Emily Ekins on Evangelicals and the Tea Party Movement

A new book by Christian Broadcasting Network correspondent David Brody gets across an often-overlooked fact about the Tea Party movement: It is a coalition compromised in roughly equal proportions of social conservatives and activists who lean toward libertarianism. Unfortunately, argues Reason pollster Emily Ekins, Brody tends to misunderstand what libertarian-leaning Tea Partiers believe, what drives them, and why they are allied with evangelicals. In turn, he misinterprets the evangelical half of the Tea Party milieu and its impact on politics. And then, having misread the movement, he urges it to shift some of its focus toward social issues.