http://www.publicreligion.org/objects/uploads/fck/file/AVS 2010 Report FINAL.pdf
The report includes a section on the strong connection between conservative christian views and the tea party. Interesting reading.
I would be interested to know what percentage of posters on the religion board, who routinely come out as anti-gay marriage and/or anti-abortion, consider themselves to be part of the tea party.
I think the claim can logically be made that this is not an economic movement. It's a "values/morality" movement.
It would take a rather large dose of indulging in the correlation means causation fallacy to come to such a conclusion, and it would be ANYTHING but logical.
Fiscal and Governmental conservatism is just that, a section of conservatism.
Memebers of the Religious Right at the very least are socially conservative.
Typically, many people who hold conservative values in one portion of conservatism hold the values in another section as well.
So it makes sense that people who are socially conservative are drawn to a movement that is fiscally conservative.
However, as it showed, more than half of the movement DOESN'T consider itself to be part of the religious right. Furthermore, its not surprising to find that there is more people who in general harbor social conservative values in the tea party, but not necessarily identify with the religious right, then there are who hold libertarian social values because as is perfectly evident from polls and political parties there are generally less "libertarians" in general than the opposite.
Additionally, two issues does not the "religious right" make. I'm hardly one you could consider "religious right", and yet a year ago I would've answered yes to the first question and no to the second. However if you were to follow up I'd have saidthat while its my personal view, I think it should be a state issue, and for the latter I would've said I supported civil unions. But for the purpose of that poll I would be lumped into the grouping.
Its only real joining document of 10 key issues are all focused on governmental or fiscal issues, and not one touches abortion or gay marriage. The main issues pushed as a national movement this year wasn't gay marriage or abortion but health care, taxes, deficiet spending, and expansion of government and this was mostly carried on the Tea Party wave.
Would I say that a majority IN the Tea Party are social conservatives? Yeah. That doens't make it a social conservative movement. Would I say that there are a lot of Religious Right people partaking in the Tea Party? Yes. There were a lot of environmentalists that were part of the Anti-War movement, but that didn't make that movement about the environment. The beauty of the Tea Party is that because its a primarily fiscal and governmentally conservative movement its attracting the Religious Right, the Paleoconservatives, and the Libertarians because its addressing an issue that all three groups of conservatives can join together on.
The issue as to why social conservatives are more highly represented within it is because two out of three of those groups hold to social conservatism, and one of those two is potentially the biggest out of any of the various groups.
