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

by Jeff Sharlet

  “Just use us, Lord, just use us, please,” Adam concluded his prayer. They’d been brought together by a shared belief in the awesome power of God, “awesome” the way a skater might say it, “power” as an absolute, a totality. They wanted and believed they were called to be in the presence of that power, but to approach it in pride would be meaningless, and they were very keen on meaning. So they prefaced speculation about God and the nature of His power with just, as if by claiming their needs were simple they could slip beneath the radar God used to detect unseemly want. All they wanted, after all, was just to be used.

  At Adam’s direction, the group broke up into smaller groups of three and four and proceeded to work through a series of questions devised by Adam and the leaders of eleven other like-minded home churches, all part of something called the Imago Dei Community. Imago Dei is an odd mix of progressive evangelicalism and fundamentalism, a church that rejects the idea of “church”; its “vision” promises, instead, community and Jesus, stripped not so much of cultural accretion as of everything boring and less-than-intense about traditional church services. They do hold a Sunday morning service, but at the pulpit an artist, who paints or draws or sculpts the Gospel as directed by God, accompanies the preacher. They believe God is present, as in here, now. “Interventionist,” as some theologians would describe their conception of the deity, is too wonky a word for the Jesus they believe is simultaneously sitting right next to them and possessing them, guiding every breath, every thought, every flicker of their eyes. They believe in sin but don’t much care; they prefer love and discuss it often. Love is the word they use most frequently to evoke how completely in the control of Jesus they find themselves. Adam’s home church group had instituted a collective prayer journal, a black hardcover notebook in which each member was to write, on one side of the page, his or her prayer requests; and, on the other, the date and time Jesus answered them. “We forget what God does in our lives,” Adam explained. “We need to remind each other.”

  In the small groups, they planned to spend that evening reminding each other of what Truth is. The Truth they were talking about was the kind that comes with a capital T, and it was essential, Adam had written on the top of the worksheet, to “set us free from the destructive nature of life and the world.”

  Then followed the chief question: What is Truth?

  I joined a group of three sitting on the carpet beside the stairs: Matt, a reedy Multnomah Bible philosophy student with presence greater than his age, who acted as group leader; Sara, a long-legged, long-armed, long-necked woman, given to elaborate stretching, who worked in standardized testing; and Ben, a resident at a nearby hospital. Ben lay down in front of the screen door. Across the street behind him an orange and blue sign grew in the garden of each yard, declaring: one man / one woman. vote YES on Prop 36—a state initiative to ban even the possibility of proposing gay marriage.

  “What is Truth?” Matt asked.

  Sara jumped right in. “A lot of people say there is no Truth, but my problem with that is that it’s an absolute itself.”

  “Right,” said Ben. “It’s self-contradictory.”

  “But we’re here,” Sara continued. “So there has to be some Truth.”

  Matt volunteered that one of his Multnomah Bible professors had brought in a woman who didn’t believe in Truth. The class had challenged her by demanding that she admit that the attacks of September 11 had been wrong. But she wouldn’t give. Right and wrong, she said, weren’t categories she found useful; she was more interested in learning about what she, we, anyone could do better. It was as concise a definition of liberalism’s strengths—and central weaknesses—as she could have given them.

  Sara put a hand over her right eye, holding her head and shaking it at the same time. “I wonder how her opinion would change if someone near to her was martyred. Or raped!”

  Matt said he had heard such people believe in what they call “pragmatism,” which means, he explained, that you believe whatever happens to be useful at the moment.

  “But some things never change!” Sara said.

  “I know,” Matt agreed. “But they deny that.” He had learned about pragmatism, he added, in an education class; pragmatism, he’d been told, was infecting public schools. Matt hadn’t heard of John Dewey, the early twentieth-century reformer who’d introduced the philosophical school of pragmatism into American education in the form of an emphasis on critical thinking rather than memorization. But the ideas of Tim LaHaye, who writes that Dewey was part of a prideful conspiracy to undermine Truth, had infused his lessons at Multnomah Bible College.

