by Jeff Sharlet
2. A note on notes: In this chapter and throughout The Family, I use endnotes to identify archival sources and to provide sources for historical events that may not be well known. Chapters 4–9, which depend largely on historical research, are extensively endnoted, but where I rely on personal experience (chapters 1, 9, 14) or directly reference interviews (chapters 10–14), or on publicly available sources identified within the text (chapters 12–14), I generally refrain from notes. As for this account of Ivanwald: like several of the brothers, I openly kept a journal. When writing about a conversation that had occurred earlier, I often asked individual brothers for their recollections. This was not “undercover.” Although I had no inkling of a book about the Family or fundamentalism at the time, I told the brothers I was a writer, the publications I’d written for, and that I was working on a book about unusual religious communities (Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, with Peter Manseau [Free Press, 2004]). A few documentary notes in chapters 4–10 identify the only general collection in which the relevant documents can be found. I made my first, brief archival research trip in late 2002, after I had decided to write about Ivanwald but before I had even imagined this book. Since magazine fact checkers are more interested in actual evidence than my assurances that memo x can be found in folder y in an archive, I made Xerox copies instead of notes for future researchers. When I returned to the main archive of the Family at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College with a book in mind, I made note of appropriate filing numbers. In total I or my research assistants reviewed well over 60,000 pages of primary-source documents, and made copies of around 5,000 pages; I lack folder numbers for a very few pages, and those I have copies of.
3. Senator Brownback, Senator Pryor, and Representative Wolf told me of their involvement in interviews. I met Senator Ensign while he was living in the C Street House, a former convent maintained as a group home for congressmen by a Family-affiliated organization, and Senators Grassley and Nelson and Representative Pitts are well represented in the Family’s archives. Senator Coburn told the reporter Tom Hess of his residence in C Street House and his participation in a Family cell for a feature in James Dobson’s Citizen magazine, “‘There’s No One I’m Afraid to Challenge,’” accessed at http://www.family.org/cforum/citizenmag/coverstory/a0012717.cfm on October 10, 2004. Senator Thune cited the Family’s leader, Doug Coe, and a house the Family maintains on Capitol Hill in a Christianity Today interview with Collin Hansen (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/februaryweb-only/42.0a.html, accessed January 7, 2007). Most of the rest of these men were spoken of as members by Ivanwalders and senior men in the Family—for instance, Steve South, former senior counsel for Senator Don Nickles, told me of Senator Domenici’s involvement, confirmed in the Family’s archives (file 15, box 354, collection 459, Papers of the Fellowship Foundation, Billy Graham Center Archives [hereafter cited as BGCA]). I’ve no reason to doubt these claims; members of the Family are scrupulous about distinguishing between members, those who have joined a prayer cell or made some other commitment to the work, and friends, those with whom they’re comfortable working. Representative Eric Cantor, for instance, a Jewish Republican from Virginia, is just a friend. Representative McIntyre, who joined Representative Wolf ’s prayer cell, is a member. This is only a partial list. The Family believes in a concentric model of holiness, with a few key men close to Christ at the center (Representative Pitts, for instance), another circle of active supporters farther out (Senator Grassley), followed by one of casual allies (such as Senator Pryor) who are mostly unaware of the group’s inner workings.
4 Thurmond: Interview, Cliford B. Gosney, former Family member. Thurmond’s association was among the Family’s most long-standing, stretching across the decades. On October 30, 1987, Family leader Doug Coe sent to Representative Tony Hall, a Democrat from Ohio who moved rightward under the Family’s guidance, a sermon preached by Thurmond to a meeting of the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast. The subject was “integrity” and “the unraveling of the fabric of our society,” to which Thurmond—a segregationist who refused to publicly acknowledge his African-American daughter—responded with four suggestions on becoming “men and women of integrity.” Folder 3, box 166, collection 459, BGCA. Talmadge and Robertson: Annual Report of the Fellowship Foundation, 1962, folder 2, box 563, collection 459, BGCA. Ford: Paul Wilkes, “Prayer: The Search for a Spiritual Life in Washington and Elsewhere: A Country on Its Knees?” New York Times, December 22, 1974. Besides Laird and Ford, the other two members of the cell were Republican congressmen John Rhodes, a Barry Goldwater protégé from Arizona, and Al Quie of Minnesota, an early opponent of affirmative action. The four had been organized into a Family prayer group during the late 1960s. Rehnquist: Doug Coe to Panayiotis Touzmazis, April 24, 1974, folder 11, box 200, collection 459, BGCA. And then there are the jocks: Buffalo Bills legend and vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp; Seattle Seahawks NFL Hall of Famer Steve Largent, one of the fiercest ideologues of the Republican Revolution of 1994; and Oklahoma Sooners Orange Bowl champ J. C. Watts, the highest-ranking black Republican in congressional history. According to Bob Jones IV, Watts preferred Campus Crusade’s related effort, Christian Embassy (“The Church Inside the State,” World, October 12, 1996), but when I interviewed him in 2003, he told me he prayed with “the Prayer Breakfast people” as well.
