Paul Weyrich, widely considered the "Godfather" of the modern conservative movement, died on Thursday, December 18, after a long illness.

I have a story about Weyrich and his nearly forty-year contributions to the growth of conservatism on Religion Dispatches.

"Paul Weyrich, 'Godfather' of Modern Conservative Movement, Dead at 66," starts out like this:

For most Americans, the death of Paul Weyrich will not resonate; after all, most Americans have probably never heard of the man. He wasn't a dashing celebrity, a sports star, a captain of industry, or a prominent public political figure; he wasn't a regular guest on the premier talking-head TV programs; he never held elected office; there was no hint of a Ted Haggard/Newt Gingrich-like "values" scandal in his life. But Weyrich, who died after a long illness on Thursday, December 18 at the age of 66, and who wasn't reticent about sharing his ideas and opinions, was, in fact, the connective tissue of the modern conservative movement.

In his book, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, William Martin pointed out that after Weyrich came to Washington in the late 1960s, he "received a revelation [about] how he might accomplish his dream [bringing together working-class Catholics and evangelical Protestants] when he attended a political strategy session run by liberal operatives."

Although Weyrich hadn't been invited to the confab--and to my knowledge he never revealed how he got there--Martin's book quoted him as saying that "there before my eyes was revealed the modus operandi of the left:"

They had all these different groups, including religious groups, networking with people on the Hill, formulating strategy for offering amendments, and then executing that strategy with media, with demonstrations, with lawsuits, with studies, with political action, by targeting people--all the different elements of the political process.
Weyrich acknowledged that from that moment on, his life was "changed": He spent the early part of the 1970s working "to get these people who really have the same morals, who have the same ideals, but who came to it from different traditions to work together."

For nearly forty years, Weyrich contributed his ideas, organizational acumen, and fundraising skills to help build what evolved from an undisciplined gaggle of organizations that made up what was loosely called the New Right in the 1970s to the powerful political movement (although somewhat weakened after the recent election of Barack Obama) that it is today. Before there was a Heritage Foundation, a Moral Majority, a Ronald Reagan presidency, and before the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994, Weyrich had his eyes on the prize: steadfastly working to figure out how conservatives could regroup and rebuild from the ashes of the overwhelming defeat suffered by Senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election.

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