Right Hand of God

A week later, Congressman John Conlan of Arizona called Ford at Bright's request and had Ford meet him at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. Conlan and Bright were old pals: In 1976 the socially progressive evangelical magazine Sojourners ran a piece titled "The Plan to Save America," tracing the rise of the New Christian Right to the 1974 creation of Third Century Publishers, which was founded by Bright and Conlan, among others, and published books and study guides linking conservative politics with born-again Christianity. As recounted in Sojourners and later Sara Diamond's book Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Religious Right, Third Century's early publications "were directed at manipulating Christians to accept political action as part of Christian thought," but in 1975 Conlan and Bright decided Third Century's strategy was "to gradually take positions of leadership with the government."

Sojourners and Spiritual Warfare reported that both men "realized they needed a tax-exempt foundation that could receive donations for the work of the for-profit Third Century" and eventually took control of the Christian Freedom Foundation, which began in the 1950s to promote conservative economics but was struggling to stay afloat by the mid-1970s. The Christian Freedom Foundation eventually would become the nonprofit, tax-exempt administrative arm of Conlan and Bright's efforts to elect Christians to public office.

Shortly after its formation in the middle of 1975, Ford became a volunteer for Christian Freedom Foundation and worked with the organization for about 18 months as the group's Texas chairman. Ford and his wife, Julie, who had set up a nonprofit organization called Foundation for an Informed Electorate, took their two young daughters across the state to raise money and recruit young Christians to get involved in politics. The presentation, consisting of a slide show and a handful of booklets with such titles as One Nation Under God, was a mixture of patriotism and religion, with quotes from Billy Graham included in the slide show.

"This congressman asked me if I would help him, and I said, 'I don't know much about politics, but I like what you are doing with trying to inform and involve Christians,'" Ford recalls. But he eventually told Conlan he didn't just want to raise money and send it to Washington. Ford said he and his wife could perhaps better serve the cause by spreading the foundation's gospel in Texas. "I thought, 'You know, I feel like I'm supposed to start educating people.'"

But by the end of 1976 Ford decided he needed to go back to work again; God, after all, doesn't pay all the bills. So he found a way to continue spreading the word and collecting a paycheck for it: In his new role as consultant, he would approach CEOs at large corporations and teach them how to set up their own political action committees. Ford would go to, say, Dr Pepper and Southland Corp. and get them to set up "responsible-citizen" programs that would educate their employees about their legislators. Ford insists there was nothing religious about their efforts and that they were meant merely to inform the uninformed about the political process. In 1978 Richard and Julie also began publishing voter guides, with information about where politicians stood on key issues, including abortion and national defense.

In the early 1980s Ford began going to Washington, D.C., with various CEOs and major donors and investors to meet with senators and congressmen who shared their conservative values. There was, Ford claims, no talk of Christ, no quoting of Scripture, only political chitchat about pertinent issues. The meetings would begin with a prayer, Ford recalls, but it was a "lifestyle decision," not a prelude to discussions about attacks on their moral values. "After all," Ford says, "back then it wasn't really an issue. It was more about economics, national defense, because you didn't have homosexual marriage as an issue."

But in 1981 Ford was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and, ultimately, confined to a wheelchair. Though his consulting business had grown considerably, expanding as far as Mississippi and Massachusetts, he turned his attention solely toward raising money for what had become Free Market Committee and its sister organizations Free Market Foundation and Free Market PAC, which allowed Ford to begin addressing the social issues that mattered to him as much as fiscal ones.

"Social issues have always been a major concern for me, but I just didn't preach them," Ford says. "I realized that when we find conservatives on either side, typically they're going to be conservative on the other side. So a limited-government, free-enterprise person, they may not be well-informed on, say, the pro-life or the homosexual issues or whatever, but they innately move in that direction."

His first major act as head of Free Market Committee, the lobbying and legislative arm of Ford's organizations, was to go to Austin to recruit conservative legislators for what would become the initial board of the Texas Conservative Coalition, a bipartisan group that now numbers some 80 lawmakers--including Jeff Wentworth. At the same time, Ford set up a grassroots coalition of "pro-family" conservatives.