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

by Jeff Sharlet

  “Jeff,” Greg said, “I advise you to explore that process. The process of becoming intimate with God.” I was a smart guy. I could do it. For a lot of men, that relationship with God, it was nothing but personal. For a few, though, it meant something greater. “There are two types of people at Ivanwald. Sharp guys, with leadership potential, and problem kids. The sharp ones use Ivanwald to build their network. If they do become successful, there’s an emphasis on maintaining contact.

  “That,” he said, “is how Doug uses Ivanwald.”

  By now I was out of my lawn chair and pacing with the phone in hand. Was I actually being recruited back to Ivanwald? It seemed impossible. But I didn’t know how else to interpret it. Greg thought I might have “leadership potential,” might be someone Doug Coe could “use.”

  For what?

  “The leadership work is secretive,” Greg said. “It has to be. There is the problem of separation of church and state. And you can get so much more accomplished in secret.” He boasted of the Family’s behind-the-scenes negotiations with Israel, of Yasir Arafat’s visit to the Cedars—an off-the-record event that had taken place long after Greg claimed to have broken with the Family. “Or Suharto,” he said. The fact that Suharto had murdered 500,000 of his countrymen, as I’d written, was news to him. But so what? “Say he did kill a half million people. Let me ask you this: did he kill them before or during his relationship with Doug?”

  Suharto’s killing started before he knew Coe. In fact, it was the killing that caught the Family’s attention. Since I’d left Ivanwald, I’d been doing some research on Indonesia; I thought that in the Family’s relationship with a Muslim dictator there might be a clue to solving the problem of Jesus plus nothing. This is what I found out.

  IN SEPTEMBER OF 1965, a communist-led rebellion attempted to topple the aging hero of Indonesian independence, Sukarno, by then withered into an incompetent dictator. It fell to young General Suharto to beat back the rebellion, which he did easily, and to prevent a recurrence. This he accomplished by leading a nationwide slaughter of communists. “Communist” schoolchildren, babies, entire villages. When it was done, Suharto was untouchable—especially with his newfound friends, the Americans. LBJ, dominoes on the mind, was willing to cut deals with any devil God gave him if it meant he could move at least one Southeast Asian nation permanently out of the communist column.

  American fundamentalists were even more enthusiastic about the Muslim dictator. In 1968, Abram declared Suharto’s coup a “spiritual revolution,” and Indonesia under his rule an especially promising nation, hope for the future in Abram’s last years.1 The CIA would eventually admit that the Indonesian massacre was “one of the worst mass murders in the 20th century.” But that wasn’t the mood at the dawn of Suharto’s reign, as Clif Robinson, the Family’s chief Asian representative, discovered in 1966, when he visited the American ambassador to Indonesia, Marshall Green. “The emergency,” as Robinson called it, made demands on the ambassador’s time, but the two men spent an afternoon together. Robinson wasn’t able to see the Indonesian diplomat who’d originally introduced him to Jakarta politics though. He was in prison, one of 750,000 Indonesians jailed or sent to concentration camps for political crimes.

  Robinson didn’t try to intervene on behalf of his friend. But then, the ambassador would hardly have been the man to ask for help. In 1990, Green acknowledged the long-suspected fact that the American embassy had been busy at that time compiling for Suharto what one of Green’s aides called a “shooting list”: the names of thousands of leftist political opponents, from leaders identified by the CIA to village-level activists, the kind of data only local observers—conservative missionaries, classically—could provide. “We had a lot more information about [them] than the Indonesians themselves,” Green boasted. Green and his aides followed the results of their gift closely, checking off names as Suharto’s men killed or imprisoned them. “No one cared, so long as they were communists, that they were butchered,” said one of Green’s aides. Another, acknowledging that the list had left “a lot of blood” on American hands, argued, “But that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”2

  One such moment occurred for Suharto in December 1975, when Portugal relinquished its claims to the tiny island nation of East Timor. It declared independence; nine days later Suharto’s army invaded, on the pretext that its neighbor was communist. Two hundred thousand people—nearly a third of the island’s population—were killed during the long occupation, to which the United States gave its blessing. Gerald Ford, the only president to have been a member of an actual prayer cell (when he was in Congress, with Representatives John Rhodes, Al Quie, and Melvin Laird, a cell that reconvened in 1974 to pray with Ford about pardoning Nixon),3 told Suharto, “We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem and the intentions you have.” Kissinger, with Ford in Jakarta, added, “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly [because] the use of U.S.-made arms could create problems.” Suharto did not succeed quickly—the killing continued for decades—but he never lacked for champions in the U.S. Congress, which saw to it that American dollars kept his regime in bullets until he was driven out in 1998.

