The Radical Catholic Right from Paul Weyrich to JD Vance: Part 1
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In this episode, we dive into the influential role of Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation, and his impact on conservative Catholic involvement in American politics. Dr. Chelsea Ebin, author of The Radical Mind, helps unpack Weyrich's reaction to Vatican II, his strategic efforts to unite conservative Catholics and Protestants, and his vision of integrating Catholic morality into the U.S. government. We also explore how Weyrich’s legacy lives on through figures like Leonard Leo and the current political landscape. The conversation delves into the paradox of promoting 'tradition' through revolutionary means and what that means for modern American politics.
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- - Axis Mundy. - Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo goo syndrome.
Good government.
They want everybody to vote.
I don't want everybody to vote.
Elections are not won by a majority of people.
They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now.
As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.
The clip you heard is Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation, the Council for National Policy, and countless other organizations and think tanks on Capitol Hill.
He's one of the most influential political operatives of the 20th century.
He's credited with bringing Jerry Falwell and the moral majority to the political forefront, helping to defeat Jimmy Carter, to usher in Ronald Reagan to the White House, and of securing the evangelical vote for the Republican Party or the Republican Party as a house for the evangelical bloc.
Regardless of how you look at it, Weirich's legacy in American politics is monumental.
He brought together conservative Christians and the GOP.
That marriage continues today, despite Weirich's overwhelming political influence.
He's rarely considered as a religious figure.
That changes in a new book by Dr. Chelsea Eban called The Radical Mind.
It traces the radical roots of the religious Catholic right, the leaders like Paul Weyrich.
Who reacted poorly to Vatican II.
Who saw the church as becoming too modern, too open, too ecumenical.
Who vowed to take political action where their church no longer would.
To rebuild Christendom through American politics because the church had backed off and retreated.
The Catholics who decided that it was their goal to dominate Earth for God, even if their church was no longer on board with that mission.
If you've listened to this show over the last two months, you'll know that I've been trying to get across what I think is a very important point. .
That at the moment, when we think about the religious forces who are influencing our public square, who are leading the charge on policy, who have the big money donors, the billionaire class behind them, to make changes in our legislature, in our judicial branch, in political offices from mayor to solicitor general to the Supreme Court.
When we think of the ways that religion is imposing itself on all Americans by way of highly conservative Christian actors, communities, and networks, I beg of you to think of the forefront of those movements as Catholic, conservative Catholic I beg of you to think of the forefront of those movements as Catholic, conservative Catholic networks of theologians, So
Who have organized to make sure that the Supreme Court has three Federalist Society judges as appointees in the last decade, and that all conservative judges, perhaps with the exception of Neil Gorsuch, are Catholic and typified accurately as conservative Catholic.
When we think about debates over abortion bans or IVF bills, punishing women for getting on the highway to get an abortion in another state, I would argue that those things would not exist without the overwhelming influence of these Catholic figures and networks.
Paul Weyrich was in many ways the genesis of that modern political movement.
His legacy in the Heritage Foundation is clear.
Today the leader of that think tank is Kevin Roberts.
A man who calls himself a cowboy Catholic.
A man who thinks that contraception is something that may lead to the destruction of our civilization.
A man who does want a federal abortion ban.
And a man who said that there is a second American revolution underway that will remain bloodless if the left allows it.
All of that, I've argued over the last two months, is how we should understand the candidacy and worldview of J.D.
Vance.
But none of that would exist without the Catholic religious right that joined forces with the likes of those people we talk about often from the 1970s and 80s.
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
Tim LaHaye and Ralph Reed.
Those who championed Reagan.
Today in part one of my interview with Dr. Eben, we discuss Paul Weyrich's biography, the ways that his Catholicism shaped everything he did, how he understood himself as a layperson in the church who was taking up a mantle that the clergy no longer would.
We see an image of an American pioneer, Forging the path that Leonard Leo and Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Kevin Roberts, and yes, J.D.
Vance, are now walking.