  Sara wove her fingers together and twisted her hands backward and stretched them out in front of her, then arched her back and leaned forward, her shirt riding up her spine; Ben and Matt, red-faced, averted their eyes. “What Truth does,” Sara said, “is: Truth names things.” She rose up out of her stretch and pointed between Matt and Ben. “Truth puts a value on things. The culture tries to portray a Truth, like with women.” She didn’t like the pressure put on women to be thin and beautiful, she explained. Either you are or you aren’t, she felt, and the culture shouldn’t tell you differently. “That’s the culture trying to name us,” she said. “We want God to name us.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Ben. “Science”—it seemed to be his word for what Sara called “the culture”—“gives you at best fragmentary truth. It doesn’t try to unify things.”

  They concluded the small group with a scripture study, looking for evidence of Truth, and then everyone reassembled in the living room, where Adam asked each group to announce their results. He reminded everyone to stay centered on Jesus and scripture. “Don’t get too caught up in the huge concepts.”

  Truth did a lot of things, the groups had discovered: sets you free, protects you from lies, exposes deception, gives you a solid foundation. Truth’s solidity was key to Adam’s closing sermon. He sat in a chair in the corner and punctuated his remarks with both hands curled like commas and slicing downward.

  “The postmodern culture, they lay aside Truth. It can be hard to interact with them. They say, ‘I don’t care about the Bible; it’s just a book of words.’” Adam shook his head. “But I don’t want a shifty foundation. God gave us His Word! I am so thankful I have that, because it’s easy to get sucked in by the culture. We want a solid foundation. Christ is a solid foundation. I was looking at my Bible today. Christ says seventy-eight times, ‘I tell you the Truth.’ That is a lot of times. The culture then was similar to ours now; they were questioning the Truth.” Adam didn’t mean good questioning. “So Christ told them ‘I tell you the Truth.’ That’s awesome. He did that for them so they’d know he wasn’t just some guy. No way. He said, ‘I tell you the truth.’ I was getting stoked looking at that because I have a solid foundation. I’m protected. Unbelievers think there is no absolute Truth. They trust feelings and experience. The power of Truth is lost to them. But we don’t have to change our conception of Truth for the culture, because it’s absolute. Its power is absolute.”

  I thought of a book by Art Lindsley, a fundamentalist writer who would stop in at Ivanwald from time to time to teach the young men about “character” and politics. A slim volume called True Truth: Defending Absolute Truth in a Relativistic World was Lindsley’s most popular work among the brothers, who took its tautological butchery of language for a closed circuit of power and wisdom. This ultrarigid intellectualization of “Truth” is the doctrine that merges elite and populist fundamentalism. The elite fundamentalism of the Family preaches its unbending concept of “Truth” as a defense of privilege; populist fundamentalism embraces these philosophical underpinnings as a response to suffering. Many of the men and women in the Parents’ living room, in fact, were employed as social workers or nurses; several were former activists, some of them even once radical leftists. They were good-hearted folk. They wanted to help the poor, the sick, the weak, and on small, everyday levels, they did so more than most do; and yet nothing seemed
to get better. Their commitment to this stern Truth enabled them to let go of the feelings of powerlessness that often afflict those whose hearts are largest. Indeed, many of them had so let go of power that they’d lost their politics, too. Former liberals had stopped voting; conservatives trusted giant evangelical organizations to make the best use of their small donations, a form of “big government” by another name. Their Truth had proven itself relative, emboldening the powerful and tranquilizing the powerless.

  Adam continued. They all knew, he said, that a couple of weeks ago the mentor of Imago Dei’s pastor had been shot. The details didn’t matter; he had been shot. “Well, if you don’t believe in absolute Truth, what do you do with that? What’s your foundation?” True Truth makes such losses bearable. It absolves you of the need to ask more questions. True Truth is God’s will, Coe’s “social order.” It’s the power and solace of submission.

