"Evangelicals and Catholics Together" Published: Colson-Neuhaus Cross-Confessional Coalition Treaty Formalizes Culture-War Alliance

On March 29, 1994, Chuck Colson and Father Richard John Neuhaus publish “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium” — a twenty-five-page ecumenical declaration signed by more than thirty leading Evangelical and Catholic scholars and activists. The signatories include Pat Robertson, J.I. Packer, Os Guinness, and Campus Crusade’s Bill Bright on the evangelical side, alongside prominent Catholics and Neuhaus himself (a former Lutheran who had converted to Catholicism and been ordained a priest in 1991).

ECT is not primarily a theological document — its theological compromises are deliberately vague and drew immediate fire from Reformed evangelicals who objected to the implication that Catholics and evangelicals shared a common gospel. Its structural significance is organizational: ECT formalizes the “ecumenism of the trenches” dynamic that the culture war had been forcing since the early 1980s, creating an explicit institutional legitimation for Protestant-Catholic political cooperation on abortion, school choice, pornography, and the family.

The structural mechanism: Before ECT, evangelical-Catholic political cooperation was informal, pragmatic, and theologically awkward — evangelicals regarded Catholicism as false religion; Catholics regarded evangelical proselytizing of Catholics as hostile. ECT provided doctrinal cover for the alliance by asserting shared Christian identity as the basis for culture-war co-belligerency, while carefully not adjudicating the theological differences that centuries of conflict had produced. The document explicitly states that Catholics and evangelicals “are not [in] every respect” agreed — but that they share sufficient common cause in opposing secularism to cooperate politically.

Pat Robertson’s participation as a signatory connects ECT directly to the Christian Coalition’s electoral-mobilization operation — giving voter-guide distribution through Catholic parishes the same theological legitimation it already had in evangelical churches. This is the structural node where the two legs of the Christian right’s electoral architecture (evangelical populist mobilization + Catholic institutional reach) are formally joined.

ECT is the 1990s middle-period’s most important structural innovation. The Moral Majority had operated almost entirely within evangelical Protestantism. ECT’s cross-confessional coalition — which Colson would deepen through Prison Fellowship’s Catholic partnerships and Neuhaus’s First Things journal — is the intellectual architecture that the Manhattan Declaration (2009) inherits and the three-track coalition treaty (Reformed/NAR/Catholic-integralist) of the 2020s extends. The lineage runs directly: ECT 1994 → Manhattan Declaration 2009 → coalition-treaty architecture 2022-2026.