  The massacre of Indonesia preceded Suharto’s friendship with the Family, but the slaughter and slow strangulation of East Timor coincided with it. A document in the Family’s archives titled “Important Dates in Indonesian History” notes that in March 1966, the Communist Party was banned and Campus Crusade arrived in April. Suharto wasn’t a Christian, but he knew that where missionaries go, investors follow. He also wanted to use God—any God—to pacify the population. In 1967, Congressman Ben Reifel sent a memo to other Fellowship members in Congress noting that a special message from Suharto calling on Indonesians to “seek God, discover His laws, and obey them” was broadcast at the same time as a Fellowship prayer session in the Indonesian parliament for non-Christian politicians. The Fellowship never asked Indonesians to renounce Islam, only to meet around “the person of Jesus”—considered a prophet in Islam—in private, under the guidance of the Fellowship’s American brothers.

  By 1969, the Fellowship claimed as its man in Jakarta Suharto’s minister of social affairs, who presided over a group of more than fifty Muslims and Christians in parliament. Another Fellowship associate, Darius Marpaung—he’d later claim that God spoke through him when he told a massive rally that the time had come to “purge the communists,” an event that helped spark the massacre—led a similar group in Indonesia’s Christian community.4 “President Suharto is most interested and would like to increase his contact through this medium with the other men of the world,” wrote Coe’s first follower, Senator Mark Hatfield, in a memo to Nixon that year. “He has indicated he would like to meet with the Senate [prayer] group if and when he comes to the United States.”5

  In the fall of 1970, Suharto did both. Coe often boasted that nobody but congressmen, himself, and maybe a special guest attended such meetings, but this time Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the Indonesian dictator.6 In October 1970, Coe wrote to the U.S. ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry. Suharto had just become the first Muslim to join the Fellowship’s off-the-record Senate prayer group for a meeting “similar to the one we had with Haile Selassie,” the emperor of Ethiopia. Korry was too busy to celebrate; October 1970 was the month his plot to overthrow Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, came to a botched end, opening the door to the more murderous scheme that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power three years later.7 (“The sun is just now beginning to shine again,” the Family’s key man in Chile, the head of a right-wing civilian faction called the “Officialists,” wrote Coe, promising to tell him the “real story” of Pinochet’s coup in person.)

  In 1971, Coe entertained a small gathering at the Fellowship House with stories from his most recent round of visits to inte
rnational brothers, “men whom God has touched in an unusual way.” Among them was General Nguyen Van Thieu, the president of South Vietnam, who arranged for Coe to tour the war zone in the personal plane of his top military commander; the foreign minister of Cambodia, “most eager to carry on our concept”; and Suharto. In Clif Robinson’s telling, “Doug and I were escorted up the steps of the palace, no attempt to make any secret of it, and the president there so warmly welcomed us and the first thing he said as I walked into the room was to express his appreciation for what had been done, and to say that the momentum that we have seen started in this must not be allowed to slacken…Along toward the end, one of the men suggested it would be good if we had prayer together. And Darius Marpaung and Colonel Sombolem were present with us. And Darius Marpaung suggested that the businessman who was there would lead us in a prayer. And I think I have seldom been in a meeting where the prayer was so God-inspired.”8

