I heard—and joined in—some grumbling about the religiosity of the event. "It's Tea Party Nation," a woman said. "They're a very religious group. You notice how they won't serve alcohol at dinner?" Another told me that several people had left a "breakout session" she'd attended, apparently because they'd taken offense at the copious prayers. "It's a regional thing. This is the Bible belt. You don't see this at Tea Party groups in the Southwest."
This wasn't a trivial issue. It's one thing for pro-life evangelicals and secular libertarians to march shoulder to shoulder behind banners saying "Kill the Bill!" and "Oust the Marxist Usurper!" or displaying a portrait of Obama rouged up and kohled to look like Heath Ledger's Joker in the Batman movie *Dark Knight*. It's quite another to coop up the same people for three days in a hotel, where they must talk to each other through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At the march on D.C., there were T-shirts proclaiming "I am John Galt" and "Atlas Has Shrugged" alongside others that said "Obama Spends—Jesus Saves" or had the legend "Yes, He Did" beneath a picture of Christ on the cross. At Opryland, devout, abstemious Christians were breaking bread with followers of Ayn Rand's gospel of unbridled and atheistic self-interest. The convention, designed to unite the Tea Party movement, was helping to expose fundamental differences of belief and mindset between people who, before Nashville, had appeared as interchangeable members of a single angry crowd.