Frenemies Won't Free Us: Why Sisters Should Do It for Ourselves

Webinar discussing the Council for National Policy, Christian nationalism, and why working with their affiliated organizations is counterproductive for women's liberation.

This talk was originally written for a Feminists In Struggle (FIST) panel entitled “The Role of Patriarchal Religion in the Global Oppression of Women.” When my presentation did not go ahead as planned, I expanded it slightly for an independent webinar and discussion. Transcript follows.

Transcript:

In recent years, some feminist organizations seeking to fight gender identity policy have justified working with anti-feminist organizations, such as Concerned Women for America, Heritage Foundation, and other Council for National Policy network groups on the basis that Democrats will not hear our concerns about gender.

So, what I want to do in this talk is to provide a brief introduction to the origin of the Council for National Policy and to Christian nationalism. And then I want to outline some arguments for why I think that working with any of these groups, even on a limited basis, is counterproductive to women's liberation.

In the late 1970s, right-wing politicos were trying to figure out how to win elections. After the social movements of the 1950s and sixties and seventies, such as the black civil rights movement, the Chicano rights movement, the women's movement and all the landmark landmark legislation that came out of those movements, it seemed that everything was going in the direction of progressivism and liberalism. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Title VII amendments prohibiting sex discrimination in the workplace came soon after that. And in 1972, the Title IX amendments, banning sex discrimination in educational institutions.

A lot of people assume that Title IX is about sports, but it was primarily intended to remedy sex discrimination in education. At the time girls could be thrown out of school for becoming pregnant, universities sometimes used different admission criteria for women and for men, and some professional programs like law and medicine limited how many women they would accept.

But here in the US sport is embedded in our educational institutions. So an unintended consequence of Title IX was a dramatic explosion in opportunities for women's sport, because it required equitable distribution of resources in federally funded educational institutions.

So Republican operatives were trying to figure out how to win elections. It was hard to get traction with what Richard Viguerie called the two legged stool, the old “reds under the bed” anticommunist issue and economic issues framed from the perspective of big business. He said, we'd win 40, 45, sometimes 47% of the vote, but very seldom would we even get 51%.

So they hit upon the idea of tapping into the evangelical vote. They noticed that 70% of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians did not vote in the 1976 presidential election. And that only 55% of evangelicals were registered to vote compared to a national average of 72%. So they decided to test their strategy of targeting these voters in the 1980 elections.

The time was ripe, too, because not everyone was happy with all the social change of the previous several decades. In her 1991 book Backlash, Susan Faludi reports that evangelical ministers at the time were increasingly frustrated with the uppity women in their flocks. One told a sociologist that, “Wife beating is on the rise, because men are no longer leaders in their homes. I tell the women, they must go back home and be more submissive.”

So Paul Weyrich and his colleagues set about winning over the pastors and organizing voter registration drives in church lobbies and parking lots. The other piece of the strategy was Richard Viguerie's direct mail initiative. He pioneered direct mail to bypass mainstream media and try to get his conservative message directly to the voters.

The evangelicals were quite flattered to be courted. Mike Huckabee, the Baptist minister, and later governor of Arkansas, said at the time, “No one had ever given so much attention to or paid respect for the Evangelicals. It was magic. And we were a major force in [president Ronald] Reagan winning.” 

So the test run was a success. Paul Weyrich and his colleagues were now ready to develop his vision for “connecting the manpower and media of the Christian right, with the finances of Western plutocrats, and the strategy of right-wing Republican operatives” to establish what Ann Nelson calls, a “pluto-theocracy.” The network of organizations they created, the Council for National Policy, includes think tanks, public policy organizations, and media.

They would build on Viguerie’s success with direct mail to develop their own right-wing media network. And that was helped along also by their success in getting the Reagan administration to repeal the Fairness Doctrine for broadcasters in 1981. Shadow Network author Anne Nelson describes the CNP as  “founded by a small group of arch conservatives who realized that the tides of history had turned against them. They dreamed of restoring a 19th century patriarchy that limited the civil rights of women, minorities, immigrants, and workers, with no income tax to vex the rich or social safety net to aid the poor.”

These are of course, the themes of Christian nationalism; that the U S was founded as a Christian nation, that there should be no separation between church and state, and that law should be based on their idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible. 

By the way, did you know that the Bible mandates deregulation? It's true. Also, anti-union! Peter 2:18-21 says, “Servants, be submissive to your masters with all respect. Not only to those who are good and gentle, but also to those who are unreasonable.”

