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The “Religious Right” lost its religion when it began to identify with first being a “conservative” movement within one Political Party.

LOS ANGELES (Catholic Online) - Several years back I wrote a controversial article entitled “Requiem for the Religious Right.” Some people were upset by the premise of the piece that the religious right was dead. Others agreed with my analysis.

One man whom I admire, an early founder of the movement that came to be called the “religious right”, wrote me a very thoughtful response. He suggested that many of my insights in the article were valid. However, he thought that my assessment that the movement was dead was premature.

Election 2008 has proven I was correct. If not yet dead, the “Religious Right” has at least lost its ‘Religion’ and, as a result, lost its way.

Before turning to an assessment of why the religious right lost its “religion” and then, how it went wrong, I think we need a bit of what is called in our common parlance a “reality check”. The impact of the movement called “the religious right” on politics and policy has been negligible.

The mobilizing commitment of the movement was to secure in law the recognition of the inalienable right to life for every human person. That must include the smallest persons in the first home of the whole human race, their mother’s womb. They have no voice but ours.

The movement made little discernible political progress in this direction except to finally ban that infanticide which was called “partial birth abortion.” Abortion, which is always and in every instance, intrinsically evil because it is the immoral taking of innocent helpless human life, is still legal in all fifty States.

The soon to be nominee of the Democratic Party is an inspiring orator. He is also prone to speak of thoughtful notions such as an “epidemic of violence” and an “empathy deficit”. However, he has stopped his ears to the cry of those whom Mother Teresa rightly called the “poorest of the poor”, children in the womb. If he becomes the nominee, I will do all I can to engage him on this very issue. I will encourage him to expand his message of hope to include giving the hope of birth to our littlest neighbors.

The presumptive nominee of the Republican Party fares a little bit better on this vital issue, at least recognizing the right to life for these little ones who are our neighbors. However, he endorses deadly research on human embryonic life. He attempts to justify this barbarism with reference to the human embryos who will inevitably die in this unethical research as being “spare embryos”. When human persons become objects to be disposed of for parts, we have simply embraced a new form of slavery where an entire class of persons has become less than human.

Some will read this strongly worded claim and accuse me of “single issue” politics. To them I insist that right to life is not a single issue; it is a foundation for freedom and a lens through which we must examine all of our other claims of compassion. Without the right to life there are no other rights and the infrastructure of rights is thrown into jeopardy. Rights become the exclusive province of the more powerful who can make the so called “choice” to take your life.

Even if you call what is wrong a “right”, and even if unelected Justices create a “penumbra” out of whole cloth behind which to hide the evil, you cannot make it right. The natural law and science confirm what we have always known, that the child in that womb is our neighbor.

We simply should not kill our neighbor.

Without the freedom to be born, there are no other freedoms. Freedom is a good of the person. Children in the womb, like all of us, are human persons. Personhood cannot be limited to only those perceived to not be “dependent” on any other persons or we will soon eliminate many other categories of human persons.

Beside which, it is our dependency upon each other which actually makes us human. Our claims of compassion, the etymology of which means to “suffer with”, are exposed as a fraud when we do nothing to stop the killing of innocents in the womb, once the safest place on earth, with chemical weapons and surgical strikes.

The Beginnings of the “religious right”

I remember the ‘religious right’ movement in its early days. Those drawn to it were drawn by this foundational idea that every single human life was sacred and must be welcomed and protected by law. I know, there were other issues, but that was what motivated us to even begin to form coalitions and alliances with one another.

I often found myself invited to speak at some of its early events, a Catholic in a predominantly evangelical Protestant crowd.

I had some favorite lines. “I’m just a guy from Dorchester, Massachusetts. Pro-life, Pro-family Irish, French Catholic from a blue collar, Democrat family”, I said. “Seems I woke up one day being called a “conservative” because I believe in the right to ...