With the Tea Party credited for Republican energy in the 2010 elections, evangelicals, typically a key Republican constituency, have been overshadowed. Purportedly, evangelical zeal for Republicans declined with the close of the Bush Administration, and young evangelicals were trending more liberal, based on their reputed environmentalism, wariness of war, and distaste for dicey social issues. Evangelical Left activist and theorist Jim Wallis, a prominent Obama supporter, is ostensibly the voice of a new breed of more progressive evangelicals.
Most egregiously, Wallis ominously wonders if "white resentment" guides the Tea Party, noting that 89 percent of Tea Partiers are white, according to one survey. "I wonder if there would even be a Tea Party if the president of the United States weren't the first black man to occupy that office," Wallis asks. Does he think the Tea Party would not exist if a President John Kerry or Hillary Clinton had pursued Obama's same policies? If not, it's not clear why. Wallis also asks if libertarianism is the "furthest political philosophy from Christian faith." Further than Communism, Nazism, Fascism, or theocratic Islam? It's a silly question, given the other possibilities.
Wallis's desire to identify the whole Tea Party with an extreme, soulless, Ayn Rand-style libertarianism that exalts the strong and disregards the weak is a stretch. Not all Tea Partiers are libertarians, much less clones of Ayn Rand. And many Christians believe in limited government for moral reasons -- because human fallibility makes centralized political power dangerous, and because big government can displace religion, family and other human institutions with divine purpose. Wallis's essay warns against the free market because of human sinfulness. But he does not acknowledge that human sinfulness may also argue against his brand of big government, which, unlike the market, has the power to tax, regulate, incarcerate, and even kill.
The current economy and political climate, of which the Tea Party is a symptom, may have neutralized whatever gains Wallis's brand of statism had achieved among younger evangelicals. Evangelical Left elites want to emphasize Global Warming regulation and government health care, while most evangelicals almost certainly share Tea Party distress about too much government. Wallis's alarms over the Tea Party, and evangelical support for it, may reveal his own political intuition that the Evangelical Left's moment has receded.
