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

by Jeff Sharlet

  Robinson and Halverson also saw the importance of smaller countries, but it was Coe who dispensed with any concern at all for politics in the Fellowship’s expansion; he would pray with anyone, and he would bless anyone, so long as they had the strength to submit their nation to God. That was his greatest virtue in Abram’s eyes: he never complained, never insisted on honors, never questioned whether Jesus really cared most for men with power.

  WHAT WAS IT they wanted? What drove Coe and his spiritual brothers to conflate the Gospel with the needs of a nation expanding into empire? Over “lamb chops and hash-browned potatoes and fried apples and fried tomatoes,” reported the Washington Post in 1966, Billy Graham followed LBJ to the podium of the National Prayer Breakfast to preach the fury of Christ down on America’s enemies in Vietnam. “I am come to send fire on the earth!” he quoted Christ. “Think not that I am come to send peace but a sword!” “There are those,” Graham continued, “who have tried to reduce Christ to a genial and innocuous appeaser; but Jesus said, ‘You are wrong—I have come as a firesetter and a sword-wielder.’”24

  A firesetter—were they revolutionaries after all? Or did they fantasize a new Holy Roman Empire, recast in the terms of the twentieth century as an empire of influence, not territory? Maybe it was more trivial, pious posturing as cover for petty crimes.

  Sometimes, at least, it was just that. In attendance for Graham’s thundering warcry were two generals who devoted their free time to Fellowship work, crisscrossing the nation to lecture prayer cells and prayer breakfasts on the need for revival. One of them, General Harold K. Johnson, chief of staff of the army, ordered the other, General Carl Turner, to work with Coe, “quietly, and I repeat quietly,” to give the army’s “substantial” assistance to the production of the Prayer Breakfast. That in itself may have been a violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, but it paled beside General Turner’s real sideline: reselling mothballed army weapons to Third World gangs, a crime for which he was sentenced to prison in 1971 after General Johnson’s attempt to help failed.

  Is that all it was? A spiritual alibi for get-rich-quick schemes? A Fellowship tract titled Studies for Public Men, 10,000 of which were printed up by a Chevron Oil executive, claimed that such abuses are inevitable, but not attributable to the piety with which such men cloaked their misdeeds. When pious men committed crimes, went the thinking, godlessness was to blame—“secularism in its worst form!” In a section titled “Accountability,” the tract explained why the Fellowship should not be held accountable for the actions of its individual members, the American generals, General Turner and General Johnson, the overseas divines on Coe and Carlson’s government gravy train, Papa Doc and Emperor Selassie, General Park in Korea, General Suharto in Indonesia, General Medici in Brazil: “Persisting in the accusation of collective guilt finally immobilizes a society,” advised the tract. Perhaps, but the Fellowship denied individual guilt as well, denied the very concept of guilt for the powerful. That was a legalistic notion, an encroachment on God’s sovereignty as expressed in Romans 13: “The powers that be are ordained of God.” Who was Coe to question them?

  Romans, declared a Fellowship study guide for bankers, is “the Bible in miniature in a layman’s words.” The layman is Paul, formerly Saul, who on the road to Damascus saw the light and abandoned the law, for better and worse. “With the Jew in mind,” declared the study guide, “not to mention the memory of his own experience, Paul shows that the purpose of the law was not to save but to reveal sin.”25 Elite fundamentalists, unlike the moralistic masses of popular crusades, did not care much about sin; they cared about salvation, a concept they understood in terms of nations, not souls, embodied by the rulers to whom God had given power, whether through ballots or bullets.

