Jeff Sharlet How Long Did He Spend With the Family

The Family unit: The Surreptitious Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
By Jeff Sharlet
Hardcover, 464 pages
Harper
List Price: $25.95

Chapter One

The Family unit, or the Fellowship, is in its own words an "invisible" clan, though it has always been organized around public men. Senator Sam Brownback (R., Kansas), chair of a weekly, off -the-record meeting of religious right groups called the Values Activeness Team (VAT), is an agile fellow member, equally is Representative Joe Pitts (R., Pennsylvania), an avuncular would-be theocrat who chairs the House version of the VAT. Others referred to as members include senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina, chairman of the Senate Steering Committee (the powerful conservative conclave co-founded back in 1974 by some other Family associate, the late senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska); Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa); James Inhofe (R., Oklahoma); Tom Coburn (R., Oklahoma); John Thune (R., Due south Dakota); Mike Enzi (R., Wyoming); and John Ensign, the bourgeois casino heir elected to the Senate from Nevada, a brightly tanned, hapless figure who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling-fortune proper name. Some Democrats are involved: representatives Bart Stupak and Mike Doyle, leading anti-abortion Democrats, are longtime residents of the Family unit'due south C Street House, a onetime convent registered equally a church and used to provide Family unit-subsidized housing for politicians supported by the Family unit. A centrist occasionally stumbles into the fold, but the Family is mostly conservative. Family stalwarts in the House include Representatives Frank Wolf (R., Virginia), Zach Wamp (R., Tennessee), and Mike McIntyre, a hard right North Carolina Democrat who believes that the Ten Commandments are "the fundamental legal lawmaking for the laws of the United States" and thus ought to be on display in schools and courtroom houses.

The Family'south celebrated ringlet call is even more striking: the belatedly senator Strom Thurmond (R., South Carolina), who produced "confidential" reports on legislation for the Family's leadership, presided for a time over the Family unit's weekly Senate meeting, and the Dixie-crat senators Herman Talmadge of Georgia and Absalom Willis Robertson of Virginia — Pat Robertson's father — served on the behind-the-scenes board of the organization. In 1974, a Family prayer group of Republican congressmen and erstwhile secretarial assistant of defence force Melvin Laird helped convince President Gerald Ford that Richard Nixon deserved non merely Christian forgiveness but also a legal pardon. That aforementioned year, Supreme Courtroom Justice William Rehnquist led the Family unit'southward get-go weekly Bible study for federal judges.

"I wish I could say more virtually it," Ronald Reagan publicly demurred back in 1985, "only information technology'southward working precisely because it is private."

"Nosotros desire to see a leadership led past God," reads a confidential mission statement. "Leaders of all levels of gild who direct projects as they are led past the spirit." Another principle expanded upon is stealthiness; members are instructed to pursue political jujitsu by making use of secular leaders "in the work of advancing His kingdom," and to avert whenever possible the label Christian itself, lest they alert enemies to that advance. Regular prayer groups, or "cells" as they're often called, have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defence force, and the Family has traditionally fostered potent ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries.

The Family's use of the term "cell" long predates the word's current association with terrorism. Its roots are in the Cold War, when leaders of the Family deliberately emulated the organizing techniques of communism. In 1948, a group of Senate staffers met to talk over ways that the Family unit's "cell and leadership groups" could recruit elites unwilling to participate in the "mass meeting approach" of populist fundamentalism. Two years later, the Family alleged that with commonwealth inadequate to the fight confronting godlessness, such cells should part to produce political "atomic free energy"; that is, deals and alliances that could not be achieved through the impuissant machinations of legislative debate would instead radiate quietly out of political cells. More than recently, Senator Sam Brownback told me that the privacy of Family cells makes them safety spaces for men of power — an cribbing of another term borrowed from an enemy, feminism. "In this closer human relationship," a document for members reads, "God will give yous more insight into your own geographical area and your sphere of influence." One'due south jail cell should become "an invisible 'believing grouping'" out of which "agreements reached in faith and in prayer around the person of Jesus Christ" lead to action that will appear to the globe to be unrelated to any centralized organization.

In 1979, the former Nixon aide and Watergate felon Charles West. Colson — built-in again through the guidance of the Family and the ministry of a CEO of arms manufacturer Raytheon — estimated the Family unit'due south strength at twenty,000, although the number of dedicated "associates" around the globe is much smaller (around 350 every bit of 2006). The Family maintains a closely guarded database of associates, members, and "key men," but it issues no cards, collects no official ante. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities.

"The Movement," a member of the Family unit's inner circle once wrote to the group'south chief Due south African operative, "is just inexplicable to people who are not intimately acquainted with it." The Family'south "political" initiatives, he continues, "have e'er been misunderstood by 'outsiders.' As a effect of very biting experiences, therefore, we have learned never to commit to paper any discussions or negotiations that are taking identify. There is no such thing every bit a 'confidential' memorandum, and leakage always seems to occur. Thus, I would urge yous non to put on paper anything relating to any of the work that you are doing ... [unless] you know the recipient well enough to put at the top of the page 'PLEASE DESTROY Afterward READING.'"

"If I told you who has participated and who participates until this day, you lot would not believe it," the Family'southward longtime leader, Doug Coe, said in a rare interview in 2001. "Y'all'd say,'Y'all mean that scoundrel? That despot?'"

