The Godly Tea Parties

Senator Jim DeMint sees the Tea Parties as a new “Great Awakening” in America’s spirituality.  Despite the idea that they are anti-tax (“Taxed Enough Already”), small-government, semi-libertarian movements, DeMint believes that leads directly to God.

Yes, God becomes more important the smaller government gets.  And, indirectly, that is in fact because when government isn’t there to help, people have to turn to prayer (DeMint doesn’t quite phrase it that way, but that’s his message).

I really think a lot of the motivation behind these Tea Party crowds is a spiritual component. I think it’s very akin to the Great Awakening before the American Revolution. A lot of our founders believed the American Revolution was won before we ever got into a fight with the British. It was a spiritual renewal.

It’s true that the Great Awakening in the 1730s had an effect on American thinking in the 1770s, though it’s not quite as clear-cut as DeMint says.  On the other  hand, DeMint seems to be reversing causality here — the Great Awakening had an effect on the revolution against domineering government, not the other way around.

I think people are seeing this massive government growing and they’re realizing that it’s the government that’s hurting us and I think they’re turning back to God in effect is our salvation and government is not our salvation and in fact more and more people see government as the problem and so I think some have been drawn in over the years to a dependency relationship with government and as the Bible says you can’t have two masters and I think as people pull back from that they look more to God.

Wow. You got elected with sentences like that, Senator?

To summarize (in shorter sentences), massive government hurts people, so they turn to God.  And they see that they can’t serve the government and God, so they turn to God.  And they see they can’t depend on government services and on God, so they turn to God.

Hmmmm.  No, it doesn’t make any more sense that way, either.

It’s no coincidence that socialist Europe is post-Christian because the bigger the government gets the smaller God gets and vice-versa.

So God’s triumph can only come about through small government?  While I agree the worse thing that ever happened to Christianity was getting formal sponsorship by Constantine (thus entangling church and state for a thousand years or more), I’d say that’s more the cause of “post-Christian” Europe — big government + big religion means that when regimes change and government restructures, the church become part of the “old,” vested in (and thus discarded with) the ancien regime.

Would that more American Christians on the Right recognized that dangerous trap.

The bigger God gets the smaller people want their government because they’re yearning for freedom.

Again, this makes little sense.  One can as easily argue that a “big God” is contradictory to some sorts of freedom, or that “big government” stands as a civil bulwark of freedom. Indeed, one can argue that in a robust and powerful democracy, freedom is more easily expressed through the ballot box than the offering plate.

So in short, DeMint really doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about.  He’s turning religious revival leads to civil libertarian impulses around to say that civil liberties lead to religious revival.  He’s claiming that big government leads to small God (poor, helpless God, powerless in the face of the bureaucracy), but that with a small government, people turn to God (again, that might be true, if only because they have no other resource for community services than through a church — which isn’t quite the same thing).

The irony here is that one of the hallmarks of the Great Awakening was a bloom and spread of new denominations in American Christianity, and ones that emphasized personal relationships with God over moral dictates from above.  That played a role, yes, in the American Revolution, but it might not play so well with the current crop of conservative churches, who would prefer “freedom” to mean “free to do what we tell you God wants you to do, but nothing else.”