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In 1976, Newsweek famously announced the "Year of the Evangelical." Most people were not familiar with Evangelical piety at the time. To them, the headline seemed exactly right. For the first time, a self-professed Evangelical Christian -- Jimmy Carter -- was about to make his home in the White House. His candidacy was attracting the support of religious voters nationally. Most notable was the effect Carter was having on Evangelical pastors and communities across the South, where Republicans already had made serious inroads since the civil rights and busing controversies of the '60s. It appeared that religiously motivated voters, turned off by the '72 George McGovern candidacy, were returning to the Democratic Party.

The Newsweek headline introduced the country to the growth of the Evangelical movement. The mention of an Evangelical evoked an image of a Bible-toting hick who talked about "being saved" in a Southern accent. Carter didn't fit this stereotype, and he was a liberal. His politics were formed out of the crucible of the civil rights movement. "Carter is not a strict Evangelical," Time had written several months earlier. Little explanation was given for this observation, which would turn out to be decisive for Carter's presidency. The article briefly mentions Carter's fondness for the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a figure unknown to the general public but whose influence on Protestant clergy in America was immense. A professor at Union Theological Seminary from 1928 to 1960, Niebuhr had a career that encompassed successive periods in American religion, from the Social Gospel of the '20s to the mainstream Protestant liberalism of the postwar period.

Carter was particularly taken with one sentence from Niebuhr: "The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world." This reveals the fundamental difference of outlook between Carter and the Evangelicals he was supposed to represent. The federally enforced notion of justice was precisely what was fueling the coming revolution of the religious conservatives against Washington. Carter was an Evangelical whose White House activism aroused a slumbering giant known as the Religious Right.

Niebuhr's call for political elites to correct injustice, protect civil rights, and challenge structures of inequality was the dominant voice of religion in politics at the time. This kind of religious activism was not new in American politics; it was the bread and butter of the National Council of Churches and mainstream Protestantism. The fact that a Southerner, Carter, had become its principal spokesman was not new, either. The country was only a decade beyond the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. What was new was that Carter -- Southern and white -- had unified other Southern Evangelicals behind his Democratic candidacy. The liberal base of the Democratic Party, uncomfortable with his public piety, made common cause with Evangelicals, still at odds with the party over civil rights issues. Evangelicals were about to learn a political lesson. They had signed on to support one of their own, or at least they thought so.

BREAKING WITH CARTER

Eight days before the election, Pat Robertson put his arms around a Sunday-school teacher from Plains, Georgia, on his nationally broadcast television program, The 700 Club, and called him "my Christian brother." After Evangelical voters were decisive in putting the Georgia governor into office, their brother soon disappointed and alienated them. Carter turned out not to be so Evangelical after all, at least by the standards of Fundamentalists and Pentecostals, such as Robertson, who had helped to make him president.

Carter's religious convictions were those of a mainstream Protestant, but he walked and talked like an Evangelical. He quoted the Bible more freely than any presidential candidate since William Jennings Bryan, but his religiously infused political passion for justice was formed by the civil rights movement, not by the culture wars that were stirring in the grassroots of religious conservatives. Carter cared little for social issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and the militant feminism that had inflamed pockets of resistance around the country and were making activists out of conservative Christians.

In the late '70s, most of these Christians were Democrats from Democratic states, but President Carter was tone-deaf to the sense of cultural crisis in conservative religious communities across the country. His success as a candidate in winning the support of religious voters was short-lived. Through its actions, Carter's administration drove the conservative Christians back toward the Republican Party. It had shed its pro-abortion inclination just in time to receive them with open arms under the leadership of Ronald Reagan.

Carter's missteps were many, but they were unavoidable given his political vision. His zeal for imposing "justice" on segregated communities led to a showdown between the IRS and Christian schools in the South. He allowed the Internal Revenue Service to threaten these private schools, newly created since the busing days of the '60s, with the loss of their nonprofit status on the grounds of being segregated. Longtime activists and organizers credit this one initiative, more than any other, with the beginning of the Religious Right.

Nothing revealed Carter's distance from the Evangelicals who supported him more than his infamous 1979 White House Conference on Families. From the moment he allowed the conference to be renamed "On Families" from "On the Family" a train wreck was inevitable for the Carter administration. The name of the conference, which was created to rebuild religious support for Carter's reelection campaign, was changed under pressure from Democratic Party ideologues. As it turned out, Carter's sense of the justice that needed to be imposed on the "sinful world" comported better with the feminists in the Democratic Party left over from the McGovern campaign than with the Southern Baptists, Fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and conservative Catholics who had rallied to his candidacy.

Religious conservatives had a much different notion of the sins that needed to be addressed by their political representatives. Protecting the traditional family, not questioning it, was a first principle of their political vision. They felt they had no choice but to protect themselves against the Evangelical in the White House the way they had defended themselves against the Equal Rights Amendment. The struggle against the ERA, which began in 1972, already had created a loose network of Evangelicals, Mormons, conservative Catholics, and Jews who saw the amendment as a threat against the family and traditional gender roles and a pretext for abortion rights. Phyllis Schlafly, a Catholic activist, had rallied a coalition of religious conservatives to kill the ERA by 1979. Carter's "Conference on Families" succeeded in reenergizing the same troops for another battle. Schlafly, along with other religiously motivated activists, led the fight to subvert the left-wing agenda of the White House conference held in all fifty states during 1979.