Dr. Chelsea Eben is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Drew University.
Her book is The Radical Mind, The Origins of Right-Wing Catholic and Protestant Coalition Building, published this year from the University Press of Kansas.
She's also a fellow at the Far-Right Analysis Network, and co-founder and fellow at the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism.
Without further ado, here is part one of our conversation.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
As I just said, I am joined today by someone I've been looking forward to interviewing for months, and that is Dr. Chelsea Eban.
So first, let me say, Dr. Eban, thanks for joining me.
It's my pleasure.
Thanks for having me on.
If people have been listening to this show closely, and there are some of you out there who listen to every episode and are like clued in, you know I've been talking about The Radical Mind, your book, for months.
Ever since I got to read it, I've been referencing it.
I've been discussing how it, I think, opens up so many dimensions of understanding both the history of the religious right and also our contemporary situation, including somebody who's running for vice president and is certainly in the mix of what we'll talk about today.
So.
Let's just jump in.
I have to say on air, I've told you this before, this is a groundbreaking book.
I hope you're so proud of it because it's really going to help people see things they normally don't see about these histories and our current situation.
You really argue that the best way to understand what we think of as the religious right, that could be, you know, people listening, folks in their mind, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye, they're thinking of Ronald Reagan beating Jimmy Carter because of these folks getting involved.
You know, whoever they're imagining, for you the best way to imagine this movement is as two religious groups, Protestants and Catholics, finding a way to make an alliance in order to work against what they took to be, quote, an imagined assault on American Christianity and American whiteness writ large.
Would you help us understand that framing of the religious right?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there, you know, there are other works that look at the religious right as also incorporating conservative Jews and LDS, other groups.
My focus was really on this coalition that forms between Protestants and Catholics.
Because I felt like so much of the history of the Christian right is understood and written from the perspective of conservative Protestants, right?
That's the public outward facing image of the movement.
All the folks you just named are conservative Protestants.
They are not Catholics.
And, you know, I knew my early American colonial history and had been taught that there were deep, deep-rooted, deep-seated antipathies between conservative Catholics and Protestants for much of the country's history.
Flash forward a few hundred years, you get to Kennedy's election, right?
And it is overwhelmingly sort of steeped in anti-Catholicism.
And yet, when I began this project in the 2010s, I was like, wait, but Catholics and Protestants are working together.
And a lot of the Protestant politicians that we see going out and talking to audiences about natural rights and natural law have conservative Catholic speechwriters, have conservative Catholics sort of in the wings.
The Supreme Court has considerably, I mean, arguably, They are all.
All of our Christian justices are Catholic.
It's unclear with Gorsuch quite where he is.
But so I wanted to understand how that came to be.
And so I just worked my way backwards from the present moment where we can see the effects of this coalition to a point where I thought I could find its inception.
One of the things that really jumps out is here we have this alliance working on the imagined assault on American Christianity and American whiteness.
I think that's just something that's a great frame.
I think it's, it's in, it's in many ways what I tried to argue in my book, but I think what you really corrected me on is the overemphasis on the conservative Protestantism.
And this really came to fore with me with the figure of Paul Weyrich.
Paul Weyrich is somebody that, if folks listen to this show, if they're the types that are reading my work, if they're reading anyone who's giving us histories of the religious right, Paul Weyrich shows up.
And he's usually presented as The political entrepreneur who's connecting all of those conservative Protestant pastors, those Falwell's to Capitol Hill, to the political mobilization structures that will like make them important political actors.
What rarely happens is what you do, and that is paying detailed attention to Paul Weyrich's own religiosity as a Catholic.
And in my book, I mentioned this.
I mentioned that he was a very conservative Catholic, but I don't treat his Catholicism in any way.
And you just really provide, I think, one of the few profiles of it.
Would you help us understand Wyrick, his Catholicism, and perhaps why it's just kind of like a decoder ring for understanding the goals and history of the religious right, the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, J.D.
Vance, you know, we'll get to all those guys, but why is it so important?
