Yale-educated history professor is Nebraska's GOP candidate for US Senate and a Tea Party conservative

[I]t is interesting that so far in these primaries the major victory claimed by the Tea Partyers doesn’t feature a standard libertarian-ish right-wing Republican railing against Big Government and babbling about Benghazi!™. It features a hardcore member of the Christian right, which is hardly the image of the Tea Party in the political press. That would be Ben Sasse of Nebraska, the Yale-educated history professor who had the backing of Tea Party groups like Freedomworks, the Senate Conservatives Fund and Club for Growth, and Tea Party icons Sarah Palin and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. He won the primary against establishment-backed State Treasurer Scott Osborne. Yes, he hates Big Government as much as any right-wing Republican, that goes without saying. But Sasse is motivated by his belief that the U.S. is a Christian nation under siege from that Big Government, not by his belief in free markets and low taxes.

Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches unearthed his doctoral thesis from 2004 and it’s a fascinating treatise on the origins of the modern religious right in America. Unlike most historians, he believes that the conservative movement grew up in the 1960s not out of rebellion against the civil rights stances of the Democratic Party but rather the “secularization” of the culture in the wake of the Supreme Court rulings banning school prayer and Bible reading. He even goes so far as to claim that rather than a cynical decision to stoke the flames of Southern racism with the Southern strategy, it was Richard Nixon’s deep understanding of the Christian culture that led him to persuade evangelicals and conservative Catholics to join the GOP and usher in the era of conservatism in the last decades of the 20th century. It’s a novel understanding of that history, to say the least. Most historians cite Nixon’s pursuit of blue-collar Catholics as part of the strategy to peel off working-class votes with racial resentment. But Sasse’s dissertation is evidently persuasive in at least some respects.

But regardless of his level of accomplishment as a scholar, Ben Sasse clearly sees the world through the lens of a conservative Christian crusader. According to his website, he is a proponent of the most radical interpretation of religious freedom that’s in circulation today on the far right:

Ben Sasse believes that our right to the free exercise of religion is co-equal to our right to life. This is not a negotiable issue. Government cannot force citizens to violate their religious beliefs under any circumstances. He will fight for the right of all Americans to act in accordance with their conscience.