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American affairs Silent but deadly By Josh Nathan-Kazis Tags: American affairs  The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet Harper, 464 pages, $25.95 Advertisement There is perhaps no more shocking revelation in "The Family," Jeff Sharlet's new expose of Christian fundamentalism in America, than the one that implicates Senator Hillary Clinton, the could-have-been Democratic nominee for president, in what she might call a vast right-wing conspiracy. At a luncheon at a private mansion near Washington in 1993, Clinton became acquainted with the Christian evangelical organization led by a man named Doug Coe. This much is public information. What?s less known is that Coe's organization is so secret that it lacks a formal name. Sometimes known as the Fellowship, other times as the Family, the group has roots that run deep among Washington's power brokers. Associates include Senator Sam Brownback, former U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft and Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Sandra Day O'Connor. Eight American congressmen pay below-market rents to live in houses owned by the organization, and 3,500 politicians and business leaders from around the world join the president of the United States to pay their respects to it each year at the National Prayer Breakfast, its sole public event. Since her relationship with the Family began, Sharlet says that Clinton has worked on legislation with members of the group, including an anti-sex trafficking law whose main effect was to fund pro-abstinence efforts, and a law that may allow individual pharmacists to refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions. It was legislation, Sharlet writes, "dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it." Christian fundamentalism in America has two faces. There are the Christians of the mega-churches, led by pastors like Jerry Falwell and Ted Haggard, culture warriors obsessed with abortion and homosexuality. Sharlet argues that these populist figures are balanced by an elite strain of Christian fundamentalism, embodied today by the Family. Its members believe that God effects His will through politicians and business leaders, and so they minister directly to the powerful, organizing prayer cells in government offices and boardrooms in Washington and beyond. The cells work quietly, through the system, to promote a Christian fundamentalist agenda. The long-term goal, says Sharlet, is to project America's power across the globe as a vehicle for Jesus. Sharlet's best material describes his infiltration of Ivanwald, a home the Family runs to groom young men for leadership roles within the organization. Ivanwald is in Arlington, Virginia, just next door to the mansion where Hillary Clinton first came in contact with the organization. It's like a frat house-without the sex, drinking or TV. Instead of girls, the guys talk about God's awesome power. Sharlet, a journalist, says that he went to Ivanwald while doing research on his previous book, an edgy survey of American religion called "Killing the Buddha: A Heretics Bible." He says he knew nothing of the Family, writing, "I thought Ivanwald would simply be one more bead on my agnostic rosary." The men living there were aware of his work, and of his mixed religious heritage (Sharlet has a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother). They didn't seem to mind, and were eager to see him become a believer- in their language, to see him broken by God. So, he moved in, participating in their Bible study sessions and doing chores alongside them. It soon became clear that this wasn't some isolated group of novitiates. There were politicians and ambassadors meeting next door, congressmen serving in a building a few miles away, and audiences with major evangelical figures. One of these figures was Doug Coe, the Family's publicity-shy leader. In a lecture on leadership for the men of Ivanwald, Coe invoked Hitler, saying that the Fuehrer truly understood the meaning of unity and the power of a small, like-minded clique. Elsewhere, Coe invokes Mao, Castro and the mafia's use of cell-based organizational structures. The references are used to help to explain the Family's core tactic of creating small prayer cells among elected officials and other powerful men. Sharlet writes that the idea was that, "deals and alliances that could not be achieved through the clumsy machinations of legislative debate would instead radiate quietly out of political cells." Members' high political and social stature meant that publicity was a hindrance, so in 1966 Coe decreed that the organization would operate in secret. There's a thin line between reverence for the organizational stratagems of Hitler and reverence for his purposes, of course. Sharlet argues that Coe & Co. cross this line with abandon. As he traces the Family's history from its founding in the 1930s to today, he shows how it has consistently operated toward anti-democratic ends with sympathies and rhetoric bordering on the fascistic. The organization that would become the Family first came into