The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  As the Lynchburg crowd commenced their conversations, Weyrich had already formulated a general idea for an electoral strategy that would take the New Right from opposition to power. He had studied the successes of the left in the 1960s and 1970s, and now he thought he knew what the left had that the right lacked: the right needed to get religion. The left had successfully appealed to religious feelings and organizations in forming the coalition that advanced civil rights, promoted Great Society programs, and opposed the Vietnam War. Just as reformers around the turn of the century had deployed the Social Gospel on behalf of progressive causes, Martin Luther King Jr. has used his pulpit to mobilize change. If the right could access the religious vote, Weyrich reasoned, power would be in its grasp. Together with Phillips, he devoted “countless hours cultivating electronic ministers like Jerry Falwell, Jim [James] Robison, and Pat Robertson, urging them to get involved in conservative politics,” according to Viguerie.19

  Weyrich eventually founded or played a critical role in a number of prominent groups on the right. They included the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Free Congress Foundation. Arguably the most consequential of the groups Weyrich played a role in founding was the Council for National Policy, a networking organization for social conservative activists that the New York Times once referred to as a “little-known group of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country.”

  Weyrich did not act alone. Other cofounders and early members of the CNP included Tim LaHaye (then head of Moral Majority), billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell. A leaked 2014 membership directory of the CNP, posted on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center, shines a spotlight on this powerful subsection of the reactionary right.20 The directory includes Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre; Christian right leaders such as Tony Perkins, Ralph Reed, and James Dobson; and antiabortion advocates Phyllis Schlafly, Penny Nance, and Kristan Hawkins. The group also brought into the fold leaders of right-wing economic policy groups and media conglomerates; masterminds of the right-wing legal movement including Alan Sears, Jay Sekulow, and Leonard Leo; and various members of the DeVos and Prince families, including Betsy DeVos’s brother Erik Prince and her husband, Richard, who served as president twice. “The Council for National Policy went on to assemble an impressive network of media and organizations that worked to advance their cause, with a special focus on mobilizing the fundamentalist vote in key districts,” says Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.21

  Weyrich came to Lynchburg armed with a clear knowledge of where to find the hot-button issues of religious conservatives. First and foremost, it lay at the intersection of federal power, race, and religion. As Weyrich knew, Jerry Falwell and many of his fellow southern, white, conservative pastors were closely involved with segregated schools and universities, and they had come together as a political force out of fear that their institutions would soon be deprived of their lucrative tax advantages. To be sure, Falwell, the founder of the Thomas Road Baptist Church and Lynchburg Baptist College—later Liberty University—suffered from no lack of hot buttons. On his nationally syndicated radio and television show, he regularly fulminated against emblems of moral decay: divorce, pornography, sex education, “secular humanism,” and public education.22 But the thing that got him up in the morning, as Weyrich knew, was the threat that the Supreme Court might end tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools.23

  In the first decades of his career, Falwell practiced segregation even in religion.24 In the early 1960s, when Black high school students attempted to pray at the Thomas Road Church, they were ejected by the police.25 When Falwell went on to set up a Christian academy, he made sure it stayed just as white as his church. He attracted national attention with a 1965 sermon impugning “the sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King” and—with immense irony, in retrospect—arguing that ministers had no business getting involved in politics. He suggested that the faithful should concentrate their reform ambitions on alcoholism rather than civil rights, since “there are almost as many alcoholics as there are Negroes.”26

  Bob Jones Sr., founder of the college that later became Bob Jones University, was an especially ardent segregationist, and he centered his defense of segregation clearly in his religion. In an April 17, 1960, radio address, “Is Segregation Scriptural?” he declared “God is the author of segregation” and called the practice “God’s established order.” He referred to desegregationists as “Satanic propagandists” and “religious infidels” who are “leading colored Christians astray” with their “Communistic agitation to overthrow the established order of God.”27

  Evidently imagining that there might be some Black listeners with whom he had any credibility, Jones added, “After the Civil War the colored people wanted to build their schools and churches, and white friends made financial contribution to the building of these schools and churches. Back in those days it was not easy when the white people were paying most of the taxes—don’t you colored friends forget that when you are inclined to turn away from your white friends.”28

  Bob Jones University excluded Black students, but this was not uncommon among southern educational institutions at the time. In response to the desegregation orders that flowed from the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, a number of white families in southern states wished to avoid sending their children to integrated schools. Public officials began promoting “schools of choice,” a euphemism for private schools that were, in effect, white-only. Such “choice” schools were also known as “segregation academies.” In many cases they were, like Falwell’s, affiliated with churches and other religious entities.29

  Christian academies soon came to depend heavily on public support. In Falwell’s Virginia, for example, state-sponsored tuition grants allowed students to take public money to the school of their choice. As religious entities, moreover, the schools and the organizations running them benefited from significant tax exemptions. But in the late 1970s, following a string of court cases, the IRS began to threaten the tax-exempt status of religious groups running race-segregated schools. For conservative religious leaders, the previous decades had seemed like a long string of defeats. And now they had a chief bogeyman in the IRS, which was coming after their schools and their pocketbooks.

