The Radical Catholic Right from Paul Weyrich to JD Vance: Part 2
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In part two of my interview with Dr. Chelsea Ebin, we dig deeper into how radical strains of Catholicism have influenced American politics, particularly through figures like JD Vance and historical activists such as Connie Marschner. Our conversation explores how these groups have long pushed to use government power to enforce conservative Christian values, especially around issues of family and gender. Dr. Ebin and I unpack the strategies that have been deployed over decades to shape societal norms and how these efforts connect to current political movements aiming for a theocratic state.
We also discuss the complexities of single-issue voting, diving into how this dynamic plays out among conservative Catholics and Protestants. Dr. Ebin brings great insights into the potential tensions between these groups, despite their shared goals of enforcing a conservative moral vision. It’s a fascinating conversation that highlights the intersection of religion and politics in shaping the landscape of contemporary America.
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I'll go back to something I said earlier about we need to reward the things that we think are good and punish the things that we think are bad.
So you talk about tax policy.
Let's tax the things that are bad and not tax the things that are good.
If you're making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you've got three kids, you should pay a different lower tax rate than if you're making the same amount of money and you don't have any kids.
Vice presidential candidate J.D.
Vance saying that we should Tax the things that are bad and reward the things that are good.
Last week we talked to Dr. Chelsea Eben about the radical Catholic right and its long history of trying to use the government as a coercive force to impose its understanding of what is good on everyone.
That understanding of good is, of course, cultivated through a reactionary Catholic vision of society, family, and gender.
J.D.
Vance is a continuation of that tradition, and today we continue our discussion with Dr. Eben about this long-standing movement to radicalize American politics.
Not only do we get into contemporary figures like Vance and Kevin Roberts, but we talk about a little-known figure, a woman named Connie Marshner, who was Paul Weyrich's partner in the movement and a driving force of the politics around family, gender, and women that set the stage for our contemporary moment.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
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.
It's just a theocratic socialist organization.
Right?
And so anyone who's not a member of that community, anyone who cannot perform these social relations in the way that government dictates, is going to be excluded.
I could not agree more.
I've been trying to like beat this drum.
My, my spouse is tired of hearing about this.
My three-year-old doesn't understand.
She doesn't care.
Um, but like I read, so everybody, we're going to go on a tangent for a minute.
Just hang with us.
Okay.
We're going to just, you're listening, you're driving your car, you're doing the dishes.
You got to hang with us.
Cause this is really important.
So like what, like why Rick and Marshner, we're going to get to Marshner here next, are like proposing that the government.
Do things to incentivize having a family structure that is a cis man married to a cis woman having children.
They're going to incentivize that woman staying home and not doing things like going to college or working.
They're not going to make it such that the woman can get protection for equal pay in the workplace, so on and so forth.
Okay.
This is big government basically shaping what kind of family you can have de facto, like in a way that makes sense and people can afford and people can live with, right?
Every time I read Kevin Roberts, J.D.
Vance, Patrick Deneen, the Catholic philosopher, anytime R.R.
Reno, every time I read Adrian Vermeule, like any of these like 21st century heirs of the people we're talking about today, I always am writing in my book, Denmark.
Norway, Finland, because what I'm thinking of is like, this is a socialist government.
They are largely secular countries that have what we would think to be, at least in this country, some way more progressive policies on things like child care and other things.
These folks we're talking about today want a highly conservative, Christian-imposed government on everyone.
The difference is really a matter of like conservative Catholicism inserted into the equation or not.
I'm overstating all this.
I'm oversimplifying it.
I'm just finally so excited to talk to someone who knows way more about this than I do.
But again, my three-year-old is not much help at this point in helping me figure it out.
I am very excited to talk about this because I think there's also something to be teased out when you say Denmark, right?
That those models, all of those Scandinavian sort of socialist democratic states are much more racially homogenous.
Totally.
United States.
Right, and I think that's part of the dream.
