The Family: “the most powerful group in Washington that nobody knows.”

[MindPilot]

This speech was delivered by Jeff Sharlet on Oct. 10, 2008, at the 31st annual convention of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Hyatt Regency Chicago . If anyone is still unclear on exactly where the power votex is in American politics, this will lay it all out for you.

The ‘F’ Word: Fascism, The Family, and the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Civil Religion
excerpt:
Chuck Colson gives us another picture. Colson’s name may be familiar to some of you–he was one of Nixon’s dirty tricks guys who famously became born again. He writes in his memoirs that The Family sought him out. They saw him as a quality guy and wanted him in their organization. Chuck Colson was delighted when he saw the reach of The Family, even after his years in the Nixon White House. He suddenly saw that he had this new political tool. He wrote in his letter to the parole board when he got out of prison that he had discovered that “that which I could not accomplish through politics,” he could accomplish using the front of religion. He was very plain about it. He refers to The Family as “a veritable underground of Christ’s men all through Washington.”

More recently, David Kuo gives us some insight from a conservative, sympathetic angle. Kuo was a special assistant to Pres. Bush in his first term, was one of the guys in charge of implementing faith-based initiatives, and was one of the guys who had helped write the legislation that would open the door to it back in the 90s, the Charitable Choice provisions. He describes The Family as “the most powerful group in Washington that nobody knows.” “The Family’s reach into governments around the world,” he says, “is almost impossible to overstate, or even grasp.”

It’s important to make very clear that The Family is not a conspiracy. It’s a group like any other in Washington. There’s ways to do power publicly and there’s ways to do power privately, which is what The Family’s doing. But it is hard to see from the outside. So I went inside. I became a member for a month. Let me share with you a scene from inside, from the beginning of The Family.

http://www.ffrf.org/fttoday/2009/april/sharlet.php

[AzDar]

1. K & R

:kick:

[Political Tiger]

2. Charles Mason's followers were called "The Family" too.

Coincidence? I think not! ;)

[dflprincess]

5. And didn't Manson claim to be Christ?

Or some of his followers said he was?

[Deja Q]

3. Thatcher said "We are not a society. There are individual men, individual women, and families."

Hell, do we even have families anymore?

Structure is not quite the same thing as fundamentalism...

[MindPilot]

4. "Structure is not quite the same thing as fundamentalism..."

Maybe I'm just having a Palin moment, but I'm not quite sure what you mean by that.

[RaleighNCDUer]

6. Bland and quiet, it stays under the radar -

even here.

Scary shit.

[Echo In Light]

7. You got it. And even when not it's downplayed/denied. K&R

[MindPilot]

9. Yeah, I've been noticing that... n/t

[mod mom]

8. not just men...wasn't this the group Hillary was associated with?

Hillary's Prayer: Hillary Clinton's Religion and Politics

NEWS: For 15 years, Hillary Clinton has been part of a secretive religious group that seeks to bring Jesus back to Capitol Hill. Is she triangulating—or living her faith?

By Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet
Illustration by: Andy Friedman
September 1, 2007



It was an elegant example of the Clinton style, a rhetorical maneuver subtle, bold, and banal all at once. During a Democratic candidate forum in June, hosted by the liberal evangelical group Sojourners, Hillary Clinton fielded a softball query about Bill's infidelity: How had her faith gotten her through the Lewinsky scandal?

After a glancing shot at Republican "pharisees," Clinton explained that, of course, her "very serious" grounding in faith had helped her weather the affair. But she had also relied on the "extended faith family" that came to her aid, "people whom I knew who were literally praying for me in prayer chains, who were prayer warriors for me."

Such references to spiritual warfare—prayer as battle against Satan, evil, and sin—might seem like heavy evangelical rhetoric for the senator from New York, but they went over well with the Sojourners audience, as did her call to "inject faith into policy." It was language that recalled Clinton's Jesus moment a year earlier, when she'd summoned the Bible to decry a Republican anti-immigrant initiative that she said would "criminalize the good Samaritan...and even Jesus himself." Liberal Christians crowed ("Hillary Clinton Shows the Way Democrats Can Use the Bible," declared a blogger at TPMCafe) while conservative pundits cried foul, accusing Clinton of scoring points with a faith not really her own.

-snip

Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. "A lot of evangelicals would see that as just cynical exploitation," says the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue who now ministers to decision makers in Washington. "I don't....there is a real good that is infected in people when they are around Jesus talk, and open Bibles, and prayer.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/hillarys-prayer.html

[MindPilot]

10. After Years of Rejecting It, Sojourners Claims the Religious Left Label

Went hunting for info on Sojourners and found this:
http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctpolitics/2009/04/after_years_of.html

I received a surprising press release e-mail last night from Jason Gedeik, deputy press secretary of Sojourners:

I wanted to gauge your interest in the first big mobilization of the Religious Left in the Obama era — a signal of the shift in power dynamics. Sojourners is mobilizing over a thousand Christian activists and 70 religious and anti-poverty groups at a conference next week in DC to prepare a new poverty coalition for legislative battle this year. This is the Religious Left filling the hole created by the decline of the Religious Right but now we have the political power and ear of the White House — definitely a new trend and a “first” within this new political era.

