party on?

Here's a quote from the comments section of the link from the preceding post. It's from a guy (presumably) who's been attending Tea Party meetings, apparently studying them. It's a rather scary description:

Shortened almost to incoherence, the pet theory is that they’ve spent their whole lives expecting (and dreading) an epic battle with evil, and they’re convinced It Is Coming.

The conservative Christian ideology has encouraged them, their entire lives, to view their whole life as part of an epic struggle of good and evil. Evil is everywhere, creeping up, preparing to overwhelm, or to suddenly strike. And you’re trained to actively look for the evil that’s always creeping up all around you (generally, this takes the form of decadence, impropriety, and disrespect for recognized authority figures). A feeling of despair at the evil of the world, and the deep threat this poses to your own soul, is quite normal.

I understand there to be some kind of implicit guilt by association: the fact that people around you are engaging in decadence endangers your soul. And they shouldn’t have a right to endanger your soul with their behavior. Or at the very least, to protect your own soul from taint, it’s your role in the world to be afraid of the sin around you, to call it out and protest it and be afraid of its ability to taint you with evil. The idea could be compared to a mild reworking of the city of Sodom story, I think.

So anyway. Every single tea party attendee I’ve ever met is a conservative Christian. Almost all of them, and every single woman, very strongly self-identifies as this; the only possible exception is some of the militia folk who go along with it but aren’t deeply emotionally invested in that identity (though even they use phrases like “God-fearing man” .

They are a subpopulation of America who are predisposed to believe, and be afraid of, grave threat. The Democratic party is already known to be the ones who pose the threat, because they enable murderers (i.e., they support killing babies; i.e., they are pro-choice).

So now they’ve been emboldened, by electing a suspect President (who wasn’t even eligible to be elected, because he is foreign-born, and who is obviously an evil man—whatever their other views on race, they understand Obama to have been illegitimately placed in the President position by sinister organizations like ACORN which have been just waiting for a moment to exploit. A common misconception is that Obama actually belonged to, and participated in bombings with, the Weather Underground).

So they’re [Democrats] emboldened, and so they’re [Democrats again] making their move to destroy America. It strikes me as very logical, if you begin with two beliefs:

1) Other people living their way of life endangers your soul.

2) Everyone knows that your Godly way of life is holy, and deviants know in their hearts they are being unholy and Satanic. Everybody (at least everybody relevant to this discussion) believes in God and Satan and has chosen a side in that fight. Therefore, the people who want alternate ways of life to your own are actually literally threatening and intentionally endangering you.

Incidentally, the commenter, one "Salient", had a lot of interesting things to say. Among them, one of the large sponsors for Glenn Beck is a gold dealer named "Goldmine". Guess what gold prices do when people get worried? How great is it to have a guy working for you who can amp up the worry?