5. NCCL News Letter, April 1948. Christian Leadership News, October 1950. Collection 459, BGCA.
6. On July 15, 1965, the Family’s founder, Abraham Vereide, boasted in an address to a prayer meeting that in Generalissimo Franco’s Spain, initially hostile to the Protestant Family, “there are secret cells, such as the American embassy, the Standard Oil office, allowing [our men] to move practically anywhere.” No box number, collection 459, BGCA. 350: D. Michael Lindsay, “Is the National Prayer Breakfast Surrounded by a ‘Christian Mafia’? Religious Publicity and Secrecy Within the Corridors of Power,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 2 (June 2006): 390–419.
7. Quoted in Stephen Scott, “Jesus’ Name Has Drawing Power for Prayer Breakfast,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, April 14, 2001.
8. The Fellowship Foundation’s 2005 990 tax form showed official income of nearly $17 million and program expenses of nearly $14 million. Among the expenses, $900,000 went to the National Prayer Breakfast, a Fellowship-produced event that appears to the world to be an official function of the federal government. (When I attended in 2003, I got my press credentials through the White House.) In 2005, the Fellowship actually turned a profit on the Breakfast, taking in $47,000 more than it cost. In “Showing Faith in Discretion,” Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2002, the journalist Lisa Getter noted that the Family has paid for overseas congressional junkets and even loaned congressmen money.
9. Bakke’s deal is documented in Deepak Gopinath, “The Divine Power of Profit,” Institutional Investor, March 1, 2001. Bakke isn’t conservative in the conventional sense—he’s a major Democratic donor—but he has made a career out of deregulation and anti-union management, and he’s used his wealth to create the Harvey Fellows Program, which aims to train an “expanding beachhead of evangelicals in the American elite” and “the corridors of power” through funds for graduate students who agree to sign a statement of faith. D. Michael Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 80.
10. Getter, “Showing Faith in Discretion.”
11. Lindsay, “Is the National Prayer Breakfast Surrounded by a ‘Christian Mafia’?” Lindsay, a fellow at Princeton University’s Department of Sociology during the period of this study and now on the faculty at Rice University, enjoyed tremendous access to what he refers to as the “backstage” of Family leadership of his study of the “Christian Mafia,” in which he asserts that the Family is not secret but private. Secrecy, he notes, “often protects the interests of the powerful.” Of course, so may privacy when maintained by elites who use it to shield networks of influe
nce from public transparency. The difference between secrecy and privacy, Lindsay argues, is that those who are not in on secrets—especially secrets about power—resent them, whereas those excluded from a private association of elites don’t mind, since such “privacy” appeals to traditions of deference to the elite. Thus, the “privacy” used by the Family to protect the privilege of its members, Lindsay argues, is “legitimated” by the public status of the Family’s members. Such are the justifications for power by the ivory tower so often derided as too leftist by conservative pundits.
12. Monday Associates Meeting, January 23, 1995, Burnett Thompson presiding.
13. David Kuo, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction (Free Press, 2006), pp. 21–24.
14. Doug Coe and General Vessey: Minutes of a luncheon held at the Cedars, the Family’s Arlington, Virginia headquarters, October 19, 1983, collection 459, BGCA; no box number. The luncheon was organized by Aquilino E. Boyd, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega’s ambassador to the United States. Also in attendance was an inner-circle member of the Family named Herb Ellingwood, a longtime Reagan aide who had been responsible for “psychological warfare” against student protestors in California. In 1970, Ellingwood was one of the small circle of men who laid hands on Reagan and heard a voice, allegedly God’s, promising Reagan the White House. Paul Kengor, God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (Regan Books, 2004), pp. 135–36. When Reagan ascended to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he took Ellingwood with him as a deputy counsel. Ellingwood’s advice? “Economic salvation and spiritual salvation go side by side.” John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 331–32. Lugar et al.: Telegram to General Manual Antonio Noriega, January 25, 1984, collection 459, BGCA. Casanova and Martinez: Getter, “Showing Faith in Discretion.” Military aid to Honduras: Elaine Sciolino, “U.S. Said to Link Latin Aid to Support for Contras,” New York Times, May 18, 1987.
