Weyrich: Oh, sure. I think he was. I think that when he initially ran for Congress he ran to the left of his Democratic opponent, Congressman Flynt, who was a old-line conservative Democrat. And eventually, when he ran the third time, when he was running against Virginia Shapard, he ran to her right and picked up a lot of the people who had been for Flynt and who didn't want a liberal representing the District.

Q; So ideologically he arrived at the place where he is now more or less by the time he was elected to Congress. But do you know exactly what Newt Gingrich found on the Road to Tarsus--what was the transforming experience for him?

Weyrich: I don't know that it was a single experience. I call Newt an experiential conservative, as opposed to a deeply philosophical conservative. Newt has a deep knowledge and so he is somewhat professorial in that respect. But he does not have a deeply-held philosophy, say, Biblically-based philosophy as some of us do. And therefore, he is much more negotiable on a lot of issues and, as the old railroad time tables would suggest, 'subject to change without notice.' You know, simply because he arrived at his conclusions based upon what he perceives is happening in the community at large. He is genuinely against the welfare state and genuinely wants to end it because he believes that in his experience, it has been destructive to people. He is not against the welfare state for the same precise reasons that I am.

On the abortion issue: He initially sided up on the pro-abortion side, at least tentatively and then he encountered a radical feminist who backed him up against the wall and threatened him and so on and he said to me, 'If that is what they are about, then I'm with you.' And since that time he has had more or less consistent pro-life voting record.

Q: In other words, it is not a deeply-held and abiding belief in the sanctity of life that cast him on the side of pro-life --Distinguish for me, then, your conservatism from Newt's.

Weyrich: Well, mine is sort of scripturally based. In other words, I look at all the issues through the prism of the belief that I have based on the Judeo-Christian tradition, which of course, never looked to government to solve problems, but rather looked to individuals. In all of the teachings of the New Testament, you never heard Jesus Christ say that it's the responsibility of society or its the responsibility of government to take care of this. He always said, 'It is your responsibility.' When he talked to the rich man, he told the rich man it was his responsibility to divest himself of some of his riches to help the poor and so on. It was never a case of asking government to intervene to take it away from him. The way I look at it, we will be judged on what we do as individuals rather than what the government does for us.

Q: I see the distinction, but does it matter how you arrive at the position, as long as the position is ultimately arrived at?

Weyrich: Well, it doesn't matter in the short term because we have all reached the conclusion that the welfare state, as we know it, is very destructive. Newt seeks to end the welfare state. We are blood brothers when it comes to ending the welfare state.

It matters when you look at what you replace the welfare state with. Because I don't buy, for example, a lot of the New Age kind of Third Wave Alvin Toffler nonsense that Newt is very much caught up in. I think his faith in technology, for example, is misplaced. I mean, technology obviously is helpful and I am not a Luddite. I don't believe in turning back the clock or hindering technology, but I believe that technology must have a moral basis, because otherwise technology can turn into the great monster. I don't think that Newt has thought that through at this point. That isn't to say that eventually he might not come to that conclusion. But, right now I think that he sees technology as a solution. Ultimately, I do not. I see it as a means.

Q: Although he seems to have arrived at many positions that you-all hold, and believe in fervently, it is not for the same reasons...

Weyrich: I make the analogy, by the way, with the end of the Soviet Empire. Because, for example, Boris Yeltsin said, 'I am absolutely committed to the end of the totalitarian regime and so on.' And, it's true. He was. But what he wanted to build was sort of very nebulous and others are coming in now, in the post-Soviet era, to fill that vacuum because he was very good at destroying the old order but he was not the person to build the new order.