How religious right is Rick Perry?

The conventional wisdom is
that the Republican primary race's frontrunners are now Mitt Romney, Michele
Bachmann and Rick Perry. Jon Stewart thinks this analysis is unfair to Ron Paul,
who placed second to Bachmann in the Ames Straw Poll on Saturday. While Paul's
libertarian ideas helped fuel the Tea Party, Stewart dismisses Bachmann and
Perry as "Moral Majority in a tri-corner hat."

This aside from Stewart echoes
Andrew Sullivan's claim that Bachmann and Perry's prominence
amounts to a "Christianist takeover" of the GOP primary, evidence that
small-government conservatism continues to be pushed out by a more religious
variety, as he argued in The Conservative
Soul. Of course, the rise of the Tea Party makes that 2006 book seem less
than prescient.

The Tea Party's energy is
primarily antitax and antigovernment. A lot of Tea Partiers are also religious
conservatives, but not because the movement was infiltrated by the almighty
religious right. It's because economic and social conservatism have a lot more genuine overlap than many commentators think.
Enter Michele Bachmann, who's had little trouble positioning herself as a
leader on both fronts.