The Radical Mind: The Origins of Right-Wing Catholic and Protestant Coalition Building

Summary

The Radical Mind is a groundbreaking analysis of the origins of the Christian Right, whose political victories are radically reshaping the landscape of American society. Scholars and the public alike have traditionally regarded the New Right and the Christian Right as separate movements. Insofar as both are conservative efforts, most people view them as reactionary and driven by a culture-war backlash against liberal changes to society.

Chelsea Ebin's The Radical Mind aims to overturn this consensus. Through a close analysis of New Right architects Connaught Marshner and Paul Weyrich (who is often seen as secular but was a committed Catholic), this book explores the way conservative Catholics and Protestants overcame their long-standing antipathy to form a political coalition—what Ebin calls the New Christian Right. Drawing on extensive archival research, Ebin shows how the movement’s key architects infused right-wing activism with religion.

The radical aims of the New Christian Right have been obscured by the way they cultivated a shared identity of victimhood and manipulated the discourse about backlash to create a nostalgic idea of the past that they then leveraged to justify their right-wing policy goals. The Catholic-Protestant alliance constructed an imagined past that they projected into the future as their ideal vision of society. Ebin calls this strategy "prefigurative traditionalism"—a paradoxical prefiguring of a manufactured past. Using this tactic, the New Christian Right coalition disguised the radicality of its politics by framing their aims as reactionary and defensive rather than proactive and offensive.