by Jeff Sharlet
“The work,” I said. “It’s a kind of prayer, right?”
Bengt glanced over at me. “Can be,” he said.
I pressed the point. “You do the work every day until it’s like praying. Isn’t that the idea?”
“It is,” Bengt said. “But you have to be careful. Even work can distract you.” We stopped at a red light. “Sometimes,” Bengt said. “Lately. Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’ve been losing the vision. Work is just work. Not because I don’t like it. Because I like it so much. I like what I’ve learned to do. I can let my head fill up with this whole world of details until there’s no room for God. I know He’s in there, but I’m not paying Him the attention He’s due.”
“What do you do then? Do you pray?”
“I’ve had my more nihilistic moments.” He paused, and we drove in silence, cruising through downtown D.C.’s deserted nighttime streets. Bengt turned right onto Rhode Island Avenue. “Yeah,” he said. “I pray. But sometimes it’s like putting pieces together. Trying to get this thing to work like it’s supposed to.”
“Which is…?”
“I have enjoyed,” Bengt said, “in the past anyway, the complete absence of doubt.”
We pulled up to the bus depot, a squat, pale brick of a building tucked behind Union Station. We were a few minutes early, and we talked. Bus station hustlers drifted toward the car but kept their distance; addicts who couldn’t even stand watched us through cloudy eyes.
“That’s what prayer is?” I asked. “Absence?”
Bengt paused. “Yeah, I think it is.”
Bengt stared at a fat woman in a red halter top; she was slapping a skinny drunk on the shoulder. When his Redskins cap fell off, he looked as if he might cry.
“You go in,” Bengt said. “I’ll wait here.”
Most of the brothers didn’t know it, but Bengt was thinking of going to graduate school. He had chosen a university close enough to commute to from Ivanwald, and a course of study in the classics that would complement his understanding of Jesus and provide him with an advanced degree that could prove useful on a political résumé. Two weeks into my stay, he began working on his application. After dinner every night, he’d disappear into the little office beside his upstairs bunk room to write his essay on the house’s one computer. At breakfast Jeff C. would ask him how it was going, and he’d plow his fingers through his hair and sigh. Handing out work assignments for the day, he’d repeat himself needlessly.
One sweltering afternoon, he gave up writing and decided to chop down two magnolia trees in the front yard. All of Ivanwald’s neighbors agreed that they were a shady, symmetrical adornment of what, without them, would look like a parking lot, but Bengt couldn’t be stopped: the trees had to go. They had to die, and they had to be killed by his hand. With a long-blade Stihl chewing up magnolia, green leather muffs protecting his ears, his eyes hidden by goggles, Bengt relaxed for the first time in days. It took just a few hours to reduce the trees to a stack of five-foot lengths of branch. He put a booted foot on the pile and pressed, listening to the wood crack, and he smiled. “I just love getting a job done,” he said.
“Bengt,” I said later that night, “I may be able to help with your essay.” Bengt looked confused. “Before I came here,” I said, “that sort of thing was my job.” Bengt smiled, clapped me on the shoulder—he’d just found the tool he needed.
A few days later, he gave me the essay. After I’d done some editing, we sat down in the office one night after dinner to talk it over. The room was barely big enough for the two of us; we sat with our legs crossed in opposite directions so as not to knock knees. “All right, dude,” Bengt said. “Lay it on me. I’m ready.” He leaned forward to peek at the pages. When he saw the amount of ink I’d added, he guffawed, slapped his knee, frowned, crossed his arms over his chest. “I can take it, boy,” he said.
And he could; we marched through the text line by line, dissecting run-ons and shuffling clauses and chain-sawing irrelevant phrases. When we were done with the line-edit, we began moving whole sections, crafting from Bengt’s collage of his life a chronological intellectual autobiography. My formal education has been a progression from confusion and despair to hope, the essay began. Its story hewed to the familiar fundamentalist arc of lost and found: every man and woman a sinner, fallen but nonetheless redeemed. And yet Bengt’s sins were not of the flesh but of the mind. In college he had abandoned his boyhood ambition of becoming a doctor to study philosophy: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Hegel. Raised in the faith, he saw his ideas about God crumble before the disciplined rage of the philosophers. “I cut and ran,” he told me. To Africa, where by day he worked on ships and in clinics, and by night read Dostoyevsky and the Bible, its darkest and most seductive passages: Lamentations, Job, the Song of Songs. These authors were alike, his essay observed. They wrote about [suffering] like a companion.