Religious conservatives had demonstrated their grassroots muscle in the states where the ERA was defeated. Schlafly and others were ready to defend their values and way of life as not being the source of any social flaws. They were ready to bring their regional grassroots leaders to Washington. Two years earlier, as part of her anti-ERA effort, Schlafly had organized a successful counterdemonstration to another federally funded effort to challenge the traditional family, the Conference on Women in Houston. But Carter's White House Conference on Families, coupled with the IRS attack on Christian schools, made the White House and Congress the source of opposition for the newly created network of religious conservatives.

Evangelicals scratched their heads in disbelief as the Sunday-school teacher from southern Georgia provided a public platform for McGovernites to attack the man-woman-child norm of the family. With the White House itself calling into question the meaning of "the family" on the heels of Roe v. Wade (1973), the IRS investigation of Christian schools, and the feminist threat of ERA still hanging in the air, a cultural all-out attack on the core beliefs of religious conservatives was under way. Taken together, these initiatives were seen as nothing less than a declaration of war on their way of life and possibly something even more sinister: an assault on the content of faith itself. Sensitive to the threat of atheism from their anti-Communist days, the network continued to mobilize.

"The Religious Right was a reactionary movement with two strands: anti-Communism and the sexual revolution of the 1960s," says Tim Goeglein, a senior advisor to President George W. Bush. Goeglein knows a great deal about the politics of religious conservatives. Over the years, he has participated in thousands of conference calls and events involving the movers and shakers in the religious conservative movement. As associate director of coalitions for President Bush, Goeglein worked 24/7 with Catholic and Evangelical leaders to relay their concerns to the Bush administration. Before that, Goeglein, a Missouri Synod Lutheran, worked on the Senate staff for Senator Dan Coates (R-Idaho), who was a leading religious conservative.

His knowledge of the broader cultural horizons of the debate makes Goeglein a particularly interesting and succinct commentator. "Everything that has come out of the movement can be seen as a product of those reactions to the Communist threat and the sexual revolution. This," he explained, "was the reason the movement loved Reagan and hated Clinton." Reagan had firmly established his credentials as an anti-Communist during his years in Hollywood and later as governor of California. But it was as a social conservative that Reagan presented himself in the 1980 presidential campaign.

Conversely, "The reason the Religious Right's hatred for Bill Clinton was so venomous," Goeglein explained, "is that Bill Clinton was a proxy for '60s behavior; he embodied the same issues that created the movement in the first place. The Clinton presidency was eight years of feeling confirmed about its views of the sexual revolution. We would wake up each morning wondering what we missed in the White House soap opera of the previous twenty-four hours. The Clinton years," he added, "are a big part of the explanation why Governor George W. Bush could get such enthusiastic cooperation from religious conservatives during the 2000 presidential campaign."

I asked Goeglein if this animus toward Bill Clinton would carry over to Senator Hillary Clinton. "If Hillary is elected president, the Religious Right will reemerge so powerfully it will make its first iteration look like a cakewalk," he said. "It's important to remember that the most powerful leader of the Religious Right came to prominence because he was the anti-Dr. Spock, that is, Dr. James Dobson, founder and president of Focus on the Family." By the time Dobson wrote his groundbreaking book Dare to Discipline (1982), the ideas of Dr. Benjamin Spock and his imitators had become the establishment view. Dobson's name and message became supercharged after an appearance on The Phil Donahue Show where he tangled with the liberal Catholic host about the raising of children. Dobson's steady rise to movement leadership underlines the centrality of family issues as the hub of Religious Right concerns. "Dobson's Focus on the Family," as Goeglein put it, "has become the bricks and mortar of the Religious Right since the days of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition."

ORGANIZING THE MOVEMENT

The Carter fiasco made Evangelicals realize they had no leverage against the president they helped to elect. Without outside groups such as the labor unions, they had no mechanism to apply pressure and deliver votes. The Carter campaign and election had brought Evangelicals onto the national stage; their preeminence as a religious force had finally been recognized. Also publicly recognized was an unexpected cost to mainstream Protestants: a significant loss of membership.

The disaffection with Carter made the year 1979, not 1976, the historical turning point for religious conservatives, both Catholic and Evangelical. They were not going to make that mistake again. Just as Clinton made Bush possible, so Carter paved the road to the White House for Reagan.

But at that moment in time, Evangelicals did not have an organization like the National Council of Churches to work their message through the media. What ongoing lobbying presence Evangelicals had in Washington, was either ineffective or out of step, just as Carter was, as a result of their growing discontent over social issues. It was during this time that two powerful Christian organizations emerged that would represent the needs and wishes of conservative Christians in the years to come.

Gary Jarmin's name is not as well known as those of other Religious Right leaders. He is president of Christian Voice, an organization he helped to create in 1979. Jarmin was present at the beginning and was a significant and innovative player throughout the growth of the Religious Right through the Reagan years. His organization continues to thrive, having registered nearly 350,000 voters in the 200 campaign. Jarmin comes across as an affable veteran of D.C. politics and looks more like a career lobbyist than the Evangelical ministers he's organized over thirty years. Sitting in his office in Alexandria, Virginia, he spoke to me of the frustrations that led to the founding of Christian Voice.

