There’s a scene in the Mad Men pilot that doubles as a decoder ring for American politics. New rules ban health claims about cigarettes; the Lucky Strike account is in trouble. Don Draper doesn’t fight the rules—he reframes the product. If no brand can sell “safe,” then no brand can differentiate on safety. So he sells something else: “It’s toasted.” The line doesn’t resolve the moral problem; it resolves the marketing problem. It gives the base a reason to feel good while nothing fundamental changes.
That’s the Religious Right’s abortion story in a nutshell: abortion is just the line on the pack; it’s not the product. The product has always been something closer to racial hierarchy, Christian cultural primacy, and patriarchal order. When the world changed by rejecting segregation and preferential systems, the New Right chose not to change the product—just the branding.
The historical record from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s is inconvenient for the myth that evangelicals were always absolutist on abortion. Major evangelical forums and even the Southern Baptist Convention allowed for legal abortion in defined cases. The early mobilization that built the Religious Right’s machinery wasn’t about “protecting the unborn”; it coalesced around protecting segregated schools and universities from losing federal tax advantages after IRS and court actions tied tax exemption to nondiscrimination. (amc.sas.upenn.edu)
Paul Weyrich—co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and a chief engineer of the New Right—saw that the raw, explicit defense of segregation could not scale. He spent the 1970s trying to recruit evangelical leaders into politics around a menu of issues (school prayer, pornography, the ERA), and by his own later account, failed to spark broad engagement—because those weren’t the felt animators of the pews. What actually galvanized leaders was the government’s move against segregated institutions’ tax perks. Weyrich’s strategic leap was to reframe the coalition around a morally vivid, unifying story that could travel: abortion.
“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” —Paul Weyrich
Operationally, he helped midwife the institutional vehicle—the Moral Majority—urging Jerry Falwell to found it (and even coining the name), then structuring it as an ecumenical front that could bind conservative Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and Orthodox Jews under a single culture-war banner. In contemporary reporting, Weyrich is quoted targeting “blue-collar Catholics” on abortion as the Achilles’ heel of liberal Democrats—classic Draper logic: if you can’t sell the old claim, sell a resonant differentiator.
Crucially, historian Randall Balmer shows how the 1978 midterms provided the “proof of concept”: Catholic anti-abortion leafleting helped flip several Senate races, and the correspondence in Weyrich’s papers lights up afterward—he had found the issue that could mobilize the base while laundering the movement’s origin in the defense of segregated spaces.
Abortion feels morally pure while carrying the freight of identity. In practice, it functions as a dog whistle whose harmonics are legible to the base: restore a world where white, Christian, male authority sets the boundaries and everyone else negotiates for exceptions. You don’t have to say “white privilege” from the pulpit if you can preach “sanctity of life” and then govern like DEI is the enemy, ICE is the conscience, and Ivy League presidents should be taught obedience.
That’s why post-Dobbs reality has split the electorate but not the machine. When maximal bans collided with medical reality, voters recoiled in red and purple states. Yet the movement keeps the pitch, because the pitch isn’t mainly about policy outcomes; it’s about identity maintenance. The base doesn’t require child allowances or maternal-health fixes to stay loyal; it requires confirmation that the rightful order is being defended. Abortion supplies that confirmation even when the policies backfire.
Mad Men is about selling the past as comfort in the face of change. “Make America Great Again” does the same work: American greatness as a pilgrimage to the 1950s—the high noon of white American dominance—marketed as safety, merit, and order. You can’t promise that world explicitly anymore (damned liberals and their precious little democracy), but you can sell its aura: law-and-order crackdowns, anti-woke crusades, campus discipline, and a sanctified cause that re-centers the pulpit. It’s not safe; it’s toasted.
Bottom line: Weyrich didn’t discover evangelicals’ deepest theological conviction in abortion; he discovered a winning story that could unify and mobilize while masking the movement’s birth in resistance to civil-rights enforcement. Judge the coalition by the systems it builds and the people it punishes—not by the righteousness of its bumper stickers. Abortion was the line on the pack. The agenda was—and remains—preserving a racialized, Christian, patriarchal hierarchy under a friendlier light.