  Senator Carlson, writing to President José Joaquín Trejos Fernández of Costa Rica in 1967, made that explicit. As a spiritual guide for the Catholic nation’s National Prayer Breakfast, he wrote, the Fellowship was sending Representative William Jennings Bryan Dorn, a South Carolina Dixiecrat who advocated extending the Monroe Doctrine, by which the United States dominated Latin America, to the entire world. Romans 13, Carlson reminded the Latin American leader, lest he balk: “For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”26

  In the decade that followed, Costa Rica, the region’s most stable government, became increasingly a base for Fellowship operations and increasingly submissive to God’s instituted authority. “The program to expand the activities of the Movement have been fulfilled according to schedule,” the Fellowship’s Costa Rican key man, a well-connected lawyer named Juan Edgar Picado, wrote Coe in 1976, assuring him that the leaders of both the nation’s minority and majority parties had been absorbed into prayer cells. “We have achieved the objectives as programmed.” Coe never sent Picado anything but prayer suggestions, but one of his assistants forwarded Henry Kissinger’s plan for the protection of U.S. investments in the region, which Picado promptly made a matter for consideration in his men’s prayers. Political brokers like Picado work in a loop of power. The more he did for the Fellowship, the more the Fellowship did for him, and the more powerful he became. “Through [a] private world Christian organization,” reported a Costa Rican paper, “Picado [has] had the opportunity to meet in Washington with…Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.”27

  “Why does God look for one man who will listen to Him?” asked the Fellowship’s Studies for Public Men. “What effect can one man have in a group, community, city, nation, and world?” Good question. What effect, for instance, did General Suharto hope for when he turned his army loose on his own people, a half million civilians murdered as “communists” in a year? What effect did Coe hope for when in 1971, he helped Suharto organize his first Indonesian National Prayer Breakfast to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the March 11, 1966, decree by which he seized power and commenced slaughtering hundreds of thousands of his own people?

  The simple answer would be that it was nothing but cynicism, war by other means, Cold War conquests for the American way. It was that, but it was also more. The prize was never Indonesia or Haiti or Costa Rica. The prize was the Promised Land. Not Israel—like Abram, Coe didn’t seem to care about Zionism one way or the other. The Fellowship’s Promised Land was as it had been for Jonathan Edwards: the New World. Edwards could hardly have been a nationalist before the American nation existed, but Coe was no nationalist, either. The Promised Land was America. Not a destination but a concept to be perfected and spread around the world. His Jerusalem, the New Jerusalem, was an idea, not a place. “My Jerusalem,” one of Coe’s men wrote to him from a businessmen’s revival he’d sparked in Billings, Montana.28 By that he meant the Kingdom of Heaven at home: first-century Christianity reconstructed, restored, resurrected on whatever ground you claimed as your own. To raise that ancient reality from the mythological depths—to seize hold of Christianity’s platonic shadow—Coe’s Fellowship adopted the strategy with which Edwards ended his days, the strategy with which, centuries later, a decade after Coe reinvented it, the new Christian Right would claim power in the public sphere. It was simple: Convert the weak. Encircle the strong.

  Edwards dreamed of doing so by leading Native Americans to Christ, thus shaming the colonials into the piety even “savages” could attain. One day, hoped Edwards, Boston and New York and the Northampton that had driven him from his pulpit would wake up to discover a frontier of saintly natives. In the late 1970s, the Christian Right wedged its way into Washington not by massive national campaigns but through local elections, PTAs, town councils, precinct captains. One day the Republican Party woke up to discover its base was Christian, fundamentally inclined, Edwards’s America achieved at last. The Fellowship’s strategy was—is—similar, but on a global scale. To work, though, it must be a surprise. Secularism must be confronted with overwhelming numbers, a host of believers in every direction. Unexpected, unimaginable
in this modern age.

  Coe used the power of the American flag to win submission (if not fidelity) to the fundamentalist God of key men in little nations nobody cared about and big nations nobody understood. There was Somalia’s Siad Barre, a self-styled “Koranic Marxist” for whose allegiance in the 1980s Coe won access to Reagan and a military aid budget nearly doubled in size. There was Jonas Savimbi, the brutal rebel of Angola cultivated by other key men from the United States and apartheid South Africa.29 There was Brazil’s General Costa e Silva, the Catholic dictator who acquiesced to a secret cell of Brazilian legislators organized by Coe and subsequently won the good graces of a far more powerful group of American congressmen, who helped pour a billion dollars in aid into Brazil’s long dictatorship of the generals.30 “I never invite them,” Coe said in 2007 of his dictator friends. “They come to me. And I do what Jesus did: I don’t turn my back to any one. You know, the Bible is full of mass murderers.”31

