Should the Democrats lose this seat, the upset will widely be interpreted as a watershed moment in politics, where President Obama's ambitious domestic agenda is put in check by a more-conservative-than-he-bargained-for public.

Worse, for the Democrats at least, is the fact that the health care reform bill so painstakingly advanced to House/Senate negotiations phase will almost certainly tank, as Brown vocally opposes the administration's reform efforts.

While I've been less than pleased with some of the deals (I think that's a generous word) cut with various Democratic senators to garner their support, I support the health care bill as mainly a good and necessary step. The thought that the months of anxious work on the bill could be undone by a narrow state election bothers me.

How does this all link back to the Tea Party/Avatar/Haiti intersection? It all came together for me with this quote from Mary Beth Cahill, John Kerry's former campaign manager who was queried by the Washington Post about the impact of a possible Republican victory. Like most of the other experts the paper asked, Cahill doubted that Brown would end up winning. If he does, however, Cahill predicts that Democrats will have a round of finger-pointing followed by some grim soul-searching, trying to figure out what things need doing before the midterm elections. Cahill offers one pressing reform: "We will have to provide an answer to voters who think, 'What about me?"

Cahill means that Democrats will have to be better about articulating how and why various administration policies will benefit Americans in the short term.

What about me? This, it seems, is the question roiling about in the many Tea Party protests, most of which identify and vilify any number of Big Red Devils (government, illegal immigrants, other countries, elites, liberals, the poor) portrayed as snatching away the benefits and rights and privileges that should be, well, mine. Enough with entitlement programs! Enough with taxes for foreign aid, universal health care, or welfare! What about me? That question serves as the beating heart of populist libertarianism today, the driving force of free market capitalism.

It is also the antithesis of what I understand to be the agape spirit of Christ. I am depressed beyond measure that an angry, petulant what about me? characterizes so much of the US spirit today. I'm frustrated that the answer to high-level greed of CEOs seems to be an argument that appeals to the lower-level greed of the middle classes: it's my turn for a piece of the pie. I'm upset, as well, that the Democrats--and frankly President Obama--have largely capitulated to these baser instincts in the health care reform process. All through the debates, I hear arguments about how health care reform will or will not lower my personal cost or quality of care. Absent entirely is the deeper question about the kind of society we want to create: one that cares for its members or one that does not. I hear no calls to sacrifice, no appeal to the ideal of a society in which those with care for those without.

Part of the popularity of Avatar, I'm gathering, involves Cameron's presentation of a sci-fi world in which all lifeforms are literally, biologically connected. All animals and many plants have biological "plugs" (a cluster of neuron tendrils) that allow any two of them to connect and share feelings, thoughts, etc. I found the plot device a bit silly, to be honest (the blue-skinned alien heroes have their tendril-things emerging from the ends of their ponytails, so there's a lot of hair-plugs--ha!). But apparently this notion of mutual co-existence and its ethical ramifications have caught many people's attention and passion.

Cameron has created a (for many people) compelling world in which the individual cannot be the prime unit of political or social consideration. In his world, What about me? becomes impossible to answer apart from What about everyone? By contrast, the villains of the film are overtly (one might say one-dimensionally) painted as selfish capitalists: they work for "The Corporation," they destroy nature in order to mine "unobtainium," they worry about profits and personal motives above all. (I should note here there are other aspects of Avatar that I feel undermine such a reading, but I'll deal with these later).

Only rarely do we see something like that trans-individual, others-first ethos in action. And this brings me to the Haiti disaster, which--comments by Pat Robertson et al. aside--appears to be an example of most of the world dropping everything and sending money/supplies/people to help a country in trouble. It's the What about everyone overtaking What about me, and no giant blue CGI figures are needed.

But of course Haiti is an exception, not the rule, and the world's attention to it is certain to be short-lived. It's only a matter of time until someone here begins wondering how and why we spent X millions of dollars to help a perpetually impoverished country (I mean, can't they just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?) when Y US segment of the population is suffering from Z trouble. Governmental assistance means taxes. And while I've heard many a conservative Christian spokesperson wax lyrical about the virtues of private charity (a check to the Red Cross or something), heaven help anyone who suggests that perhaps a tax could be levied or increased to make sure that no one goes without adequate medical care.

"Rescue the perishing" transforms to "Don't tread on me" faster than a lightning strike. How is this logic change possible? How can Christians consider them selves other-directed in all things except in civil society? I hear constantly from the Christian right how one's faith should dictate one's political orientation in terms of culture-war issues. Why then is it so hard for me to see how Christian faith directs the economic policies the right supports?

I am not, I have to say, a fan of Avatar for a number of reasons. But to the extent that it taps into and cultivates an ethos that disrupts what about me?, I think there's some hope there.

More tomorrow,

JF

Tea Party Politics

Brief note: News of Haiti's suffering continues to pour in. Please take a moment to pray and contribute what you can to a reputable relief agency (I gave to UMCOR).