  We bowed our heads in prayer. We prayed for friends and relatives with cancer, just that they might know God, and that if God wanted to heal them that he would, but just, please God, let them know you. And we prayed for me, for my book, that it just be a good book, a True book, one by which I’d come to know what I had been created for.

  And—just—amen.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, I thought about Truth and the junkie, what she wanted and what she needed, and what a believer might have done. I couldn’t come up with answers, and I knew it wouldn’t help to ask Adam. Because even if there is a Truth, what we would have done in a given situation is always subjective. But I’m pretty sure Adam would have prayed for her salvation, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had taken her by the arm and guided her to a shelter. Nor would I have been shocked if he had given her a blessing and a sad, half-mouthed smile and sent her packing. In either case, what would be the Truth of the matter?

  I checked into my room, a tiny box with a window looking out on an air shaft and a skylight above the bed revealing the dark purple night. The room was stuffy, so I turned on its rotating table fan and lay on top of the covers. “Everything is connected,” Ben the doctor had told me at the house church. “Everything is Jesus. It’s like a web, and He’s at the center”—where otherwise you’d find a spider.

  2. SALVATION

  In 2007, as this book neared completion, I met with a former special assistant to President Bush the younger named David Kuo, in a quiet office he’d rented outside of Washington to write his memoirs. He’d published a book called Tempting Faith: The Inside Story of a Political Seduction, in which he recounts his own journey from liberalism to fundamentalism and, after a fashion, back again. Kuo is a tall, big-boned man with spiky black hair and a pleasantly padded face given to loose smiles. His demeanor is naive, but by his own account he can be calculating; yet he doesn’t seem to want to deceive.

  As a student at Tufts University in the 1980s, Kuo found the Family. Or rather, they found him. He was bright, political, and moving rightward, from a girlfriend’s abortion to antiabortion activism. A man named Kevin, who “worked with” student Christians on elite campuses, fed him books by conservative Christian writers and took him to go hear Chuck Colson speak. “I was dazzled,” writes Kuo. “If I followed Jesus, helped others follow Jesus, and did it all publicly, I’d be fighting back against the secularizing forces that were sweeping God into the corner.” Kuo has always been a service-minded soul. He wanted to help—as a young man, he didn’t think too much about what he wanted to help—and he wanted to do so on a grand scale.

  Before he graduated, Kevin gave him a “political gift”: an invitation to the National Prayer Breakfast, where he’d be one of “150 student leaders” initiated into “the mysterious—some thought secretive—group behind the prayer breakfast.” It was, he’d learn, “the most powerful group in Washington that nobody knows.” At a session with Doug Coe after the official event, he learned that “Jesus the man” is more important than politics, that faith must be individual, that Jesus chose certain individuals to whom to reveal greater secrets. “The three within the twelve,” Coe called them—Peter, James, and John, the three disciples who, according to Coe’s teaching, Jesus took aside for “glimpses of his power” and “special instruction.” That was a “model,” Coe taught, “of intimate relationships” followed by only a few very clever leaders. “[Coe] pointed to Hitler, to Stalin, to Mao, to Castro.” Evil men, said Coe, but wise. “Do you want to prove your worth?” Coe asked Kuo and the other students selected for special instruction. “Then pursue Jesus, pursue real relationships. Forget about power.”

  It was like the note Abram wrote to himself in 1935, his scribbled list of delegated authority for his new movement: To this man went responsibility for organization, to that one finances. And beside his own name, he’d written “power”—and then crossed himself out, erasing the evidence of his desire.

  Kuo began to rise in politics. An intern for Ted Kennedy in college, he became a Republican, working in the orbit of Family men such as Jack Kemp and John Ashcroft. He tried to strike out on his own—and failed. Coe took him up as a project. “Without my realizing it, the Fellowship”—as he prefers to call the Family—“began subverting my ideas of power, and, more specifically, of Christian power.” Coe took Kuo fishing in Montana, with Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. He introduced him to Billy Graham and Bill Bright of Campus Crusade, to Democrats and Republicans. Through the Family, he met former vice president Dan Quayle. In 1996, Quayle arranged for his conservative backers to support a nonprofit Kuo had created to evaluate groups doing “effective” poverty work and channel more money their way—an experience Kuo would draw on when the grand experiment in “faith-based initiatives” to which he’d been contributing went federal in 2001.

