by Jeff Sharlet
“All through these last forty years,” Coe continues, “I’ve had the privilege of traveling to countries, I’ve been in China, in Vietnam with the Vietnamese, the Vietcong, Communists in Panama, Communists in Russia, the Red Guard in China, Nazis in Germany.” (Coe’s first visit to Germany was in 1959. Did he know more about the past of Abram’s key men in Germany than they liked to acknowledge?) “And you know, I discovered that the same things that they make people give vows to keep, are the same things that Jesus said…The only thing that was changed was the goal, the only thing that changed was the purpose. In essence, it was all the things that Jesus taught in private to the disciples. I began to realize why they were so successful in human terms.”
Coe cites one of his favorite scripture verses, Matthew 18:20, “When two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” “Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler were three men. Think of the immense power these three men had, these nobodies from nowhere. Actually, emotional and mental problems. Prisoners. From the street. But they bound themselves together in an agreement, and they died together. Two years before they moved into Poland, these three men had a study done, systematically a plan drawn out and put on paper to annihilate the entire Polish population and destroy by numbers every single house”—he bangs the podium, dop, dop, dop—“and every single building in Warsaw and then to start on the rest of Poland.”
It worked, Coe says; they killed 61/2 million “Polish people.” (The actual sum was closer to 51/2 million, 3 million of whom were Polish Jews. But that, as Stalin would say, is just a statistic).
“These three men by their decision alone.” What he’s trying to explain, Coe says, is the power of friendship: between a man and Christ, between brothers in Christ. Once, he says, a friend who’d been France’s foreign minister during its war with Vietnam told him he should try to meet Ho Chi Minh. “‘Even though he was our enemy, he was amazing.’ He said, ‘[Ho] knows what it means, to be brothers.’” What does it mean to be brothers? It means, Coe learns when he finally meets one of Ho’s, a foreign minister Coe says he happened to bump into in Mauritania, to be willing to—happy to—die for your cause.
It’s late; the room is gloomy; Coe’s brothers and sisters are sitting on hard chairs. He needs to make it very clear for them.
“These enemies of ours,” he says, “they have taken the very words of Jesus Christ and used them for themselves.” What words is Coe talking about? The ones about “social order.”
“That’s all that matters.” The social order: “Jesus says, ‘You have to put me before other people, and you have to put me before yourself.’ Hitler, that was the demand of the Nazi Party.” Coe slaps the podium, and the Führer creeps into his mannerisms: “You have to put the Nazi Party and its objectives in front of your own life and ahead of other people!” Now he’s Coe again. “I’ve seen pictures of young men in the Red Guard of China,” he says. “A table laid out like a butcher table, they would bring in this young man’s mother and father, lay her on the table with a basket on the end, he would take an axe and cut her head off.” Now he’s Mao, punctuating his words by slapping his pulpit: “They have to put the purposes of the Red Guard ahead of the mother-father-brother-sister—their own life!”
He pauses, makes the fist. “That was a covenant. A pledge. That was what Jesus said.” Now he’s Jesus: “If you do not put me, before your father”—bang—“your mother”—bang—“your brother”—bang—“your sister”—bang—“you cannot be my disciple.” Now as Coe: “If you’re gonna have any movement that moves men and movements, that’s”—he clenches his fist again at the end of the phrase—“you have to have that kind of commitment. Jesus knew that. That’s the way the social order is run.”
In America, Coe says, “Today. In this country. This very day”—that vision of social order is lost.
