C Street

by Jeff Sharlet

  Coe himself boasted of what the press couldn’t see, declaring that the single public event, the Prayer Breakfast, “is only one-tenth of one percent of the iceberg… [and] doesn’t give the true picture of what is going on.” Ronald Reagan almost dared someone to ask questions in 1985, announcing at the Prayer Breakfast that he wished he could say more about the sponsor of the elite gathering. “But it’s working precisely because it’s private.” By the age of Reagan, much of the press had come to see that as a virtue. “Members of the media know,” said Reagan, “but they have, with great understanding and dignity, generally kept it quiet. I’ve had my moments with the press, but I commend them this day, for the way they’ve worked to maintain the integrity of this movement.” Time, for instance, ran a feature on the “Bible Beltway,” rife with factual errors and seeming to almost celebrate “the semisecret involvement of so many high-powered names.” There was Secretary of State James Baker and his wife, Susan; the Kemps; the Quayles; and a Democrat, Don Bonker of Washington, since departed from Congress to become a free trade lobbyist. The presence of Democrats as well as Republicans, the magazine proposed, proved there could be no politics involved.

  The first serious report in decades came in 2002, when Lisa Getter, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times, published a major front-page exposé in which she revealed that the Family dispatched congressmen as missionaries to carry the Gospel to Muslim leaders around the world—and did so with a “vow of silence.” The media response was—well, there was no response. Several months later, the Associated Press reported on C Street’s subsidized housing for the anointed, describing the Family as “a secretive religious organization.” Nobody followed up on that story, either. That spring, I published in Harper’s magazine an account of a month I’d spent living with the Family in Virginia. I included a C Street vignette, a spiritual counseling session between Doug Coe and Rep. Todd Tiahrt, a Kansas Republican. Tiahrt came seeking wisdom on how Christians could win the population “race” with “the Muslim” and left contemplating Coe’s advice to consider Christ through the historical lens of Hitler, Lenin, and Osama bin Laden. Like the other stories before it, mine was left to stand alone, giggled over and gossiped about by media colleagues but treated as a true tale of the quirks of the political class that demanded no further investigation.

  Or, worse, it fell victim to the rule of reductio ad Hitlerum, the sensible Internet adage that holds that the first party in a debate to compare an opponent to Hitler loses. In 2004, a Democratic candidate for the northern Virginia congressional seat held by Republican Frank Wolf noted Wolf’s association with Coe. Coe’s Hitler talk wasn’t limited to the example of power I’d witnessed him offering Rep. Tiahrt at C Street, although it has to be said, immediately and emphatically, that Coe is not a neo-Nazi. He uses Hitler, his defenders declare, as a metaphor. For what? For Jesus. The lion and the lamb are too abstract for Coe. He asks his followers to imagine pure power, as modeled by Hitler and other totalitarians; then, he instructs, imagine that power used for Christ, for good instead of evil.

  When the Virginia Democratic candidate pointed to these unorthodox teachings, the Washington Post would have none of it, editorializing against this low blow and dispatching a reporter to prove it untrue for good measure. He did so by asking the aggrieved parties and their friends if the accusations were true; they assured him they were not. Case closed—until 2008, when NBC aired videotape given to me by an evangelical critic of the Family’s “spiritual abuse,” as he put it, depicting Coe rattling on to a group of evangelical leaders about the fellowship model offered by “Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler.” There was more: audio buried deep on the website of the Navigators, a fundamentalist ministry, of Coe going into greater detail on the depth of commitment he thought his disciples should learn from such men: “You say, hey, you know Jesus said, ‘You got to put him before mother-father-brother-sister’? Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that’s what they taught the kids. Mao even had the kids killing their own mother and father. But it wasn’t murder. It was for building the new nation. The new kingdom.”

  None of this, not even the NBC News video, broke the story beyond a few isolated blips in the news cycle. There was no conspiracy of silence. Rather, all of these reports were lost in the black hole of conventional wisdom. A scoop, for most reporters, isn’t actually a new story; it’s a twist or a new variation on a story people already think they understand, a story that reassures the reader that his or her cynicism is justified and yet contained within the known realm of vice: stuffed in an envelope next to a wad of Ben Franklins or tucked into bed beside a stripper. The parameters for stories about religion in politics are even narrower: fundamentalism sells, but only if it’s low-class, the purview of sweaty Southern men in too-tight suits pounding pulpits and thumping Bibles. C Street—a distinguished address, an upscale clientele, an internationalist perspective—simply did not register.

  Until, that is, sex entered the story. Suddenly, the media that had ignored C Street for years needed to know all about it. Or, rather, not all about it, not its implications for democracy and desire; interest was limited to the topic of hypocrisy, publicly pious Republicans, and their secret lovers. Ensign’s affair was at that early stage still mostly limited to his two-minute press conference and a few grubby, isolated details: that his best friend’s wife was the best friend of Ensign’s wife, for instance. Mark Sanford, on the other hand, offered both sex and schadenfreude, an exotic mistress and love letters exposed, a wife, Jenny Sanford, who refused to stand by her man, and a man who refused to stop talking about his lover. And then there was C Street, the mysterious address linked to both scandals.