Christian Voice was founded the year before the Moral Majority. The two fledgling organizations shared space in the same building on Capitol Hill in Washington in the early 1980s. A Baptist from California, Jarmin came to D.C. in 1971, eventually becoming legislative director of the American Conservative Union, founded in 1964. "I remember constantly encountering many of these prominent liberal clergymen, from mostly mainline denominations," said Jarmin. "All of these people would gather on Capitol Hill and were taking a very liberal or hard left line. It was frustrating. You would hear these guys running around lobbying members of Congress, testifying at committee hearings, presuming to represent all of Christendom. You'd have the National Council of Churches pretending to represent all of their denominations. You'd have the Baptist Committee guy talking as though he represented all Baptists in the U.S., and of course, you knew darn well that what was really represented there was a minority slice of opinion in those churches. In fact, I felt that I represented the political views and attitudes of most mainstream Protestants, Evangelicals, or Baptists. I found this very frustrating."

Jarmin continued to complain aloud about "all the liberals running around Capitol Hill pretending to represent all of Christendom" and was eventually introduced to someone who was doing something about the same problem in California. In 1974, Robert Grant started a group called American Christian Cause, and, like Anita Bryant in Florida, he fired one of the first flares of Religious Right activism, fighting the pornography and the homosexual lobby on the West Coast. Jarmin saw in Grant's activism the opportunity to start an "effective lobby for pro-family Christian values around the country." When the two finally met in 1977, they agreed that the conservative Christian community had no voice in Congress and decided to create one. "That's how the name came about. We were really the first Moral Majority." According to Jarmin, the first two major news stories about the Religious Right, in Newsweek and on 60 Minutes, were both about Christian Voice.

"We made a decision at the beginning not to get a big name, like a Falwell, Bakker, or Swaggart. We wanted to make sure we were as broad-based and as eclectic as possible in terms of representing the Christian community. Fundamentalists, Pentecostals, mainstream Protestants, and Catholics -- everyone would feel welcome and support what we did. If we picked one well-known leader of a particular domination or faction within a denomination, that would really limit our appeal to only those people," Jarmin told me.

Grant and Jarmin had correctly realized the need for someone to represent conservative Christians in Washington. Their timing in founding Christian Voice was impeccable. They sensed that it was only a matter of time until the culture "inside the Beltway" would step over the line and so outrage Evangelicals that they would be shaken loose from their disdain of politics. At the very moment he and Grant were getting organized, it happened.

Jarmin pointed to the IRS's threat against Christian schools in 1978 as the "spark that set off the powder keg." "Nothing gets Christian pastors mobilized faster than when their churches are being threatened. Suddenly, there was a genuine threat, Caesar coming in to take away the tax-exempt status of a church school, an appendix of a church, not a separate entity. By going after the schools, the government was in effect going after the Church. Evangelical Christians perceived the action as governmental interference with their civil right to teach and pass on to their children Christ-guided principles of how to distinguish right from wrong, sin from virtue."

Fortunately, the Carter administration's regulation was never fully promulgated or implemented. But the mere fact that the IRS was proposing and circulating this for public comment was enough to provide insight into their intention. For the conservative Christian movement, it was a blessing in disguise. There was probably nothing the left could have said or done that felt more like hitting the Christian community over the head with a two-by-four. The community was stirred and suddenly understood that the government was presenting a real threat to Christian education. Schools mobilized, associations suddenly got involved, and it became an integral part of an emerging Christian Right.

Christian Voice also anticipated the work of the Christian Coalition by using candidate scorecards and spreading them through networking in church groups. Jarmin recalled, "We were the first ones to do scorecards. I used to do ratings for the American Conservative Union, so I came up with the idea of doing them for Christian Voice. We used them in 1980 to target about thirty-two members of Congress." Initially, Jarmin encountered resistance from the churches. "We had two major challenges. One was what we considered bad theology. This was the attitude that good Christians are not going to associate with politics or get tainted by that. We'll all hang by our fingertips and wait for Jesus to come. We went to the ministers and said, 'Jesus taught us to be salt and light; we have to take dominion of our communities. There may be certain things we have to render unto Caesar, but our children won't be one of them. '"

The second challenge was the ministers' fear of violating the IRS, which was already threatening to strip the nonprofit status from their Christian schools. "We showed them the law. Sometimes they would check with their attorneys and get back to us, and they'd say it was okay. So first, we had to get them in the pot, and then we had to turn up the temperature. Next, we had their members register to vote. Then we said, 'Don't you think it would be a good idea to let them know where the candidates stand on our family biblical values?'"