15. Quoted in Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power, p. 36.
16 Ibid., p. 35.
17. Paul N. Temple to James F. Bell, October 7, 1976, collection 459, BGCA; no box number. Phillips gave $30,000 toward the cost of the Cedars; Stone, a self-help author of get-rich-quick books who was also famous for having given $2 million to Nixon’s 1968 and 1972 campaigns, donated $100,000. Temple, a former Standard Oil executive, gave $150,000, while the oilman Harold McClure gave $100,000. Other financing for the Cedars came from: William Loflin, $150,000; James Millen, $150,000; Mike Myers (not the actor), $150,000; Otto Zerbe, $100,000; the PGA pro Jim Hiskey, $100,000; and Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital, $83,000. The president of a local bank who was also a member of a Family prayer group arranged for a loan up to $400,000 (Temple to Bell, January. 6, 1977).
18. Thomas: Kuo, Tempting Faith, p. 92; Durenberger: Edward Walsh, “Senator Goes Public with Private Life,” Washington Post, March 2, 1986, and Tony Bouza, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire: Corruption, Decadence, and the American Dream (Da Capo, 1996), p. 102; Watt: Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power, “Is the National Prayer Breakfast Surrounded by a ‘Christian Mafia’?”
19. New chosen and throwaway religion are ordinary phrases in the daily vernacular of the Family, no more than variations on contemporary evangelical rhetoric, but the din of the vox populi—the voice of the people—I found as far back as an account of the first National Prayer Breakfast (then known as the Presidential Prayer Breakfast) held shortly after Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953, by the then-Senate chaplain Dr. Frederick Brown Harris. Dr. Harris is quoted at length in a hagiography of the Family’s founder by the Family evangelist Norman Grubb: Modern Viking: The Story of Abraham Vereide, Pioneer in Christian Leadership (Zondervan, 1961), p. 131. The existence of a published biography may seem like a paradox for a group so bent on invisibility, but the early Family leaders assumed a lack of public scrutiny as the due of their elite status. It wasn’t until the antiestablishment revolt of the late 1960s that Vereide’s successor, Coe, led the group “underground.”
20. Lynette Clemetson, “Meese’s Influence Looms Large in Today’s Judicial Wars,” New York Times, August 17, 2005. Meese is credited with moving into the mainstream the idea of a jurisprudence of original intention—the basis for a conservative judicial philosophy that rejects worker protections, the right to privacy, women’s reproductive rights, and queer rights.
21. Ben Daniel, a minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and a former member of the Family, interviewed former residents of Potomac Point for a study of what he views as the Family’s “spiritual abuse”: “A former resident of Potomac Point told me about her nine months there. Having been encouraged to share her every thought and to expose her secrets and sins, she found her confessions and confidences used against her when she would ask questions or resist Fellowship authority. As the Fellowship exerted control over every aspect of her life she became angry and bitter. Something broke inside her. ‘When I came to Potomac Point I struggled with self-esteem issues,’ she told me. ‘While I was there my low self-esteem moved from a personal to a spiritual level.’ When, at last, she expressed a desire to leave, she was told that, without the teaching and company of the Fellowship, her well-being would disintegrate. She became terrified of life on the outside.” The wife of a Fellowship member describes her role in the Family: “I’m always third. The Fellowship comes first in my husband’s life. Then our children. Then me.” “Dysfunction in the Fellowship Family,” http://bendaniel.org/?p=110 accessed November 27, 2007.
22. Congressmen who have lived there include former representatives Steve Largent (R., Oklahoma), Ed Bryant (R., Tennessee), and John Elias Baldacci (D., Maine). The house’s eight congressman-tenants each paid $600 per month in rent for use of a town house that includes nine bathrooms and five living rooms. Lara Jakes Jordan, “Religious Group Helps Lawmakers With Rent,” Associated Press, April 20, 2003. When the Los Angeles Times asked then-resident Representative Bart Stupak, a pro-life Democrat from Michigan, about the property, he replied, “We sort of don’t talk to the press about the house.” Getter, “Showing Faith in Discretion.”
23. On October 29, 2007, a reporter for the Norwegian daily Dagbladet, Tore Gjerstad, who was following up on Norwegian conservatives’ connections to the Family, managed to confront Coe with some of the language about Hitler I’ve quoted. Coe, Gjerstad told me, responded, “No one who really knows me would think I admire Lenin, Hitler, Stalin. They were evil men. But they were successful when it came to power…All power is with Jesus. You can choose to go against him, but you can never have more power than what he gives you.”
24. Carter’s contacts with Doug Coe, whom he told the sociologist D. Michael Lindsay (“Is the National Prayer Breakfast Surrounded by a ‘Christian Mafia’?”) had been a “very important person” in his life, predated his presidency. In a 1972 briefing to the Family’s leadership, Coe wrote that Carter was involved with the Family’s mission to Brazil’s dictatorial government. Folder 1, box 362, collection 459, BGCA. That same year, the Family’s chief Central American associate, a Costa Rican lawyer named Juan Edgar Picado, hosted Carter in Costa Rica; in 1976, Picado boasted to his Central American allies that Carter would increase aid to the region, which he did. It was Carter, not Ronald Reagan, who began the United States’ support for El Salvador’s brutal regime. (Howard Siner, “Attorney Knows Carter as Smart, Kind Friend,” San Jose News, March 4, 1977.) Nixon kept his personal distance from the Family until after his presidency, when, according to Lindsay, he “ministered” Reagan’s national security adviser, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, into a Family prayer cell in the wake of McFarlane’s disgrace as an Iran-Contra conspirator.
25. Folder 1, box 166, collection 459, BGCA.
2. EXPERIMENTAL RELIGION
1. Doug Coe, “The Person of Christ, Pt. 4,” videotape of an address given to a conference of presidents of evangelical organizations, Navigators Great Hall Productions, January 15, 1989.
2. There are many great biographies of Edwards, but my method of research for this account of his life was to rely primarily on original sources, which I tried to read through the filter of my own half-secular mind and as I imagine a Family man might, attuned to power and relationships. I depended on the two-volume Works of Jonathan Edwards, with a Memoir by Sereno E. Dwight, ed. Edward Hickman (F. Westley and A. H. Davis, Stationers Court, 1834); Works of Jonathan Edwards, particularly vol. 2, Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith (Yale University Press, 1959); vol. 7, The Life of David Brainerd, ed. Norman Pettit (ibid., 1985); and vol. 16, Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn (ibid., 1998); Samuel Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards, first published in 1765 and collected—along with a useful portrait by Peter Gay, “Jonathan Edwards: An American Tragedy,” and two fine poems about Edwards by Robert Lowell—in David Levin, ed., Jonathan Edwards: A Profile (Hill and Wang, 1969). For a full account by a sympathetic biographer, I recommend George Marsden’s authoritative Jonathan Edwards (Yale University Press, 2003). I also found useful portions of Philip J. Gura’s brief biography, Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical (Hill and Wang, 2005); Perry Miller’s classic portrait of the Puritan mood, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Macmillan, 1939); Jon Butler’s investigation of the eccentricities of American religion, Awash In A Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Harvard University Press, 1990); Ann Taves’s history of religious enthusiasm, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton University Press, 1999); Nancy Carlisle, “Pursuing Refinement in Rural New England, 1750–1850: An Exhibition Review,” Winterthur Portfolio 34, no. 4 (1999): 239–49; Ava Chamberlain, “Bad Books and Bad Boys: The Transformation of Gender in Eighteenth-Century Northampton, Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2002): 179–203; Chamberlain, “The Immaculate Ovum: Jonathan Edwards and the Construction of the Female Body,” William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2000): 289–322; Sandra Gustafson, “Jonathan Edwards and the Reconstruction of ‘Feminine’ Speech,” American Literary History 6, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 185–212; and “Jonathan Edwards in 2003,” a special issue of Theology Matters, “A Publication of Presbyterians for Faith, Family, and Ministry” published in November/December of 2003 and edited by, among others, Richard Lovelace, a mentor of sorts to Doug Coe’s son Jonathan, and the inspiration for Jonathan House, an Ivanwald-like residence for young men on Capitol Hill in Washington.