Julie Ingersoll, Religion Dispatches
- For those who wonder about the religious dimensions of the Tea Party movement, an event earlier this month at Faith Baptist Church in Deltona, Florida, looked pretty much indistinguishable from the 1980s era church-based political organizing efforts of the religious right. As each local candidate spoke at the Deltona 912 Patriots event, it was clear how profoundly conservative, Republican, and Christian (in the exclusivist conservative sense of Christian) this gathering was.
But there was a twist, born of the Tea Party’s efforts to run from the racist and violent imagery and rhetoric in its ranks. The banner on the Florida Tea Party website read:
9-12 Project: not racist, not violent, just not silent anymore.
The event was in a more rural part of Florida than where I live and I passed a number of confederate flags on my way there. I expected an all white crowd making arguments about “reverse discrimination,” libertarian arguments against violations of state sovereignty, especially with regard to the Civil Rights Act, and maybe even some of the “slavery wasn’t as bad as people say” arguments. Not so much.
Don’t like history? Make up some of your own
The keynote speaker was Franz Kebreau of the Florida-based National Association for the Advancement of Conservative People of all Colors (that’s right: NAACPC), who has been traveling the Tea Party circuit with his alternative history of racism and slavery in America. The NAACPC maintains that the “once-great NAACP has become a negative, shameful tool of the left: overseers committed to keeping their fellow blacks dependent and subservient to the Democrat party.”