FROM FEMINISM TO SECULARISM

One historian of the Religious Right, Ruth Murray Brown, calls 1979 the year of "transition between the first anti-feminist phase of the movement and the second anti-secularist Christian America phase." It was the Carter administration's hostility toward Evangelical culture and values that propelled this evolution. After the founding of Christian Voice came Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Beverly LeHaye's Concerned Women for America, and Ed McAteer's Religious Roundtable. (James Dobson's fifteen-minute weekend radio show, Focus on the Family, was founded in 1977 but started expanding in 1979 when staff was hired to answer letters from listeners.) And since pollster George Gallup had just announced that the number of U.S. Evangelicals had grown from 40 million to 70 million between 1946 and 1979, there were plenty of potential voters for the new organizations to recruit.

These groups, and the others to follow, would combine to lead the majority of Evangelicals from the Democratic Party to the Republican. But in 1979, Evangelical Christians were not nearly as united in their theological and political perspectives as they would become in later elections. The Southern Baptist Convention, then and now the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, had significant pockets of liberal leadership expressing support for women's ordination, abortion, and laxer views of biblical interpretation. Major seminaries of the SBC, such as Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and Southeastern Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, were seen as under the control of liberal trustees, resulting in the hiring of faculty who did not believe in the "inerrancy" of Scripture. There was growing alarm that the SBC was going down the same road as mainline denominations in conforming to the latest political concerns of the secular culture.

The Carter years in the White House had an impact on the president's own religious denomination as well. At the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Houston in 1979, a group of conservative pastors and laymen, including Paul Pressler, Reverend Paige Patterson, and Reverend Adrian Rodgers, met to create a plan to rid the SBC of its liberal leadership. By the time they were through, the Jimmy Carters of the SBC would be gone from positions of power and, for the most part, from the Convention itself. With the election of Rodgers at the Houston convention, a ten-year effort began effectively to purge the Southern Baptist Convention of liberals and unify it under conservative leadership by using Rodgers's power over the SBC's Committee on Committees. Consequently, several moderate-to-liberal Baptist organizations and seminaries were created, such as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in 1990 and McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University in 1994.

The changes at the SBC were a watershed for religious conservatives. As Ralph Reed, first executive director of the Christian Coalition, put it, "I consider the purging of the Southern Baptist Convention and the election of John Paul II the two most significant events for social conservatives in this country." John Paul II's papacy, whose first full year was 1979, would overcome much of the lingering anti-Catholic suspicion among Evangelicals toward Catholics. The pope's pro-life message inspired a de facto political coalition between conservative Catholics and Evangelical organizations such as Moral Majority, Christian Coalition, and Focus on the Family; their swelling numbers created outposts in non-Evangelical areas of the country.

A CATHOLIC STARTS THE MORAL MAJORITY

As Evangelicals' discontent with Jimmy Carter grew, they began to pin their hopes on a candidate without any Evangelical bona fides, who didn't speak with the Evangelical cadences that gave Carter his appeal. Nevertheless, this man, Ronald Reagan, became the president who empowered an entire generation of religious conservatives, enabling them to become the political movement known as the Religious Right. After a single term of Carter's presidency, Evangelicals voted decisively for Reagan. A New York Times and CBS voter exit poll showed that white "born-again" Protestants voted 61 percent for Reagan, 34 percent for Carter.

Prominent Evangelical leaders such as Falwell, Robertson, Grant, McAteer, LeHaye, and Dobson, along with other nationally known Evangelicals such as Reverend James Robison in Texas, Oral Roberts in Oklahoma, and Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright, threw themselves into the Reagan campaign as if the very future of our nation depended on it. Oddly enough, the strategy for bringing these Evangelical preachers and laymen into politics was the brainchild of a Catholic, Paul Weyrich, a conservative strategist who later became a deacon in the Melkite rite (the Melkite Greek Catholic Church is an Eastern rite Catholic church in communion with the Roman Catholic Church and the pope).

Beginning in 1979 and continuing to the 1980 election, Weyrich and his colleagues Howard Phillips and Connie Marshner traveled coast-to-coast recruiting ministers by explaining both what was at stake and how a nonprofit church could become political without risking tax exemption. It was a hard sell. Evangelicals had stayed out of politics since the Scopes trial debacle in 1925, believing such an active grappling with worldly matters beneath their spiritual mission. Yet when they realized that the power of the federal government and the judiciary was legitimizing the taking of human life, putting its religious schools and churches at risk, redefining the meaning of the family and sexuality, and forcing the teaching of secular and relativistic morality in public education, there was nothing to do but stand and fight.

Throughout the '70s, there had been bursts of Christian activism among ERA opponents and in local controversies in Florida, West Virginia, and California. But the event that galvanized the leadership occurred in February 1979 at a rally in Dallas held by Robison. A local television station, WFFA in Dallas, had taken the evangelist off the air because of his remarks about homosexuals who Robison claimed recruited children for sex acts. Twelve thousand attended a rally to protest the station's action and defend Robison's right to speak from a Christian perspective. (Future Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee worked for Robison at the time and helped organize the meeting.)

Weyrich was asked to speak at the rally. As he recalls, Robison introduced him by saying, "Weyrich is a brother Cath-o-lic, and if any of you want to leave, do it now, because I don't want you in the room." Only six people left. Weyrich said this was the first time he witnessed the barrier between Evangelicals and Catholics begin to break down. Following the rally, WFFA put the show back on the air. But the rally itself, with its success, was not what galvanized Evangelical leadership; it was the meeting afterward.