being in the midst of the labor unrest that plagued the Western seaboard in the 1930s. Abraham Vereide, the Norwegian immigrant preacher who founded the group and led it through its early years, became convinced that Christianity could play a role in the normalization of labor relations. He brought together a group of business leaders to talk about a strong, robust Christianity that would beat back the rising disorder. Before long, a union leader began attending. He began to feel a deep connection to the businessmen, finally announcing that he had realized that if every businessman was devoted to Christ the way these men were, "there would be no more need for a labor union." Then he asked for and received forgiveness for his part in the strikes. Sharlet reports that Vereide would repeat this story over and over throughout his life, calling it the first success of his great vision. If the labor man's proclamation sounds a lot like an argument for the sort of vertical unions instituted in Spain during the Francoist period, it won't come as a surprise that Vereide's prayer groups bred support in the pre-War era for American pseudo-Fascist groups like Seattle's New Order of Cincinnatus, and that Vereide himself ministered to Henry Ford, the Fascist sympathizer and anti-Semite. 'That despot?' Sharlet's most damning revelations, however, concern the Family?s post-War relationships with dictators in Ethiopia, Brazil, Uganda and elsewhere, conflating American interests with the will of God. Coe met with emissaries from the Haitian government in the early days of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier's rule, later dispatching a mission of Family members, including two sitting U.S. senators, to set up prayer cells in the Haitian parliament, and helping direct aid to the bloody dictatorship. Sharlet describes deep connections between the Family and the Suharto regime in Indonesia, which murdered over 600,000 of its citizens during its three decades in power. The Family had members in Suharto's cabinet and parliament, and Suharto met with the Family's prayer cell in the U.S. Senate. "If I told you who has participated-you would not believe it," says Coe. "You'd say, "You mean that scoundrel? That despot?" But Coe isn't concerned with the sins of the elite. If God has chosen the powerful, who can question them? Writes Sharlet, "Elite fundamentalists ... did not care much about sin; they cared about salvation, a concept they understood in terms of nations, not souls, embodied by the rulers to whom God had given power." This is Christianity stripped down to its barest, most brutal core. Coe calls it "Jesus plus nothing." If it all sounds like a wacky conspiracy theory, Sharlet's book nonetheless appears thorough and well documented. He had access to the Family's archives (which have since been sealed), and his book's notes demonstrate that serious research was conducted on those files. The history is skillfully related, particularly the chapter that traces the theology of the Family to the 18th-century preacher Jonathan Edwards, whose fiery exhortations launched America's Great Awakening. The book does lose focus in its last third, as the narrative wends its way through chapters on homeschooling and life among the followers of Ted Haggard in Colorado Springs, which feels thinly connected to the core argument. Still, "The Family" is a compelling read. As the Bush era comes to a fitful close, and the American presidential elections approach, the Christian evangelical movement that brought the Republicans to power in 2000 is, to all outward appearances, losing its political influence. The strange spectacle of the past eight years, in which fire-breathing preachers from Colorado Springs and Lynchburg appeared to be crafting American policy, looks to be over. But Sharlet's book puts an end to any such thoughts. Hillary Clinton?s involvement with the Family draws into question the nature of the difference between the two American parties, and the extent to which the election in November could significantly effect the growing role of religion in Washington. Haggard and Falwell themselves have both already left the stage. But it may be that the future of their cause doesn't rely on the political influence of their successors reaching the peaks they achieved in 2000. If Hillary Clinton will work with the Family, populist evangelical pastors don't need to be able to rally support for a senator like Sam Brownback. Clinton and Brownback represent very different political positions, of course, but, writes Sharlet, "in the geometry of power politics, the Family knows, they are on the same plane, and the distance between them is shrinking. "You can almost hear his sigh. "This is an awful tight space into which to fit a democracy." Josh Nathan-Kazis is the editor of New Voices, an independent magazine for American Jewish college students (newvoices.org). He lives in Brooklyn. Haaretz Books Supplement, September 2008 Bookmark to del.icio.us   'I didn't kill Rose' Rose's mother, grandfather request court delay autopsy of body found in Yarkon River. 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