The original Tea Partier, Samuel Adams… took as strong a view of the connection between religion and liberty as any of the Patriots. Religion fueled virtue, Adams wrote, and “the public liberty will not long survive the total extinction of morals.”

The Tea Party movement seems conflicted about religion. Prominent Tea Partiers, including Glenn Beck, have steered away from the usual priorities of Christian conservatives: restrictions on abortion, gay marriage, and the like.

But in other ways, we see evidence of religion’s importance to the Tea Party: Beck’s summer rally in Washington, D.C. focused almost exclusively on a return to America’s heritage of faith, and a recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute suggested that Christian conservatives represent the core of the Tea Party.

This identity crisis reflects a deeper question about religion’s role in public life: Does faith restrict or enhance our freedom?

Some might believe that the Tea Party’s emphasis on liberty over moral restrictions represents a repudiation of the traditional agenda of the Religious Right. But instead, the Tea Party may actually represent a return of religious conservatism to its origins in Revolutionary America, when the Founding Fathers universally paired religion and freedom.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the brilliant French writer who toured America in the 1830s in preparation for his magnum opus, Democracy in America, was struck by the difference between American and French notions of freedom. The American Patriots viewed religion as essential to freedom, while French radicals saw religion as freedom’s enemy.

Read More: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2010-10-16-kidd15_ST_N.htm

Thomas S. Kidd is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. He is the author of God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution.