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

by Jeff Sharlet

  That’s why supporters of faith-based governance can’t comprehend the critics who accuse them of theocratic inclinations. They think they’re going in just the opposite direction, secularizing salvation, reconciling theology into law. Theocracy is a collective endeavor, they point out; American fundamentalism reveres the individual. So, too, the mystic liberalism of free markets, more similar to fundamentalism in function than secularists believe. Classical liberalism fetishizes the rational actor; fundamentalism savors the individual soul. Both deny possessing any ideology; both inevitably become vehicles for the kind of power that possesses and consumes the best intentions of true believers.

  When Kuo discovered that Bush’s faith-based rhetoric was for the most part just that—lost in the shadow of the Iraq War, the program never received anywhere near the $8 billion Bush had once spoken of—he resolved to prove its value to the money men. Tempting Faith is, most damningly, the story of how he and a few others transformed the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives into the very Republican vote-getting machine its critics had accused it of being from the beginning. “We laid out a plan whereby we would hold ‘roundtable events’ for threatened incumbents with faith and community leaders,” he writes. In 2002, those roundtables contributed to nineteen out of twenty victories in targeted races. In 2004, the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives repeated the trick on the presidential scale. But by that time, Kuo was gone. He had quit. “We were good people forced to run a sad charade, to provide political cover to a White House that needed compassion and religion as political tools.”

  It was a startlingly honest admission. The media celebrated Kuo as a truth teller and his book as the first big crack in the Christian Right’s alliance with the Republican Party. By 2007, the press was declaring the Christian Right dead and evangelicalism a waning force in American life, despite the fact that by Kuo’s own confession, the machine he helped build will likely continue to lurch along after Bush is gone. Bush never provided it the funds he had promised in idealistic speeches aimed at evangelical voters, but he did something more significant: through administrative changes made by executive order, he transformed Clinton’s 1996 welfare reforms into a wedge with which to drive irreparable cracks into the wall of separation between church and state. Suddenly, there were faith-based offices not just in the Department of Health and Human Services but also in the Department of Justice, not only in the Department of Education but also in the Department of Commerce. The Small Business Administration gained a faith-based office; so, too, did the Agency for International Development, through which the United States distributes its imperial largesse, the diplomacy of foreign aid. None of these offices had much money, but then, they didn’t need to. Their budgets didn’t matter so much as the budgets of the departments and agencies in which they were housed, huge portions of which could now be tapped for faith-based ends even if the money didn’t flow directly through the faith-based office. The real achievement of faith-based initiatives was not to launch flashy programs or even to buy votes for Republicans; it was to open the door for religious groups to the whole treasure house of federal social-services funding, tens of billions of dollars.

  But that, too, was only a means to an end: Abram’s Idea written into the DNA of the government of a world power, Chuck Colson’s “worldview” fused with constitutional tradition. The dream, hardening now not into politics but the very structures in which politics happen, is the sanctification and privatization of power as one and the same process, proclaimed as “service” by the powerful and accepted as God’s will by the powerless.

  This is no more nor less than a theological restatement of globalization—a transfer of wealth and power embraced by most Democrats as well as Republicans as a natural “fact,” as if divinely ordained. The difference between the two parties, economically, theologically, is one of degrees, not principles. “The United States is also a one-party state,” Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, once observed in defending his own one-party system. “But with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.” That was a truth Abram grasped seven decades ago. The first law of the Family’s elite fundamentalism is that power does not require partisanship. “True Truth,” transcending traditional left and right, is a doctrine of obedience, not a bill of particulars.

  Bush’s mistake—the misapplication of power that cost him the loyalty of men such as Kuo and even John Ashcroft, who emerged as a late critic of the administration—was to bend the “True Truth” of American fundamentalism to the needs of the electoral cycle. The slow convergence of the elite and populist fundamentalism separated at the Scopes trial in 1925 doesn’t promise the permanent victory of a political party but of a social order, served with greater or lesser devotion by Republicans and Democrats bound together in prayer cells.

  After Kuo and I had been talking for several hours, I mentioned that I’d written about the Family for Harper’s. Kuo seemed surprised. “I think I remember your article,” he said. He tapped a couple of his keys on his computer. Not a Google search; a couple of keys. “This is how they pray,” he began reading, and then shot me a goofy grin. Was I supposed to think he’d had the story on his screen before I arrived? “You should call Doug Coe,” he said, and gave me a number. (I did, as I had before; no response.) Coe, he said, had entered semiretirement. Stepping up to replace him was a man named Dick Foth, a longtime adviser to John Ashcroft. I’d listened to a recorded sermon by Foth; it’d struck me as unremarkable stuff, platitudes and tautologies. Kuo wasn’t offended. This, he said, is proof that the Family is not political. Politics are specific, Kuo said; the Family’s faith is universal.

  In a sense, this was true. The cell structure that defined Abram’s movement in 1935 has since become the model for populist fundamentalism and more, one of the common denominators of evangelicalism. Both elite and populist cells look upward, their concept of faith drawn along the vertical axis. Elected elites look up to their greatest constituent, God; the people who elect them pray that their leaders listen to God. Both call this gaze “love,” and in exchange both demand “salvation.”

  The popular front promises the salvation of individuals, a chance to buy into “purpose,” “meaning,” a movement: to feel like a part of the big picture. Elite fundamentalism pursues the literal salvation of that big picture: the preservation of power, even as those who serve it change churches, or parties, or particular political whims. Power is what remains. The popular front rises and falls in an ebb and tide of “revivals,” spontaneous and cultivated, each, so far, stronger than the last, each surging just as secularism says that this time that bad old religion, the superstitious kind, the political kind, the powerful kind, is a thing of the past. The key men endure. Indeed, they prosper.

  3. DELIVERANCE

  The numbing authority of American fundamentalism resides in its language, “love” as an expression of obedience, “just” as a disclaimer for desire, “Jesus plus nothing” as a description not of a brilliant divine but of blunt authority. Such banalities do not disguise evil, as Hannah Arendt argued in her famous study of traditional fascism, but rather subvert what is essentially generous about fundamentalism, its dream of a community in which every member is free to approach the divine as he or she feels guided, its desire for a city upon a hill in which hunger and regret are unknown. At their roots, evangelicalism and its child, American fundamentalism—both driven by the democratic feeling of individual belief toward faith in authority—arise in response to the central dilemma of nearly all religion: suffering, from that of Abigail Hutchinson to that of lonesome immigrant Abram to that, even, of Ted Haggard. Fundamentalism wants to ease the pain, to banish fear, forget loneliness; to erase desire. Populist fundamentalism does so by offering certainty, a fixed story about the relationship between this world and the world to come; elite fundamentalism, certain in its entitlement, responds in this world with a politics of noblesse oblige, the missionary impulse married to military and economic power. The result is emp
ire. Not the old imperialism of Rome or the Ottomans or the British navy, that of a central power forcing weaker groups to pay tribute. Rather, the soft empire of America that across the span of the twentieth century recruited fundamentalism to its cause even as it seduced liberalism to its service “presents itself,” in the useful formulation of the political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity.”2

