Evangelical, Tea Party Divide

Evangelical, Tea Party Divide Highlighted in Bob Jones Endorsements

Political observers have predicted that the Tea Party could be the game-changer the Republican Party needs to win key Congressional seats come November. The TP represents a new raw force and overshadows a population that was once the GOP’s base: Evangelicals. The division between the two right-wing camps has simmered below the surface for months. Now it’s bubbling up at the politically influential, Evangelically-inclined Bob Jones University, where the school’s chancellor and a senior administrator have issued rival endorsements in South Carolina’s Republican run-off.

Electoral battles are inherently zero-sum game. If one side wins, the other loses. There’s rarely any middle ground. That explains why Evangelicals, long an instrumental GOP base, were worried about the rise of the Tea Party, with its focus on economic and policy issues, rather than social morality. “There’s a libertarian streak in the tea party movement that concerns me as a cultural conservative,” Bryan Fischer from the anti-gay American Family Association, toldPolitico last year. The tea party movement needs to insist that candidates believe in the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage.” The Tea Party movement, however, has little interest in social issues, lest they distract from other concerns, like immigration, another place where Evangelicals and the TP split.

Evangelicals moved away from the Tea Party last May, when a host of leaders, including the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy director Richard Land and Mathew Staver, dean of the Liberty University School of Law, came out against Arizona’s immigration law. They preferred Obama’s path to the Copper State’s draconian measures. “The pathway for earned legal citizenship or temporary residency should involve a program of legalization for undocumented persons in the United States,” they wrote in a letter, although now may back out over gay partner benefits. The Tea Party, of course, prefers to erect fences and tent cities than consider citizenship.

Now the right wing civil war has moved to Evangelically-inclined Bob Jones University. The school has long history with the Republican Party, and GOP leaders like Mitt Romney, Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan have stomped on the university’s grounds. No wonder the school’s current chancellor, the founder’s grandson, BJ III, has endorsed incumbent Rep. Bob Inglis.

“We know that with all the diversity of opinions in a district, there are bound to be thousands who part company with you on certain votes,” said Mr. Jones. “Nevertheless, the goodhearted, Christ-loving, God-fearing, ‘real’ Bob Inglis is one we appreciate greatly and hope will continue to represent us in the future.” Meanwhile, Robert Taylor, head of the College of Arts and Sciences, has backed Tea Party-approved candidate Trey Gowdy, signaling that the once solid Evangelical grounds aren’t a guaranteed win for the established GOP.

The Republican Party will face a new challenge this election: how do they create a tent big enough to address social conservatives’ queer concerns, and immigration stance, while also focusing enough attention on the Tea Party’s more “Main Street” crusade? One thing’s for sure: Republican strategists have their work cut out for them, and Democrats are no doubt tickled pink. 

by Andrew(AKA William)