I looked up. “A double,” I said, remembering Dostoyevsky’s alter egos.
Bengt nodded. “You know how you can stare at something for a long time and not see it the way it really is? That’s what scripture had been to me.” Through Dostoyevsky he began to see the Old Testament for what it is: relentless in its horror, its God a fire, a whirlwind, a plague. Even worse is its Man: a rapist, a murderer, a wretched thief, a fool.
“But,” said Bengt, “that’s not how it ends.”
Bengt meant Jesus. I thought of the end of The Brothers Karamazov: the saintly Alyosha, leading a pack of boys away from a funeral to feast on pancakes, everyone clapping hands and proclaiming eternal brotherhood. In Africa, Bengt had seen people who were diseased, starving, trapped by war, but who seemed nonetheless to experience joy. Bengt recalled listening to a group of starving men play the drums. “Doubt,” he said, “is just a prelude to joy.”
I had heard this before from mainstream Christians, but I suspected Bengt meant it differently. A line in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed reminded me of him: Shatov, a nationalist, asks Stavrogin, the coldhearted radical whom he had revered, “Wasn’t it you who said that even if it was proved to you mathematically that the Truth was outside Christ, you would prefer to remain with Christ outside the Truth?”
“Exactly,” Bengt said. In Africa he had seen the trappings of Christianity fall away. All that remained was Christ. “You can’t argue with absolute power,” Bengt said.
I put the essay down. Bengt nudged it back into my hands. “I want to know what you think of my ending.” He had written about a passage from the Gospel of John in which John, with two travelers, encounters Jesus on the road. John hints at Christ’s importance, so the two men travel with him. “Then Jesus turns around and asks the two men one question,” Bengt had written. “‘What do you want?’ he asks.” The question, Bengt thought, might mean, “Why are you following me?” or “What is it that you are doing?” But Bengt had decided that what Christ was asking was “What do you desire?”
The word was important to him. “That’s what it’s about,” he said. “Desire.” The way he said the word made it sound almost angry. He shifted in his chair. “Think about it: ‘What do you desire?’”
“God?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the answer?” I asked.
“He’s the question,” was Bengt’s retort. Downstairs, most of the men had gone to sleep; from the living room we could hear someone quietly picking a guitar.
“Bengt,” I said, “I don’t understand.”
“You know,” he said, “I don’t either. That’s what I’ve kind of come to realize. The thing is, I don’t need to. I can just trust in the Lord for my directions. He’ll tell me what I need to know.”
“A voice?” I said, surprised.
“A prayer,” he answered. The voice he heard was his own, his prayers, transformed by his inverted theology into revelation. What he wanted was what God wanted.
“Absence?” I said, realizing that what he’d meant by the absence of doubt was the absence of self-awareness, the absence of an understa
nding of his thoughts as distinct from God’s and thus always subject to—doubt. But I did not say this. Instead, I just repeated myself. “Absence,” I said, without a question mark.
“Totally, brother.”
He half smiled, satisfied with this alchemy of logic by which doubt became the essence of a dogma. God was just what Bengt desired Him to be, even as Bengt was, in the face of God, “nothing.” Not for aesthetics alone, I realized, did Bengt and the Family reject the label Christian. Their faith and their practice seemed closer to a perverted sort of Buddhism, their Christ everywhere and nowhere at once, His commands phrased as questions, His will as palpable as one’s own desires. And what the Family desired, from Abraham Vereide to Doug Coe to Bengt, was power, worldly power, with which Christ’s kingdom could be built, cell by cell.
WHENEVER A SUFFICIENTLY large crop of God’s soldiers was bunked up at Ivanwald, Doug Coe made a point of stopping by for dinner. The brothers viewed his visit as far more important than that of any senator or prime minister. The night he joined us, he wore a crisply pressed golf shirt and dark slacks, and his skin was well tanned. He brought a guest with him, an Albanian politician whose pale face and ill-fitting gray suit made Doug Coe seem all the more radiant. In his early seventies, Coe could have passed for fifty: His hair was dark, his cheeks taut. His smile was like a lantern.
