Conservatives Without Conscience

The same cannot be said of Paul Weyrich, whose early work complemented that of Phyllis Schlafly in the development of social conservatism. Both Schlafly and Weyrich were once strident anticommunists, Hoover’s vigilant Americans. They continued the culture war that Agnew and Nixon had started, and their principal contribution was mustering the troops, working from the bottom up.

Weyrich has been described by friendly observers as “the Lenin of social conservatism—a revolutionary with a rare talent for organization,” and while his stature within social conservatism is waning, it remains significant.[34] Weyrich is a master of the art of direct-mail fund-raising and is best known as the “funding father” of modern conservatism. He believed conservatives needed a Washington-based think tank comparable to the once liberal (now moderate) Brookings Institution, so along with a colleague from Capitol Hill, Edwin Feuler, Weyrich established the Heritage Foundation in 1973. Today Heritage is the wealthy granddaddy of conservative think thanks.[35] These organizations have become the marketing arms of contemporary conservatism, providing various factions an imprimatur of scholarship, and none more than social conservatives. Much of their “thinking” supports their particular “authority,” and in this sense they are efficient authoritarian tools. They devote significant resources, and intellectual firepower, to demolishing policies and programs on the liberal agenda.[36]

Barry Goldwater described Weyrich as “a bull-headed, stubborn, son-of-bitch,” and observed that “Weyrich doesn’t really understand how Washington works, but he thinks he does.”[37] In his memoir he worried that Weyrich and other social conservatives were “pushing [their] special social agendas…at the risk of compromising constitutional rights,” an agenda that threatened to splinter Republicans. Weyrich “preached little or no spirit of compromise—[no] political give-and-take.” He “failed to appreciate that politics is the ordinary stuff of daily living, while the spiritual life represents eternal values and goals.” Goldwater added, “Public business—that’s all politics is—is often making the best of a mixed bargain.” Social conservatives, nonetheless, stressed “the politics of absolute moral right and wrong. And, of course, they are convinced of their absolute rightness.”[38] The senator was addressing the second phase of Weyrich’s activism, when the latter helped organize the religious right. In a profile that recognized his authoritarian influence, the Washington Times noted that Weyrich “helped bring [conservatism] structure, discipline and, gradually, dominance” over the Republican Party.[39] Weyrich may be a Double High authoritarian, and his authoritarianism is, at times, brutal.

Weyrich once admitted, and many believe only half in jest, that “to gather all of [his] enemies together” would require “RFK Stadium.”[40] He calls himself a “cultural conservative,” and in doing so he explains that what is important to him is opposition to legal abortion, stricter divorce laws, and prayer in public schools. Washington Post reporter E. J. Dionne described Weyrich’s outlook as a “dour, almost medieval, pessimism.”[41] Not unlike many Christian authoritarians, Weyrich has not hidden his anti-Semitism. At the outset of the Bush administration, Weyrich published an Easter message in which he stated, “Christ was crucified by the Jews…. He was not what the Jews had expected so they considered Him a threat. Thus He was put to death.” [42] (It is impossible to believe that Weyrich, a deacon in the Melkite Catholic Church, does not know that the Romans crucified Jesus, and that his libel has been responsible for the persecution of Jews throughout history.)

During the 1980s and early 1990s the news media frequently turned to Weyrich for the conservative Catholic view of the religious right, and with typical authoritarian aggressiveness, mixed with much self- righteousness, he minced no words in denouncing conservatives who failed to live up to his standards.[43] In 1995 the New York Times listed Weyrich in the top twenty-five individuals of the conservative “attack machine,” which it described as “specialists in bare- knuckle attacks on political opponents.”[44] But his most significant influence on conservatism was the role he played in bringing fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics into the political arena. These Christian conservatives almost by definition are right-wing authoritarians.[*] Unhappy in the late 1970s, when the Heritage Foundation’s financial backers did not wish to get into social issues, Weyrich turned his organizing skills and energy to drawing Christian conservatives into the movement. He remains active in that effort to this day, and the Heritage Foundation later joined the fold.

The Religious Right: The Great Army of Authoritarian Followers

“The Christian Right,” one scholar observed, “owe[s] its existence to two Catholics and a Jew. Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich and Howard Phillips…. They believed that…there were many socio-moral issues that could serve as the basis for an organized conservative movement”; accordingly, in 1979, they “persuaded Jerry Falwell, a popular fundamentalist Baptist preacher from Lynchburg, Virginia, to lead an organization they named the ‘Moral Majority.’”[45] This was the birth of the modern religious right. It had not escaped the notice of Viguerie, Weyrich, and Phillips that in 1976 long-dormant Christian fundamentalists had been attracted to the presidential campaign of born-again presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, and their vote helped the former Georgia governor defeat the incumbent president, Gerald Ford. After having their beliefs ridiculed during the 1925 trial of John Scopes for teaching evolution in the classroom in violation of a law fundamentalists had persuaded the Tennessee legislature to adopt, they had withdrawn from any and all political activity. Jimmy Carter’s evangelicalism kindled the interest of many of these fundamentalists, who like Carter called themselves evangelicals.

Following Carter’s election as president, the news media, struggling to understand the evangelical phenomenon, began blurring Christian fundamentalists with evangelicals, with neither group happy to be lumped in with the other. Considerable confusion still exists about the terms “Christian fundamentalist” and “evangelical Christian,” and even those who fall within these ranks use the terms loosely, and often interchangeably. In fact, not until the reelection of the second evangelical president did even religion scholars fully sort the matter out.[46] In December 2004, after George Bush’s success the nonpartisan National Journal decided it was time to clarify a confusion that had gone on far too long, and they were successful in distinguishing the two, as explained below.

Fundamentalist Christians retreated from politics and much of modern life after the Scopes trial in 1925, but their children, when they reached adulthood in the early 1940s, wanted to return to a more active public existence. This new generation called themselves “neoevangelicals,” and in 1942, they founded the National Association of Evangelicals, dropping the “neo.”[*] Unlike their parents, who “practiced extreme forms of separation, refusing to cooperate in common ventures with others who did not believe as they did,” the evangelicals “were bridge builders and were more willing to give some credit to, and treat with charity, those with whom they disagree.” The evangelicals, however, continued to share their parents’ tenets of faith. “Both believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible and hold that Christians must individually accept Christ and be born again, according to Christ’s words in John 3:5–8: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and [of] Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh; and that which is born of Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.’”[47] Thus, in a broad sense, the term “fundamentalist” covers evangelicals, but evangelicals in fact distinguish themselves from fundamentalists, and vice verse. (Except as noted, I have distinguished them. I use the term “conservative Christians” or “Christian conservatives” to cover both Protestants and Catholics.)

By 1978 increasingly politically active evangelicals had grown disenchanted with Jimmy Carter, whom they had helped put in office. They did not like his progressive Democrat policies, in general, but, in particular, they were offended by a proposal by the Internal Revenue Service to deny tax-deductible status to all private schools, including private Christian ones. Carter’s apparent acceptance of the IRS proposal caused uproar within the evangelical community. Reverend Tim LaHaye, the best-selling Christian author and one of the founders of the Moral Majority, met with Carter at the White House to discuss the measure, along with other concerns conservative Christians had about his progressive policies. Following their meeting, LaHaye reportedly left the Oval Office, lowered his head, and prayed: “God, we have got to get this man out of the White House and get someone in here who will be aggressive about bringing back traditional moral values.”[48] That is exactly what conservative Christians did. They worked like bees— literally millions of them devoted themselves to this task—and by 1981 they had significantly helped to put Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office.

Today evangelicals comprise the core of the religious right, and white Protestant evangelicals, depending