What’s fascinating isn’t really the gathering of activists. That happens all the time. What’s amazing is the repeated self-identification as “Religious Left.”

For decades, Sojourners founder Jim Wallis has repeatedly argued that neither he nor Sojourners are part of the Religious Left.

[chill_wind]

11. K & R. See also Octafish's DU Journal 2006

More, if anyone is interested:

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Octafish/130

(see also DU searches for Ivanwald, The Cedars, Jesus Plus Nothing etc)

[nichomachus]

12. The Family makes the Taliban look like a high-school frat

Take a gander at this. This guy went undercover at The Family. It is truly scary.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/03/0079525

[struggle4progress]

13. "The Family" represents wealthy elites and they are primarily interested in their own power

which they are attempting to consolidate in a manner analogous to the Afrikaner Broederbond, the secret society that controlled South Africa during the apartheid period. Associated with their own quest for power, they seek the dismantling of social programs, the abolition of any corporate regulation, and a new imperialism

Jeff Sharlet was on NPR last year:
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/05/22/family_q/

... In public, they host prayer breakfasts; in private they preach a gospel of “biblical capitalism,” military might, and American empire ... http://jeffsharlet.blogspot.com/2008/02/blog-post.html

Jesus plus nothing:
Undercover among America's secret theocrats
By Jeffrey Sharlet
... The Family maintains a closely guarded database of its associates, but it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities ... The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand “Communists” killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise ... Two weeks into my stay, David Coe, Doug's son and the presumptive heir to leadership of the Family, dropped by the house ... “You guys,” David said, “are here to learn how to rule the world” ... http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/03/0079525

God's Senator
Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback
JEFF SHARLET
Posted Jan 25, 2006 1:09 PM
... In the future envisioned by Coe, everything -- sex and taxes, war and the price of oil -- will be decided upon not according to democracy or the church or even Scripture. The Bible itself is for the masses; in the Fellowship, Christ reveals a higher set of commands to the anointed few. It's a good old boy's club blessed by God ... http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/9178374/gods_senator

Q&A with Jeffrey Sharlet
The writer who infilitrated a secret, power-brokering fundamentalist Christian group on his Harper's piece and the 'Brothers'
By Leslie Synn – March 21, 2003
... The beginning began with this vision that Christianity had wrongly focused on the "down and out." And the founder, in 1935, said that's not the point; we need to focus on the "up and out." The elite are the ones who can change the world. And this group has been at odds at times with other more traditional and conservative Christian groups because they don't really care about converting the masses. They just want to convert the leaders who will instate a Christian-led government. Does it matter whether you or I share their vision of Christ? No, not at all. As long as the leaders who support the Family are making the laws that we have to follow ... http://www.mediabistro.com/articles/cache/a46.asp

Monday, June 9, 2008
Review of Jeff Sharlet's The Family
... The Fellowship began taking shape in 1935 through the efforts of Seattle businessman Abraham (Abram) Vereide. Concerned about increasing labor unrest and the big-government politics of the New Deal, he formed “breakfast prayer meetings” for a select group of like-minded colleagues ... After Abram recruited several members of Congress to join his Washington, D.C. “Breakfast Group” in the 1940s, he convinced them that anti-labor legislation was in line with God’s will. More egregious were his diplomatic efforts with and on behalf of German war criminals after World War II ... A close reading indicates how the Family uses a twisted fundamentalism to justify a lust for power and blind eye for violence. It’s this application of the Idea for undemocratic ends, and its influence upon popular religion, that should be of most concern ... http://notabibliothecae.blogspot.com/2008/06/review-of-jeff-sharlets-family.html

June/July/Aug 2008
Beyond Belief
By RICHARD BYRNE
... Worldly instructions were also woven into the fiber of the Family gospel, stressing the power of “cells” and “cov­enant.” But these parables of power bypassed the models of social organization handed down from early Christians in catacombs, in favor of realpolitik appreciations of the efficacy of Mao and bin Laden. “Hitler made a covenant,” said Family leader Doug Coe at one gathering. “The Mafia makes a cov­enant. It is such a very powerful thing” ... Sharlet may be right not to underestimate the power of fundamentalism when it aspires to become a civil religion. But one could also argue that the careful attention to history and the acidic truth-telling in The Family could prove equally effective tools against the group’s success in that goal. After all, the history that Sharlet so carefully spells out in the backdrop to the Family’s victories also supplies some useful longer-view antidotes to despair over neotheocratic power in the United States. For one thing, the currents that usher in revivals also sweep them back out of fashion. In addition, several wings of the American fundamentalist movement have nursed a long-running distrust of dalliances with the fallen political world. Perhaps America’s fundamentalists have the power, intensity, and sense of purpose that Sharlet ascribes to them. He is clearly determined not to sell them short. But in the face of the sulfurous blasphemies that he sets out in The Family, it would seem a bit lacking in spiritual charity to assume that our fundamentalist brethren cannot sniff out such uncleanness in their own house themselves. http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_02/2490

FDL Book Salon Welcomes Jeff Sharlet: The Family, The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
By: Siun Sunday May 25, 2008 2:00 pm
http://firedoglake.com/2008/05/25/fdl-book-salon-welcomes-jeff-sharlet-the-family-the-secret-fundamentalism-at-the-heart-of-american-power/