“He hates the limelight,” Gannon had warned me. “It’s not about him, it’s about Jesus, so he doesn’t like people to know who he is.” But he knows who you are. When I reintroduced myself that night, he cut me short. “I remember you,” he said, and moved on to the next man.
“Where,” Coe asked Rogelio, “are you from, in Paraguay?”
“Asunción,” he said.
Doug Coe smiled. “I’ve visited there many times.” He chewed for a while. “Asunción. A Latin leader was assassinated there twenty years ago. A Nicaraguan. Does anybody know who it was?”
I waited for someone to speak, but no one did. “Somoza,” I said. The dictator overthrown by the Sandinistas.
“Somoza,” Coe said, his eyes sweeping back to me. “An interesting man. I liked to visit him. A very bad man, behind his machine guns.” He smiled like he was going to laugh, but instead he moved his fork to his mouth. “And yet,” he said, a bite poised at the tip of his tongue, “he had a heart for the poor.” There was another long silence.
“Do you ever think about prayer?” he asked, but it wasn’t a question. Coe was preparing a parable.
There was a man he knew, he said, who didn’t really believe in prayer. So Doug Coe made him a bet. If this man would choose something and pray for it every day for forty-five days, he wagered God would make it so. It didn’t matter whether the man believed or whether he was a Christian. All that mattered was the fact of prayer. Every day. Forty-five days. He couldn’t lose, Coe told the man. If Jesus didn’t answer his prayers, Coe would pay him $500.
“What should I pray for?” the man asked.
“What do you think God would like you to pray for?” Doug Coe asked him.
“I don’t know,” said the man. “How about Africa?”
“Good,” said Coe. “Pick a country.”
“Uganda,” the man said, because it was the only one he could remember.
“Fine,” Coe told him. “Every day, for forty-five days, pray for Uganda. ‘God, please help Uganda. God, please help Uganda.’”
On the thirty-second day, Coe told us, this man met a woman from Uganda. She worked with orphans. Come visit, she told the man, and so he did, that very weekend. And when he came home, he raised $1 million in donated medicine for the orphans. “So you see,” Doug Coe told him, “God answered your prayers. You owe me five hundred dollars.”
There was more. After the man had returned to the United States, the president of Uganda called the man at his home and said, “I am making a new government. Will you help me make some decisions?”
“So,” Doug Coe told us, “my friend said to the president, ‘Why don’t you come and pray with me in America? I have a good group of friends—senators, congressmen—who I like to pray with, and they’d like to pray with you.’ And that president came to the Cedars, and he met Jesus. And his name is Yoweri Museveni, and he is now the president of all the presidents in Africa. And he is a good friend of the Family.”
“That’s awesome,” Beau said.
Coe had told this story many times before, I’d learn; it now appears recycled in evangelical sermons around the world, a bit of fundamentalist folklore. It’s false. Doug’s friend was not just an ordinary businessman but a well-connected former Ford administration official named Bob Hunter. He may have made a bet with Coe, but his trip was hardly as casual as Coe suggested; I later found two memos totaling eighteen pages that Hunter had submitted to Coe, “A Trip to East Africa—Fall 1986,” and “Re: Organizing the Invisible,” detailing his meetings with Ugandan and Kenyan government officials (many of whom he already knew) and the possibility of recruiting each for the Family. Central to Hunter’s mission was representing the interests of American political figures—Republican senator Chuck Grassley and Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for Africa, Chester A. Crocker, among them—who might influence newly independent Uganda away from Africa’s Left.25 The following year, Museveni met with Ronald Reagan at the White House; he’s served as an American proxy ever since. Once heralded as a democratic reformer, Museveni rules Uganda to this day, having suspended term limits, intimidated the press, and installed the kind of corrupt but stable regime Washington prefers in struggling nations.
“Yes,” Coe told us, “it’s good to have friends. Do you know what a difference a friend can make? A friend you can agree with?” He smiled. “Two or three agree, and they pray? They can do anything. Agree. Agreement. What’s that mean?” Doug looked at me. “You’re a writer. What does that mean?”
