There’s been a lot of chatter recently about certain GOP presidential hopefuls’ religious pilgrimage to Sheldon Adelson’s Venetian palace in Las Vegas to beg for dispensation from the Republican Jewish Coalition and ask for financial support from billionaire Adelson — who promises to spend millions on the person who professes his willingness to outlaw online gambling, unequivocally support Israel and bust unions whenever possible. But another GOP religious mission last week got less notice, though it may be more significant in determining who wins the GOP primary: Senator Ted Cruz traveled to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and gave what everyone considered to be a fiery sermon about the gathering threat to religious liberty in America.

That address was received much more raptuously than the last time a 2016 presidential hopeful appeared at Liberty U — when Rand Paul made his infamous Wikipedia-lifted “Gattaca” speech — and points up one of the two major battle lines between the two main contenders for the Tea Party primary. In this first skirmish, it is obvious that it’s Cruz who has his finger on the pulse of the Christian Right.

But what’s that got to do with the Tea Party, you might ask? The movement is supposedly kaput, having retreated with its proverbial tail between its legs after Ted Cruz embarrassingly read “Green Eggs and Ham” on the Senate floor. And anyway, Liberty U is the Christian Right, not the Tea Party.

But that fundamentally misunderstands what the Tea Party actually is. It’s not a movement, it’s a brand. Or, more specifically, a re-brand that was formed in the wreckage of the Bush administration’s spectacular political flame-out when the True Believers badly needed to distance themselves from the GOP’s failure. It is simply the conservative movement in a tri-corner hat. And that movement, as Ronald Reagan described it, famously sits on a tri-legged stool of traditional values, strong defense and small government. How those issues are emphasized is a matter of the political zeitgeist of a given time.

At the time the Tea Party allegedly sprang up out of nowhere the country was still reeling from the war in Iraq and a financial crisis that shook the economy to its core, so it naturally marketed itself around economic issues. Therefore, the Tea Party was assumed to be populated by people who cared little about social issues and defense and instead signaled the beginning of a new, highly motivated libertarian faction in the GOP. But polling showed the Tea Party largely overlapped with the Christian Right and the traditional Republican hawks. In fact, they are the same people.

And it must be noted that the right wing of American politics is inherently reactionary and always animated by certain impulses, however they might be identified at a particular time. As sociologist Theda Skocpol, author (with Vanessa Williamson) of the book “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” described them:

They are overwhelmingly older, white, conservative-minded men and women who fear that “their country” is about to be lost to mass immigration and new extensions of taxpayer-funded social programs (like the Affordable Care Act) for low- and moderate-income working-aged people, many of whom are black or brown. Fiscal conservatism is often said to be the top grassroots Tea Party priority, but Williamson and I did not find this to be true.

(They could have called themselves the “Get Off My Lawn Coalition,” but Tea Party has a nicer ring to it.) That description goes to the far right’s motives and those don’t change much. And one can see how both Rand Paul and Ted Cruz might feel they have a claim to these voters. But only one of them really does.