Weyrich was surprised when Ed McAteer came up to him after his speech and told him that he had organized a meeting of ministers and lay leaders, including Jerry Falwell and prominent Dallas minister W. A. Criswell, and wanted him "to tell them what they needed to do." Weyrich went and took with him a Dallas pollster named Lance Torrance. This was fortunate. Speaking extemporaneously, he told the group, "I have talked to any number of you, and you are telling me that you can't get involved in the political process because your congregations will not support both your church activities and any political activities you might engage in....We need to find out if this is the case now." Weyrich then introduced Torrance, saying, "We need to take a poll. What is it going to cost?"

Weyrich raised the required amount, $30,000, on the spot, commissioning the survey from Dick Wirthlin's D.C. firm to find out whether members of Evangelical churches wanted their leaders involved in the political process, whether they would continue to support their contributions to the church, and whether they were prepared for the inevitable negative reaction. The most important question to be asked, according to Weyrich, was, "Since you have been told that it is a virtual sin to be involved in politics, are you willing to become political, based upon what is going on in the country?"

The results of the Weyrich-commissioned survey were delivered at a Religious Roundtable meeting in late December in Washington. Shortly after the Robison rally, McAteer had created the Religious Roundtable, and attendance at the first meeting included most of the future leaders of the Religious Right, including Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Howard Phillips, James Robison, and Beverly LeHaye. The survey showed that church members were demanding that their leaders be involved in the political process. Jan Vandelhausen from Wirthlin, who made the presentation, said he had never seen polling results that showed such a sense of urgency. Evangelicals would support financially both their churches and a political effort.

Other denominations were not as ready to engage in the culture war. Results showed that the groups least inclined to become politically active were mainline Protestants, followed closely by Catholics. But Evangelicals, especially the Southern Baptists, were, as Weyrich recalled, "off the charts," as were the Missouri synods of Lutherans and Mormons. "That was life-changing, when these guys saw that. They fell over themselves to start some activity or to involve themselves," Weyrich remembered.

The success of his postrally meeting in Dallas and the survey results encouraged McAteer to continue his briefings, which culminated in the now-famous speech of candidate Ronald Reagan at a Religious Roundtable meeting in Dallas in 1980. It was at this gathering that Reagan said, "I know you cannot endorse me, but I endorse you." Weyrich further recollected, "We gave him a ten-minute standing ovation. I've never seen anything like it. The whole movement was snowballing by then." Connie Marshner, who was also there, told me she had "never heard such a loud noise."

Ed McAteer, as a salesman for Colgate Palmolive, had made it a point to meet the Evangelical ministers in whatever town he visited. He offered to introduce Weyrich to his network of ministers around the country. Thus, Weyrich met pastors such as Robison, Falwell, Robertson, Charles Stanley, and Adrian Rodgers and important laymen such as Paul Pressler, who later led the purging of liberals from the Southern Baptist Convention.

It was in one of these meetings with Jerry Falwell that the idea of the Moral Majority was born. In May 1979, McAteer and Weyrich had flown on a private plane to Lynchburg, Virginia, along with attorney Alan Dye, who was there to explain the legalities of setting up a political organization. Howard Phillips did not arrive at the meeting on time, and Weyrich, knowing that Falwell was a fanatic about starting meet-ings on time, began the meeting. Weyrich said, "Out there is a moral majority..." Falwell interrupted and said, "What did you say about a moral something?" Weyrich, stumbling, said, "You mean the moral majority?" Falwell turned to an associate and said, "If we have an organization, that will be its name."

The Moral Majority was founded a month later, in June 1979.

There was no overt display of religious conservatism in 1979 among U.S. Catholics to match the turbulence of Evangelicals entering politics. Catholics who had led the pro-life movement since the '60s had joined, with the help of the Catholic bishops, to create National Right to Life, but it would be years before NRL would have a significant voice in politics.

The Catholic left was in its ascendancy, and there was no core group of laymen, as in the SBC, who had the power to challenge it. By the late '70s, political and theological liberalism became the dominant voice in Catholic colleges, universities, publications, and associations. Pro-life Catholics were becoming alienated from their bishops and the Catholic Conference and, just as Evangelicals did, gave up on Jimmy Carter. Catholics, disgusted with the turning away from life issue at the Conference, started to send money to Falwell's Moral Majority.

These same Catholic pro-lifers soon would find themselves in the awkward position of being judged not pro-life enough by American bishops. Leading bishops, emboldened by radical changes in the Church, extended the pro-life agenda to housing, health care, education, and welfare assistance, among other things. Catholic activists who simply wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade by passing the Human Life Amendment were excluded from the centers of Catholic power because they wouldn't embrace the liberal agenda. The bishops themselves created an office in 1973 devoted specifically to passing the Human Life Amendment, but by 1979, few Catholics were aware that it existed.

THE U.S. CATHOLIC CHURCH MOVES LEFT

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C., and the United States Catholic Conference were created in 1966 on the heels of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). The two-part structure of the conferences was originally intended to provide more input from parts of the Church not officially connected to the bishops. As Russell Shaw, who worked at the conferences for eighteen years, put it, "The USCC was intended in the minds of the people who created it to evolve into a national pastoral council, a structure involving the collaborative interaction of bishops, priests, religious, and lay people in hammering out and implementing the Church's sociopolitical program in the United States."

