The earliest phase of the Christian Right movement didn’t bridge the Protestant-Catholic divide. But when Protestant Christian Right leaders such as Jerry Falwell Sr. followed the advice of Catholic political activist Paul Weyrich to include opposition to abortion as a leading issue for the nascent movement in the late 1970s—as white Protestants were increasingly fleeing the Democratic Party over its support for civil rights—old antipathies quickly gave way to the promise of new political alliances.