  Coe and Robinson weren’t the only representatives of the Fellowship to seek such inspiration with Suharto. In 1970, a memo to Fellowship congressmen from Senator B. Everett Jordan, a North Carolina Dixiecrat, reported that Howard Hardesty, the executive vice president of Continental Oil, listed as a key man in the Fellowship’s confidential directory, had traveled to Indonesia to spend a day with the Fellowship prayer cells and join Suharto for dinner.9 The following year, Senator Jordan himself traveled to Jakarta on the Family’s behalf, where a special prayer breakfast meeting of forty parliamentary and military leaders was assembled for him by the vice president of Pertamina, the state oil and gas company that functioned like a family business for Suharto. Such corporate/state/church chumminess was hardly limited to dictatorial regimes. Jordan may well have traveled to the meeting on an airplane provided that year for congressional members of the Family by Harold McClure of McClure Oil, and the year previous, he’d boasted in a memo to congressional Family members, oil executives and foreign diplomats had used the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington to meet for “confidential” prayers.10

  By 1972, some of Abram’s old hands were concerned about the moral vacuum the Family now called home. Elgin Groseclose, the American economist who’d helped the Shah run Iran in the 1940s, worried that Muslims who saw through the facade of the “brotherhood of man” would ask, “Down what road am I being taken?” And, perhaps, decide to take Americans for a ride instead. “This has been one of the aspects of the…movement that has long troubled me,” concluded Groseclose. “Where does politics end and religion begin?”11

  Poor Groseclose. He could not grasp power. Suharto got it. “We are sharing the deepest experiences of our lives together,” Clif Robinson wrote of his brother the dictator. “It was at this point when I was with President Suharto of Indonesia that he said, ‘In this way we are converted, we convert ourselves—No one converts us!’”12

  In the spring of 1975, Bruce Sundberg, a Family missionary to the Filipino government of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, began planning with Marcos’s chief financial backer for a summit in Jakarta. Included would be Marcos, Suharto, and General Park, the South Korean dictator. Sundberg called it “The Jakarta Idea,” the “Idea” to be pondered the same one that had come to Abram forty years earlier in Seattle. That it had not evolved since 1935 was, to the men of the Family, proof of its eternal truth: the Idea that God’s method is the “man-method,” that God chooses His key men according to His concerns, not ours. That conviction enabled Coe to ignore Elgin Groseclose’s concern about foreign nationals using them for their connections. People didn’t use people, according to the Idea. People didn’t do anything. Rather, they were used by God, and their only two choices were to struggle against the inevitable, or to allow God to pull their strings. Was Suharto using them? Only if God wanted him to. Everything the Family did for Suharto—the connections, the prayers, the blessings—they did for God.

  On December 6, 1975, Gerald Ford blessed Suharto’s invasion of East Timor. Twelve hours after Ford left Jakarta, Suharto’s forces, armed almost entirely with American weapons, attacked East Timor’s population of 650,000 on the premise that the island nation was planning a communist assault on Indonesia, a nation of 140 million people.

  Here are the words of the last broadcast from East Timor’s national Radio Dili, in the nation’s capital: “Women and children are being shot in the streets. We are all going to be killed, I repeat, we are all going to be killed. This is an appeal for international help. Please help us…”

  THE CONSERVATIVE ESTIMATE of Suharto’s death toll, in East Timor and Indonesia proper, is 602,000, but most scholars of Indonesia believe it is two or even three times greater, ranking Suharto next to the Cambodian madman Pol Pot as one of the worst mass murderers of the twentieth century. What role the Family played, or did not play—which of their “deepest experiences” they shared—in the long occupation of East Timor that followed the invasion, a period during which it was transformed into “islands of prisons hidden with islands,” I can’t say. The Family restricted its archives before I could follow the story into the next decade. All I know is that in 2002 my Ivanwald brothers proudly proclaimed that one of Suharto’s successors, President Megawati, had bent her knee to the Jesus of the Cedars.

  I shared some of Suharto’s story with Greg. I wanted to make some kind of connection. Not of politics to religion but between us, “man-to-man,” as the Family likes to say. I knew almost nothing about him, but his tone reminded me of Bengt Carlson, one of his successors as leader of Ivanwald, and that made me think that like Bengt, Greg was probably a decent sort absorbed into a movement the awful shape of which he simply didn’t see. It wasn’t that I wanted to school him. I wanted him to know that I got it. That I understood good intentions and where they could lead. That I appreciated that diplomacy requires doing business with bad men. That I knew there had been honorable Cold Warriors—my father, a Sovietologist who advised the CIA near the end of Eastern European communism, was one of them—who believed that the threat of the Soviet Union justified terrible alliances.