In other words, the dual structure of the conferences was to encourage the adoption of a collaborative model for the U.S. Church and weakening of the centuries-old hierarchical model. It is no accident that in 1967, twenty-six Catholic college presidents met at the Land O' Lakes Conference Center in Wisconsin to declare their "independence" from the Church hierarchy. The so-called spirit of Vatican II was blowing through the creation of the Catholic Conference and the Land O' Lakes statement. A quarter-century later, Catholic dissident groups such as Call to Action and Voice of the Faithful still would be insisting on the democratization of the Church, which was assumed in the mid-'70s to be just around the corner.

Both Catholic conferences were closely aligned with the Democratic Party from their inception, which is only to be expected given the historic relationship of Catholics and Democrats. According to the only major study of the public-policy positions of the bishops, 1979 marked the year that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the U.S. Catholic Conference declared their adoption of "liberal policy prescrip-tions," as exemplified in their 1979 pastoral letter, "Brothers and Sisters to Us":

The structures of our society are subtly racist, for these structures reflect the values which society upholds. They are geared to the success of the majority and the failure of the minority. Members of both groups give unwitting approval by accepting things as they are. Perhaps no single individual is to blame. The sinfulness is often anonymous but nonetheless real. The sin is social in nature in that each of us, in varying degrees, is responsible. All of us in some measure are accomplices. As our recent pastoral letter on moral values states: "The absence of personal fault for an evil does not absolve one of all responsibility. We must seek to resist and undo injustices we have not caused, lest we become bystanders who tacitly endorse evil and so share in guilt in it."

For the bishops, sin was not confined to the individual person. Sin now existed in social structures -- and every individual who lived within these structures was guilty of "anonymous sin," whatever that is. Thus, it was no longer enough for someone to cultivate love for God and one's neighbor; suddenly, it was necessary to change social "structures." People are not the only racists; social structures themselves are racist. And, of course, it falls to the federal government to reengineer society through its various means of redistributing income and giving preferential treatment to groups claiming discrimination. Catholics were left in the odd position of overcoming their sin by demanding that the federal government use its power to restructure society according to the vision of the Bishops Conference. One wonders if voting against Jimmy Carter in 1980 or Walter Mondale in 1984 should have been a matter for the confessional. No matter, it wouldn't be long before the same staff would be advocating changes in social structures that led to abortion rather than focusing on changing the laws that permitted it.

Conference staff and leading bishops at this time were animated by this egalitarian ideology that eventually alienated the longtime base of Catholic voters from the Democratic Party -- the proof of which was to be seen shortly in the surprise victory of Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in 1980. The now well-known description of the Conferences as "the Democratic Party at prayer" was elicited by eight years of unrelenting attacks on the Republican administration by Catholic bishops and Conference staffers.

The representation of the faith by the Conference in the late '70s was replaced with a social service and civil rights mission. The Conference contributed to the public misperception that pro-lifers were not active in feeding, clothing, and educating the poor. That being pro-life was represented, in and of itself, as a dereliction of Catholic duty made it possible to depict pro-lifers as "sinful." The USCCB began a crusade to make the catechetical and scriptural teachings on the sanctity of life a political and in fact "Republican" issue that should be alienated from Catholic theology and academics.

These two conferences, which essentially operated as one, replaced the National Catholic Welfare Conference, founded in 1919. The intent of the newly created organizations in Washington was to provide the U.S. bishops with a more effective and visible lobbying arm to Congress and the White House. The NCWC had relied on the traditional and inherently conservative understanding of Catholic social teaching based on the natural-law tradition as articulated by Saint Thomas Aquinas and his later interpreters, especially Pope Leo XIII.

The new Bishops Conference and especially the staffers at the U.S. Conference didn't have much time for Aquinas, Leo XIII, or his magisterial encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). The U.S. Catholic Church was, at this moment, looking only ahead, not backward. It was enveloped in a progressive, sometimes revolutionary mood following Vatican II. At the Bishops Conference and the Catholic Conference, the Thomism (shorthand for the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas) of preceding generations was deemed unsuitable to address the complex realities of the modern world, particularly the need to cooperate with non-Catholics in pursuit of social change. (The battle of the legacy of Thomism and its reliance on natural law is analogous to the battle over the interpretation of Scripture among Southern Baptists that arose in the mid-'80s resulting in a purge that strengthened the Religious Right.) Thomistic Catholic theology, with its carefully preserved hierarchies of knowledge and authority, had been taught to the generation of bishops and staff who controlled the Catholic conferences in Washington. But Thomism gave way to a politicized theology focused on the "sinful" social structures and the need for greater social activism.

The move toward social activism meant that the voice of the Catholic bishops, as expressed through the Conference, was going to become less effective as it sought to address more and more issues. And as they lobbied on particular pieces of legislation, at several steps distant from traditional Catholic social teaching, their moral authority was diminished. As a result, "American bishops in the NCCB now hesitated to assert that the Catholic faith holds truth for all society. They were even more reluctant to criticize the ideological sources of error or vice, or to insist that true social progress and its source and end is in Christ."