  Eternity! There’s a word that the subjects of this book understand better than Hardt and Negri and the entire establishment of political theorists, political scientists, policy wonks, and newspaper editorial boards. Eternity, says fundamentalism, is the only real response to the basic fact of suffering, the constant of human existence that compels us to seek knowledge, or understanding, or faith, or grace. Fundamentalism frames that response as a story with a neat beginning, middle, and, most of all, an end that can be known. The better story we—believers and unbelievers alike, all of us who love our neighbors more than we love power or empire or even the solace of certainty—must tell is not simply a different answer, secular myths opposed to fundamentalism’s, but a question. Maybe it’s about that city upon a hill. Maybe it’s about how we get there, and what we must walk away from. Such a question isn’t to be found in revelation, but in exodus, the act of stepping into the unknown. I suspect it has something to do with the difference between salvation, as imagined by fundamentalism, and deliverance. Salvation ends in heaven; deliverance begins in the desert. Salvation is the last word of a story; deliverance is the first. Salvation is the certainty of empire; deliverance is the hope of democracy. It’s not humble, because hope isn’t humble, it’s impertinent. It’s a question, always another question, always leaving Egypt behind.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is the product of many years, during which I have been the beneficiary of the efforts and generosity of many friends and colleagues. First among them is my editor at Harper’s, Bill Wasik, without whose early encouragement this book would not exist. I’m grateful, too, for the insights of several other magazine editors who helped me develop my ideas, sharpen my prose, and get my facts straight along the way, including but not limited to: Ben Austen, Naomi Kirsten, Lewis Lapham, Miriam Markowitz, and Ben Metcalf at Harper’s; Will Dana, Sean Woods, Eric Bates, Eric Magnuson, and Coco MacPherson at Rolling Stone; Bob Moser at The Nation; and Monika Bauerlein at Mother Jones. Claire Wachtel at HarperCollins saw the whole thing through with patience, wit, and wisdom. Her assistant, Julia Novitch, shepherded it along with care, for which I’m grateful. Vicki Haire saved me from capitalizing heaven. Special thanks to Kathy Anderson, who helped me understand what this book should be, found the right publisher, and made sure I actually finished it. Giulia Melucci, vice president of public relations at Harper’s, advised me on launching it.

  My most critical and trustworthy readers were Julie Rabig, Robert Sharlet, JoAnn Wypijewski, Kathryn Joyce, and Peter Manseau. Thank you.

  Kim Nauer and Joe Conason at The Nation Institute provided support, as did the incomparable MacDowell Colony, at which several of these chapters were written and revised during three visits. I’m especially grateful for MacDowell’s Michelle Aldredge, without whose account of her secondary education this book would not have its thirteenth chapter. Hampshire College, a strange and wonderful school unlike any other, is present in everything I write. I’m also grateful to the KGB Bar, which has given me a forum to test out much of this book piece by piece. The results are incalculably better than they would have been otherwise for the influence of New York University’s Center for Religion and Media, where I have been an associate research scholar for the last four years—which is to say, a sponge soaking up the ideas and insights of some very smart people. I am particularly indebted to Angela Zito, Faye Ginsburg, Barbara Abrash, Adam H. Becker, and Omri Elisha. Scholars at other institutions to whom I’m indebted include Diane Winston, Michael Janson, Kenneth Osgood, Ron Enroth, and Jamie K. A. Smith.

  I’m likewise indebted to a number of journalists and researchers who shared their knowledge of Christian conservatism with me, including Chip Berlet, Max Blumenthal, Frederick Clarkson, Doug Ireland, Scott McLemee, Suzanne Pharr, Michael Reynolds, and Bruce Wilson.

  Several former members, associates, and neighbors of the Family, as well as a few current ones, spoke with me. Many of them preferred to remain on background; among those I’m able to thank publicly are Cliff Gosney, Ben Daniel, Carl von Bernewitz, Steve Bauer, Mary McCutcheon, and David Kuo. I’m also very grateful to the hundreds of evangelical conservatives and other Christians who’ve agreed to speak with me about their faith and their politics over the years, especially Matt Dunbar and Lisa Anderson. Several evangelical journalists have kept talking to me even when my work infuriated them, and it’s the better for those conversations. Among them are Bob Smietana, Patton Dodd, Ted Olsen, and Tony Carnes.

  Then there are the friends, family, and fellow travelers who provided the kind of crucial support—responding to chapters on short notice, providing me with housing, sharing ideas—without which the book would have fizzled. Which is to say, for better or worse, the accomplices. I’ve been working on this book for a long time, which means there are more than I can list, but among those who spent time on the front lines of this book’s production were Gretchen Aguiar, Jeff Allred, Laura Brahm, Fiona Burde, Colleen Clancy, Stellar Kim, Michael Lesy, Victoria McKernan, Paul Morris, David Rabig, Don Rabig, Jude Rabig, Irina Reyn, Gwen Seznec, Jocelyn Sharlet, Darcey Steinke, Baki Tezcan, and Tom Windish. And the researchers: Martha Lincoln, Sherally Munshi, Meera Subramanian, Jaime Pensado, and Seonaid Valiant.