  But what I wanted him to say—and I admit it, I wanted him to answer for Coe, for Carlson, for the whole goddamn bunch, because, after all, here he was, apparently asking me to join them—was that making Suharto a brother, at least, had been a mistake. Why hadn’t Coe risked his access, risked the Family’s friendships in big oil, risked even his certainty about the biblically sanctioned authority of whichever strongman ends up in charge, to tell Suharto—after a prayer, maybe—to stop killing his own people? To hold him accountable, as the Family likes to say. For if the Family had not done so—if they had, in fact, greased Suharto’s economic machine, voted for weapons, praised him to the world as a champion of freedom—they were accomplices. Brothers in blood, yes, but not that of the lamb.

  Greg preferred to look on the bright side. “If not for Doug,” he said, “maybe Suharto would have killed a million.”

  GREG’S MATH WAS the calculus used by Stalin when he said that a single death is a tragedy, but a million is no more than a statistic. Stalin, monster that he was, spoke not of flesh-and-blood murder but of politics by narrative, the stories to which even a dictator must resort if he is to wield the power he takes by the gun. As a human being, Stalin may have been worse than worthless, but as a fabulator, he was astute. A single death does make a better story. Suharto’s victims—602,000, 1.2 million, or 1.8 million—may never find a place in literature. But they deserve a place in history, and to win them that, one small problem must be solved here in America, that of Jesus plus nothing, the logic of faith that allows American politicians to contribute to the nightmares of other nations, and the rest of us to vote for them.

  Jesus plus nothing. Phrased like that, as Coe puts it, it doesn’t sound like a problem at all. One who preaches Jesus plus nothing claims to be in possession of pure Godhead. Not Jesus plus the history of his believers and what they’ve done in His name, or Jesus plus the culture through which we view Him now, or Jesus plus the best efforts of the minds G
od, presumably, gave us, or Jesus plus humanity itself. Not Jesus plus scripture, since scripture, after all, contains a great deal besides Jesus. No burning bush, no voice in the whirlwind, no Daniel, no lions. Coe and his inner circle do believe in the trinity; a Washington fundamentalist activist told me, “but they’ll give the Father and the Holy Ghost the weekend off. Because they clutter the conversation. Jesus is so easily presented.”13

  And what is it about Jesus that Coe presents? Not the teachings of Christ; simply the fact of His being, “the Person of Christ,” as Coe called it in a four-part lecture series he presented to a conference of evangelical leaders in January 1989, recorded on two videotapes lent to me by an evangelical scholar distressed by Coe’s peculiar concept of God. The lectures took place at the Glen Eyrie Castle in Colorado Springs, the Navigators headquarters at which Coe first conceived of Jesus plus nothing. With a great stone hearth lit by two murky yellow lanterns behind him, Coe, in a dark suit and tie, his black hair slicked across his skull, doesn’t drive toward his points; he ambles up to them. He tells a story about touring forty-two small nations in the Pacific with a member of Reagan’s National Security Council, an Australian politician, and some American businessmen. On the tarmac of each country’s airport, they pray for a key man, a power broker, and then they go off to meet a top man, the one with the power.

  What am I supposed to say to them? asks the Australian.

  “We wanna be your friend,” says Coe.

  Okay, says the Australian, but how?

  “Tell ’em, ‘By learning to love God, together, centered around Jesus Christ.’”

  The Australian, who used to work in the foreign ministry, doesn’t think he can say that. He’ll sound crazy. He’ll sound stupid. So Coe makes him a bet: if it doesn’t work after two countries, they’ll go back to Australia and play golf. But there’s to be no golf in his near future, because on every little island they visit, Yap and Truk and Palau, this delegation of First World power finds prime ministers, presidents, parliamentarians, strangely receptive to their message. The NSC man, David Locke, a veteran of a similar trip with Coe, described it once. “It reminded me of the story in World War II, where the British sent an OSS type into Borneo…And this guy parachuted out of the sky and they had never seen anything like this so they looked on him as—he had blonde hair and white skin and he was a white god who had come out of the sky to mobilize them. Obviously his side was going to win so they had no trouble aligning themselves. Well, from the point of view of a lot of these little island countries, we were something akin to that.”14