The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

by Jeff Sharlet

  But Zapp had been heard plying his version of journalism throughout the war, broadcasting the “new conception” into Vichy France along with a bittersweet tune about his forsaken love, America—a land, he now lamented, thick with gangsters and Jews. A Democratic congressman from New York demanded that Zapp—along with “Little Alfie” Krupp, the “munitions king” captured that same week in his eight-hundred-room palace—be tried for war crimes immediately. Like Krupp—who actually was tried and convicted, but returned to high places by the occupation government—Zapp had a brighter future to look forward to.

  The September 1951 issue of Information Bulletin, the magazine of the U.S. occupation government, marked Zapp’s next appearance in the American press. By Zapp’s standards, Information Bulletin was a publication of crass obviousness—an article in the previous edition was headlined “I Hate Communism”—but he must have appreciated the irony of a pictorial feature titled “German Newsmen Tour Army Bases.” In a photo of twenty-two newsmen gathered around an American officer at an ordnance depot, Zapp can be seen just to the officer’s right; he looks like he’s rocking back on his heels. His tie is short, his pants ill fitting, and he’s wearing shades—but he still smiles for the camera, an Aryan Zelig, born again into the Cold War.10

  “THERE IS STILL a lot of misery in this part of the world,” Zapp wrote Abram in 1949. “Every day between one thirty and two o’clock the radio is broadcasting the names of lost persons.” What did Zapp do about it? Nothing. “I say to myself,” Zapp wrote, “carpe diem, enjoy your life.”

  Over the next seven years, Zapp would write Abram tens of thousands of words, the musings of a man speaking for a nation he believed to be the war’s true victim. By far the most prolific of what would grow to be Abram’s deep pool of German correspondents, Zapp was also the most cogent in his description of Germany’s suffering, and the most plain in his statement of the bargain he believed Germany still had the power to strike with America: its loyalty in a united front against communism—aka “materialism,” radicalism, and that old byword, degeneracy—in exchange for desperately needed American dollars.

  Abram was hardly alone in thinking this unwritten contract mutually beneficial. Such was the deal struck by Harry Truman, the Marshall Plan the Faustian trade of food for faith made at the hinge between wars, the one just ended and the Cold War which would stretch across the next five decades. But in 1949, nobody believed it would last that long. “Now,” Zapp wrote Abram as North Korean troops massed along the Thirty-eighth Parallel in 1950, “everybody sees clearly that a great war between USA and Soviet Russia cannot be avoided.”

  Zapp understood as well as any Cold Warrior that the battle would be fought in faraway places. “Now it is Korea, tomorrow it might be Formosa, or China, or Indochina.” One day, he feared, it would be Berlin. He was skeptical of America’s chances. Had not the Wermacht slaughtered 20 million Slavs? And still they had come, the Red Army growing in numbers even as the ranks of its dead swelled to the size of a nation. Hitler could not stop them. German civilians thought the Americans would succeed where the Reich had failed. “Oh, the Russians can’t do anything,” Zapp summarized his man-on-the-street interviews. “Because as soon as a war starts the Americans will drop a chain of Atom bombs from the Baltic to the Black Sea and create a radioactive curtain right across Western Russia.” But Zapp, who understood American propaganda and promises for what they were, knew better. “This optimistic opinion sounds to me like the whispering campaign Dr. Goebbels started at the end of the war, when he spoke of new decisive weapons, of which nobody knew anything.”