  Coe has always claimed he’s not a nationalist, and it’s true—unlike immigrant Abram, who cared most for America, Coe, Oregon-born, cares most for the American Christ, His power spread throughout the world even as the homeland is denied Him in the secular folly of church/state separation. One day, Coe believes—not yet—America (and Old Europe, too, the Germans and French and Italians who drifted from Christ once their prosperity was assured) will wake up and find itself surrounded by a hundred tiny God-led governments: Fiji, a “model for the nations” under a theocratic regime after 2001, a Family organizer boasted to me; and Uganda, made over as an experiment in faith-based initiatives by the Family’s favorite African brother, the dictator Yoweri Museveni; and Mongolia, where Coe traveled in the late 1980s to plant the seeds for that country’s post-communist laissez-faire regime.

  Nobody notices; nobody cares what happens in small places. This is what George H. W. Bush praised in 1992 as Coe’s “quiet diplomacy.”

  In 1966, with the Christian Right just starting to emerge as a visible front for fundamentalism, Coe decided to go in the opposite direction. “The time has come,” he instructed the Core, “to submerge.” Thereafter, the Fellowship would avoid at all turns any appearance of an organization, even as Coe crafted ever more complex hierarchies behind-the-scenes. Business would be conducted on the letterhead of public men, who would testify that Fellowship initiatives were their own. Finances would be more “man-to-man,” which is to say, off the books. The Fellowship was going underground.32

  The decision was not so much conspiratorial, as it seemed to those among Abram’s old-timers who responded with confusion, as ascetic, a humbling of powers. Or, rather, of power’s visible expression. The Fellowship had long been protected from scrutiny by the fact of its membership’s elite positions; not since the days of the muckrakers had the press really pressured the country’s “top men” of affairs. The same principle that forbade photographers to picture FDR’s shriveled legs prevented reporters from asking for details about the private devotions of public men. But such protections were withering. Assassination, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War demanded tougher questions, and it wasn’t just the press that was asking them; ordinary citizens called for answers, marched for them, fought for them. Power—political, cultural—appeared to be democratizing beyond the scope of God’s anointed leaders, just as it had during the 1930s, when Abram first conceived of his backroom brotherhood. The decision to “submerge,” to make the Fellowship “invisible,” was, then, merely a reaffirmation of Abram’s founding principles, recast in response to a new populism, deepened, even, to suit the needs of Coe’s new internationalism.

  COE ANNOUNCED THE decision in a series of letters to the old guard of Abram’s European leadership: Pierre Harmel, the foreign minister of Belgium; Edmond Michelet, a former hero of the French resistance who’d gradually sullied his reputation for integrity through a series of cabinet positions in General de Gaulle’s government; and, in Europe’s sphere if not its territory, Charles Malik, a Lebanese Christian. To anyone who is familiar with the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Malik helped write, his name may be the most surprising of all those to emerge from the Fellowship’s archives. Yet Malik had been party to Abram’s schemes for almost two decades. In 1949, Abram and a retired U.S. admiral, C. S. Freeman, waged a secret diplomatic offensive against Israel. Christian Zionism as a feature of American fundamentalism was still decades away; Abram and Freeman—and their strongest ally in the United Nations, Malik—saw the Jewish state as an obstacle to the “gradual readjustment of political and economic control in the Near East in line with the divine plan as declared in the Bible,” a plan they believed best served by U.S. power in Lebanon.33 In Israel’s place they proposed an ostensibly neutral international zone. Of course, to Abram, neutrality would only lead to Jesus, the “universal inevitable,” as he called his God. The plan was a total failure but for one detail: Abram’s acquisition of Malik’s name for his letterhead, an impressive declaration of elite fundamentalism’s international connections.