The kind of perspective proposed by Reinhold Niebuhr and embraced by Jimmy Carter was the bread and butter of the Catholic left, but it was now being radicalized by large doses of Marxism through the influence of liberation theology. Catholic pro-lifers were told that social structures were responsible for abortion -- not activist judges, not feminists -- and it was the duty of all Catholics to change them.

Jerry Falwell later estimated that one-third of his seven million Moral Majority members were Catholics. They had nowhere else to go. The actions of the American bishops and their conference staffers were driving pro-life Catholics into political collaboration with Evangelicals, two groups who for years had looked upon each other with near disdain. Ralph Reed estimated that 25 percent of his Christian Coalition members were Catholics. Even today, large numbers of Catholics support organizations led by Evangelical ministers: American Family Association and Focus on the Family.

There were still many bishops who had not embraced the shift to the left, but with the creation of a center of operations in Washington, those bishops, now viewed as "conservative" or "pre-Vatican II," watched helplessly as liberal or radical staffers produced documents on every left-wing issue. This rejection of the politicization of the Catholic theology in the style of a "social gospel" had been a mainstream Catholic position since early in the century. Those voices now found themselves in the minority. Conference staffers were alarmed by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and for the next eight years did everything they could to thwart his administration. As Michael Warner so judiciously puts it, "During the 1980s, the leaders of the NCCB and the USCC consciously resolved to play a 'prophetic' role in confronting the errors of the Reagan administration." The bishops' major pastoral letters of the '80s, one on war and peace, another on justice and the economy, were aimed at the heart of the Reagan agenda, with the hope that Catholic voters would return to the Democratic Party. (They didn't, at least not until Bill Clinton's defeat of George H.W. Bush in 1992.)

The beginning steps toward the new liberal paradigm for Catholic social teaching were taken by its first president, Bishop John F. Dearden; the first general secretary, Bishop Joseph Bernardin; the first assistant general secretary, Father James S. Rausch; and the first director of the Office of International Justice and Peace, Father J. Brian Hehir. They became the major architects for the new model of political theology focused on the issue of social justice. Among these figures, it was Rausch, not Bernardin, as is commonly thought, who was the most committed to a liberalizing agenda. Rausch, who became the second general secretary, was a strong proponent of liberation theology and made its principal assumption the foundation of subsequent policy pronouncements by the bishops: "All inequalities of wealth and power that are not immediately tied to some greater service for the common good are oppressive." Their interpretation of the "preferential option of the poor" made what had been understood as an act of charity into an obligation of justice and a first principle of public policy.

Later on, Bernardin, with the aid of Hehir, devised a "consistent ethic of life" known as the "seamless garment" that defined being pro-life to include positions on poverty reduction, housing, education, health care, war, and nuclear deterrence. His motivation for this, according to Russ Shaw, was not an attempt to bury the defense of unborn life under a plethora of other issues. Bernardin had been badly burned in 1976, when he was tasked by the bishops with interviewing candidates Jimmy Carter and President Gerald Ford. Bernardin was surprised and disappointed to discover that Carter refused to support the Human Life Amendment, and he said so. When he said publicly that he was "encouraged" by Ford's support for the amendment, the Conferences erupted with anger toward Bernardin. As Shaw remembers, "Bernardin found out that you could never expect support from Catholic conservatives." The seamless-garment approach, Bernardin hoped, would force the left to embrace the defense of life as part of their consistent ethic of life.

One Catholic pro-life activist put it this way: "Realistically speaking, the bishops made their own bed. Who was the party of the first part in abandoning support? The bishops abandoned us. They should have expected no more support in the public square than they gave. By then, our families were under siege on the parish level and we were frantically trying to keep our children from embracing the dissent they ignored." Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee expressed the view of many bishops and Conference staffers when he said later that Catholic pro-lifers needed "a laxative and a hug."

In spite of Bernardin's intentions, the broadening of the pro-life position enabled the Catholic Conferences to back away from the abortion issue and distance themselves from pro-life activists who were demanding more action from the bishops. The USCC message to the pro-life community was clear: "If you are not visibly active in promoting these programs of redistribution then you are not truly pro-life." The American bishops, who truly can be credited for helping to lead the pro-life movement after Roe v. Wade, gradually withdrew from grassroots involvement to attend to what they considered larger matters. John Cardinal O'Connor of New York City, the pope's point man in the United States, was one obvious exception among others, including Bernard Cardinal Law of Boston.

While the American bishops were moving left, there was a different wave of change in the Vatican. The election of Reagan may have alarmed the Conference staff in Washington, D.C., and led to a series of anti-Reagan pastoral letters, but the election of Karol Cardinal Wojtyla as pope in late 1978 had consequences they could not thwart.

The liberal establishment in the United States was surprised by the choice of the first Polish pope and didn't know what to expect. But with John Paul II's first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (1979) and his first trips to the United States and Latin America, it was clear the new pontiff was going to challenge the new politicized theology that had taken hold in the Americas. At the same time, he was not going to countenance dissent on issues such as abortion, contraception, or female priests. On his first trip to the United States, John Paul II proclaimed on the Mall in Washington, D.C., "No one ever has the authority to destroy unborn life." In Chicago, he spoke in support of the ban on contraception and addressed the lack of confession.