  It would be hard to overestimate the degree of outrage that the threat of losing their tax-advantaged status on account of their segregationism provoked.30 As far as leaders like Bob Jones Sr. were concerned, they had a God-given right not just to separate the races but also to receive federal money for the purpose. Emerging leaders of the New Right were prepared to defend them. They began to meet regularly, to discuss politics, and to look for ways to make their voices heard in Washington. Weyrich stoked the flames with sympathetic words about the unjust efforts “to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de-facto segregation.” In the grievances of the segregationists, he saw the opportunity to found a movement.31

  The correspondence between the religious conservatives and the New Right conservatives now crackled with energy. At their meetings in Lynchburg, common ground began to emerge. As Harry R. Jackson Jr. and Tony Perkins relate the story in their 2008 book, Personal Faith, Public Policy, “At one point during the wide-ranging discussion, Weyrich is reported to have said that there was a moral majority who wanted to maintain the traditional Christian values that were under assault in America. Falwell asked Weyrich to repeat the statement and then spun around and declared to one of his assistants, ‘That’s the name for this organization—the Moral Majority.’ ” That day, say Jackson and Perkins, “marked the beginning of a new force in American political landscape … At the rebirth of the Conservative civic involvement in 1979, the new leaders were determined not to repeat the “sins” of the fathers. They woul
d not shy away from controversy, nor would they yield to criticism; they would work with others to restore the moral foundations of the nation.”32

  But they had a problem. As Weyrich understood, building a new movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools wasn’t going to be a viable strategy on the national stage. “Stop the tax on segregation” just wasn’t going to inspire the kind of broad-based conservative counterrevolution that Weyrich envisioned. They needed an issue with a more acceptable appeal.

  What message would bring the movement together? The men of Lynchburg considered a variety of unifying issues and themes. School prayer worked for some, but it tended to alienate the Catholics, who remembered all too well that, for many years, public schools had allowed only for Protestant prayers and Bible readings while excluding Catholic readings and practices. Bashing communists was fine, but even the Rockefeller Republicans could do that. Taking on “women’s liberation” was attractive, but the Equal Rights Amendment was already going down in flames. At last they landed upon the one surprising word that would supply the key to the political puzzle of the age: “abortion.”

  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

  More than a decade later, Weyrich recalled the moment well. At a conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by a religious right organization called the Ethics and Public Policy Center (to which Balmer had been invited to attend), Weyrich reminded his fellow culture warriors of the facts: “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

  As Balmer tells it in his book Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America, Weyrich then reiterated the point. During a break in the proceedings, Balmer says, he cornered Weyrich to make sure he had heard him correctly. “He was adamant that, yes, the 1975 action by the IRS against Bob Jones University was responsible for the genesis of the Religious Right in the 1970s.” It was only after leaders of the New Right held a conference call to discuss strategy, Balmer says, that abortion was “cobbled into the political agenda of the Religious Right.”35

  In those earlier days of the emerging New Right, Balmer reports, activist Robert Billings, in correspondence with Falwell, marveled with delight that abortion would “pull together many of our ‘fringe’ Christian friends.”36 Falwell, Weyrich, and their fellow operatives at last recognized that support for reproductive rights from feminists and liberals “had imbued the abortion issue with associations that could be tapped to mobilize a wide array of cultural conservatives,” according to Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel.37 Five years after the Roe v. Wade decision, Jerry Falwell began denouncing abortion, along with same-sex intimacy and pornography, in his sermons.38 In a 1980 book chapter titled, “The Right to Life,” he declared that abortion is “murder according to the Word of God.”39

  The matter advanced when the influential evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer was converted to the cause by his son. In 1979, Schaeffer, in collaboration with the pediatric surgeon C. Everett Koop, produced a book and film series decrying abortion titled Whatever Happened to the Human Race? and screened it at churches around the country. A subsequent movie, The Silent Scream, was produced in 1984 in partnership with the National Right to Life Committee. Premiering on Reverend Jerry Falwell’s television program, it aired on several major television networks and was widely used as a lobbying tool. “It’s been said that if every member of the Congress could see this film of an early abortion,” President Reagan declared, “that Congress would move quickly to end the tragedy of abortion. And I pray that they will.”40

  Abortion henceforth would be the key to unlocking power for the conservative movement. But before it could be used to control the future, it was necessary first to change the past. The flock would have to learn to forget that for decades abortion was just one among many moral concerns, and it played little role in dividing the faithful from the damned.