  The connection seemed to seduce Malik. By the time Coe joined the Fellowship in 1959 and began pushing for the evangelization of African, Asian, and Latin American leaders, Malik, then the president of the thirteenth session of the United Nations’ General Assembly, had veered from his own sense of “universal human rights” to the Fellowship’s, declaring that Christians had a responsibility to eradicate “tribal and national deities” in Africa and Asia.34 As Coe’s influence in the Fellowship grew, so did Malik’s intolerance. Christians, he declared, “worship a person,” while “they”—everyone else—“worship an idea”—words that Campus Crusade’s Bill Bright would convert into mainstream American fundamentalism. Christians, Malik went on, worshipped Christ’s “strength,” and in the end, Malik worshipped strength, indeed, becoming one of the founders of the Lebanese Front, the right-wing alliance of Christian militias in Lebanon’s long and awful civil war. Malik’s old internationalist friends may have been surprised, but it’s hard to imagine that Coe was. Through Malik’s involvement with the group, his name became popular with mainstream American fundamentalists like Bright, happy to add Malik’s intellectual credentials to their case.

  In 1963, Coe collected a group of other people’s speeches he labeled “Thoughts on Prayer,” as close to a statement of his beliefs as one can find from his early years.35 Malik’s ideas were well represented, just one clue that Coe’s ideas about what prayer was for were international in scope, despite his own personal mysticism. “Thoughts on Prayer” began with Senator Strom Thurmond railing against the 1962 Supreme Court decision Engle v. Vitale, which outlawed official school prayer. Following Thurmond came the once moderate John Mackay, president of the Princeton Theological Seminary, declaring that the nations of the world could now be divided into three categories: the secular (increasingly, Western Europe), the “demonic” (the Communist bloc), and the “covenantal,” an echo of the old “City upon a hill” thinking that understood the United States not so much as a country as a holy mission. But pride of place in “Thoughts on Prayer” belonged to a speech by Bill Bright, based on Malik’s ideas and delivered to a 1962 Fellowship prayer breakfast for the governor of Arizona.

  Bright, a candy maker before he launched Campus Crusade, was not a charismatic man. He wore a pencil-thin black mustache that made him look like a cartoon, and he was so stiff that next to him Pat Boone, his musical apostle, seemed like a genuine rocker. Bright’s genius was organizational discipline. To the world, Campus Crusade was as simple as Bright’s “Four Spiritual Laws,” a dumbing-down of the gospel that made even his allies uneasy. Internally, Crusade organizers were required to adhere to a book-length set of rules for fundamentalists that ranged from evangelism techniques to what kind of socks to wear (argyle was forbidden) to the proper way to pick up girls.

  Bright took the same approach to politics. He publicly declared that Campus Crusade had none, and since Crusade didn’t donate money to candidates or lobby
for specific legislation, the press accepted Bright’s contention. Among friends, he told a different story. “The house is on fire,” he raged to the Arizona governor’s prayer breakfast, “and there is no time to fix the pictures.” The “house” was America; the “pictures” were niceties of the Bill of Rights, such as the First Amendment’s establishment clause separating church and state. Citing Malik, Bright declared that only Christians could save American government from communism. The time had come for America to embrace 2 Chronicles 6.

  What did this mean? That was a question the businessmen and politicians assembled that spring day in Arizona must have asked, too, for in the collection of Bible verses bandied about by fundamentalists—as if scripture was Bartlett’s Quotations—2 Chronicles 6 had little standing. It was Old Testament, and unlike the prophecies of Isaiah, it could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be said to foretell Christ. Instead, it promised a new political order. It’s the story of Solomon’s construction of a temple to be the heart of an Israelite nation, to house the mythic ark of the covenant, “the ark of your might,” as Solomon called it, that would make his kingdom undefeatable in battle.

  The Jewish temple was destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago, in 70 CE. The ark is now nothing but a story. Within Judaism, 2 Chronicles 6 is both history and mystery, scripture to be studied and pondered and parsed for ancient meanings. To Bright, though, guided by Malik, 2 Chronicles 6 was a blueprint for a new God-led nation. Bright wanted to rebuild the temple, but in Washington, not Jerusalem. The prayer armies he dreamed would be unstoppable were those of American fundamentalism. To the world, Bright’s Campus Crusade preached Bible studies for college kids, ice cream socials, and even Christian dance parties. To the movement, he preached spiritual war. Like Coe, he anticipated the coming Jesus wave, and recognized that for the movement to be successful, it would need men to work the deeper currents. Bright organized the masses; Coe cultivated the elite. And Coe’s most successful protégé, Charles W. “Chuck” Colson, would soon do both, combining Bright’s populist style with Coe’s political sophistication.