How Paul Weyrich Founded the Christian Right

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Who's the person most responsible for bringing evangelicals—who had retreated from public life in America after the public relations disaster of 1925's Scopes Monkey Trial—back into politics? Here's a hint: he cofounded the Moral Majority.

No, it isn't Jerry Falwell.

It's Paul Weyrich, the powerful but low-profile conservative activist who died this morning. Weyrich was the behind-the-scenes architect of Falwell's very public organization, which began a legacy of evangelical political activism that has since been taken up by the likes of the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family.

Weyrich was a visionary. Back in 1962, when the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that banned state-sponsored school prayer, there was no Christian right to protest. Weyrich, then a 19-year-old Republican activist and program director for a Kenosha, Wis., radio station, called the Wisconsin Republican Party and insisted it denounce the decision.

The party chairman demurred, saying that "businesspeople would think it was strange that we are getting involved in a religious issue."

"That was the moment I said to myself, 'By golly, this is just off the track,' " Weyrich told me in a 2006 interview. " 'I'm going to see to it that one day the party will listen to these kinds of issues,' and that really became my mission in life."

There was only one problem. Before Weyrich could get the GOP to start listening to the political concerns of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, he needed to get religious conservatives to speak up. "Christian conservatives of the evangelical and fundamentalist type had been told for years—ever since the Scopes trial—that they should not be involved in politics," Weyrich told me. "That it was a sin to be involved in politics."

Or at least that was the perception of most evangelical pastors. They were convinced their flocks would resent them if they got political. It wasn't until more than a decade and a half later, in 1979, that Weyrich developed a plan to prove them wrong. He raised money to conduct a national poll asking churchgoers if they'd tolerate their pastors getting political—and whether they'd give money to faith-based political organizations on top of their weekly church contributions.

When the poll results came back, Weyrich smiled. "Among evangelicals and fundamentalists," he told me in 2006, "not only did they want their leaders involved in public policy, they were clamoring to have their leaders involved in public policy. And moreover, they said, 'Yes—we will financially support both organizations.' "

But Weyrich, who'd founded the Heritage Foundation earlier in that decade, knew he needed a figure who could tap into the masses of theologically conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists across the country. Weyrich himself couldn't do it—he'd been raised a Roman Catholic and had since joined the orthodox Eastern Catholic Church. And he wasn't a preacher.

But Weyrich had recently been introduced to a Virginia preacher who hosted a popular weekly TV show and who'd founded a bible college. His name was Jerry Falwell.

Weyrich drove to Lynchburg, Va., and told Falwell that there were tens of millions of conservative evangelicals, fundamentalists, Catholics, Mormons, even mainline Protestants, who could form a mighty voting block by putting their theological differences aside to pursue common political goals. It was a radical concept that Falwell would later call "cobelligerency."

"I said, 'Out there is what you might call the moral majority,' " Weyrich said, remembering his 1979 sit-down with Falwell. "And Falwell turned to his guy and said, 'If we get involved, that's the name of the organization.' "

And so, the first major Christian right organization was born, helping fuel a long Republican ascent that is just ending now.

How could Weyrich have guessed then that 30 years later, a Democratic president-elect would be tapping into that same religious movement, inviting one of its leading lights—Rick Warren—to give the invocation at his inauguration?

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