It is part of the vision they have of having racial and religious kind of homogeneity and really having the state You know, I don't I don't think the motivation for envisioning this kind of communitarian socialist utopia is the same as it is in Europe.
But I think what they envision the state being capable of doing is very, very simple, right?
That the state can provide in these ways.
And what makes it good, as opposed to godless communism, is that it is a Christian state.
It is that it is theocratic.
I will just put a pin that I do think that this is a potential place where, you know, I wrote a whole book about this coalition that gets built between Protestants and Catholics, but I think actually this communitarian vision is where that coalition can't really be.
Oh, totally agree.
Because I think that the Protestant Christian nationalists do have a very, very different vision of what the state should look like.
And this big government aspect of the right is coming to us through conservative Catholics and not through conservative Protestants.
So I see on the horizon a sort of right conflict brewing.
Oh, I could not agree more.
Like, if the dog ever catches its tail, we're going to have something akin to the wars of religion that have already happened in Europe between Protestants and Catholics.
Because the Doug Wilson crowd, the Stephen Wolf crowd, the Joel Webben folks, they don't have the same vision that Leonard Leo and Clarence Thomas and J.D.
Vance and Kevin Roberts have.
The Napa Institute people And so, but I think your book and I think other work that's come to light recently has really been helpful for people seeing that when it comes to institutions, when it comes to government operations, the Catholics are the leaders at the moment in terms of like, when the Southern Baptist Convention condemns IVF,
They would have never done that without like decades of, of signaling and leadership and pressure from the likes of the reproductive theological conservatives in the Catholic church and who all are heirs of Weyrich and Marschner and Schlafly and others.
And so I think Project 2025 should be read as like a Catholic Christian manifesto rather than a Protestant one.
So I just, I agree there's, there's trouble ahead if they ever actually get somewhere where they want to be.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think, so thinking about, right, like condemning IVF, because that is, that, you know, was, I don't want to say came as a shock when SBC did that, but I was definitely a little taken aback.
I was like, huh, okay, we're doing this.
And I think really, though, that sort of we move from Catholic condemnation of IVF to Baptist condemnation through the vehicle of fetal personhood, right?
It is the discourse of fetal personhood, which doesn't secularize Catholic beliefs, but does reframe them in a way that is palatable and a little bit distanced from Catholicism.
And that's what Wyrick and Marshner and the New Right did with pro-family politics, right?
So they use it almost as a kind of Trojan horse to get Catholic visions.
sort of embedded in not just the Christian right, but the Republican Party through this language that is still very much tied to Christianity, but divorced enough from its Catholic.
They're not talking about subsidiarity.
They're talking about pro-family politics.
Right.
And I think that similar process has happened with IBS.
It's a brilliant point and a brilliant way to frame it.
And I wrote, so when the IVF decision came down in Alabama, I wrote a whole article about how like, Hey Protestants, most of y'all going back to like the sixties, didn't think that like conception was the point when, when, you know, personhood started.
And I tried to like make this long historical case and the emails I got were exactly what you've talked about today were.
Nope, it's always been that way, and how dare you, you terrible, murderous, child-hating man, who is certainly going to hell.
Because it has always been, from Jesus, to Paul, to Augustine, to Aquinas, to Calvin, till Robert Jeffress, it has always been that life begins at conceptions.
And I got hundreds of emails that were like, you should die a slow death because you hate children and all that, right?
On that, like, no, no, no, no, I, you know, but the point here is what you said about them being able to not make it a Catholic issue to make it a Christian issue writ large is what led to the Protestant adoption of what are essentially conservative Catholic views on reproduction and personhood, right?
I mean, it's really brilliant.
Yeah.
Let's go to Marschner.
We need to, we need to switch paths.
We've been on Paul Weirich too long.
So most people listening, They don't know who Phyllis Schlafly is.
They're aware.
They don't know who Connie Marshner is.
Who is Connie Marshner and how did she get into politics?
Oh, Connie Marshner is who everyone in the country can thank for not having state-funded universal child care.