It's so useful, don't you think, that the Bible affirms what corporate interests want? But this has been the role of major religions down through the ages. They function as the ideological justification for the social order. Katherine Stewart, who studied Christian nationalism for more than 10 years says that the movement should not be understood as a religious creed, but rather a political movement that “actively generates or exploits cultural conflict in order to improve its grip on its target population.”

It's also a movement that embraces authoritarianism. Stewart says that we're not in a culture war, but rather in a war over the future of democracy. And that the Republican party today is its host vehicle. 

Now, there are many organizations in the CNP network and many more that are loosely affiliated that are propagating Christian nationalism. But I want to look here at just three key organizations with whom some of our feminist groups have been working in recent years. And the first one is the Heritage Foundation. It's one of the key organizations in the CNP network, co-founded by Paul Weyrich as a conservative think tank to counter the Brookings institution.

Its stated mission is to “formulate and promote public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.”  

Their first Mandate for Leadership in 1981 called for reducing the size of the federal government, increasing military spending and ending affirmative action programs for women and other minorities. They offered 2000 specific ideas to achieve these goals. And the Reagan administration adopted 60% of them.

The founders of Heritage were alarmed by the power and gains of second wave feminism. The women's movement, according to political scientist Rosalind Petchesky, “had become the most dynamic force for social change in the country, the one most directly threatening to conservative values and interests.” So Heritage’s first Mandate for Leadership warned of the “increasing political leverage of feminist interests”, and the infiltration of a “feminist network” into government agencies.

Mandate for Leadership II, three years later was equally preoccupied with pushing back against feminist initiatives. It called the fight against comparable worth, an equal pay initiative, a top priority. In 2021 Heritage identified banning critical race theory, and “tightening” voter laws as the top two issues for their advocacy arm.

Another early and key institution in the CNP network is the Concerned Women for America. CWA was founded by Beverly LaHaye, the wife of minister Tim LaHaye, who was the first director of the CNP, specifically to oppose the women's movement. LeHaye famously said she was inspired to found CWA after seeing a Barbara Walters interview with Betty  Friedan that convinced her that Friedan's goal was to “dismantle the bedrock of American culture, the family.” 

The stated mission of CWA is to “protect and promote biblical values”, and to “impact the culture for Christ through education and public policy.” CWA has consistently opposed the 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, or CEDAW, and continues to meet regularly with Senate staffers to lobby against it.

The US is the only industrialized democracy, and one of a few UN member states, that have not ratified CEDAW. The Declaration on Women's Sex-Based Rights, the founding document for Women's Declaration International, draws on CEDAW to articulate nine articles affirming sex-based rights for women and girls. 

CWA also regularly lobbies against reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act and did so even before gender identity language was inserted into the Act. In a 2012 article entitled “The Violence Against Women Act Should Outrage Decent People,” Janice Shaw Crouse, a senior fellow at CWA’s research arm, the Beverly LaHaye Institute, called VAWA a “boondoggle for feminists” and an “attack on men.” And of course, CWA also opposes homosexuality and abortion rights.

In Kingdom Coming, her book about Christian nationalism, journalist Michelle Goldberg tells a really interesting story about Janice Crouse. At the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on women, in an NGO meeting, Crouse gave a talk about feminism and how it's been “an unmitigated disaster for women.” And she said something really striking about abortion. I want to read you the full quote. She said: 

To what end has this plague of abortion, this massacre of innocents been directed? The pursuit of hedonist pleasure? Women’s liberation? Liberation from what? So that a woman can engage in the pleasure of sexual intercourse without the demands of motherhood?

No, this horrible slaughter has little to do with pleasure, but it has a great deal to do with the demands of motherhood. Radical feminists accurately see abortion as the ultimate weapon to escape the control of men. The issue is of power, of having the power to call the shots. With abortion as an option, a woman can escape pregnancy. Abortion gives her the power to escape giving birth to a man’s child, a child she would otherwise be connected to for that child’s whole life, and who would likewise connect her to the child’s father.

So, here Crouse is showing that she knows exactly what the feminist argument is; she understands that abortion allows women to escape male domination, and she opposes allowing us to do so. 

The third organization I want to look at quickly is Alliance Defending Freedom that was founded in the early nineties as a counter to the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union. ADF is a key organization working toward the Christian nationalist goal of dismantling the separation between church and state. They focus legal work in five core areas: religious freedom, freedom of speech, sanctity of life, marriage, and family, and parental rights.

