The flavor of Tea, Part 4

On Monday I shared some of the picket sign messages I had scribbled down while on the lawn of the Capitol building during the 9/12 Tea Party rally. You may have noticed that for every 10 or so "Throw the bums out"-type signs, there was one with a Bible verse, or some allusion to Christ. To refresh your memories, here is a partial list:

"Jesus Christ is my Savior. So sorry Obama is yours."

"You were bought with a price. Do not become slaves of men (1 Corinthians 7:23)."

"We stand with Israel. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you."

"My God, not my government, will supply all my needs."

"Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

"The message of the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing."

"When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice. But when a wicked man rules, the people groan."

"If my people seek my face, then I will hear from heaven and heal their land."

One of the speakers at the podium (I forget who) exhorted the crowd to "Be angry and sin not" (Ephesians 4:26). That kind of remark would have gone over the heads of anyone there who wasn't a churchgoer. But my strong sense of the crowd was that it was almost completely churchgoers!

I realize that's quite a statement to make anecdotally. It could, of course, be merely a coincidence that the people I happened to talk to at the 9/12 rally---and two weeks earlier at Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial---all liked to talk about Jesus. (One of them had even read the book I am reading on revival by J. Edwin Orr.)

It could also be that the Beck crowd was merely incredibly tolerant of Christians when "Amazing Grace" and other hymns were piped out of the giant loudspeakers lining the reflecting pool. But even if the intersection of Christian and Tea Party circles turned out not to be quite as large as my sense of it is, it is still larger than what would be expected by a random statistical sampling of a crowd of people on a street.

What is this? I wondered. I started thumb-sucking the phenomenon of the intersection of Tea Partiers and Christians in our society. For it is no foregone conclusion, it seems to me, nor a logically obvious state of affairs that resistance to socialism and fervor for political freedom should be more intently sought by Christians than by Unitarians or Wiccans. After all, wouldn't you think all people would resist encroaching government control equally? What do you think is going on?

I solicit our readers' help.

For more on Andrée's experiences related to Sunday's 9/12 Tea Party rally, click here.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.