  The Catholic Church first prohibited abortion at any stage of pregnancy by canon law in 1869.41 But when abortion was criminalized across most of the United States in the late nineteenth century, the sentiments of the Catholic Church had little to do with it. Two groups in particular spearheaded the antiabortion cause. The first was Protestant nativists who feared an onslaught of immigrant and Catholic babies and saw a ban on abortion as a way of producing the more “desirable” kind of babies. Leaders of the eugenics movement, too, were initially hostile to both abortion and birth control, fearing they would suppress the birth rates of wealthy, “better” women. According to historian Leslie J. Reagan, professor of history at the University of Illinois, “White male patriotism demanded that maternity be enforced among white Protestant women.”42

  Standing shoulder to shoulder, if at times awkwardly, with these Protestant nativists was a faction of the medical establishment led by the Boston physician Horatio Robinson Storer, who sought to reverse widespread acceptance of early abortion. Storer also railed against the education of girls, asserting that “To stimulate a girl’s brain to the utmost, during the access of puberty, is a positive loss to the State.”43 In a widely distributed tract, he lamented that “abortions are infinitely more frequent among Protestant women than among Catholic,” and wondered whether America’s western and southern territories would be “filled with our own children or by those of aliens? This is a question that our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”44

  By the middle of the twentieth century, abortion was both mostly illegal and yet widely practiced in the United States. Somewhere between 200,000 and 1.2 million procedures took place every year (estimates vary), with a large number occurring in unsafe circumstances. One indication of the prevalence of the procedure was the death toll. According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 1930 there were an estimated 2,700 deaths attributed to illegal abortions—though some researchers suggest the true number was higher. With the invention of antibiotics, the procedure became safer, but in 1965 deaths from illegal abortion still accounted for 17 percent of all deaths attributed to childbirth and pregnancy.

  In the 1950s and 1960s, two opposing forces emerged around the issue. While many first-wave feminists declared their opposition to abortion, casting it as a consequence of male promiscuity and the degradation of women, feminists in the second wave saw the criminalization of abortion as an intrusion on women’s right to bodily autonomy and private decisionmaking regarding health and family. Many religious leaders agreed with them, and came together to form the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, which assisted women in obtaining abortions from licensed medical professionals. The effort to reform laws criminalizing abortion was also driven by public health–minded doctors, who pointed out that the risk of injury and death from illegal abortion “disproportionately harmed poor women and women of color, who could not afford to pay the ‘right’ doctor or travel to a jurisdiction where abortion was legal,” according to Reva B. Siegel.45

  These doctors, feminist activists, and pro-choice religious leaders, together with allies in the Protestant political establishment, took the fight to state legislatures. In response, a number of Catholics mobilized to oppose the expansion of abortion rights. Thus, the abortion battles of the middle decades of the twentieth century did not divide the religious against the secular, nor did they divide one party from the other. On the contrary, as Daniel K. Williams, professor of history at the Univer
sity of West Georgia, points out: “The early political battles over abortion in state legislatures pitted Catholic antiabortion lobbyists against Protestant proponents of abortion law liberalization, with most Republican legislators siding with the Protestants.”46 As Williams goes on to note, “many Republicans supported the liberalization of state abortion laws, believing that abortion law reform accorded well with the party’s tradition of support for birth control, middle-class morality, and Protestant values.”47 Billy Graham echoed widely shared Protestant sentiments when he said in 1968, “In general, I would disagree with [the Catholic stance],” adding, “I believe in planned parenthood.”48 Indeed, the most liberal abortion law in the country was signed in 1967 by California’s Republican governor, Ronald Reagan.

  It is important to note that, among the populace at least, the issue did not reliably divide Catholics and Protestants. “It is incorrect to assume that the Catholic Church has always organized against abortions or that all Catholics subscribe to the views of their church leaders,” writes Leslie J. Reagan. “Indeed, many Catholics shared what I have described as a popular ethic supporting abortion … More tolerant attitudes toward abortion, rooted in material experiences, persisted in the face of a public discourse that denounced it.”49