ADF has successfully litigated a number of Supreme court cases, including one that is probably the most damaging to our democracy, Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission. What happened here was a conservative non-profit group called Citizens United challenged campaign finance rules after the FEC stopped it from promoting and airing a film that criticized presidential candidate Hillary Clinton too close to the presidential primaries.

The court ruled that corporations and other outside groups can spend unlimited money on elections because to limit their spending, violates their rights to free speech. So in other words, corporations are people with free speech rights. This decision overturned election spending law that went back more than a hundred years.

ADF also successfully litigated Good News Club versus Milford Central School. Good News Club is an initiative of the Child Evangelism Fellowship. Katherine Stewart wrote a book about the club and she reported that they seek to establish clubs in after-school programs for very young children and convert them to what she calls “a deeply reactionary form of evangelical Christianity.”

Now, the Establishment clause in the first amendment to the constitution says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” So prior to the Good News Club case, religion was largely kept out of public schools on that basis. So what ADF are now doing is litigating on the basis of free speech.

The long-term goal of ADF is to make the Establishment clause irrelevant. So in this case, they argued that disallowing the Bible clubs is an infringement of free speech. And the Supreme court ruled in their favor. 

Another significant Supreme court case ADF successfully litigated was Burwell versus Hobby Lobby. In this case, the corporate owners of the craft store chain claimed that the Affordable Care Act mandate that required them to cover birth control in their health care plans for their employees violated their religious belief. So here again, a corporation is treated as a person, this time exercising their religious freedom.

These are just a few of the cases. ADF has successfully litigated and they're branching out worldwide. They have offices in Geneva, Mexico city, Vienna, Brussels, London; many other cities around the world. They workshop legal concepts in the US and then they disseminate them everywhere else. In fact, the entire Christian nationalist project has tentacles worldwide and especially deep connections in Russia.

Soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, Paul Weyrich began traveling to Russia and to other Eastern European countries to facilitate visits between US conservatives and Russian political leaders. American and Russian Christian nationalists founded the World Congress of Families 20 years ago. The organization brings together Catholics, evangelicals, and Russian Orthodox leaders to promote the patriarchal family.

There's just so much more of this that I don't have time to go into. There's the Christian homeschooling piece, the prayer and Bible study groups with political leaders, the judicial project. The main thing to understand is that there are many, many groups and organizations involved. Some are networked via the CNP. Others are more loosely affiliated, but they are all working together to develop the movement worldwide. 

One of the rationales that we are given to justify feminists working with these patriarchal anti-feminist groups is that the Democrats aren't listening to us on the gender identity issue, which is true. And that we can just set aside the things we don't agree on and work together on the issue that we do agree on. That was the idea, I think, with the Hands Across the Aisle. But I see a number of problems with this. 

And the first one is language. We know that we're against gender identity ideology for different reasons than the Christian nationalists, but it's not always obvious that we have different meanings. even for the language we use to talk about the issue. What feminists mean by gender is a set of sex role stereotypes; norms, characteristics, expected behaviors, assigned on the basis of sex, and that reinforce male supremacy. For Christian nationalists, these sex role stereotypes should not be separated from sex. In fact, many of them blame feminists for creating the gender identity problem by separating gender from sex and refusing gender conformity.

So their opposition to gender ideology includes opposition to feminism, to lesbian and gay rights, as well as gender identity. So we're not even talking about the same thing. We could be working on a policy paper using the language “gender ideology,” and they're thinking one thing and feminists another. The image I have here on this slide shows Jayne Egerton's post about Hungary on the Women's Place UK website, that illustrates some of these issues with language and what gender ideology means for right-wingers.

Also, the call to set aside our differences, and focus on the one issue with which we agree, distracts us from looking at the big picture. It depoliticizes our work, because we're not looking at the whole system and making connections. Patriarchy is a system, right? It's not a collection of unrelated issues.

Further, if we're looking at the big picture, if we understand Christian nationalism, if we understand the harms to women of patriarchal religion, we might think, why would I write an amicus brief for ADF, when the long-term goal of the organization is to dismantle the separation of church and state? To make irrelevant the Establishment clause in the constitution, in the service of patriarchal religion?

And they're strategically choosing cases to further that goal. Why would I write one word for them? If you're looking at the big picture. But Women's Liberation Front (WoLF) has written a number of amicus briefs for ADF cases. 

Further, the primary issue we're expected to set aside in order to work with anti-feminist organizations is reproductive rights, by which they mean not only abortion rights, but also birth control. We know that exploitation of our sexual and reproductive capacity is at the root of our oppression, foundational to the creation of patriarchy, as even senior researcher at Concerned Women for America, Janice Crouse, acknowledges.