Yeah, so I think that in large part this book is a product of really good luck.
Because when I set out to do the research, the Paul Weyrich scrapbooks at the Library of Congress had just been processed.
And I think I probably was one of the first people to get in there and spend a lot of time working through his scrapbooks.
And that is, you know, I went there with the intent of understanding Wyrick as a Catholic actor who had been influential, but really with the version of him that you just described.
He was a political entrepreneur.
The new right was secular.
I was, you know, looking at maybe how he also facilitated Catholics into that coalition.
I didn't think that what I was going to find were volumes and volumes and volumes of Wyrick archiving his own Catholicism and the deep, deep religiosity that he had from a very young age.
Um, so Wyrick was raised Catholic.
His father was a conservative and a Catholic who he very, very much admired.
And he wrote extensively about his father in, you know, articles for The Wanderer about how his dad would stand up against social justice priests and would, you know, stand up in the middle of a service and yell at them and, I think this was incredibly influential for Wyrick, right?
He was raised thinking that politics and religion went together and were part of a conversation that should be had at the dinner table, at work, in all facets of your life.
So that's sort of early Weyrich, right, in this Catholic environment.
And then it's really, right, he becomes activated by Vatican II.
He becomes politicized in this different way around his Catholic identity.
And so through the late 60s, Wyrick is really, he is, he's sort of getting his, his footing.
He's establishing himself as a political entrepreneur into the late 60s, early 70s.
But the whole time he was really enmeshed in these internal conversations about Catholicism, about the centrality of the family, opposition to birth control, fears around population control.
So Catholicism is structuring his worldview as he begins to establish the networks and institutions that become the scaffolding for the new right.
Paul Weyrich's father is a big part of this story.
I think it's actually really important that his father was this sort of layman willing to stand up and yell at priests like in mass, but I wonder how apocryphal that is.
Like, I wonder how much that actually happened and how much that's Wyrick's mythologization of his father because I have a really hard time imagining that in The late 1940s, early 1950s, his father is going to stand up in the middle of mass and start yelling at the priest.
It's possible that it happened, but I read it through the lens of him lionizing this man that he very much idolized.
It's a great point.
It would have probably been somewhat embarrassing in a small town, Wisconsin, to have your dad doing that, right?
It would have been mortifying, right?
And especially because there still is a heavy dose of anti-Catholic sentiment.
Like, you don't want to be known as the weird Catholic cranks who yell at the priest.
Yeah.
But maybe I should say that a part of working through Wyrick's scrapbooks is this process of trying to discern how much is his self-mythologization and what is reality, right?
He underlined his own name in every newspaper clipping that he pasted into these scrapbooks.
It's phenomenal.
Well, there's so much to say here, but I think the point you're making here about his lionization of his dad actually feeds into something I really want to drive us towards, and that is this.
I want to work backwards.
Clarence Thomas is a Catholic.
He's on the Supreme Court.
I don't think we need to explain Clarence Thomas to anyone listening, but he's a Catholic who had this father figure, his grandfather, in his life that he thinks of as the ideal patriarch.
If you all just had a house and a community led by that man, Clarence Thomas is like, society would be good.
Then we get to Leonard Leo.
And, like, Leonard Leo is a lot like Weyrich.
He seems to, like, have been built from day one to do this.
Like, he's the kid in 11th grade raising money and wearing a suit to class every day, underlining his name in the newspaper.
He also has this view of his father.
And then we get all the way back to this, like, OG of the movement, Paul Weyrich, and he has this patriarchal view of his father.
And I guess what I'm driving at here is it seems like The through line there is, hey, if we just had a grand benevolent patriarch, a big dad who ruled the church and the home and the government, life would be good for everybody.
You're the one who's sifted through the scrapbooks, not me.
Is that a fair reading or am I just, you know, kind of like a glossing here?
No, I think that's a very fair reading, right?
