Paul Weyrich: The Religious Roots of a New Right Radical

In the 1970s, the political activist Paul M. Weyrich helped to launch an insurgent and self-proclaimed radical political movement, termed the New Right, which aimed to reshape American conservatism. While much has been written about the relationship of the New Right to the formation of the more politically influential Christian Right movement, New Right actors are largely treated as secular political brokers. This article challenges traditional understandings of the New Right by centering the deep influence Catholicism had on the formation of Weyrich’s political beliefs and development as a political entrepreneur. It focuses on the early formation of Weyrich’s religious identity before addressing how the transformation of the Catholic Church in the 1960s shaped and informed his conservative worldview, making it possible for him to identify as a “conservative Catholic.” His religious beliefs are examined with an eye to his development of the “pro-family” political platform—later adopted by the Christian Right and the Republican Party—and the production of a conservative ideology that would carve out space for a new kind of state, one which would be dramatically limited in terms of social welfare provision and vastly expanded in terms of social regulation.