John Paul II set out to restore the traditional moral and social teaching of the Catholic Church, which he called the "culture of life." In this act of restoration, which he considered the true "spirit" of Vatican II, John Paul II empowered a movement of religious conservatism among Catholics that started down the political path cleared by the Evangelicals in the late '70s and early '80s.

There were no Catholic movements or organizations to match the Evangelicals' Moral Majority or the Christian Broadcasting Network. But there were scores of small entrepreneurial apostolates that arose to reassert Catholic orthodoxy in the face of Catholic institutions that were openly practicing and endorsing dissent from Church teaching. These apostolates enjoyed little, if any, support from the Catholic bishops. They were driven by charismatic and determined individuals who overcame the opposition and hostility of many bishops and staff from the Catholic Conference. Some of these apostolates became quite influential; Lyman Stebbins's Catholics United for the Faith, Father Paul Marx's Human Life International, Judie Brown's American Life League, Father Joseph Fessio's Ignatius Press, Mother Angelica's Eternal Word Television Network, and an organization for Catholic CEOs called Legatus, created by Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan.

Monaghan, before he started building Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, became something of a Medici figure in the renaissance of Catholic orthodoxy. His office complex in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Domino's Farms, had an entire wing reserved for Catholic apostolates, including the Thomas More Society, the Spiritus Sanctus Academies, and Legatus. So strong was Monaghan's influence that a group of Dominican nuns, led by Mother Assumpta Long, started a community on property adjacent to Monaghan's headquarters. Without Monaghan's support, many of the new conservative apostolates, including Mother Angelica's EWTN, would not have survived.

CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC LEADERS EMERGE

Other conservative apostolates, along with many of the bishops appointed after 1979, would become the outposts of John Paul II's message to American Catholics. Normally, this would be the work of colleges, universities, seminaries, media, and intellectuals. But in the late '70s, these were almost entirely in the hands of the Catholic left. National leadership figures emerged, such as Father Richard Neuhaus, editor of First Things; Mary Ann Glendon, professor at Harvard Law School; Robert George, political philosophy professor at Princeton University; Mary Ellen Bork, wife of Judge Robert Bork; Kate O'Beirne, a writer for National Review; Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights; and Scott Hahn, formerly a Protestant minister who became a best-selling author for Doubleday. New publications such as Crisis, Catholic World Report, Fidelity, Lay Witness, and This Rock took up the cause. Largely Catholic pro-life groups such as American Life League, National Right to Life, and Human Life International and orthodox colleges such as Christendom College, St. Thomas Aquinas College, University of Dallas, St. Thomas More, Magdalen College, Ave Maria College (now a university), Ave Maria School of Law, and Father Michael Scanlon's revived Franciscan University of Steubenville led in the work of evangelizing the culture following the inspiration of John Paul II. It was at Franciscan University that charismatic Catholics found an institution to welcome them. The movement of charismatic renewal among Catholics had begun with the Word of God community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, founded by Ralph Martin. The Word of God community became very important in the creation of an Evangelical subculture in the U.S. Catholic church supporting the leadership of John Paul II.

In the early days of his pontificate, John Paul II not only confronted the left in the Church, starting with the Jesuits, but also protected and encouraged these orthodox apostolates. These included the charismatic renewal movements and organizations such as Opus Dei and the Legionnaires of Christ. The pope came to the aid of Mother Angelica and EWTN when it was unpopular with some bishops and the U.S. Catholic Conference. His popularity reinforced the leadership of Bill Donohue in fighting anti-Catholic prejudice at the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Most of all, John Paul II legitimized the work of pro-life activists who fought abortion directly through legislation and judicial review. His teaching of a culture of life directly challenged the left's political message of the "seamless garment" favored by the Bishops Conference, an approach that put the prohibition of abortion on a par with issues such as ending homelessness. As a result, Catholic politicians in the Democratic Party found it more difficult to pretend their pro-abortion stance conformed to Catholic teaching.

Reagan's appeal to Catholics in the 1980 campaign, and throughout his terms in office, accelerated the migration of Catholics into the GOP. His appeal to Catholics was more natural than it had been with Evangelicals -- after all, one of his most famous roles had been that of the "Gipper" in a film about Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne. Many Catholic voters just assumed he was Catholic or Irish or both. Among Catholic voters, there was a similar sense of alienation from the Democratic Party over social issues that had disaffected Evangelicals. Out of Reagan's message of patriotism and traditional values, the so-called Reagan Democrat was born, a usually ethnic, usually Catholic, usually Northern or Midwestern version of the Evangelical voter who could not stomach the ideological drift of the Democratic Party. The Bishops Conference would find out that Reagan Democrats could not be won back to the Democratic Party with liberal pastorals on peace and economic justice.

The year 1979 was a tipping point, when Democrats lost their allegiance to the party of their parents and began identifying with the GOP as social or religious conservatives. It was the Reagan Democrats, mostly Catholic, and the Southern Democrats, mostly Evangelical, who would provide the Republican Party with an entirely new generation of voters to have an impact on elections into the twenty-first century.

Copyright © 2008 by Deal W. Hudson