So, I think a stark example of the danger of focusing only on one issue is the refusal of WDI USA to support the Women's Health Protection Act, which would legalize abortion, because of the gender identity language in it. Never mind that, unlike sport, gender identity language here, though objectionable, does not materially affect women’s sex-based rights. So at a time when it appears that Roe v Wade is about to be overturned, when draconian anti-abortion laws are advancing and getting passed in various states, WDI USA has allowed gender identity concerns to override a primary feminist issue, women's reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, and ignore the health risks for women and girls.

Another problem I see with working with the right, is that doing so retards the development of an independent feminist movement, and with that, an independent feminist voice. The CNP organizations are larger, they have more resources, they're well connected with other powerful organizations and politicians.

So every moment that we spend on zoom calls with Heritage Foundation, ADF, CWA, and others is time not spent developing our own movement, our own resources, our own agenda. If we become dependent on them to tell us which bills are coming up in state legislatures, which politicians might be amenable to our concerns, we never develop our own networks and relationships. Professional lobbyists will tell you that developing these relationships takes time. It takes repeated visits, building up trust. If we're just seen as the feminist auxiliary to the main group, we never develop any of those networks and resources ourselves. And our message gets diluted, or subsumed, into that of the right wing groups; the larger, more powerful groups.

An outstanding example of this occurred during the Supreme court hearings on the nomination of Judge Jackson. WDI USA president Kara Dansky, on Twitter, prodded the Republican senators to ask Jackson, What is a woman? Dansky asked, “Will even one Senate Republican ask Ketanji Brown Jackson what she thinks a woman is?”

Tagging the Republican senators she asked, “Will it be you?” Eventually a Republican senator did ask the question and Dansky excitedly reported it on Twitter.

However, right-wing media then ran away with the narrative, much to her frustration. Matt Walsh tweeted, “The what is a woman movement has begun. As I've said for years, this is the question that single-handedly destroys gender ideology.”
 

Kara:

You didn't invent the question, Matt. Feminists have been at this for a very long time.

Ben Shapiro tweeted:

Ketanji Brown Jackson cannot answer the question. Can anyone on the left? 

Kara:

Yes, leftist feminists can, as you know, I address this topic in my book. 

Washington Post reported that Fox news sent out a push alert about Jackson's response and that a phalanx of right-wing voices pointed to her response as disqualifying.  

Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, another right-wing legal group, and, as of 2022, the president of CNP tweeted: 

So a vote for Judge Jackson is a vote for CRT in schools, leniency on child porn crimes, abortion on demand, the definition of “woman,” undermining the 2nd amendment…

He then tagged Senators Manchin and Sinema, two Democrats who regularly vote with the Republicans: What do you think?

So, the right wing has the power and resources; they can co-opt our message in their narrative. Ultimately, WDI USA issued a statement opposing the nominee and calling on President Biden to withdraw the nomination. I do wonder whether, in part, they were trying to reclaim the narrative in some way.

Further, focusing on the one issue, gender identity, means there is no consideration of whether this nominee might be good for women on other issues, whether it’s good for the feminist cause in general to help Republicans set her up for failure. No kind of discussion at all. We’re just focused on the one issue.

Finally, and this is probably the major problem of working with anti-feminist Christian nationalist organizations; that is, we can't work with entities that are integral parts of the system that oppresses us in order to overthrow that system. It's just not possible. I mean, we might work with them to alleviate some aspect of our oppression, but the system of oppression will not be overthrown by those who are seeking to advance it.

So we're back to square one. The Christian nationalists seek to suppress women's liberation. The Democrats are pushing a novel form of male supremacy, gender identity ideology. So, what do we do? Well, we can't indulge in self-pity because the Democrats won't help us. They won't be our saviors. They never, ever are.

Workers did not achieve the right to form unions and other labor rights without a sustained mass movement of strikes, protests, and other actions. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed only after years and years of various kinds of protests; the freedom rides, the lunch counter sit-ins, the mass marches. The gains that women made in the sixties and seventies also came about from mass actions and organizing; from the power of a mass grassroots movement.

And so that's what I think we need to do today. We need to get off the internet, which is good for some networking and organizing. But the real strength of the movement comes from face-to-face organizing. We need to rebuild an independent movement with power that comes from the grassroots to revive our movement for women's liberation.

Thanks for listening.

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Works Cited

Faludi, Susan. 1991. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.

Goldberg, Michelle. 2007. Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism.

Nelson, Ann. 2019. Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.

Stewart, Katherine. 2020. The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism