by Jeff Sharlet
“Politics is a false god,” Brownback once wrote. What he meant, he explained to me, is that God doesn’t require brilliant leaders, erudite lawmakers. All he wants is those who submit. It’s as simple as the love between father and child. Love, not the sharp-edged coexistence made possible by tolerance, is the fundamentalist covenant with America. Love, not the never-ending arguments of democracy.
WHEN BROWNBACK WAS growing up, he was more concerned with the weight of his hogs than the wages of sin. His parents still live in the dusty white one-story farmhouse in which he was raised, on a dirt road outside of Parker. Brownback likes to say that he fights for traditional family values, but his father, Bob, was more concerned with the price of grain, and his mother, Nancy, had no qualms about having a gay friend. Back then, moral values were simple. “Your word was your word. Don’t cheat,” his mother told me. “I can’t think of anything else.” Her son played football (“quarterback” she said, “never very good”) and was elected class president and “Mr. Spirit.” Like most kids in Parker, he just wanted to be a farmer. But that life was already gone by the time he graduated from high school. If he couldn’t be a farmer, Brownback decided, he’d be a politician. In 1975, he went off to Kansas State University. There he joined a chapter of the Navigators, a fundamentalist ministry for young men and women founded by Doug Coe’s first mentor, Dawson Trotman. The summer before his senior year, Brownback worked in Washington as an intern for Bob Dole. “The Prayer Breakfast folks had rented a sorority house for the summer, for people who were working on the Hill. I made contact.” That was Brownback’s first introduction to the Family, and to Coe. That fall, Brownback returned to K State with a new sense of the potential synergy between politics and religion.
In 1983, Brownback was fresh out of law school and considering a career in politics. He searched through Kansas history for a role model and settled on the forgotten Republican senator Frank Carlson. “He stood at the center of power when the U.S. had no peer,” Brownback remembers thinking. In 1968, the last year of Carlson’s Senate career—long before the term culture war was invented—he wrote an article for U.S. News calling for a “man to stand” against what Brownback now terms decadence. Brownback wondered, Could I be the one? Carlson was still alive, so Brownback drove out to Concordia, Kansas, and as the light died one summer evening he sat on Carlson’s porch, listening to stories. Tales from the Senate, legends of spiritual war, Carlson’s now-ancient Worldwide Spiritual Offensive. Brownback thought he’d found a mentor. “He became a model to me.”
In the years that followed, he stayed in touch with Carlson, and the Family stayed in touch with him, but Coe didn’t invite Brownback to join a prayer cell until he went to Washington as a congressman in 1994. “I had been working with them for a number of years, so when I went into Congress I knew I wanted to get back into that,” he says. The group was all Republican and all male. Conversation tended toward the personal. Or, according to the old feminist maxim, the personal as political. “Personal transformation will inevitably have cultural and ultimately, political implications,” Brownback has said. He still meets with the prayer cell every Tuesday evening. The rules forbid Brownback to reveal the names of his fellow members, but those in the cell likely include some of the men with whom he lived in the Family’s C Street House for congressmen: Representative Zach Wamp of Tennessee, former representative Steve Largent of Oklahoma, and Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, then a representative and a medical doctor who took the personal as political to new depths when he shanghaied Hill staffers into a basement office for a slide show of genitals mutilated by sexually transmitted diseases, a warning against sex outside of marriage that Coburn underlined by advocating the death penalty for abortion providers.
Coe must have seemed like a voice of reason next to Brownback’s new friends. He pointed out scripture verses to the congressman, mailed him poems, gave him books to study. In a nation under Jesus plus nothing, Coe explained, Brownback would ultimately have to answer to only one authority. Everything—sex and taxes, war and the price of oil—would be decided upon not according to democracy or the church or even, strictly speaking, scripture. In a prayer cell, Christ speaks directly to his anointed. “Typically,” Brownback explained, “one person grows desirous of pursuing an action”—a piece of legislation, a diplomatic strategy—“and the others pull in behind.”
In 1999, Brownback teamed up with two other Family associates—former senator Don Nickles and the late senator Strom Thurmond—to demand a criminal investigation of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. In 2005, Senator Coburn joined Brownback in stumping for the Houses of Worship Act, to allow tax-exempt churches to endorse politicians. Brownback’s most influential effort is as chair of the Senate Values Action Team, a caucus that gathers on Tuesdays, before his Family cell meeting. Everything that is said is strictly off the record, and even the groups themselves are forbidden from discussing the proceedings. It’s a little “cloak-and-dagger,” says Brownback’s press secretary. The VAT, as it’s called, is a war council, and the enemy, says one participant, is “secularism.”
The Senate VAT grew out of a House version chaired by Representative Joe Pitts, a burly, white-haired conservative from Pennsylvania Amish country who’s a regular at the Family’s Arlington mansion. The VAT was then-Representative Tom DeLay’s creation, but as far back as 1980, Pitts had been one of the regional activists who’d helped push a relatively new concern for evangelicals—abortion—to its place at the center of American politics. In 2002, Brownback, whose concern with what he refers to as a “holocaust” against a womb-bound nation of fetal citizens, was the logical man for the job of leading the VAT’s Senate version. The VAT demands a bridge builder’s sensibility, the ability to convince fundamentalism’s popular front, which demanded its creation, that it’s taken seriously by more elite conservatives.
The VAT unifies their message and arms congressional staffers with the data and language they need to pass legislation. Working almost entirely in secret, the group has directed the fights against gay marriage and for school vouchers, against hate-crime legislation and for “abstinence only” sex education, against diplomacy with North Korea, and for war with Iran. The VAT is like a closed circuit between elite and popular fundamentalism, with Brownback at the switch.
Every Wednesday at noon, he trots upstairs from his office to a radio studio maintained by the Republican leadership to rally support from Christian America for the VAT’s agenda. One participant in the broadcast, Salem Radio Network News, reaches more than 1,500 Christian stations nationwide, and Dobson’s Focus on the Family offers access to an audience of 1.5 million. During the broadcast I sat in on, Brownback explained that with the help of the VAT he hoped to defeat a measure that would stiffen penalties for violent attacks on gays and lesbians. Members of the VAT mobilized their flocks: An e-mail sent out by the Family Research Council warned that the hate-crime bill would lead, inexorably, to the criminalization of Christ. When it comes to “impacting policy,” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, told me, “day to day, the VAT is instrumental.”
The VAT’s efforts often go beyond strictly spiritual matters, rallying fundamentalism’s popular front around laissez-faire policies—tax cuts, deregulation—in line with elite fundamentalism’s long-standing dream of not just a nation but an economy under God. At its best, that makes for a paternalistic capitalism where bosses placed in authority by God, according to Romans 13, treat their employees with respect and compassion, to which the employees respond with devotion, leading to big profits, high wages, and smiles in every cubicle. More often—well, the world we live in is the “more often,” an economy in which employers treat their employees as commodities and employees respond with fear and boredom. Only the big profits are the same.
In 1999, Brownback worked with Pitts to pass the Silk Road Strategy Act, designed, Brownback told me, to block the growth of Islam in Central Asian nations, essentially buying thei
r oil and natural gas resources for American corporations through lucrative trade deals, granted with little concern for the abysmal human rights records of the region’s dictatorships. Brownback also sits on the board of trustees of the U.S. Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce, an organization created by the Azeri government with funds from eight oil companies, including Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron. Current and former members include Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Iraq War architect Richard Perle—a neoconservative trinity too cynical for prayer cells—and two of Brownback’s Family brothers: Pitts and former attorney general Ed Meese. One of the Silk Road Act’s provisions, which Brownback fought for, lifted U.S. sanctions on Azerbaijan, imposed in response to the Azeri blockade against neighboring Armenia. Azerbaijan is 94 percent Muslim; Armenia is predominantly Christian. Brownback apparently issues indulgences where oil is concerned.
Brownback’s biggest financial backer is Koch Industries—the largest privately held company in the United States, with extensive oil and gas interests around the world. “The Koch folks,” as they’re known around the senator’s office, are headquartered in Wichita, but the company is one of the worst polluters across the country. In 2000, the company was slapped with the largest environmental civil penalty in U.S. history for illegally discharging 3 million gallons of crude oil in six states. That same year, Koch was indicted for lying about its emissions of benzene, a chemical linked to leukemia, and dodged criminal charges in return for a $20 million settlement with the federal government, an inexplicably cheap price to pay. Brownback has received nearly $121,000 from Koch and its employees. During his neck-and-neck race in 1996, a shell company called Triad Management provided $410,000 for last-minute advertising on Brownback’s behalf. A Senate investigative committee later determined that the money came from the two brothers who run Koch Industries.
With Brownback, it’s nearly impossible to draw the line between the interests of his corporate backers and his own moral passions. Everyone applauds his fight to keep the murder of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees prioritized in U.S. foreign policy. And by standing up to the regime in Sudan, he’s also sending a warning to China, which has been willing to overlook the Sudanese government’s murderous campaign in exchange for access to the country’s oil. Of course, Koch Industries might be interested in that, too.
Is that all there is to Brownback? Cash in an envelope? No—there is not even that. A Kansas businessman who calls Brownback his friend and has known him for years told me that the de facto price of doing business with the senator—the cost of admission for a single meeting—was, last he checked, $2,000. In that, Brownback is unexceptional. Many congressmen expect just as much from those who want face time. It’s not illegal, just slimy. The difference with Brownback, said the businessman, is that he never touches the money. The businessman is used to putting a check directly into the hands of the politician whose help he needs. But whenever he visited Brownback’s offices, a staffer always quietly intervened, relieving the businessman of the check beyond the senator’s sight lines. “Sam,” the businessman told me, “doesn’t talk money.”
One afternoon, I met Brownback in his corner office to talk Bible. On his desk, there was a New Testament open to the Gospel of John. I sat on a sofa beneath a portrait of Mother Teresa. There was also a painting of a little blond girl in a field of sunflowers. “What can I help you with?” Brownback asked, smiling. Two scripture passages, I said. Leviticus 20:13, and Romans 1, the proof texts on which most Christian conservatives base their opposition to homosexuality. Brownback frowned. He wasn’t aware of the passages. His hatred of homosexuality derived not from an engagement with scripture—which academic Bible scholars say is not actually clear on the matter—but on what he considered direct revelation. “It’s pretty clear,” he said, his fingers folded into a temple beneath his chin, “what we know in our hearts.” Brownback calls this knowledge “natural law.” To legislate against it or any other practice his heart tells him is sin is not theocratic, it’s “natural.”
“There’s a sacredness to it,” he said. He meant heterosexuality. “You look at the social impact the countries that have engaged in homosexual marriage.” He shook his head in sorrow, thinking of Sweden. “You’ll know ’em by their fruits.” He paused, and an awkward silence filled the room. We both knew he was citing scripture—Matthew 7:16—but he’d just declared gay Swedes “fruits.” He regretted that. Hate the sinner, love the sin, Brownback believes. In the Family, he’d learned to love everybody.
ALTHOUGH BROWNBACK’S 2002 Catholic conversion was through Opus Dei, an ultra-orthodox order that, like the Family, specializes in cultivating the rich and powerful, the source of much of his religious and political thinking is Chuck Colson. “When I came to the Senate,” Brownback remembers, “I sought him out. I had been listening to his thoughts for years, and wanted to get to know him some.” The admiration was mutual. Colson spotted Brownback’s potential not long after Brownback joined a Family prayer cell. At the time, Colson was holding classes on “biblical worldview” for leaders on Capitol Hill. Colson taught that abortion is a “threshold” issue, a wedge with which to introduce fundamentalism into every question. Brownback, who’d been quietly pro-choice before he went to Washington, recognized the political utility of the anti-abortion fight and developed what is now a genuine hatred for the very idea that a woman’s body is her own. It is not, he learned from Colson; it belongs to God, just like that of a man, a line of reasoning by which Colson claims that his fundamentalist faith is more egalitarian than feminism, an analysis he extends beyond the womb into an implicit critique of democracy itself. The two men began coordinating their efforts: Colson provided the philosophy, and Brownback translated it into legislative action.
