Basically it shows that the Tea Party members are NOT independent, grass roots, small government people as has been touted by its organizers and the main stream media, but rather the real indicator of whether someone is going to be a Tea Party member is whether they were previously a member of the religious right. So really the Tea Party is not a new group of independent, politically inexperienced uprising of common folks, it is just a re-branding of the same old religious right political pros gaming a new angle to gain control of the government.
To most people this comes as no surprise since the same extreme anti-government/anti-tax/anti-abortion/nativist idiocies and general social policy inflexibilities of the religious right's historical showings are being pursued by the Tea Party people. But it's nice to have this study as proof of that intuition.
More information about this study and the actual questions which were asked can be found on americangrace.org.
The Tea Party favorable ratings have taken a serious beating of late as show by the two charts below. In the second instance, the Tea Party comes in dead last out of 24 groups which includes Muslims, and atheists. Given that, you've got to ask why the Republicans are allowing this group to be so instrumental in their policy making.
Below, one of the study's authors, Robert D. Putnam is interviewed by Rachel Maddow:
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