A friendly, plainspoken Oregonian with dark, curly hair, a lazy smile, and the broad, thrown-back shoulders of a man who recognizes few superiors, Coe has worked for the Family since 1959 and been "First Brother" since founder Abraham Vereide was "promoted" to heaven in 1969. (Recently, a successor named Dick Foth, a longtime friend to John Ashcroft, assumed some of Coe'south duties, just Coe remains the preeminent effigy.) Coe denies possessing any authority, just Family members speak of him with a mixture of intimacy and awe. Doug Coe, they say — well-nigh people refer to him by his first and last name — is closer to Jesus than perchance whatever other human alive, and thus privy to information the rest of us are too spiritually "immature" to empathise. For case, the necessity of secrecy. Doug Coe says information technology allows the scoundrels and the despots to plough their talents toward the service of Jesus — who, Doug Coe says, prefers power to piety — by shielding their work on His behalf from a hardhearted public, unwilling to believe in their good intentions. In a sermon posted online by a fundamentalist website, Coe compares this method to the mob's. "His Body" — the Body of Christ, that is, by which he means Christendom — "functions invisibly like the mafia. ... They keep their organization invisible. Everything visible is transitory. Everything invisible is permanent and lasts forever. The more yous can make your organization invisible, the more influence it will have."

For that very reason, the Family has operated under many guises, some agile, some defunct: National Committee for Christian Leadership, International Christian Leadership, National Leadership Quango, the Fellowship Foundation, the International Foundation. The Fellowship Foundation lone has an almanac upkeep of nearly $14 million. The bulk of it, $12 one thousand thousand, goes to "mentoring, counseling, and partnering with friends around the world," but that represents merely a fraction of the network'south finances. The Family does not pay large salaries; one man receives $121,000, while Doug Coe seems to live on most nothing (his income fluctuates wildly according to the off-the-books support of "friends"), and none of the 14 men on the board of directors (amongst them an oil executive, a defense contractor, and government officials past and present) receives a penny. But within the organization coin moves in peculiar means, "man-to-man" financial back up that's off the books, a constant proliferation of new nonprofits big and small that submit to the Family's spiritual authority, money flowing up and downward the tranquillity hierarchy. "I give or loan money to hundreds of people, or have my friends exercise so," says Coe.

The Family'due south only publicized gathering is the National Prayer Breakfast, which it established in 1953 and which, with congressional sponsorship, it continues to organize every February at the Washington, D.C., Hilton. Some three,000 dignitaries, representing scores of nations and corporate interests, pay $425 each to attend. For most, the breakfast is just that, muffins and prayer, but some stay on for days of seminars organized effectually Christ's messages for particular industries. In years by, the Family organized such events for executives in oil, defense, insurance, and cyberbanking. The 2007 event drew, among others, a contingent of aid-hungry defense ministers from Eastern Europe, Pakistan's famously corrupt Benazir Bhutto, and a Sudanese general linked to genocide in Darfur.

Hither's how it can work: Dennis Bakke, former CEO of AES, the largest independent ability producer in the world, and a Family unit insider, took the occasion of the 1997 Prayer Breakfast to invite Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, the Family's "primal human being" in Africa, to a private dinner at a mansion, just up the cake from the Family's Arlington headquarters. Bakke, the author of a popular business volume titled Joy at Work, has long preached an ethic of social responsibility inspired by his evangelical organized religion and his complimentary-market convictions: "I am trying to sell a style of life," he has said. "I am a cultural imperialist." That's a phrase he uses to exist provocative; he believes that his Jesus is so universal that everyone wants Him. And, manifestly, His business opportunities: Bakke was one of the pioneer thinkers of energy deregulation, the laissez-faire fever dream that culminated in the meltdown of Enron. But there was other, less-noticed fallout, such every bit a no-bid deal Bakke fabricated with Museveni, the effect of a relationship that began at the 1997 Prayer Breakfast, for a $500-one thousand thousand dam close to the source of the White Nile — in waters considered sacred by Uganda'south 2.v-million–potent Busoga minority. AES announced that the Busoga had agreed to "relocate" the spirits of their dead. They weren't the only ones opposed; first environmentalists (Museveni had one American arrested and deported) and then even other foreign investors revolted against a projection that seemed like it might really increment the price of power for the poor. Bakke didn't worry. "We don't become away," he alleged. He dispatched a young man named Christian Wright, the son of ane of the Prayer Breakfast'southward organizers, to be AES's in- land liaison to Museveni; Wright was afterward accused of authorizing at to the lowest degree $400,000 in bribes. He claimed his signature had been forged.

"I'm sure a lot of people use the Fellowship every bit a way to network, a way to gain entree to all sorts of people," says Michael Cromartie, an evangelical Washington recall tanker who's critical of the Family unit'due south lack of transparency. "And entree they practise get."

"Anything can happen," co-ordinate to an internal planning certificate, "the Koran could fifty-fifty be read, merely JESUS is there! He is infiltrating the earth." Too bland most years to merit much press, the breakfast is regarded by the Family equally simply a tool in a larger purpose: to recruit the powerful attendees into smaller, more frequent prayer meetings, where they tin can "see Jesus homo to man."

In the process of introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family unit has managed to outcome a number of behind-the-scenes acts of diplomacy. In 1978 information technology helped the Carter administration organize a worldwide call to prayer with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. At the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast, Family leaders persuaded their South African customer, the Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, to stand down from the possibility of ceremonious war with Nelson Mandela. Only such beneficial acts announced to be the exception to the rule. During the 1960s, the Family forged relationships between the U.S. authorities and some of the most oppressive regimes in the earth, arranging prayer networks in the U.S. Congress for the likes of General Costa e Silva, dictator of Brazil; General Suharto, dictator of Republic of indonesia; and General Park Chung Hee, dictator of South Korea. "The Fellowship's attain into governments around the world," observes David Kuo, a former special banana to the president in Bush-league'due south first term, "is virtually impossible to overstate or even grasp."

From The Family: The Hugger-mugger Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet. Copyright 2009 by Jeff Sharlet. Published past Harper. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120746516