  Abram agreed. The “steel bath” of armaments alone would not protect them. Only the solution that had saved Seattle in 1935 would suffice. “The totalitarianism of God is the only answer,” as one of the Cold War academics routinely trotted about by Abram had lectured a conference of diplomats in 1948. The gathering was the work of Donald C. Stone, director of administration for the Marshall Plan, a man who hardly seemed a likely candidate for fundamentalist crusades. Stone was a blue-blooded bureaucrat inspired by noblesse oblige, one of the many authors of Europe’s reconstruction who never made headlines. But in the postwar era he had come to believe that the West stood for Christ-like perfection while communism was “hate” incarnate. Stone’s ambition for the Marshall Plan was to conform the Western bloc “politically, economically, psychologically, and spiritually,” to a “global offensive” of ideas. The idea, for Stone, was God. “My main use,” he told Abram, “is to try to get the Christian Spirit into [the Marshall Plan]. I have worked at that constantly. It is vital.”11 In 1948, the newly formed National Security Council had issued a secret menu of covert actions to be pursued with Marshall Plan funds, with the only restriction being plausible deniability: “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerillas, and refugee liberation groups; and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”12 The most important battlegrounds, Stone concluded, were the souls of the undecided, who must either give their absolute loyalty or be destroyed.

  Stone, Zapp, Abram. Just three small men in the Cold War, they might be said to stand in for the three branches of America’s ideological army. Establishment Cold Warriors of Stone’s ilk dominate the history books. Zapp, the ally with an ugly past, is his dark shadow. But Abram and the influence of his fellow fundamentalists would remain invisible for decades, their influence unmarked by media and academic establishments. The role played by fundamentalists in refashioning the world’s greatest fascist power into a democracy would go unnoticed. So, too, would the role of fascism—or, rather, that of fascism’s ghost—in shaping the newly internationalist ambition of evangelical conservatives in the postwar era.

  Between the Cold War establishment and the religious fervor of Abram and his allies, organizations that came of age in the postwar era—the National Association of Evangelicals, Campus Crusade, the Billy Graham Crusade, Youth For Christ, the Navigators, and many more—one finds the unexplained presence of men such as Zapp, adaptable men always ready to serve the powers that be. From American Christendom, Zapp and his ilk took the cloak of redemption, cheap grace, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of their most famous victims. To it, they offered something harder to define. This is an investigation of that transmission; the last message from the Ministry of Proper Enlightenment; the story of American fundamentalism’s German connection.

  ON CHRISTMAS DAY, 1945, one of Abram’s men wrote him a letter about the world waiting to be made. “Well, Abram, D-Day is at hand.” The letter writer, a member of one of Abram’s cells called the “Lindbergh Group”—possibly that of Charles Lindbergh—referred not to the actual D-Day, eighteen months past, but to the battle for what Abram would soon take to calling the “new world order.”

  “We must move now,” wrote Abram’s correspondent. “You have been raised up for a job like this.”

  And yet the following spring God and Abram’s appendix laid him low, nearly killing him in the midst of a speaking tour of the Midwest. Lying on an operating table in Minneapolis, about to go under, he listened with unfrightened curiosity to the worldly disinterest of his doctors, one of whom thought the sixty-one-year-old silver-haired man would momentarily “shake hands with St. Peter.” He may have. After the operation, Abram would say that he had spent his time hovering up near the ceiling of his hospital room, looking down at his body. Then Jesus came and bobbed along next to him, floating on the stale currents of hospital air. This was not a dream, Abram would insist, but direct communication. Together they discussed flesh and “personality.” The body, they concluded, is no more than “our means of contact with the physical world.” Abram and the Jesus of his hallucination had reinvented the Gnostic heresy, the belief that bodies possess no essence of humanity, that flesh is meat, the suffer
ing of which matters little or not at all. Such convictions have very worldly ramifications when wielded by the powerful—those in positions to make decisions about the suffering of others. Abram, of course, didn’t think about that.13

  Abram’s mystical experience marked a transformation in his mission. Gone were any vestiges of the Social Gospel, any old-fashioned Christian notions of feeding the poor—food, that is, not scripture—as a matter of first concern. The Cold War and spiritual war would be one in his eyes, but this battle would be ideological, fought for hearts and minds, those of the leaders who could set terms for the unknowing masses. Thereafter Abram’s religion, the faith of the fundamentalist elite, would be global in scope, with Washington, D.C., “the world’s Christian capital.” Fundamentalism could no longer simply defend its own ground; it must, as Finney had done, conquer new territory.