  In the first months of the new Bush administration, John DiIulio, the Democrat Bush had tapped to sell his faith-based program, called to invite Kuo to move into the West Wing. “Karen Hughes is on board, Karl Rove is on board,” he told Kuo. “When can you start?” Faith-Based and Community Initiatives merged DiIulio’s old-school urban politics, rooted in Catholic social justice teachings, with the ideas long championed by the Family. Its chief advocates in Congress during the late 1990s were two Family members, Senator Dan Coats of Indiana and Ashcroft, who as a senator from Missouri inserted the concept of “charitable choice”—allowing religious groups to win government funding without separating out their religious agenda—into the 1996 welfare-reform bill. The theory behind faith-based initiatives grew out of the work of scholars and theologians schooled in traditions that could hardly be considered fundamentalist, or even conservative. But its implementation was in many senses the logical result of the Family’s decades of ministry to Washington’s elite combined with the increasingly established power of populist fundamentalism: a mix of sophisticated policy maneuvers and the kind of sentimentalism that blinded many supporters to the fact that faith-based initiatives, no matter how well intended, are nothing less than “the privatization of welfare,” as the faith-based theorist Marvin Olasky put it in a 1996 report commissioned by then-Governor Bush. Such an outcome satisfied elite fundamentalism’s long-standing belief in the relationship between laissez-faire economics and God’s invisible, interventionist hand, and populist fundamentalism’s desire for public expressions of faith, preferably heartwarming ones. The goal, Senator Coats declared, was the “transfer of resources and authority…to those private and religious institutions that shape, direct, and reclaim individual lives.”1

  Coats, a bulb so dim he considers Dan Quayle a mentor, isn’t much of a thinker on his own, but he couldn’t have summed up Abram’s original Idea any more succinctly. The Family’s interests have always tended toward foreign affairs, but faith-based initiatives embody a core philosophy of governance fundamentalists have long sought on every front. During the 1980s, Attorney General Ed Meese and Gary Bauer, Reagan’s domestic policy adviser, corresponded with Coe about creating a federal, faith-based response to poverty—a broad application of the met
hods Coe had experimented with a decade earlier by backing the Black Buffers as an alternative to black power. Meese’s plans never came to fruition, but the outlines of compassionate conservatism, as Olasky would describe the trickle-down approach to helping the poor, began to cohere in those letters.

  What is the cause of poverty? they asked themselves. Their answer was simple: “disobedience,” according to a special report commissioned by the Family. At the right end of the Family spectrum, this was interpreted according to the logic of just deserts (Bauer, for instance, seemed to believe AIDS was a punishment from God) or plain denial (in 1983, Meese said he had a hard time believing there actually were any hungry children in the United States). But both those positions eroded as the Family’s international realpolitik asserted itself domestically: the poor existed, and they had to be helped. Or reconciled, in the Family’s words. The goal was not the eradication of poverty; it was the maintenance of a social order through the salvation of souls. That’s always been the main agenda of populist fundamentalism; now, elite fundamentalism began to embrace it as well.

  But that’s not what Kuo cared about when he went to work in the West Wing. Kuo’s religion was as infused with liberal Christianity as it was with the obedience-based theology of the Family. For that matter, faith-based initiatives are as liberal as they are fundamentalist, their privatization of social services an exercise of the unstated conviction of classical liberalism that the free market is absolute and yet requires government subsidy. They are to religion what Clinton-era “free trade” deals were to labor: a “rationalization” in the name of “efficiency.” Both turn on a contradiction: a belief in a universal principle—faith, free markets—put into practice by denying the importance of universal principles. “That we hoped everyone would one day know Jesus was simply a private goal,” writes Kuo, even as he insists that one’s “worldview” informs one’s every action.