Is The Tea Party A Religion?

Is the Tea Party a religion as the Daily Beast claims? Or is it something else?

Says the Daily Beast's Jack Schwartz:

America has long been the incubator of many spiritual creeds going back to the Great Awakening and even earlier. Only one of them, Mormonism, has taken root and flourished as a true religion sprung from our own native ground. Today, however, we have a new faith growing from this nation’s soil: the Tea Party. Despite its secular trappings and “taxed enough already” motto, it is a religious movement, one grounded in the traditions of American spiritual revival. This religiosity explains the Tea Party’s political zealotry.

But when religion is thrown into the mix, all that is lost. Religion here doesn’t mean theology but a distinct belief system which, in totality, provides basic answers regarding how to live one’s life, how society should function, how to deal with social and political issues, what is right and wrong, who should lead us, and who should not. It does so in ways that fulfill deep-seated emotional needs that, at their profoundest level, are devotional. Given the confusions of a secular world being rapidly transformed by technology, demography, and globalization, this movement has assumed a spiritual aspect whose adepts have undergone a religious experience which, if not in name, then in virtually every other aspect, can be considered a faith.

By that definition the Democrat Party is a religion, and the Progressives within that party are a cult, a deluded and deadly offshoot that “knows the Truth Revealed!” One of those commenting to Breitbart piece covering this particular view from Schwartz nails it perfectly:

The DB is also using V.I. Lennon's dictum: "Call your enemy what you are." Liberalism is a designer substitute for revealed religion. It has an apocalypse called "climate change". It has a system of indulgences called "carbon credits". It has a messiah named Obama and an enemy it holds to be demonic known as the Tea Party. Liberalism has a blood sacrifice called abortion and an inquisition known as political correctness. Liberalism has a tithe known as the income tax and and a confession called criticism of privilege. In every respect, and in every way, the corrupt religion of Liberalism serves it's jealous and devouring god of secularism such that no competing faith is allowed in the public square. So the acolytes of Liberalism seek to defame and destroy all who refuse to bow before their religion and all who refuse to give them the pinch of incense.

Isn't that always the case with the Leftist “faith'? - Turn truth upside down, make what was considered to be good to be bad, do away with the concept of good and evil and replace them with vaguely defined concepts that are nothing but shades of gray, and profess tolerance for other's beliefs while at the same time doing their best to silence those very same “others”? They profess to care for the poor, yet do everything they can to keep them poor and enthralled to the government all while pointing their fingers at the ones who truly care and have better ideas (and means) to lift the poor out of poverty and declaring them to be “greedy business owners whose only concern is making a profit.”

Oh, yeah, give that ol' time religion!

The list of grievances against the Religion of Leftism is long and could easily take up pages and pages, but I have better and more productive things to do.