And it is this Catholic principle of subsidiarity that I think structures both the understanding of the family, the understanding of the family's relationship to the church, and then by extension, the model on which the state should be Absolutely.
I think that there is fundamentally a belief that if we could just run the state like a conservative Catholic family, and everyone just did what Daddy said, then we would be A-OK.
So I won't go there yet, but if you read Project 2025 through what you just said, it makes so much sense why they want the executive branch and the president to just be what you just said, that dad who rules everything and everyone will be fine and just know your place, do what you're told, and everybody will have peace.
That's Project 2025 and the president that they want.
Absolutely.
I'm Leia Payne, a historian and expert in Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in the United States and beyond.
Welcome to Spirit and Power, a limited series podcast where we do deep dives into how Charismatic and Pentecostal movements are shaping the American political and social landscape.
As the 2024 election approaches, I'll be tracking key stories and highlighting critical data from leading experts to keep you informed.
Beginning September 26th, join me every Thursday for in-depth conversations with journalists and scholars exploring this critical intersection of religion and politics in America.
So let's go back to Vatican II.
Vatican II is this watershed moment in American religion, in the Catholic Church, and so on and so forth.
It changes things on the ground for Catholics.
And one of the things though that it does is it moves the Catholic Church away from the ideas of like theocracy.
And Christendom toward a kind of ecumenical view of relationships with other Christians, with other religions.
We're going to get along with the world.
We're going to open ourselves to the world.
We're not here to dominate the world.
And a lot of Catholics see that as like the modernization of the Catholic church in the 20th century.
For Paul Weyrich, this is the downfall of the Catholic church in the 20th century.
Why?
Why is it the downfall?
At least for Wyrick.
At least for Wirich. - So there's a story I tell in the book that I think is really illuminating, right?
So one of Wyrick's kind of first religious political stance that he took was trying to get a priest fired for having held an ecumenical service the night of Martin Luther King Jr.' 's assassination.
And so to circle all the way back to what you said about like, where's the threat to whiteness, the threat to the sort of supremacy of Christianity?
I think for Weyrich, right, it is always tied up in the perception that Vatican II liberalization of the church undoes this not just patriarchal structure, but white supremacist patriarchal structure.
There's, you know, I don't feel like I have evidence from the archives to say that Weyrich was an overt or avowed white supremacist.
There's nothing there to indicate that.
But certainly in terms of an ideological disposition toward thinking about what the country should look like, white supremacy is baked into his case.
Now, other things about Vatican II that I think are particularly interesting, right, is one, it sort of injects modernism into the Catholic Church in a way that as someone who identifies as a traditionalist, as a conservative who wants to conserve the past, Weyrich is deeply, deeply opposed to.
But the liberalizing reforms of Vatican II also create the conditions for Wyrick to become this traditionalist Catholic, right?
It's what makes it possible for him to begin to identify and to organize with things like the Catholic traditionalist movement.
That Vatican II empowers the laity to have more agency and more autonomy and to go out and do more on their own accord.
And why Rick Seas is on that.
And that's really what establishes the sort of, let's say, religious political conditions of opportunity for him to emerge in this way.
That's exactly right.
Yeah, that's such a great summation, right?
I mean, if the church doesn't modernize, the laity doesn't have the power and voice that it does.
And you make a point that we've tried to make on this show many times, which is that traditionalist and fundamentalist movements are modern by nature because their reactions to modernity, like the very categories of traditionalist or the very category of fundamentalist, are Possible only because of the onset of what we would call a more modern pluralist, whatever you want to say, kind of setting.
And so Wyrick, as you just said so perfectly, the thing he's most mad about is what gives him a place to yell and scream about being mad.
What struck me reading your book is that it seems one of the things he wants to do then is say, well, If the church has given up on Christendom, then I'm going to have to do it myself by organizing and mobilizing Christians of all stripes to basically revolutionize the government.
You know, you say at one point he wants to insert Catholic morality into the United States government because the church basically won't do it.
Is that a fair reading?
And what does that tell us about his political project?
