Howard Phillips, Founding Father of Religious Right, Has Died
April 21, 2013, 6:29PM
Post by Julie Ingersoll
Howard Phillips, the founder of the Conservative Caucus and the Constitution Party, three-time presidential candidate and founding father of the religious right, has died. Following a diagnosis of Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) and Alzheimers Disease his health had deteriorated rapidly over the past couple of years, his son explained via Facebook.
As the story goes Phillips, Paul Weyrich, and Richard Viguerie got together in the late 1970s using Viguerie’s groundbreaking direct mail company to help Jerry Falwell build the Moral Majority and Paul and Judy Brown build the American Life League. While Weyrich, Vigerie and the Browns were Catholic, Falwell was a Baptist, and Phillips was an evangelical convert from Judaism with great affection for RJ Rushdoony and Christian Reconstructionist leanings.
It’s hard to overstate Phillips’ influence in the transformation of the more secular mid-century conservatism of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley into today’s religiously-inflected conservatism. In the 1980s Phillips played an important role in the Reagan Revolution as President of the Conservative Caucus, founding member of the Council on National Policy (CNP) and a as a Senior Editor at the Conservative Digest.
By the 1990s, finding the Republican party’s shift to the right inadequate, Phillips turned his efforts toward building a viable third party, founding the U.S. Taxpayers Alliance, then the United States Taxpayers Party—now known as The Constitution Party.
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/julieingersoll/7056/howard_phillips__founding_father_of_religious_right__has_died/
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