So when you are struggling to pay for daycare costs, you can just think, I have Connie Marshner to thank for this.
So Connie Mercer is this fascinating character and she kept a fairly low public profile.
She keeps, she is still alive.
She, when I tried to interview her about a decade ago, never responded to my emails.
But on a side note, I know that she has read at least the chapter on Weyrich.
Because she rewrote it as her own praising Wyrick, so used the same kind of archival citations, which is fascinating and an interesting thing to have happen to your work where you're like, oh, wow, OK, you're going to take this in a very different direction than I intended it.
But Connie Mercer moves to D.C.
in 1971 after graduating from college.
She begins working in conservative organizations and with other political entrepreneurs.
Um, she is a Republican and a conservative.
And I think it's important to say that, right at this time, Marshner and Weirich would have identified as both because they were very critical of, you know, the Republican Party for, for not being conservative enough.
It's part of the new rights whole move to be radical and insurgent.
Um, Marsha was really involved at the time.
She was Connie Coyne, really heavily involved in the YAS, Young America's Foundation.
And in the early 70s, she starts working with Weyrich, and I'm not exactly sure where they meet.
I'm assuming it's at this foundation that becomes an incubator for heritage, right?
Coors gives the seed funding, but there's this foundation that kind of incubates heritage.
And Marshner becomes and remains Weyrich's right-hand woman for decades.
But it is, I think, a disservice to her to say that she is Weyrich's right-hand woman, because she is really an equal with Weyrich, right?
When you look in the archives at who's sort of crafting policy, who's advancing visions of the future, who is pulling together the coalition, Marschner is not Weyrich's assistant.
She is his partner in politics.
On a personal level, right, she's very, very conservative, very Catholic, had many children.
I'm a little fuzzy on exactly how many because there are different numbers and different sources, but it's either five or six.
And she was a career woman, right?
So while she is campaigning to have universal child care vetoed by Nixon twice, while she is arguing against ratification of the ERA, while she is writing speeches for senators opposing equal pay for equal work, she herself is a full-time D.C.
political entrepreneur, right?
She lost a either lost a very late term pregnancy or lost an infant child and was back at work within weeks, which I know because the condolence cards in the archives indicate, right, that the sort of date between when she would have lost The pregnancy or the child, and when she's back at work, it is an incredibly short period of time.
My sense is that her husband, who is a conservative Catholic theologian, was really the one at home with the kids.
And I assume that they had paid childcare, but I'm not positive.
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Marshner is such a, again, most people listening will have seen movies and films about Phyllis Schlafly.
They will not have read one word about Marshner.
One thing that Marshner seems to do, along with Weirich, is make issues like the healthcare, childcare, welfare reform, not only things that would disrupt the family, but were victimizing conservative Christians.
And I think to this day, folks don't understand why the Family Values crowd sees those things as an attack on them.
Is Marshner a helpful inroad into understanding that?
Yeah, I think she is.
And there's, um, so early in her, you know, early in her political career, she goes to Kanawha County in West Virginia.
And I want to just plug, Carol Mason does a fantastic job of covering this episode in her book, Reading Appalachia from Left to Right.
So anyone listening, just a little plug for that.
But Marschner goes to help grassroots Protestants protest against the introduction of secular humanism into their public education curricula.
Right.
And it is this really interesting moment where she's sort of on the ground parachuting in from D.C.
to help parents who are, you know, hysterical about the introduction of these new textbooks.
Sounds familiar, right?
We are we're living through another another resurgence of this.
In the idea, the sort of discourse that gets mobilized is that the books are a threat, right?
They're going to corrupt and pervert your children.
They are stripping you of your parental rights.
Again, this might sound familiar, right?
Vaccination, masks, critical race theory, don't say gay, like we're doing it all again.
But the discourse is all about how good Christian parents are being persecuted by the government, which wants to come in and tell your children what to think and tell you how to raise your children.
And in doing so is going to disrupt this, quote unquote, traditional social order.
Now, never mind that the conservatives just want the government to do the exact same thing, but with a different message.