For all his talk of moral values, much of Brownback’s real work as a senator revolves around the same kind of “quiet diplomacy” practiced by his forebears in the Family, the art of backroom dealing perfected by Senator Frank Carlson. Liberals dismiss him as a prudish hayseed from Kansas, but to do so is to underestimate both the man and the place. Brownback, like Carlson before him, is yet another wheeler-dealer from the plains, possessed of a savvy in international affairs that is faith-based and rooted in the cornfields of Kansas.
In 2002, Brownback followed his pastor onto the stage of Topeka Bible—the minister had just told a joke about Muslim terrorists and virgins—to talk about a recent trip to Israel and Jordan. Jordan, Brownback explained, matters not just spiritually but strategically. The “person of Jesus” is a key diplomatic tool in winning its cooperation with the United States. Brownback said he’d met with King Abdullah about starting a fellowship group, a fellowship group around the person of Jesus. It wasn’t a casual suggestion. Brownback gave Abdullah the name and number of a Christian brother with whom he wanted the king to meet. Before Brownback left Jordan, Abdullah let him know that he’d made contact with the senator’s man and agreed to “fellowship” with him on a regular basis. “His father, King Hussein,” mused Brownback, “was really quite interested in Jesus, and attended the National Prayer Breakfast several times.” Since then, so has Abdullah. In 2005, he came to the prayer breakfast to conduct diplomacy, so he said, with American evangelicals.
Brownback doesn’t demand that everyone believe in his God—only that they bow down before Him. The senator is part holy warrior, party holy fool. The faith he wields in the public square is blunt and heavy, brass knuckles of the spirit. But his intentions are only to set people free. He is utterly sincere in his belief that his particular idea of God is as universal as his faith in the free market. The religion of his heart is that of the woman whose story led him deep into his unearthly devotion, Mother Teresa; it is a kiss for the dying. He sees no tension between his intolerance and tenderness. Indeed, their successful reconciliation in his political self is the miracle, the cold fusion, at the heart of the new fundamentalism, of Hallmark and hellfire. “I have seen him weep,” says Colson, his own voice thick with admiration. There ca
n be no higher praise for a man of power who proclaims his own humility.
THE FIRST DAY I met Brownback, I was to bear witness to him among his interns at a luncheon in the Senate dining room. But when his press secretary and I arrived, there were no interns. Brownback saw me, though, and led me into the Senate dining room, where the maître d’ seated the three of us at a table set for eight. Brownback began speaking about his faith. Only, he called it his cancer. This wasn’t a metaphor; it was a melanoma on his side he discovered in 1995. Brownback’s green-black eyes opened wide. He took his jacket off. His shoulders slumped. He began to talk about “solitude,” about “meditation,” about the dark night of the soul.
Once, he said, he was a bad man, just any other politician, in it for himself. And then came cancer, like a message from heaven. Only at first it brought not certainty but doubt. Brownback found himself wondering, What does anything mean?
For a short spell in his youth, Brownback was a radio broadcaster. It’s easy to imagine his voice on the radio dial, deep in the darkness on a Kansas highway, not preaching so much as whispering to itself across the airwaves, creating a cocoon around the listener. The Senate dining room faded into silence. I saw Hillary Clinton, but I couldn’t hear her. I saw John McCain slapping backs, but he seemed very far away. The powerful and the ugly swam past us like fish in the ocean, and Brownback kept talking, completely lost in the strangely serene recollection of his former fear. The doctors scooped out a piece of his flesh, a minor procedure, but in his mind, he had lost hold of everything. He asked himself, “What have I done with my life?” The answer seemed to be nothing.