  In 1947, an evangelical theologian named Carl F. H. Henry would publish a startling book titled The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, since interpreted as a reconciliation of fundamentalism with the postwar world, a eulogy for William Jennings Bryan and Billy Sunday and the Bible thumpers of old that allowed fundamentalism to bury its dead and move on to an easier relationship with society at large. And yet The Uneasy Conscience still “breathes with fire,” an editor of Christianity Today (the flagship evangelical magazine Henry started) wrote just a few years ago, “rejecting the failed theology of liberalism, discredited by the devastation of two wars.”14

  That one could view the ruins of Europe and the dead of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau—or, for that matter, Dresden or Hamburg or Hiroshima—and conclude in 1947, or today, that liberalism was the problem, that Locke’s tradition of tolerance had led to the slaughter, that what the world needed more of was the gospel of no compromise, was, whatever else we might make of it morally or historically, a bold assertion. It was American fundamentalism coming into its own, fulfilling the evangelical promise it claimed to uphold, no longer defending itself against modernity’s encroachments so much as expanding into modernity’s sphere. Henry’s call for “positive engagement” with politics laid the foundation for a popular front, to borrow a term from the American Left of the previous decade: an ideological army of common cause, with “Christianity” the battle cry rallying the troops well beyond the confines of fundamentalism.

  “I believe honestly,” Harry Truman had announced at war’s end, “that Almighty God intends us to assume the leadership which he intended us to assume in 1920, and which we refused.” Truman was a hard-nosed liberal who borrowed heavily from American fundamentalism even as he held it at a distance. It took him another two years to fully blend the two in his 1947 “Truman Doctrine”—a mandate for massive military aid around the world—on behalf of a Greek government riddled with fascist collaborators, fighting a civil war against the very same mountain partisans—communists, indeed—who had been the chief resisters against the Germans.

  Before the war, Truman had been such a devotee of Buchmanism that he had attempted (unsuccessfully) to corner FDR into an implicit endorsement of the Moral Re-Armament guru. In 1947, Senator Absalom Willis Robertson, a fiercely conservative Democrat from Virginia (and Pat Robertson’s father) met with Truman to invite him to expand his sphere of piety to the Fellowship’s meetings. Robertson would tell Donald Stone that Truman seemed excited by the idea, but nothing came of it. By then, Truman was officially distancing himself from MRA lest he be tainted by its prewar enthusiasm for fascism. It seems more likely that it was Truman’s hardheadedness that influenced the Fellowship rather than the other way around, leading toward a more militant realpolitik than Abram, enamored of pomp and status, had yet imagined.15

  Unlike Abram—who considered King Paul of Greece a messenger from God—Truman wasn’t addled by royalty. The doctrine that began by making client states of Greece and Turkey, the old “imperial interests” as FDR had dismissed them, was too ambitious, too abstract, to be starstruck by Europe’s quaint nobility. It was at best and at worst an ontological division of the world into heaven and hell, with the United States declared to be not only on the side of the angels but responsible for enforcing their dictums. “Worldwide Spiritual Offensive,” Senator Frank Carlson would call this strategy at a twentieth-anniversary meeting of the prayer breakfast movement. He meant to summon the unified forces of politics and religion—power and will, as Manfred Zapp, a propagandist of a blunter regime, might have phrased the idea. “Moral Doctrine for Free World Global Planning,” was how another Abram disciple, a Pentagon director of “information” named John C. Broger, would frame it in the barely secular terms of midcentury Cold War.16

  Such was the language of the times: aggressive but vague. Five years before Carl F. H. Henry published his Uneasy Conscience, the denominational leaders of America’s conservative Protestant factions had come together to form the National Association of Evangelicals. It was an alliance of orthodox fundamentalists, such as Bob Jones Sr., and “free enterprise” apostles, such as Abram’s friend J. Elwin Wright. The NAE would fight “real dangers” threatening America, a category of menace sufficiently broad that it included both Roosevelt’s “managerial revolution” and the separatist fury of fundamentalists too pure for politics. The NAE saw socialism and separatism as opposite ends of the spectrum of the beast known as secularism, which the NAE considered the unnatural division of believers and American power. “Personal legalisms”—this church doesn’t approve of dancing, that one won’t play cards—would thereafter be just that, personal, not to interfere with the war for a Christian nation. “Christ for America,” proclaimed the NAE’s president in his second annual address. Come on in, said the populist front, whether you speak in tongues and wave your hands on Sunday or sit on them and tsk, tsk at the sweat and tears of the holy rollers. Its fundamentalism was not theological; it was American. The totalitarianism of God, unlike that of man, welcomed all true believers.17