Yeah, I think it's absolutely a fair reading.
I think it's interesting.
There are sort of between the American Heritage Center and the Library of Congress and these two big archives that I was spending a lot of time in, there are a handful of letters and memos from Weyrich and Connie Marschner being like, anyone have any luck with the with the bishops?
Anyone able to reach out to them?
Anyone able to get them on board?
And my sense is that these these Memos are reflecting disinterest on the part of the organized church, right?
And that's fueling a lot of this sense that, like, we have to be radical, we have to be insurgent, we have to do it on our own, because we're just not getting the support we want from the church.
Um, and that is, yeah, I think that is a big part of what they're doing.
I think the way Wyrick is envisioning his political project is really to, I think the phrase I use in the book is to like seize control of the coercive apparatus of the state, right?
To actually capture the state in such a way that it can then be used to structure and impose certain types of social relations policies that are all informed and reflective of this traditionalist Catholic worldview.
This brings up a point that I think we'll come back to, but what you just said about government, using the apparatus of the government, the coercive powers of the government, the imposing force of the government, is not the small government, low taxes, no regulation that I've heard Buckley and Goldwater and Reagan and everybody was after this whole time.
And I want to come back to that point because it's rearing its head in our politics right now.
Before we go there, let's go to quote unquote family values.
You know, Wyrick is as invested or more in the Family Values tropes and movements and issues as the Falwells and the Lehays and the Robertsons and everyone else that we often imagine as part of this group.
So what did Family Values mean to him?
And like issues like abortion, birth control, why did those threaten the family, the ERA?
I mean, the very short answer to all of that, right, is that all of the things you just listed are things that threaten the supremacy of patriarchal authority, right?
So when we think about abortion, when we think about birth control, when we think about the ERA, when we think about equal pay for equal work for women, Or universal childcare, right?
All of these are things that weaken the supremacist power of men within the home.
And by extension, I think this kind of patriarchal vision of this organization of the state, right?
So that is a big part of it.
There is also, I mean, for Quite a few years in the mid-60s, Weirich was very, very concerned with population control being a tool for advancing anti-Catholic bigotry.
There's a lot of sort of bordering on conspiracist feeling talking points around how population control is going to be used to eradicate Catholics.
But I think what it really comes down to is why Rick has this vision of daddy rolling the roost and things that create conditions for women's autonomy, agency, emancipation really need to be opposed.
And the state needs to be leading the charge to oppose.
Those things, right?
It's not that just in your home, you shouldn't use birth control.
It is that the state should coerce people into not using birth control by limiting access to it.
Once again, we have a government that does not sound small or tiny or, you know, anything but invasive and in your bedroom, in your in your body, in your person and so on and so forth.
And once again, I just can't help but think about a certain candidate who every time he opens his mouth talks about childless cat ladies and post-menopausal women and daycare and in ways that are like from the 21st century, but could be like Paul Weyrich if he like zoomed into the 21st century and started talking.
So again, we'll come back to that.
All right, just to finish up on Weyrich and his whole profile, you say something I think is so poignant and so insightful, and that is that Weyrich and his colleagues on the religious right, whether that was Falwell, Well, that was other Catholics, Richard Vigery, whether that was Morton Blackwell, you know, all the people that he worked with to start the Council for National Policy, the Heritage Foundation, Alec, the lunches on Capitol Hill.
They don themselves as both revolutionary and traditionalist.
How can you be both of those?
You can be both of those if you manufacture and invent what you mean by tradition, which is what I think Wyrick especially excelled at, but what they all have in common.
And so we can point to the radical, the sort of insurgent, the revolutionary aspects really clearly.
Those get couched in terms of conserving the past or returning us to tradition.
In order to, I would say, obscure the real impact that they're looking to have.
But they also get justified through this constant recourse to, well, this is how it once was.
This is how it should be.
This is how it's always been.
And that, right, provides the sort of justificatory schema for their political aims.
But the tradition they point to is always one that's being actively manufactured in the present, right?
