A couple of months ago I heard a Terri Gross interview with a writer named Jeff Sharlet, who had just published a book entitled The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. The Family, sometimes called The Fellowship, is an elite group of fundamentalist Christians founded in the 1930s in Seattle by Abram Vereide, and headed for several decades by Doug Coe, now thought to be in semi-retirement. Sharlet’s book is long and difficult, his writing florid and often opaque. He spends several chapters on various founders of charismatic American fundamentalism such as Jonathan Edwards (whom Strauss and Howe described as Prophet of the Awakening Generation) and Charles Finney, from the Transcendental Generation that gave us the Civil War. He also, in my opinion, exaggerates the influence that Coe and others have had on various bloody episodes in American foreign policy, such as our support for the bloody Indonesian purges after the coup of 1965 and later on the island of East Timor. (While Doug Coe may have encouraged President Suharto on his path, the cooperation of the CIA in the first case and the encouragement of Henry Kissinger in the second were far more important.) But the book remains an extremely important eye-opener to those seeking to understand contemporary political Christianity from the outside, and to grasp exactly why it has emerged as such a formidable political force.
I should perhaps interrupt my narrative with a disclaimer. Believing as I do that religion should be private manner, I always hesitate to criticize religious beliefs in print. Like many other devout agnostics tending towards atheism, I instinctively give religious people the benefit of the doubt as regards their motivation, and certainly do not begrudge them what comfort their religion offers them. I also see Christianity as one of the foundations of western civilization as it has evolved (although I have no truck with the patently false idea that it was a primary inspiration for the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, an idea which Sharlet himself does not completely reject.) What this book showed me is that my view of Christianity is too narrow. The kind of fundamentalism preached by Doug Coe has become politically powerful precisely because it is so free of doctrinal subtlety and so focused upon this world rather than the next. It is—avowedly—a political strategy patterned after the great revolutionary movements of our time. While its divine hero is Jesus, Stalin, Mao and Hitler stand high in its Pantheon of earthly exemplars because of their “commitment” and clever political strategy. This kind of Christianity has nothing to do with humility, with rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, or which enduring the pain of this world in hopes of joy in the next. It is focused above all—like Orwell’s Party in 1984—on earthly power, and it has achieved a great deal of that.
Sharlet—who seems, like myself, to be an unreligious product of a Jewish-Christian marriage—did his original research by infiltrating the Family, specifically Ivanwald, a training camp for young men in Arlington, Virginia. (Another Family institution is C Street, the Capitol Hill townhouse that is home to various conservative Congressmen.) There he was introduced to a doctrine often summarized in half an equation: “Jesus plus nothing.” (The book spends a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what that sum is supposed to equal.) The young acolytes at Ivanwald are encouraged to engage Jesus directly, to become an extension of his will. Coe and others have delivered the same message to many prominent businessmen, to dozens of legislators on Capitol Hill (from Strom Thurmond, Frank Carlson of Kansas, Homer Capehart of Indiana, Charles Colson of Watergate fame, and other notables of my youth to Sam Brownback of Kansas, Mike Stupak of Pennsylvania, and many others today. Hillary Clinton, though not actually a member, is a kind of comet passing in and out of the Family’s orbit, and cooperated with it on one or two pieces of legislation. Just two days ago, however, at The Family's National Prayer Breakfast, both she and Barack Obama attacked Family-sponsored legislaton in Uganda that would make homosexuality a crime.)
The Family, following a Communist model, works through cells—prayer cells in its case—one of which approached Gerald Ford in 1975 to urge him to forgive the sins of Richard Nixon. (I do not doubt that this story is true, but once again I question whether it had the critical role in Nixon's pardon that Sharlet seems to give it.) It is a true fellowship, a cadre of men working to recreate the world in their own image—which they have decided, without very little scriptural foundation so far as I can see, is Jesus’s image as well. It prefers to work in secret, and no less a figure than Ronald Reagan, during his Presidency, remarked that that was why it had been so influential. (Ed Meese is another important acolyte.)
What is equally striking is what Sharlet did not find in his sojourn among these particular faithful. Although they did some daily Bible reading, it was neither thorough nor particularly penetrating. They liked sound bites, not subtlety. Nor is the family directly interested in organized Churches or in direct appeals to millions of Americans. Its power certainly has advanced in parallel with that of various megachurhes and organizations like James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, but its gaze fixes intently upon the rich and powerful. The brightest light that burst upon me as I read this book solved a mystery that had profoundly shocked me when I first learned of it a few years ago: how was it possible that George W. Bush had never regularly attended a church, not even when he was in the White House? The answer, evidently, is that he was recruited in the 1980s by a similar movement (though not, as far as Sharlet ever found out, by the Family itself), which persuaded him that a personal relationship with Jesus could make all his earthly works serve the divine order. (In a rare lapse, my favorite TV show, Jeopardy, recently repeated the myth that Billy Graham converted Bush to evangelical Christianity. In fact Bush was converted by a more eccentric figure, Arthur Blessit, who began his career in the 1960s as what was then called a "Jesus freak.") And Bush, like so many others, henceforward felt no need for data, analysis, or consensus when reaching decisions. Revelation now governed his life and his thought, elevating him far above all the professors and fellow students he could never equal at Yale. The war in Iraq was one result.
Continued>>>>
http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2010/02/different-kind-of-christian.html
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