Over the past few decades, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have published numerous studies of the origins of the Religious Right and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the late 1970s. One might wonder whether anything new can be said about the alliance between New Right Catholics such as Paul Weyrich and conservative evangelicals such as Falwell. But Chelsea Ebin, an assistant professor of political science at Drew University, argues in The Radical Mind that previous scholars have made two fundamental errors when chronicling the Religious Right’s origins: (1) They have portrayed the Religious Right primarily as a backlash against cultural or political liberalism in the 1970s; and (2) They have erroneously described the New Right as a secular conservative movement, when in actuality, it was steeped in conservative Catholicism.
Ebin’s book, which is based partly on archival research in Paul Weyrich’s papers, traces the development of Weyrich’s conservative Catholicism in the 1960s and 1970s, and makes a convincing argument that his Catholic traditionalism was connected to his New Right ideology and his “pro-family” agenda. Ebin demonstrates that several of Weyrich’s early associates, such as Connie Marshner and Onalee McGraw, evinced a similar interest in melding their conservative Catholic values with political campaigns to defend parental rights and “traditional” gender roles for women.
In Ebin’s view, there was little about the New Right that fit with traditional postwar conservatism, if postwar conservatism is defined by advocacy of limited government and tax cuts. The New Right was defined almost entirely by the social issues that were of interest to the movement’s conservative Catholic creators, and it was “willing to jettison economic conservatism in order to both pander to voters and pursue a conservative Christian social agenda” (97).
If this is true, Falwell’s cooperation with Weyrich was not a pragmatic “unholy alliance” between a secular New Right that was motivated by economics and evangelical Christians who were motivated by religion. Instead, the Catholic New Right and the Protestant-dominated New Christian Right had closely overlapping concerns, which made them natural allies in their mutual project of “harnessing the coercive power of the state to regulate and structure social relations” (136).
In Ebin’s view, this was a proactive political project that Weyrich and Falwell recast as a move to defend conservative Christians against the liberal federal government’s attacks. White conservative Christians were not victims, but they claimed to be – and their movement was premised on the language of victimhood. Yet since the movement was not motivated primarily by backlash against liberalism, its leaders never intended merely to restore an allegedly lost American past. Instead, “from the very beginning,” the movement has been “radical” and “revolutionary” in its quest to “make America anew” (170).
But if neither the Catholic New Right nor the New Christian Right were defensive political movements or products of a backlash against liberalism, Ebin must then explain the timing of these movements’ origins and identify a catalyst for them. If the New Christian Right’s origins cannot be explained as a reaction against Roe v. Wade, second-wave feminism, the IRS investigation of racially segregated Christian schools, or any other development of the 1970s, what prompted it to emerge at the particular moment when it did, on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s election?
Ebin argues that if Weyrich’s ideology was a backlash against anything, it was a backlash against Vatican II and its efforts to create a more irenic, pluralist version of Catholicism. And while Falwell did have some personal reasons to oppose the federal government’s regulatory power – most notably, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission’s investigation of his enterprises in 1973, along with the IRS’s investigation of racially segregated Christian schools – his main reason for allying with Weyrich was his perception that the Catholic New Right had the institutional connections that conservative Protestants lacked. In short, the Catholic New Right offered conservative Protestants a path to power, so that they could pursue their own political priorities, which were nearly identical with those of conservative Catholics such as Weyrich and Marshner. The catalyst for the New Christian Right was a desire for power to enact a “radical” cultural agenda that they had long held, and the timing can be explained by serendipitous events that were not directly related to a backlash against feminism, Roe v. Wade, the gay rights movement, or the Supreme Court.
The strongest part of Ebin’s argument is its identification of the New Right with a particular strand of conservative Catholicism and its convincing assertion that there was a much closer alignment between conservative Catholics and evangelicals’ political priorities in the 1970s than some have assumed. Indeed, there is probably more to be said about this theme that Ebin’s narrowly focused study – which concentrates almost entirely on Weyrich and his closest associates, as well as their relationship with Falwell – does not address. A more comprehensive study might look at conservative Catholic periodicals such as Triumph and The Wanderer and build on Ebin’s research by placing Weyrich’s conservative Catholicism in a larger historical context.
On the other hand, Ebin’s suggestion that the Christian Right was not catalyzed by any of the cultural or political changes of the 1970s is hard to sustain, since there is abundant evidence (including numerous statements from Christian Right leaders, both at the time and in retrospect) that suggests otherwise.
The Radical Mind is too narrowly focused – and based on too limited a range of primary source material – to substitute for any of the more comprehensive existing studies of the Christian Right. But it raises some intriguing questions that deserve to be considered. In particular, its compelling argument that the New Right was a religious movement may prompt scholars to give greater attention to the role of conservative Catholicism in launching the Religious Right.
