Is the Tea Party a “Religious” Movement? Religiosity in the Tea Party versus the Religious Right Ruth Braunstein* and Malaena Taylor University of Connecticut Since the Tea Party Movement (TPM) emerged, observers have drawn parallels between this move- ment and the Religious Right (RR). This article deepens our understanding of this relationship by pro- viding a detailed analysis of religiosity in the TPM versus the RR. We find that compared to the RR, the TPM mobilized a religiously heterogeneous membership. Although roughly half of TPM members were also members of the RR, the other half of this movement reported lower levels of religious orthodoxy and commitment, and included relatively large numbers of nonreligious individuals. Yet a majority of TPM members, including disproportionately high numbers of nonreligious members, believed that America is a Christian nation. Our findings complicate the notion that religious “nones” are predictably liberal and that Christian nationalist views are necessarily linked to Christian identity, instead raising the possibility that Christian-America rhetoric can operate—even for some nonreligious individuals—as symbolic boundary-work that marks certain groups as political “others.” Key words: Christian right; Tea Party Movement; social movements/collective behavior; nationalism; atheism/agnosticism/irreligion. INTRODUCTION Since its rise in the 1970s, the Religious Right (RR) has become the dominant model of religiously infused activism in the United States. It is thus not surprising that when the Tea Party Movement (TPM) formed in 2009, observers drew paral- lels between these movements. There were some clear similarities: like the RR, the TPM mobilized large numbers of white conservative Christians through grassroots organizations and worked to gain influence within the Republican Party (Arceneaux and Nicholson 2012; Brody 2012; Clement and Green 2011; Jones *Direct correspondence to Ruth Braunstein, Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut, Unit 1068, 344 Mansfield Road, Storrs, CT 06269, USA. E-mail: ruth.braunstein@uconn.edu. # The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals. permissions@oup.com 33 Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review 2017, 78:1 33–59 doi:10.1093/socrel/srw056