Conservatives Without Conscience

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.