I remembered Paul’s letter to the Philippians, which we had begun to memorize. Fulfill ye my joy, that ye be likeminded.
“Unity,” I said. “Agreement means unity.”
Doug Coe didn’t smile. “Yes,” he said. “Total unity. Two, or three, become one. Do you know,” he asked, “that there’s another word for that?”
No one spoke.
“It’s called a covenant. Two, or three, agree? They can do anything. A covenant is…powerful. Can you think of anyone who made a covenant with his friends?”
We all knew the answer to this, having heard his name invoked numerous times in this context. Andrew from Australia, sitting beside Coe, cleared his throat: “Hitler.”
“Yes,” Doug Coe said. “Yes, Hitler made a covenant. The Mafia makes a covenant. It is such a very powerful thing. Two, or three, agree.” He took another bite from his plate, planted his fork on its tines. “Well, guys,” he said, “I gotta go.”
As Doug Coe left, my brothers’ hearts were beating hard: for the poor, for a covenant. “Awesome,” Bengt said. We stood to clear our dishes.
ON ONE OF my last nights at Ivanwald, the neighborhood boys asked my brothers and me to play flashlight tag. There were six boys, ranging in age from maybe seven to eleven, all junior members of the Family. It was balmy, and the streetlight glittered against the blacktop, and hiding places beckoned from behind trees and in bushes. One of the boys began counting. My brothers, big and small, scattered. I lay flat on a hillside. From there I could track movement in the shadows and smell the mint leaves planted in the garden. A figure approached. I sprang up and ran, down the sidewalk and up through the garden, over a wall that my pursuer, a small boy, could hardly climb. But once he was over, he kept charging. Just as I was about to vanish into the trees, his flashlight caught me. “Jeff-I-see-you, you’re It!” the boy cried. I stopped and turned. He kept the beam on me. I heard the slap of his sneakers as he ran across the driveway. “Okay, dude,” he whispered. He clicked off the flashlight. Now I could see him. Little Stevie, whose drawing of a machine gun we’d posted in our bunk room. He handed the flashlight to me, spun ar
ound, started to run. Then he stopped and looked over his shoulder. “You’re It now,” he whispered and disappeared into the dark.
2.
EXPERIMENTAL RELIGION
…the election will obtain, and the rest will be blinded.
—JONATHAN EDWARDS, “SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD”
LITTLE STEVIE WAS RIGHT: As soon as I left Ivanwald, I became It. That is, I’ve been chasing the story I first encountered there ever since, trying to fit the religious practice I found in that Arlington cul-de-sac onto a spectrum of belief where it seems to have no place. It was at once as ordinary as a game of golf and stranger than anything I’d seen in years of reporting from the margins of faith. Maybe it was nothing but country club fundamentalism, worth little more attention than Rotary or the Freemasons. But experienced from within, the Family was as perfectly absurd and—granted its own logic—as perfectly rational as the Catholic dirt eaters of Chimayo, New Mexico, who consider the dusty soil in one small spot in the mountains capable of curing any ailment; or Shinji Shumeikai, an international sect of religious aesthetes who believe that by building modernist architectural masterpieces in remote places they’re restoring the planet’s balance, literally. But such convictions are self-contained, interested mostly in internal purity. Indeed, the more eccentric the religion, the more sharply its followers tend to define themselves against the rest of society.
And yet, despite the Family’s theological oddities—its concentric rings of secrecy, its fascination with megalomaniacs from Mao to Hitler, its conviction that being one of God’s chosen provides divine diplomatic immunity—it is anything but separate from the world. It so neatly harmonizes with the political shape of worldly things, in fact, that it’s nearly indistinguishable from secular conceptions of social order. It’s “invisible” not because it’s hiding, but because it’s not. Dismissed as “civil religion” by observers who know it only by the National Prayer Breakfast’s annual broadcast on C-Span, the Family’s long-term project of a worldwide government under God is more ambitious than Al Qaeda’s dream of a Sunni empire. Had I not stumbled into its heart, I would never have seen it. Since I had, I began to ask basic questions. Was the Family’s vision simply a pious veneer on business as usual? Do its networks actually influence the world the rest of us live in? Is it an aberration in American religion, or the result of a long evolution?