Political activism
Weyrich foresaw a potential to organize conservative Christians into a voting bloc in the early 1960s, and reportedly started trying to do so during the 1964 presidential election campaign. Throughout the 1960s, he tried several wedge issues, including abortion, pornography, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, and school prayer, without success. In 1966, Weyrich became press secretary to Republican U.S. Senator Gordon L. Allott of Colorado. While serving in this capacity, he met Jack Wilson, an aide of Joseph Coors, patriarch of the Coors brewing family. Frustrated with the state of public policy research, they founded Analysis and Research Inc. in 1971, but the organization failed to gain traction.
In 1973, persuading Joseph Coors to support it financially, Weyrich and Edwin Feulner co-founded The Heritage Foundation as a think tank to counter liberal views on taxation and regulation, which they considered to be anti-business. While the organization was at first only minimally influential, it grew into one of the world's largest public policy research institutes and has been hugely influential in advancing conservative policies. The following year, in 1976, again with support from Coors, Weyrich founded the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (CSFC). CSFC "became active in eastern European politics after the Cold War. Figuring prominently in this effort was Weyrich's right-hand man, Laszlo Pasztor, a former leader of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party in Hungary, which had collaborated with Hitler's Third Reich. After serving two years in prison for his Arrow Cross activities, Pasztor found his way to the United States, where he was instrumental in establishing the ethnic-outreach arm of the Republican national Committee," author Martin Lee wrote in 1997. Under Weyrich, the CSFC proved highly innovative. It was among the first grassroots organizations to raise funds extensively through direct mail campaigns. It also was one of the first organizations to tap into evangelical Christian churches as places to recruit and cultivate activists and support for social conservative causes. Over the next two decades, Weyrich founded, co-founded, or held prominent roles in a number of other notable conservative organizations, including founding the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of state legislators, co-founding the Council for National Policy, a strategy-formulating organization for social conservatives, co-publishing Conservative Digest, a conservative magazine, and serving as national chairman of Coalitions for America, an association of conservative activist organizations. He also later reorganized CSFC into the Free Congress Foundation (FCF).
In the early 1970s, Weyrich was first able to politically mobilize conservative Protestants after federal courts ruled segregation academies ineligible for tax exemption, and the Internal Revenue Service began revoking tax exemptions of these schools. Most of these private schools were church sponsored and had been founded to serve white students who abandoned public schools after they were integrated. At this time, conservative Protestants were not an organized voting bloc, and many of them supported both major political parties. These court cases and actions by the IRS reportedly caught the ire of several evangelical leaders, including Jerry Falwell. Weyrich sought to frame the IRS crackdown on segregation academics as an issue of government intrusion and attacks on religious freedom, effectively diverting attention from the racial aspect of the issue. The largest institution targeted was fundamentalist Christian college Bob Jones University, which lost its tax exemption in 1976 due to a policy prohibiting interracial dating. This action further enraged evangelical leaders, many of whom believed that the IRS was overstepping its legal authority.
In 1977, Weyrich co-founded Christian Voice with Robert Grant. The following year, the IRS proposed a new rule that would have revoked the tax exemption of private schools based on their racial demographic composition relative to that of their respective communities. Weyrich later cited this as the beginnings of the religious right, but realized that another wedge issue would be required to keep evangelical Christians mobilized. The unexpected success of predominantly Catholic anti-abortion activists in the 1978 midterms convinced Weyrich that opposition to abortion might work as a wedge issue to keep evangelicals politically mobilized. He favored the issue because it could be framed in the context of family values and be used to claim moral superiority, as well as attack second-wave feminism. Prior to this time, the Catholic Church was the only Christian denomination that was staunchly anti-abortion, with many Protestant and evangelical denominations, including the Southern Baptist Convention, either supporting legalization of the procedure, or not taking a stance on the issue. Many evangelical leaders were hesitant to embrace opposition to abortion as a wedge issue, believing that its stereotype amongst evangelicals as a "Catholic issue" would hinder its ability to politically mobilize them, but conservative Christians began joining the anti-abortion movement in large numbers by the early 1980s. In 1979, Weyrich co-founded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. The organization was credited with mobilizing evangelical Protestants to support Ronald Reagan, and electing him to the presidency in 1980.
In 1997, under the auspices of the Free Congress Foundation, Weyrich founded the Washington, D.C.–based satellite television station National Empowerment Television (NET), later relaunched as the for-profit channel "America's Voice" in 1997. That same year, Weyrich was forced out of the network he had founded when the network's head persuaded its board to force out Weyrich in a hostile takeover. Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates said this was, "apparently for his divisive behavior in attacking GOP pragmatists". From 1989 to 1996, he was also president of the Krieble Institute, a unit of the FCF that trained activists to support democracy movements and establish small businesses in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
By 1997, The Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation were two of the top five biggest and best funded conservative think tanks.
In his 2009 book "The Next Conservatism" which he co-wrote with William Lind, Weyrich argued that conservatives "should be fighting to return to family structures of the 1950s" which is a goal that has been picked up by leaders after him.
