How William F. Buckley Jr.’s Right-Wing College Crusade Paved the Way for Ron DeSantis

The novelty was not in the messaging—nor in DeSantis’s bland delivery. It was in the staging. Normally, the dais is set up at midpoint on the long central green, the speakers facing east, with the Mother Theresa Museum on one side—her visage on a mural next to Pope John Paul II. The DeSantis team, however, “wanted to flip” the stage, according to a university official—that is, pivot in the opposite direction. The difference was evident in the video and photos of the event. As DeSantis addressed the sun-drenched crowd, cameras framed him before a mighty structure, a hulking futuro-Gothic hangar of travertine stone, Carrara marble, glass, and steel, its façade, more than 100 feet high, shaped like a bishop’s miter—Ave Maria’s parish church (“the spiritual and physical centerpiece for the first new major Catholic university in the U.S. in 40 years,” the Catholic News Agency reported in 2004 when the plans were being drawn), one of the most improbable churches built in the US this century, rising up from the drained and bulldozed tomato fields.

DeSantis did not need to squeeze extra votes out of Ave Maria or anywhere else in Collier County, Florida, a GOP stronghold. But getting that picture, preserving that image—which then graced his website and Twitter feed—was reason enough for Catholic archconservative Ron DeSantis to come to Ave Maria.

The all-important affinity between politics and religion is usually told as a Protestant story, particularly in the modern era: the political campaigns of the Moral Majority in the Ronald Reagan ’80s, which targeted the LGBTQ+ community during the AIDS epidemic; the Christian Coalition in the ’90s, with its broad-based culture war that called for restoring prayer in schools; the faith-based politics of George W. Bush in the 2000s, with the banning of stem cell research and zealous promotion of “intelligent design”; up through the perplexing devotion of evangelicals to the libertine Donald Trump, based chiefly on his promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who would reverse Roe v. Wade.

But the story of the contemporary far right and the church, the Catholic Church, is one we’ve been slower to understand—in part because the subject feels tainted with prejudice and bigotry. “Catholic-baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals,” the poet and political thinker Peter Viereck observed in the 1950s, one of that decade’s enduring aphorisms. He was writing at a time when suspicions of Catholicism verged on the feverish, complete with accusations that Catholics were subversives secretly bound to Rome, like Communist spies serving an alien cause. Catholics belonged to “an organization that is not only a church but a state within a state,” as a highly respected journalist put it back then, “a foreign-controlled society within American society.” This attitude persisted through 1960, when John F. Kennedy, the first elected Catholic president, came under attack from the powerful Protestant clergymen Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, who tried to mobilize voters to defeat him, lest the country be sold out to the Vatican.

It was only later, in 1973, after a woman’s right to choose became the law of the land, that Catholic conservatives and evangelicals formed an alliance. Opposition to abortion “was a godsend for leaders of the Religious Right,” the historian Randall Balmer recently pointed out. And it was Catholic intellectuals, writers, and jurists who framed the main arguments, crowned by the Dobbs opinion, which last year overturned Roe v. Wade, written by Justice Samuel Alito, one of six Catholics on the Supreme Court, the most conservative in modern history.

Alito has said that National Review and its founding editor, William F. Buckley Jr., were among “the greatest influences on my views.” The staunch conservative ideas Alito was referring to are inseparable from a vision of higher education in which universities would become citadels of faith and dogma, or would be depicted as such. And the first to grasp this in the full potential of its meaning was, indeed, Bill Buckley, three quarters of a century ago.

Buckley would go on to become the most influential leader of the modern American conservative movement. But in the winter of 1949, when he was just a second-semester junior at Yale, he fired the first important shot in the culture wars. He had been voted “chairman”—that is, chief editorial writer—of his campus paper, the Yale Daily News, and immediately put readers on warning. There would be “no squeamishness about editorial subject matter,” Buckley vowed in his first opinion piece.

The right, Buckley said, needed “a brigade of intellectuals who must preach American principles and natural rights and divine sanction.” Over time, a new idea was born—of IDEOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE WAGED AS OUTRIGHT WARFARE.

He did not wait for a controversy but started one himself mere weeks into the job. Playing off an innocuous series by the outgoing chairman (“What Makes a Course Good?”), Buckley explained “What Makes a Course Bad.” He listed familiar student complaints (tedious, distracted professors) before warming up to his true target: “dogmatism…the tendency by some teachers to utilize the classroom as a soapbox from which to impose upon their students not the great ideas of great scholars, but their own.”

He had one culprit in mind, one of the most popular educators on campus: sociology professor Raymond Kennedy. In his early 40s, rock-jawed with the fierce gaze, it was said, of a Marine colonel, Kennedy attracted legions to his course on comparative cultures, enlivening his lectures with anecdotes drawn from his research expeditions in the remote cultures of Southeast Asia, an experience that had made him a harsh critic of both colonialism and ideologies of cultural supremacy. “The caste line of oppression and exploitation, whether in America or the colonies, is a race and color line,” he said in his best-known public lecture, delivered in the mid-1940s. Undergrads fondly called him “Jungle Jim,” the school paper having dubbed him, pre-Buckley, “a sociologist with a conscience.”

Buckley’s editorial assessed Kennedy differently. Buckley had learned speed writing while in the Army, and it enabled him to produce detailed notes of Kennedy’s lectures. Buckley, 23 (who, like many of his peers, had delayed attending college due to his service in World War II), had taken Kennedy’s course as a freshman and been captivated by the “brilliance of oratory” and amused by the professor’s “bawdy and slapstick humor,” but not by his cavalier dismissal of Christianity. “Mr. Kennedy never makes the positive assertion that God does not exist,” Buckley wrote. Instead, Kennedy found “ridicule and slant have always been more effective.” The professor scored his points through statements like “chaplains accompanying modern armies are comparable to witch doctors accompanying tribes.” He also talked in anthropological terms of the shamanism of the Eucharist, in which the priest ceremonially turns bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. “Submit the wine to a chemical analysis after consecration,” Kennedy had said, “and then see if you’ve got hemoglobin out of the grape juice.” The classroom erupted.

“Funny, without a doubt,” Buckley wrote. “So are Bob Hope and Bennett Cerf.” Buckley granted that “Good old Jungle Jim” was entitled to espouse atheism from his classroom pulpit. But Yale had been founded by ministers to educate the leaders of a Christian nation. And here was a lecturer who was setting himself up as the leader of “a cult of anti-religion.” Moreover, by singling out the Eucharist for derision, Kennedy seemed set on an intentional provocation, one in keeping, it was easy to infer, with Yale’s well-documented history of anti-Catholicism. Only later would Buckley learn that Yale continued, in his day, to limit Catholic and Jewish enrollment. (Students of color were fewer still, and Yale wouldn’t go coed until 1969.)