The next morning, Coe explains to the crowd how it can be regained. Remember, he says, he is talking about love. A necessary reminder, perhaps, since he continues to use Hitler and Lenin, and, today, Stalin, to illustrate the shape of the love he pursues. Why such monsters? Why not speak of the church? Coe removes a pair of eyeglasses from a pocket, but instead of putting them on, he twirls them on one finger. “There is nothing in the Bible about the Christian church. That isn’t the name of it. The name of it is the body.” The Body of Christ, of which all believers are cells. “His body functions invisibly.” Coe draws an analogy to a tree. All you see are the leaves; “you don’t know what’s going on underground.” But look at the churches, he says, with all their pomp and circumstance, all their titles, every full-time church worker stuck in a hierarchy. It depresses people, Coe explains, when they can see who their master is. A movement that is visible is weak, vulnerable. It’s an organization, not love. But the Body of Christ—“The Family,” Coe says—“we are bound by the strongest power in the world”—love, I think, but I’ve lost hold of the connections—“and the whole world is afraid of it.”
Let’s return to our problem. Let J stand for Jesus. J + 0 = X. Is X a body of cells, or a social order, or a vision? Yes. All three. X = a vision. The vision isn’t the Sermon on the Mount; it’s not the beatitudes; it’s so simple it hurts (remember the Red Guard’s axe): the vision is total loyalty. Loyalty to what? To the idea of loyalty. It’s another M. C. Escher drawing, the one of a hand drawing the hand that is drawing itself. The Communist Party, plus Jesus. The Nazi Party, plus Jesus. The Red Guard, plus Jesus. What is the common denominator? Jesus? Or power? Jesus plus nothing equals power, “invisible” power, the long, slow, building power of a few brothers and sisters. J + 0 = P. We have our formula. Now let’s run the equation for the twenty-first century. J + 0 = P divided by the many permutations of the Family’s present, its latest incarnation.
INTERESTING BLOOD
THE REVEREND ROB SCHENCK, the founder of a ministry called Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital—a knockoff of the Family, the theological equivalent of fake Gucci—is one of the most unusual fundamentalist activists in Washington. He has the glad, plastic face and quick wit of a Borscht Belt comedian and the big brown eyes of a pitbull puppy. There’s an echo of Brooklyn in his voice, which he amplified on my behalf. We had two things in common, we discovered when we met one day for sauerbraten at Schenck’s favorite restaurant: a fascination with Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney, and the fact that we’re both “half-Jews,” born of gentile mothers and Jewish fathers. “Makes for very interesting blood!” said Schenck. This realization was an occasion for Schenck to dust off his Yinglish, the mix of Yiddish and English usually reserved for bar mitzvahs, funerals, and Fiddler on the Roof revivals. It was probably the only time Jonathan Edwards has been described as a luftmensch and Finney as a schmoozer. (Between us, MOT, we agreed that Billy Graham is a theological schlimazel.) Schenck was that rarest of creatures: an ironic true believer.
Where I’d made sense of my half-Jew, half-Christian self by writing about those without doubts or divisions, Schenck, seventeen years old at the tail end of the hippie “Jesus People” movement in the early 1970s, decided to become one. With his twin brother, Paul, in tow, he began attending late-night stoner prayer-and-gospel guitar sessions. But that wasn’t enough. It’s a strange truth of American fundamentalism that several of its public ideologues—Marvin Olasky, the former communist who converted and coined the phrase compassionate conservatism, and Howard Phillips, a Yiddish-speaker who converted and recruited Jerry Falwell to create a “Moral Majority,” and Jay Sekulow, the converted legal genius behind many of the movement’s courtroom victories—came up in the deradicalized world of postwar American Jewry. It’s as if, casting about for the political passion of their immigrant fathers and mothers, they settled on Christian fundamentalism as the closest approximation of that vanished world, its socialist unions and communist cells.
Schenck took it further than most: he helped organize Operation Rescue, the militant anti-abortion crusade that specialized in grotesque pro
tests—the twin Schencks waved aborted fetuses like flags—and “direct action,” such as a full-throated prayer vigil outside the home of a Buffalo abortion provider, Dr. Barnett Slepian, in 1997. A year later, an Operation Rescue volunteer named James Kopp shot Slepian to death. “My brother and I felt very badly about the shooting,” Schenck told a reporter.1
It was true—by then Schenck had realized that there was a quicker path to power. He had begun praying in Washington with a rising star in the Senate from Missouri, John Ashcroft. He took to riding what he called the “vertical chapel”—the elevators of congressional office buildings—hoping to bump into more catches like Ashcroft. Instead, he kept running into members of the Family, on their way to meetings not just with fundamentalist fellow travelers such as Ashcroft but the entire spectrum of the political elite. “The mystique of the Fellowship,” Schenck observed, “has allowed it to gain entrée into almost impossible places in the capital.”
