It was all revival meeting, no political fireworks. The news reports accurately likened the atmosphere to that of a church picnic -- and no reporter wants to write about a church picnic.

But then I realized: The abundance of religiosity was the news. Beck is offering -- and whatever the precise crowd count on Saturday, a whole lot of people seemed to be buying -- a new form of fusion politics, melding the anti-government, anti-spending, anti-tax fervor of the Tea Party with the faith-based agenda of the religious right.

"America today begins to turn back to God," Beck proclaimed. On stage, he had assembled a "Black Robe Regiment" of religious leaders, modeled on a group of colonist-backing pastors during the Revolutionary War.

For decades, the conservative movement has struggled to manage tensions between fiscal and social conservatives. There is an overlap between the two camps, but the libertarian urges of the fiscal conservatives also tend to rub against the antiabortion and, more recently, anti-gay-rights positions of the social conservatives. The successful Republican politician -- Ronald Reagan, most prominently -- is the one who manages to minimize that friction and get the two wings to work in unison.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/31/AR2010083104555.html?hpid=opinionsbox1