It is not a historical past.
It is not A tradition that exists or could have existed, but more to the point, I think it is not a tradition that they are looking to actually recreate, right?
Because they're, they're looking to the future.
So they're sort of projecting us forward at the same time as they call back in order to create justifications.
This is a little bit of a segue, but I've been spending some time listening to Patriot Church sermons, talking to the head pastor of the Patriot Church.
And when I first went to the Patriot Church, I said, you know, I'm interested in understanding what kind of future you want to create.
He immediately corrected me and said, oh, we're not trying to create anything.
We're trying to conserve.
And I was like, Oh, are you?
Interesting.
Let's talk about that.
What do you want to conserve?
I feel like the look you just gave, like mimicking the look you gave to the Patriot church pastor was the look Kamala Harris gave Donald Trump at the debate.
Several times.
I'm like, Oh, that's really cute.
You're lying.
And you're really deceiving yourself, but sure.
Keep going, please.
We'd love to hear more.
First of all, are you okay?
You've been listening to Patriot Church sermons and you went to talk to them.
I just want to, you know, I hope you're finding joy in other parts of your life just so that you're, you know.
I've been reading, like, Jenny Ophiel novels.
Okay.
I really love her writing.
Yeah, I'm still finding joy in my life.
Okay, good.
I did, after I spoke to Pastor Ken, I tuned into the live stream of the sermon two days later, and he called me a very nice lady, and that did some real damage to my safety.
Well, I haven't quite recovered from being called a very nice lady, but I'm working on it.
So just sorry.
I just, I, I instantly got worried for you when you said that.
Um, but, but, but you're okay.
So pastor Ken makes a point that I think Wyrick might've also tried to make, which is like, Oh no, we're just trying to go back to the good old day.
I mean, and you hear this all the time, whether it's tradwives on Instagram, whether it is JD Vance, whether it's Kevin Roberts, whether it's the make America great again, crowd.
There's always this appeal to a Pax Americana, a Pax Christendom, when things were good and everybody seemed to like have the dream existence.
But I think one of the things you do in the book that is so genius is you say, every time that Weyrich made inroads in government, that they were able to mobilize to get the people they wanted elected, to get issues pushed forward.
They were doing so in a revolutionary mode.
Like, like they want an American government that is not the one that we imagine it is in terms of the government's role in our life.
Like, how does that revolutionary vision play out?
What is it?
What is Weirich's revolutionary vision?
I mean, very concretely, by the early mid 80s, they are talking about using everything from educational to tax policy to structure social relations in a way that would impose this kind of fever dream of traditionalist social organization.
It is not dissimilar to Project 2025, right?
If you work through Project 2025 and you look at what they want to do in each kind of realm of government authority, they're looking to use the state in this way that would make it so that you need to be in a heterosexual marriage because you get certain tax benefits because you are able to.
I mean, J.D.
Vance, I think, would like Your right to vote to be conditional on existing within this, quote unquote, traditionalist family structure.
So Wyrick, right, gets to this point of really saying, like, we need to we need to use every aspect of the government to impose what I read as a very Catholic social vision.
Right.
And that is cutting off welfare benefits unless people live with their parents or get married.
Right.
It is making access to education, right, much more accessible to men than to women and incentivizing women to stay home.
One, by not having equal pay for equal work.
Two, by making childcare inaccessible and unavailable.
And three, by paying.
Here, to circle back to your question about big government and fiscal conservatism, Connie Marshner proposes pay mothers to stay home.
And using tax dollars to provide up to two years of wages as a way of encouraging the traditional family structure.
It's about as far from small government fiscal conservatism as you can get.
You know, the only place I know where they do that is my friends in Denmark who live in a socialist government with the biggest government I can think of in like one of, in, in, in terms of what the West would quote unquote Western world.
And yeah.
Yeah, I'm not convinced that the sort of current integralist Catholic vision that really seems to be edging towards communitarianism is not also a form of socialist organization.