Meanwhile, in less traumatic topics, I listened today to a podcast of On Point with Tom Ashbrook, an NPR-affiliated radio talkshow. The topic? The Tea Party, the populist, grassroots (some would quibble with that descriptor), diverse, and widespread movement of fiscal and social conservatives agitating for a variety of reforms to US policy and government. Given my research interests in the performance of conservative activism, it's perhaps surprising that I've avoided doing much work on this most visible and powerful of political protest movements on the right.

This show served as a good introduction to some of their beliefs and operations. Ashbrook (the host) devoted most of the show to two guests, themselves leaders of local Tea Party-affiliated groups. Throughout the dual interview/call-in, Ashbrook maintained a pretty fair tone throughout, pushing gently when a guest or a caller made an unclear or contradictory statement but never becoming cable-talk-showy (i.e., aggressive, interrupting, belittling, etc.).

For all the conversation, though I remain in the dark about the Tea Party's core ideals. Certainly "less government spending" and "less taxation" appear to be common themes. But the rationales underlying these slogans, as well as the related political/cultural philosophies linked with them, remain inchoate. Both guests tended to speak in rather vague terms about personal liberties or the values of the founding fathers. Beyond such language, however, their worldviews seemed to diverge sharply.

One guest, Lorie Medina from the Dallas Tea Party, cited some relatively specific grievances, instances in which she feels the government has overstepped its bounds by, for example, dictating the leadership of this or that corporation. She was careful to keep her arguments restricted to economic policy, advocating a Reganesque "no big government" libertarianism (though she did not use that latter term). The other guest, Jeffrey McQueen, founded a group (or, perhaps, a website) called "USRevolution2." Its main offering at present appears to be a modified flag available for purchase:



Asked by Ashbrook about the flag's design, McQueen explained that the thirteen stars reference (of course) both the original thirteen colonies of the original American Revolution and the thirteen guests at the Lord's Supper. The second revolution the flag alludes to implies a coming reform of government along general lines of fair tax, fair trade, limited government, and the right to bear arms.

McQueen's rhetoric ranged more widely than Medina's did. The show's more extreme comments came from him, as he at one point drew comparisons between the health care reform bill and the Holocaust (solemnly referring to Jewish relatives of his who died in Nazi camps) and openly described the President as a socialist. Toward the end of his time, he said something to the effect that Americans have "four boxes" to use in order to express themselves: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box--and the "bullet box." Ashbrook stopped him, asking him to elaborate. Did he really mean an armed revolution? "Just look at ammunition sales," McQueen answered. "They're way up."

Medina tactfully distanced herself from that particular line. She also strained to distance herself from overtly racist images that a caller reported were being sent to him and defended by Dallas-based Tea Party people. Both Medina and McQueen vehemently denied that either they or their fellow Tea Partiers were racist simply because they disagreed with Obama, castigating what they saw as critics' easy recourse to "the race card." As for the racist images and alarming/violent slogans circulated at Tea Party rallies, Medina fell back on the fact that the Tea Party is a leaderless grassroots movement that does not police its members. (Oddly, she coupled this argument with firm assurances that her Tea Party group would never allow such images in its communications).

One caller picked up McQueen's reference to the Last Supper, challenging McQueen to explain how the passionately anti-socialist Tea Party could reconcile its pro-capitalism with the practice of the early church as described in Acts (I think he referenced Acts 4: 32-35--"All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. . . . There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.").

Here my ears perked up. Pace Max Weber, the collusion between capitalism and Christianity baffles me since passages like the one above seem utterly at odds with the profit/property/individualism values of the "free market." Is not the sharing all things with everyone and giving the needy everything they need more socialist? Medina swooped into rescue McQueen, claiming authority as the daughter of a Baptist pastor. The Acts passage, she explained, described the believers' actions toward each other. They did not, she argued, give their money "to Ceasar" and then ask Ceasar to redistribute it. That would be socialism. Christians give their possessions on their own, not via government.

I've heard this interpretation before, and, forgive my bluntness, but what self-serving tripe! It's the height of hypocrisy for a Christian-right political conservative to hide behind separation of church and state when the bulk of their agenda blatantly pushes US government to mirror supposedly Christian values. Would it be socialism for the US government to adopt and enforce strictly Christian notions of, say, marriage? Would it be socialism for the government to adopt Christianity as its official religion? The Christian right (broadly speaking) consistently holds that the US is a Christian nation. Shouldn't a Christian nation adopt Christian values--not just culturally but economically?

Moreover, Medina's exegesis conveniently dodges the caller's main criticism. Even if the example in Acts 4 doesn't advocate a socialist economic system, no stretching can possibly distort that passage into a Christian case for supporting capitalism, particularly the corporate-freedom capitalism Medina praises. Where exactly does Jesus or the early church throw their support behind trickle-down economics?

But I digress...

Clearly the Tea Party is a diverse movement in the throes of defining itself. Certainly its members have a great deal of passion, but (as Elinor Clift mentioned in a subsequent show segment) passion isn't enough to create meaningful political change. At some point they will need to cohere around a leader who articulates their passion in terms of a distinct platform of policy proposals. And the tricky thing about articulation: it dissolves the illusion of unity conjured by hurrah-words like "freedom" and "values" and "normalcy."

I wait to see how and if the Tea Party confronts and navigates its own internal differences.

More tomorrow,

JF