Paul Weyrich Quotes

As the historian and author Randall Balmer writes, “It wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.”33

For nearly half a century, the Radical Right had built towards this moment. Its leaders had convinced generations to have an almost Pavlovian response to the mention of abortion and had made their opposition to Roe an effective filter to keep out all but those most committed to their agenda. They had professionalized their operations and taken over the conservative establishment. They had prepared for a frontal attack on reproductive freedom as the tip of the spear in their agenda for control, the restoring of white Christian men to their rightful place in society as seen by Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell, and their fellow dominionists. And in the end, they cynically exploited their religious credentials in support of the most unqualified presidential candidate in American history — a man whose life was a rebuke of everything they claimed to value.

I don't want everybody to vote... As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

It is far too facile an explanation to pin this devotion solely on a personality cult around Trump. The conditions that first brought him to power and, later, led to a nearly complete Republican capitulation to his whims were set in motion by two religious and political transformations of the 1970s: the sprawling political and ideological infrastructure Paul Weyrich built in the wake of Watergate, and the proliferation of televangelism and its marriage to Republican politics. At this critical moment in American history, when the democratic experiment hangs in the balance, this totalizing political and religious culture, rooted in a white Christian nationalist political ideology, was tailor-made to go to the mat for Trump. For Trump’s white evangelical supporters, defending him became indistinguishable from defending white Christian America.

Paul Weyrich, who was a cofounder of the Heritage Foundation, gave a talk in 1980 where he laid out what would become the blueprint for GOP victory. He chastised the audience for believing in “Good Government” where they wanted “everybody to vote.” “Well, I don’t,” he said, because “our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.

Contemporary conservatives often make Roe v. Wade the turning point in the story. In this account, the Religious Right emerged out of opposition to abortion. But the facts don’t really fit that story particularly well. Conservative white Protestants did not become pro-life until the late 1970s. Before that, Protestants were divided on the question and abortion was seen as a “Catholic” issue. The rightward turn of white evangelicals actually began a quarter-century earlier with another Supreme Court case: Brown v. Board of Education. The political architects of the Religious Right—Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie—were quite clear on this point. Opposition to racial integration was the real catalyst for the rise of the Religious Right.

Indeed, as if channeling Paul Weyrich’s mantra, a Texas Republican explained that while there might not be widespread voter fraud, “‘an article of religious faith’ among Republicans… was that an ID law ‘could cause enough of a drop-off in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 percent to the Republican vote.’”51

ALEC was an umbrella group that coordinated efforts among conservative state legislators around the nation. ALEC’s mission, and its organization, was a novel innovation. State legislatures were often seen as policy backwaters. ALEC stepped into the breach by giving much-needed resources to overworked and underpaid state lawmakers. This innovation was born of necessity in 1973, when liberal politics dominated Washington. ALEC’s founder, a religious conservative activist named Paul Weyrich, felt it would be far more effective to push policy ideas on the state level. He was right.