But that's the discourse, right?
So I think Marshner is really central to pushing forward this discourse around victimization, right?
It hurts women to have child care available.
It's harmful to them.
She's also really instrumental I've been sort of pushing this manufactured tradition, right?
So I write about the speech she gave called The New Traditional Woman, where she says, like, the traditional woman that I'm talking about has never existed, but we're going to call her into being.
Right?
Like we are going to prefigure this idea of past.
traditional role for women.
It is not dissimilar to, I think, what young women who spend a lot of time on social media as trad wives or rad trad calves are doing, right?
Similar process.
The prairie chic corner of Instagram is what comes to mind for me.
Okay, so Weyerich, Marschner, others on the religious right, one of the things they do, and I know we're going to run out of time here so we got to be quick, but you know one thing that they do really well is they create single issue voters.
And I think a lot of folks listening have family members who are single issue voters, that it doesn't matter what the Republican Party does, but when it comes to abortion, when it comes to guns, when it comes to immigration, if they do X, I will vote for them.
And as a former evangelical myself, I have lived this.
I have been that person.
How did they use single issue voting to like create alliances, to kind of mobilize a movement and in some ways patch together a cosmos of these conservative revolutionaries?
Yeah, so it's one of the things that I think they do most effectively and most successfully, right?
And there's this sort of thesis in political science, right, that coalitions necessarily moderate people's views.
That when you bring people into coalition with one another, they're going to have to find common ground.
And so we'll shift from the furthest poles of our beliefs closer to the center.
I think the strategy of mobilizing people on the basis of single issues is a strategy that can be used to disrupt that moderation thesis, right?
Because you radicalize people around this one core issue.
The New Right did that very, very successfully, right?
They had, I mean, I think I call it like an alphabet soup of organizations and groups that they had built from the ground up in order to speak to these different single issue voters.
And that allows them not only to maintain the radicality of the positions, but it also gives them the capacity to really Shed a lot of the expectations of conservative political thought, right, around fiscal conservatism, around some of the the other sort of tenants of small government.
Like if you break people apart around these single issues, no one's going to.
I mean, people were aware and did call them out for being sort of fake, fake conservatives.
We can problematize that term.
But that was the charge often leveled against them, right?
Because they weren't fiscally conservative and because they were self-identified as radical.
Now, the problem with single issue voters is necessarily mobilizing people to all turn out in support of a party that may not be as attentive to that issue as you might want.
And that's where things like pro-family politics, right, this umbrella Kind of empty signifier that allows these different single issues to be grouped together and then mobilized across a broader swath of the electorate.
Like that's where the strength is.
Yeah.
No, and it's just not hard to see how this all echoes today in our politics.
I know we're running out of time.
I know I've kept you on the mic here for a while today.
I want to finish with something that I think we've hinted at throughout, but is really, really important.
And for me, Locked in so many aspects of what I've been thinking about.
So, Wyrick, Marshner, others on the religious right, you say, ideologically committed neither to fiscal conservatism nor to limited government as a structuring principle.
Instead, they were committed to using the government to coerce society to take on the shape and form of an idealized Christian polity.
I feel like I want to put that sentence in front of everyone who listens to this show so they understand whether it's the 60s, the 80s, the 2000s, the Tea Party, or today, the goals of this movement.
How does that reverberate, this mission to shape and form an idealized Christian polity?
How do we see that in the Heritage Foundation of today, the J.D.
Vance candidacy, so on and so forth?
I mean, I think it is Project 2025, right?
And you look at what Project 2025 wants to do, and it's not move us toward fiscal conservatism or limited government.
It's consolidate executive authority and then, in effect, devolve power away from the institutions and structures in government that historically have supported the rights of marginalized and underrepresented people, right?
So I think like if Project 2025 gets enacted, what we end up with is a king and a king who is interested in wielding power in such a way that other institutions that could check that authority become disempowered, become, right, disappeared.
And for Heritage, for, you know, many of the people who participated in the writing of Project 2025, that king is a Christian king.
