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The Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), founded in 1976, was a leading player in the early effort to discredit the secular humanist tradition in the United States. The center is one of several institutes and programs established by neoconservatives to promote an increased role of religion in public policy. These include the Institute on Religion and Democracy and the Institute on Religion and Public Life, as well as the religious freedom program at the American Enterprise Institute.

The EPPC says its mission is "to clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues." The center sponsors conferences, publishes books and reports, and provides the media with policy analysis relating to its research programs. It operates a dozen programs that mix politics with religion: America's Enemies; Bioethics and American Democracy; Catholic Studies; The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture; Economics and Ethics; Evangelicals in Civic Life; Foreign Policy; Islam and American Democracy; Jewish Studies; Religion and the Media; Science, Technology, and Society; and South Asian Studies and Religious Nationalism.

When he founded EPPC in 1976, Ernest Lefever, then a professor of political science, said that part of the role of a "small ethically oriented center" like EPPC was to "respond directly to ideological critics who insist the corporation is fundamentally unjust." President Ronald Reagan's first nominee to direct the State Department's Office for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, Lefever was regarded as a fierce critic of President Jimmy Carter's human rights policy. Among his purported credentials as a human rights advocate was his white paper "The Trivialization of Human Rights," published in 1978 by EPPC. In testimony before a Senate committee the following year, Lefever set forth his ideas on human rights, recommending that the human rights records of governments receiving U.S. aid should "not be judged primarily by their internal policies but by their foreign policies" (Peddlers of Crisis, p. 295). This attitude became a standard neoconservative position, one that would influence the policies of both the Reagan administration and, two decades later, the George W. Bush administration.

An embarrassing conflict of interest between the EPPC and Nestle Corp., which had contributed $35,000 to this think tank, resulted in such bad publicity that the Reagan administration withdrew his nomination for the human rights post. Critics had campaigned against Nestle for its aggressive marketing of infant formula in undeveloped countries; in a Fortune magazine article, Lefever attacked Nestle's critics as "Marxists marching under the banner of Christ." (The anti-Nestle infant formula campaign led to a near unanimous vote in the United Nations to establish an international code for advertising of breast milk substitutes. Lefever acknowledged discussing the upcoming vote with U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who cast the sole vote against the voluntary code on the grounds that it restricted free trade. See Ellen Hume, "Behind Lefever's Downfall ," Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1984; and Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis, pp. 295-296.)

In place of Lefever, the Reagan administration nominated Elliott Abrams, who espoused the same instrumentalist position on human rights as Lefever, saying that human rights should be a "policy tool" of the U.S. government. Abrams, who would go onto to serve as EPPC's president from 1996 to 2001, entered the Reagan administration scandal-free, but he left a convicted (and later pardoned) criminal for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Lefever was one of the founding members of the 1970s version of the anti-communist Committee on the Present Danger, a group recently revived by a number of neoconservatives and hardliners to champion "America's war on terror." Still associated with EPPC as a senior scholar, Lefever continues to write about ethics and public policy. His latest book America's Imperial Burden, published in 1998, addresses what he considers to be pertinent moral and ethical questions associated with empire building. According to Lefever, no moral quandaries arise from the U.S. government's imperial status. He examines the pressing responsibility of the United States as the world's preeminent power to export "peace and freedom." If the United States lives up to its historical responsibilities, Lefever says, the country will "remain faithful to the vision of America's founders," which he claims included the belief in a God-given mission to extend its values abroad.

In addition to exploring the supposed U.S. ethical responsibility to be proficiently imperialist, the EPPC concentrates on U.S.-Middle East relations, arguing that the country has the moral responsibility to support the hawks in Israel. After Elliott Abrams left the center to join the George W. Bush administration, Hillel Fradkin became the center's president. Like Abrams, Fradkin has been closely associated with the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Fradkin was vice president from 1987 to 1998 of the Bradley Foundation, the leading neoconservative foundation, and previously worked as a program officer at the Olin Foundation and at the Institute for Education Affairs.

The current EPPC president is M. Edward Whelan III, who also directs the center's program on "The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture." As a contributor to the right-wing National Review Online's Bench Memos blog on judicial nominations, Whelan was a leading commentator on the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

Working with the Republican Congress, the EPPC together with the Christian Coalition and Family Research Council proposed the creation of a new permanent governmental commission that would focus on "religious persecution." The main countries of concern listed in the congressional deliberations were China, Sudan, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia, as well as general condemnation of Muslim nations. Like the right-wing social conservative groups that argued for its creation, the government's religious persecution commission has served to shift the primary consideration of U.S. human rights policy from a respect for political rights to issues on the treatment of religious minorities, especially in countries that have long captured the attention of social conservatives, such as China and Sudan. Similarly, the commission—like its private counterparts such as the EPPC or the Institute on Religion and Democracy—highlights for policy attention the treatment of Jews and Christians by Muslim or communist societies. Given the highly selective character of U.S. human rights policy, the increased U.S. focus on religious rights has done nothing to diminish rising international concerns that the U.S. government accepts the assumption that there is a clash of civilizations, and what is more, intends to defeat all cultural opponents, at home or abroad.

Several EPPC scholars and associates were tapped to serve in the George W. Bush administration, including Abrams (National Security Council), Alex Acosta (attorney general's office), Robert George (Council on Bioethics), and Nina Shokraii Rees (assistant to the vice president).

EPPC's board of directors includes: William Burleigh (former chairman of E.W. Scripps and director of the Hebrew Union College Ethics Center); Robert P. George (director of the James Madison Program at Princeton University); Paul Klaassen (chairman of Trinity Forum and board member of U.S. Chamber of Commerce); and vice-chairman Richard Neuhaus (Institute on Religion and Public Life).

Members of the EPCC's Policy Advisory Board, who "assist EPCC's scholars," include Peter Berkowitz, Mary Ann Glendon, William Kristol, Lewis Lehrman, Gilbert Meilaender, Mark Noll, and Michael Novak.

Most of EPPC's funding comes from the so-called "four sisters" of the conservative foundation world: the Olin, Bradley, Smith Richardson, and Sarah Scaife foundations. The center is also supported by the Castle Rock and Earhart foundations.

EPPC's staff and fellows include Michael Cromartie (EPPC vice president and former special assistant to the Christian Right's Charles Colson); George Weigel; Stanley Kurtz; Rick Santorum; Eric Cohen; and Christine Rosen.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) joined EPPC soon after losing his reelection campaign in November 2006. He heads a new EPPC program called "America's Enemies," which will "focus on identifying, studying, and heightening awareness of the threats posed to America and the West from a growing array of anti-Western forces that are increasingly casting a shadow over our future and violating religious liberty around the world." Santorum, a Roman Catholic, was a leading far-right social conservative in the Senate, where he guided the bill banning partial-birth abortion to victory in 2003. A strong supporter of the Bush administration's "global war on terror," Santorum late in his election campaign started laying the groundwork for the "America's Enemies" program, calling "Islamic fascism" the "biggest issue of our time." According to Santorum, who announced his plans to join EPPC four days after his electoral defeat, the threat of a "gathering storm" of enemies—including Hugo Chavez and Kim Jong Il—"is not obvious to the American people right now." War, says Santorum, "is at our doorstep, and it is fueled, figuratively and literally, by Islamic fascism, nurtured and bred in Iran" (Weekly Standard, January 29, 2007).