Schenck found a donor to buy him a town house across from the Supreme Court, where he began practicing a Coe-style ministry to judiciary staffers. In 2000, he prayed with Justice Antonin Scalia a day after the Supreme Court decision that made Bush president, and since 2001, Schenck has been able to penetrate the White House with ease, counseling staffers on their spiritual responsibilities. He does the same for congressmen in the quiet garden behind his town house, and fundamentalist activists from the provinces make Schenck’s HQ a regular stop on their pilgrimages to power. But he’s still, by his own admission, third tier. He remains an outsider with inside connections.
As such, he has become a sharp study of how the power he wants actually flows. In the first rank of fundamentalist influence, there are the old lions: James Dobson and Focus on the Family; Pat Robertson, batty but too rich to ignore; Chuck Colson, the “scholar in residence” in the house of fundamentalism. “Then you have the B list,” which is comprised of dozens of mid-sized organizations with big membership rolls but little name recognition outside activist circles: American Values, led by Gary Bauer, a former top Reagan aide who worked with the Family in the 1980s; and the Traditional Values Coalition, led by Louis P. Sheldon, a longtime Family ally who uses their C Street House for “faith-based diplomacy” in the fight against what he calls the “Marxist/Leftist/Homosexual/Islamic coalition”—a clumsy coinage that marks him as too crass for the Family’s inner circle.
“Where does the Family fit on this scale?” I asked.
Off the charts, said Schenck. Not more powerful; differently powerful. The big Christian lobbying groups push and shout; the Family simply surrounds politicians with prayer cells. They don’t try to convert anyone. They don’t ask for anything. They’re as patient as a glacier. “It works. It works extremely well. Inside the beltway, if you’re going to enjoy the platform of the National Prayer Breakfast—I mean, really enjoy it, not be invited courteously to show up, if you’re going to have the force of that thing behind you, Coe’s approval is a big deal. It’s the kosher seal.”
Coe doesn’t demand doctrinal loyalty, only a willingness to do business behind the scenes, and liberals are free to join him in the back room. Testifying before Congress about global warming in 2007, Al Gore came under angry assault from Senator James Inhofe, a longtime member of the Family. Gore blunted the attack by invoking their “mutual friend, Doug Coe,” with whom, he suggested, he and Inhofe ought to meet away from the cameras. “You know what I think of when I think of Doug Coe?” Schenck asked, his voice thick with admiration and laced with envy. “I think literally of the guy in the smoky back room, you can’t even see his face. He sits in the corner, and you see the cigar, and you see the flame, and you hear his voice—but you never see his face. He’s that shadowy figure. Nobody ever sees him. At the Prayer Breakfast, he’s never on the dais, but he puts the whole thing together. Nobody speaks from that podium, including the president, without Doug’s nod of approval. It’s a delicate play: He brings everyone together.”
For instance, says Schenck, Senators Sam Brownback and Hillary Clinton, partners in prayer at Coe’s weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast. The Family is dedicated to spiritual war, not the intramural combat of party politics, Schenck explained. Coe doesn’t have a systematic theology, he has a vision of power. Not just to come, but as it exists. “They’re into living with what is,” said Schenck. “But you don’t want to alienate them, you don’t want to antagonize them. You need them as your friends. Even Hillary will need them. They keep a sort of cultural homeostasis in Washington. Washington right now is a town where if you’re going to be powerful, you need religion. That’s just the way it’s done.”