That king is a king who is going to use that consolidated power to restructure U.S.
society in such a way that it models a, you know, Christian, theocratic state.
Or Paul Weirich's dad.
Or Paul Weirich's dad.
At home.
I know.
We can just call it daddy politics.
That's what it is.
And, you know, I think for me, you know, reading your book, thinking a lot about The contemporary conservative, excuse me, the contemporary Catholic common good conservatism movement that we hear about.
The common good is really, hey, we know what's best for everyone.
We just need our king and he'll, like dad at home, like daddy, he'll order everything.
And you may not know it's good for you, three-year-old, right?
But believe me, it is.
And so even if you're not experiencing this as good for you, woman who's being arrested on the highway to trying to cross the state line for, to get an abortion or Uh, woman who's dying from an ectopic pregnancy or trans person who's being erased or, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in a detention center in the middle of the country waiting deportation or Americans being fired upon by the military because the insurrection act has been used.
It is good for you and it's good for all of us.
So just take your punishment and understand that we know better.
Last question.
Your book led me to a conclusion that I'm going to be stuck on and I'm going to be writing about and thinking about for a long time, which is, I don't think this was ever about a Christian nation.
I think for Weyrich, for Marschner, this was about a revolution to Christendom.
Like, the first revolution got us away from a king.
Kevin Roberts says we're in the middle of a second revolution that will remain bloodless if the left allows it.
That revolution is We've never had a king.
It's time for one.
So we don't want a Christian nation.
I don't want George W. Bush out here reading the Bible.
I want a king who will institute Christendom.
And is that too far?
Have I lost it?
Have I spent too much time talking to my three-year-old about this?
Or what do you think?
No, I think that's absolutely the case for the Catholics.
Right.
I think that for, and not all Catholics, but for, you know, traditionalist, Tigrealist Catholics, I think that's absolutely the case.
I think that's what J.D.
Vance wants.
I think that it is not what Joel Webben wants or what Ken Peters wants.
And so I, you know, I think you were, you're really onto something when you say, like, if, if they succeed, we will be headed for another series of religious civil wars, right?
Because these views are not commensurate with one another.
Um, but I think, you know, I believe that we should listen to people when they tell us who they are.
And I think Paul Weyrich told us over and over again that he was a radical, that he wanted radical change, that he saw himself as leading an insurgent movement.
And that is not about returning us to some idealized Christian American past.
That is absolutely about Building something new.
I think for Jerry Falwell and his fundamentalist ilk, right?
They told us, they said, we see ourselves as the militant opposition to liberalism.
And so we should listen when they tell us that they're not liberals.
I think where there is a point of convergence is both the Catholic right and the Protestant right are anti-liberal.
Yes.
It's just everything else where they have more difference and sort of disparities in their vision.
You have a quote, though, at the beginning one of your chapters that talks about it's Falwell saying, you know, what the left needs to know is in another context, we'd be shedding blood.
And that sounds exactly like what Kevin Roberts said like a month ago.
And so anyway.
Dr. Chelsea Evan, so thankful for your work and this book, which I could not put down and I've been referencing for months on the show and I'm so glad to be able to actually finally get to meet you and talk to you.
Where can people keep up with you, things you're doing, send you tea so that you survive listening to Patriot Church sermons, so on and so forth.
Um, you can follow me on Twitter, uh, C-R-R-E-B-I-N.
Um, and although, you know, complicated feelings about being on that platform these days, but that's probably the best place to keep up.
Um, and I'm just, I'm so honored to be on the show.
I'm a huge fan and listen religiously.
Well, that's.
Couldn't have written this.
Yeah, this is a show where bad, you know, puns and dad jokes are always welcome.
So as always, friends, find us Wednesday with It's in the Code, Friday at the Weekly Roundup, starting 926.
We have Spirit and Power every week.
And that's Leah Payne talking about Charismatic and Pentecostal.
Christians in the United States and their effects on politics and the November election.
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