Reed said, “people have not only the right but the have the duty and the obligation to overthrow that government, by force if necessary,” if government violates those God-given rights.

At the annual Values Voter Summit last weekend, Billie Tucker, co-founder of the Jacksonville, Florida–based First Coast Tea Party, recounted how “some people say, ‘don’t you put God in the tea party, Billie, you’ll run people off.'”

Tucker…pledged to reject such advice. “I’m putting God back into the United States of America!” she declared; the audience erupted in applause.

Although many tea party groups focus on “fiscal” issues over “social” ones like abortion and LGBT rights, the Tea Party movement shares activists, organizers and ideology with the religious right. Many of the attendees at the Values Voter Summit, as well as at the conference of fallen GOP golden boy Ralph Reed’s new Faith and Freedom Coalition the previous weekend, are involved in local tea parties.

But the issue isn’t just whether or not tea party groups mobilize around particular religious-right issues like abortion or gay marriage. The intersection goes a lot deeper—to the very basis of the Tea Party’s claim that government is trampling individual freedoms.

According to Julie Ingersoll, associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, this view on government’s limited role is based on Christian Reconstructionism, a fundamentalist movement that advocates for the rule of Biblical law (which includes imposition of notions of “traditional family”) and which holds that God ordained government with limited (essentially law enforcement) authority.

Read More: http://www.thenation.com/article/154944/tea-party-values