SAM
The senator looks taller than he is, looks broader than he is. He is slight, but you notice the narrow cut of his suits, the weightlessness of the man, only after you have been with him for a while. His face is wide and flat and smooth across the cheekbones. His skin is Washington-pale but thick, like leather, etched by windburn and sun from years of working on his father’s farm in Parker, Kansas (population 281 and falling). You can hear it in his voice: slow, distant but warm, almost a baritone, spoken out of the left side of his mouth in half sentences with very few hard consonants. It sounds like the voice of someone who has learned how to wait for rain.
As a freshman in the House, part of the Republican revolution of 1994, he spoke with approval of his supporters’ feelings about Congress: “blow it up,” they demanded. He refused at first to sign the “Contract With America,” Newt Gingrich’s right-wing manifesto, not because it was too radical but because it wasn’t fast enough. Don’t just reform government, he insisted; erase it. He wanted to start by abolishing the departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, and the IRS. He wanted to do these things, he said, for the poor. He topped the National Review’s list of rising stars. Less than two years later, he was a senator. He grabbed his seat out from under Bob Dole’s anointed successor.
He calls himself a “faith-journey man.” He considers human rights his forte. He has been to Darfur and Iraq. He welcomes “pro-American” refugees. (Those who don’t speak English, he has said, “would not work well in Kansas.”) He worries a great deal about sexual slavery. He’d like to censor violent videos, but he’s steadfast against making gay bashing a hate crime. “Religious freedom” is a top priority, and it may require force. He has suggested Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan as military targets, and proposed sending troops to the Philippines, where rebels killed two American missionaries. “There’s probably a higher level of Christians [being persecuted] during the last ten, twenty years than…throughout human history,” he told Chuck Colson’s radio program. He takes solace from scripture. “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,” reads Matthew 5:10, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” He believes he can feel it when people are praying for him.
BROWNBACK’S STAFF OFTEN seem puzzled by the intensity of his religion. They worry when the only thing he eats for lunch is a wafer, the Body of Christ, at the noontime mass he tries to attend daily since his conversion to Catholicism. On weekends he gets up early so he could catch a mass before meeting his family at Topeka Bible, the city’s biggest evangelical church. He calls this routine a “great mixture of the feeding.” One Sunday morning I joined him. His preferred seat was in the back row of the balcony. A guest preacher from Promise Keepers, a revival of nineteenth-century “muscular Christianity,” had arranged for two men to perform a melodrama about golf and fatherhood. The senator chuckled when he was supposed to, sang every song, nodded seriously when the preacher warned against “Judaizers” who would “poison” the New Testament.
After the service, Brownback introduced me to a white-haired man with a yellow Viking mustache. “This is the man who wrote ‘Dust in the Wind,’” the senator announced proudly. It was Kerry Livgren, of the band Kansas, born again. Brownback likes to take Livgren on fact-finding missions. He wants to take him to Israel, because he thinks songwriters are very spiritual, and he thinks Jews are also
very spiritual. “Carry on, my wayward son…,” the senator warbled, trying to remember the words to the other big hit by Kansas.
When he ran for the House, Brownback was a Methodist, simple and proper. When he ran for the Senate, he was an evangelical, filled with Holy Ghost power. Now he’s a Catholic, baptized not in a church but in the “Catholic Information Center,” a chapel tucked in between lobbyists’ offices on K Street in Washington, run by Opus Dei, a secretive lay order founded by a saint who saw in Generalissimo Franco, the late dictator of Spain, an ideal of worldly power. Brownback prefers Mother Teresa. He studies Torah with an orthodox rabbi. “Deep,” says the rabbi. His daughter once told him that different churches have different aromas, and that there is a scent for everyone. Brownback wants to huff them all. “I am a seeker,” he told me, an understatement of grand proportion. Brownback’s faith is complicated, like American fundamentalism in the twenty-first century. The movement’s two great strands—the populist, pulpit-pounding tradition of its masses and the mannered evasions of its elite—are coming together, intertwining to become the mutant DNA of men such as Sam Brownback, the next generation of spiritual warriors.