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

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Of all Virginia Swan’s extraordinary adventures on her first trip to New York City, this visit

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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.

Let us remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.”34

The history of the New Right—and its deep and pervasive opposition to civil rights, desegregation, immigration, and other efforts at ending race discrimination—has been largely forgotten or erased. But that history demonstrates, in multiple ways, how the New Right, and its calculated alliance with white evangelicals, foreshadowed the rise of Trump’s coalition. The bloc behind Trump—a combination of the religious right, white nationalists and their sympathizers, and more “traditional” Republicans—had been mapped out by Weyrich decades before, fusing the ideas of New Right ideologues like Rusher and Whitaker with the grassroots activism of conservative white evangelicals and antichoice Catholics. Over the years, the coalition yielded to societal pressure to reel in its overt racism and opposition to civil rights advances for black Americans.

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.

Weyrich consistently repeated this racial backlash foundation story through the 1990s, recounting to historians and interviewers the difficulties he had persuading evangelicals to join his anti-abortion cause. He told the historian Randall Balmar that it was the IRS action regarding schools, not abortion, that “enraged the Christian community.

As much as the Christian right of the twenty-first century is now fixated on abortion and sexual politics, the backlash against the efforts of the federal government to desegregate tax-exempt private schools is embedded in the movement’s DNA. The white evangelical attraction to Trump was not in spite of his extended birther crusade against Barack Obama, his racist outbursts in tweets and rallies, and his administration’s plans to eviscerate federal protection of racial minorities from discrimination in housing and education by eliminating their ability to show discrimination based on the disparate impact of a policy, as opposed to having to prove discriminatory intent. The Christian right movement was born out of grievance against civil rights gains for blacks, and a backlash against the government’s efforts to ensure those gains could endure. When Trump offers paeans to “religious freedom”—the very clarion call of the Bob Jones University defenders—or sloganeers “Make America Great Again,” he is sending a message that rings true for a movement driven by the rhetoric and organizing pioneered by Weyrich and Billings. Trump’s white evangelical admirers do not just see a leader who is making it safe to say Merry Christmas again, or holding the IRS back from penalizing pastors who endorse him from the pulpit. In Trump’s words and deeds, they see an idealized white Christian America before civil rights for people of color—and a meddling government—ruined it.

Weyrich’s hand was key here, too. He cemented the movement’s influence in Congress by creating the Republican Study Committee, a caucus that united outside activists and conservative elected officials.

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.

I mention all this only incidentally to establish my evangelical credentials. The real purpose is to say that I don’t recall abortion being a topic of conversation in evangelical circles in the middle decades of the twentieth century, so Weyrich’s declaration struck me as credible. During the 1970s, the decade when the Religious Right began to emerge, I attended and graduated from an evangelical school, Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois, and then worked in the development department for its sister institution, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, while completing a master’s degree in church history as a part-time student. As it happens, a single member of the seminary faculty, Harold O. J. Brown, became exercised about abortion, what most evangelicals considered a “Catholic issue,” in the latter part of the 1970s. But he was regarded as an outlier, an exception that proved the rule, on a faculty more interested in recondite doctrines such as biblical inerrancy, the notion that the Scriptures are entirely without error in the original (no longer extant) manuscripts.

Here before his Christian Right audience, Weyrich explained the strategy: our group stays in power if fewer people—especially our opponents—are able to vote. The policy implication is clear: make it harder for “problem” populations to vote, or at least don’t make it easier.

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

One was the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group aimed at waging conservative fights in every state legislature in the country. From 1973 until 1983, the Scaife and Mellon family trusts donated half a million dollars to ALEC, constituting most of its budget. “ALEC is well on its way to fulfilling the dream of those who started the organization,” a Weyrich aide wrote to Scaife’s top adviser in 1976, “thanks wholly to your confidence and the tremendous generosity of the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts.

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.