Will War Between the Religious Right and Libertarians Tear the Tea Party Apart?

In the months leading up to the midterm congressional elections, the tea party movement managed to tamp down on its internal divisions in pursuit of a shared goal of defeating Democrats. But with the elections over, the movement's fault lines are starting to show, and tensions between the tea party's social conservative and libertarian wings are poised to explode into an all-out civil war.

"It's easier for them to be united around the political agenda of defeating Democrats than it is going to be agreeing on a legislative agenda," observes Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way.

The most recent example of an emerging schism: Some tea party activists have linked arms with the gay conservative group GOProud to demand that the new GOP congressional leadership stick to the tea party's core fiscal issues and not those of evangelical Christians. They sent a letter to House Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell imploring them "to resist the urge to run down any social issue rabbit holes in order to appease the special interests." They write:

Already, there are Washington insiders and special interest groups that hope to co-opt the Tea Party's message and use it to push their own agenda—particularly as it relates to social issues. We are disappointed but not surprised by this development. We recognize the importance of values but believe strongly that those values should be taught by families and our houses of worship and not legislated from Washington, D.C.

The letter represents a direct challenge by the tea party's libertarian faction to the GOP's historic fealty to its base of evangelical Christians. Represented in the GOProud letter by Andrew Ian Dodge, a Maine-based coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, the tea party libertarians believe the movement has been successful in large part because it has avoided divisive social issues like abortion and homosexuality. They want the movement and the leaders it helped elect to Congress to stay focused on the limited agenda it set out from the beginning. Joining up with a gay Republican group certainly drives that point home. But it also promises to ruffle some feathers—and not just those of the establishment social conservatives who've been on the outside of the movement looking in.

According to a recent poll, only 18 percent of tea partiers support gay marriage, a figure that puts them well to the right of most voters. About half of all tea partiers also consider themselves part of the Christian conservative movement, whose members aren't fans of GOProud. Earlier this year, several evangelical groups went so far as to boycott the annual Conservative Political Action Conference simply because GOProud was allowed to sponsor a small table in the exhibit hall.

The tensions within the Tea Party Patriots are a microcosm of those roiling the movement as a whole. Even as one faction of the group is now calling for social issues to be left to the family and the church, another is actively courting social conservatives. In September, for instance, members of the group's national leadership attended a meeting of high-powered social conservatives in California, attempting to hit them up for donations.

A few weeks earlier, Mark Meckler, TPP's national coordinator, appeared at a DC conference sponsored by Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition. There, Meckler told the religious right's assembled foot soldiers that he believed the real animating force behind the tea party movement was opposition to the separation of church and state and the "removal of God from the public square." One of the group's newest board members is the former Oklahoma Republican congressman Ernest Istook, a stalwart of the Christian right.