  Most of all, Julie Rabig, wise as serpents and innocent as doves, and also as funny as a sea otter, brave as a buffalo, and more beautiful than a great blue heron. Thank you for enduring, provoking, and inspiring.

  NOTES

  THE AVANT-GARDE OF AMERICAN FUNDAMENTALISM

  1. I was loaned a copy of “Thoughts on a Core Group” in 2002 by one of the men with whom I lived at Ivanwald. I cited this document in an article titled “Jesus Plus Nothing” in the March 2003 Harper’s, the fact checkers of which gave Ivanwald full opportunity to respond. They have never publicly contested the document. You can now find a similar text on the Web site of a conservative evangelical named Glenn Murray. Murray has added some and subtracted some, including this peculiar reference, but he leaves the spirit intact: “The mafia,” his “Thoughts” read, “operates like this,” and so too should the community of believers. Accessed 2006 at http://www.glennmurray.nccn.net/thoughts_on_a_core_group.htm. The very ideological promiscuity of the document—Hitler, Lenin, and the mafia—proves that it is the principle of organization admired, not the essence of Hitler’s or Lenin’s beliefs. Cold comfort.

  2. Nancy T. Ammerman, “A Brief Introduction and Definition,” in Martin E. Marty and Scott Appleby, Fundamentalisms Observed (University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 2. This is one volume in the University of Chicago Press’s comprehensive five-volume “Fundamentalism Project,” in many ways the first and last word on fundamentalism. George M. Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 1980), updated in a new edition in 2006, is another authoritative text on Christian fundamentalism as a specific idea and movement in American history. “A fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something,” Marsden simplified his definition in a follow-up collection of essays, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (William B. Eerdmans, 1991), a pithy summation from a scholar sympathetic to evangelicalism. It suffices so long as we remember that anger takes many forms, and that the “something” a fundamentalist is opposed to is not, in his or her mind at least, necessarily modernity, but sin, whether defined as sex outside of marriage or the disobedience to God many fundamentalists believe is implicit in managed economies.
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  1. IVANWALD

  1. In this chapter, I use the full names of men who held leadership positions at Ivanwald. Such men are activists, and some, such as Gannon Sims, built on their Ivanwald experiences to develop careers in government. (Gannon became a spokesman for the Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Human Trafficking.) Men who were not in leadership or government positions I identify only by their first names. “Zeke” is a pseudonym for a man who I fear might face repercussions for his role in introducing me to the Family. In the years since then, several former members have contacted me with accounts of ostracization and even retaliation for various actions, and while I’ve no way of confirming these stories, there’s no need to unduly expose Zeke to the possibility of similar responses.

  2. A note on notes: In this chapter and throughout The Family, I use endnotes to identify archival sources and to provide sources for historical events that may not be well known. Chapters 4–9, which depend largely on historical research, are extensively endnoted, but where I rely on personal experience (chapters 1, 9, 14) or directly reference interviews (chapters 10–14), or on publicly available sources identified within the text (chapters 12–14), I generally refrain from notes. As for this account of Ivanwald: like several of the brothers, I openly kept a journal. When writing about a conversation that had occurred earlier, I often asked individual brothers for their recollections. This was not “undercover.” Although I had no inkling of a book about the Family or fundamentalism at the time, I told the brothers I was a writer, the publications I’d written for, and that I was working on a book about unusual religious communities (Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, with Peter Manseau [Free Press, 2004]). A few documentary notes in chapters 4–10 identify the only general collection in which the relevant documents can be found. I made my first, brief archival research trip in late 2002, after I had decided to write about Ivanwald but before I had even imagined this book. Since magazine fact checkers are more interested in actual evidence than my assurances that memo x can be found in folder y in an archive, I made Xerox copies instead of notes for future researchers. When I returned to the main archive of the Family at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College with a book in mind, I made note of appropriate filing numbers. In total I or my research assistants reviewed well over 60,000 pages of primary-source documents, and made copies of around 5,000 pages; I lack folder numbers for a very few pages, and those I have copies of.