  DURING THE WAR years, Abram had acquired a new patron, a youngish widow named Marian Aymar Johnson, heiress to the fortunes of both her late stockbroker husband and of her old, Hudson River family. A lovely if empty-headed beauty raised between Newport, London, and Manhattan, she was a second cousin to FDR, but her isolationist politics were far to his right. Before the war, she’d been fond of Buchmanite house parties, hosting one herself at her Long Island estate—an event of sufficient gossip value to rate an article in Time. Tall and blue-eyed with a broad, open smile, after her husband died she resolved to develop greater gravitas. She gave up the life of a social butterfly for what she called Abram’s “total Christianity.” Her goal was the establishment of “spiritual beach heads” from which to evangelize leaders. Only by accepting the same Christ, the “Supreme Leader” she had come to serve, could they save America from communism.18 With her help, Abram bought a four-story mansion on Embassy Row in Washington at 2324 Massachusetts Avenue. He hoped it would be a headquarters for politicians and diplomats of all denominations, a place for businessmen visiting Washington (by this point, Abram’s inner circle included the president of the National Association of Manufacturers) to share their concerns with brothers-in-Christ in spiritual, not material, terms. A “Christian Embassy.”19

  Abram kept offices on the third floor, and there was a reception hall, a library for small gatherings, a formal dining room, and a dining room for servants on the second floor. There were guest rooms above and drawing rooms suitable for soul surgery—a term Abram borrowed from Buchman—below. It quickly “became natural” for ambassadors “looking for a Christian approach and solution” to drop in for lunch, but Abram delighted even more in “drifters in from a pagan legalism”—what nonbelievers call ethics—who, sitting with Abram on the back porch during a summer meal, might catch the “contagion” of the Idea.

  A magnificent garden in the back grew upon the green ridge of Rock Creek Park, the narrow gorge that separated the property from the sculpted grounds of Dumbarton Oaks. It was there, in 1944—the same year that Abram and
his wife, Mattie, at last risen from her sickbed in Seattle, moved to the Christian Embassy—that Roosevelt and his advisers began planning the United Nations.20 Abram at first interpreted the United Nations as the result of divine intervention leading the secular world toward international acknowledgment that the truths of the world’s religions were best summarized in the personality of Jesus. He turned his weekly congressional prayer meetings into lobbying sessions on the organization-to-be’s behalf, and his most conservative prayer disciples—especially the old arch-isolationist Senator Arthur Vandenberg, converted to Cold War internationalism before World War II had even ended—helped quiet American resistance to the endeavor.

  History, not his Christ, would disappoint Abram. After the war ended, after it dawned on him that the UN would not become an international Christian congress, after the atom bombs fell, after the Red Army boiled up to the edge of Western Europe and did not stop so much as simmer, waiting, Abram was certain, for Stalin’s command, for Satan’s whisper—after he had taken stock of the war’s victories and defeats, his anxieties and his enthusiasms grew more warlike than the UN could accommodate. Communism no longer meant the creed of insufficiently submissive workers; now it was as great and grand as Lucifer’s kingdom, an evil empire that had launched “World War III,” Abram decided. “Most of these communists are in fact rebels and should be treated as rebels,” he said, waving the black flag of no mercy for those who disobeyed God—a sentiment his followers in developing nations would later make real by murdering hundreds of thousands of leftists. Abram’s fundamentalism was polite only within the confines of Washington; projected onto the world, it thrived on violence and raised up those most capable of it.