  I was the only reporter to have written from within its walls, and suddenly that mattered in a way it hadn’t before, when I’d been bleating on about the Family’s support for murderous regimes in Haiti and Indonesia and Somalia, machete militias and “kill lists” and rape rooms, all blessed by the Family’s faith and financed by its “leaders led by God” in Washington. Boring! Or, as one young radio producer put it, “What’s a Somalia?”

  But consensual sex between adults? That could be news. Only by dispensing with the dead, though—“Let’s save Somalia for another time!” another producer suggested brightly—and kicking the heartbroken while they were down. That’s what Sanford was. The man had fallen in love, and everybody has done stupid things for love, and most of us, at one point or another, have done something awful. That’s not really news, it’s an Aesop’s fable. Evangelicals ritualize this truth with the declaration that we’re all sinners; secular folk speak of psychology’s contradictions. But such recognitions are reserved for private lives, and Mark Sanford’s self-destruction was public spectacle, served up for our satisfaction.

  Shortly after the governor’s press conference, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow invited me on her evening show. I’d spoken to Maddow several times during her radio days, and I knew she was one of the smartest hosts in broadcast journalism. But I was conflicted about discussing Sanford. Sanford was done. The question that remained was, Do we gloat over his hypocrisy? Or do we welcome him into the human race—where the heart wants what it wants and that’s not always a simple or good thing, even when it’s a true thing?

  I don’t think I would have been able to do that in a five-minute television interview, which is why I thank God for the sad intervention of Michael Jackson. I imagine Mark Sanford said much the same thing on June 25, the day the Sanford scandal started to crest, and also the day Michael Jackson died. Suddenly, one southern governor’s affair was very small news.

  I was buying a new pair of shoes when I heard. When I’d received the invitation to be on the Maddow show, I was wearing flip-flops. That seemed too casual for a TV studio, and besides, I needed a new pair of shoes. I tried Shoe Mania, in Manhattan’s Union Square. The store was abuzz: He’s dead! Who? Michael Jackson! Michael Jackson is dead. I was stunned. In my grief, I bought a pair of shoes Michael might have liked, long, poli
shed, and pointy, flashier than any I’d ever owned.

  I walked out onto Broadway, where drivers had opened their windows and jacked up their radios, “Rock with You” mingling with the honk and roar of the city at rush hour. Some people didn’t hear it, some didn’t care, but sprinkled up and down the avenue there was immediate mourning. I saw an old woman crying and three middle-aged white men with beer guts goofing the moonwalk and girls who hadn’t been born yet in the days of “Billie Jean” gliding backward up Broadway, smooth as Michael’s falsetto. Here was another spectacle of self-destruction, but the public responded not with vicious glee, as to a sex scandal, as to so many of Jackson’s failings in the past, but with necessary delight; with the remembrance of transcendence; with the late recognition of something that had been lost long before. Over the radio and in the faltering and fluid dance steps of the mourners thumped the beat of pop democracy, Walt Whitman you could dance to, songs that mattered more to how we all imagined and dreamed ourselves than any of Michael’s scandals—much less those of a couple of Republican politicians bent on disowning their own desires. So why the hell was I going on TV to count the sins of the love-struck governor of South Carolina?

  I wasn’t. I was barely a block away from the shoe store when a call came from MSNBC. I’d been bumped. “Thank you, Michael Jackson,” I thought. The King of Pop had saved my soul, prevented me from playing the part of a puritan, scolding Sanford for his confession when his real weakness was not his transgression—seedy, selfish, and human—but his retreat. He’d set out on the road to Damascus but had turned back too early. Instead of becoming an apostle of a love as free as his economic libertarianism, he’d fallen back on “God’s law.” And that was defined for him by C Street not as liberation but as the sort of freedom that isn’t free, that which protects us from ourselves, “this notion,” as he put it, “of what it is that I want.”

  Unless, that is, what we want is power.

  And then, King David drew me back to the story. Two days after Sanford’s public tears, he seemed back in control of himself. Opening a televised cabinet meeting, he spoke calmly of scripture, as if he were Cubby Culbertson himself, leading a spiritual counseling session. The topic was resignation: Sanford’s rejection of his own party’s calls for him to do so. As a congressman, he’d called on Bill Clinton to resign after the exposure of his affair. But there was a difference. Clinton was just a president. Mark Sanford, he explained to his cabinet, was like a king. King David, in particular. “What I find interesting is the story of David,” he said, all waver and dodge gone from his voice, his tone that of a teacher, not a penitent.

  “What I find interesting”—it’s an evangelical men’s movement phrase, it is interesting to note, what I find interesting, the almost casual, seemingly humble approach to a major claim based on a bit of scripture isolated from its text and put to work as a maxim, a law for leaders, an ancient justification for present-day authority. What Sanford found interesting about David was this: “The way in which he fell mightily, he fell in very significant ways.”

  The governor was speaking of the second book of Samuel, chapter 11. King David, God’s chosen leader, is in Jerusalem while his armies are at war, conquering and destroying. All is well; but “all” is not enough for David. One night he wakes in the dark, restless, and goes up to the roof. From his high perch he looks down rather than up, toward the world rather than God, and spies a woman bathing. Lovely. The king snaps his fingers and off his servants go, and when they return they’ve brought with them the woman David desires, still wet from her bath. Her name is Bathsheba, and David rapes her or perhaps seduces her, offering the prospect of sex with the king in lieu of the loneliness she must feel for her husband, gone fighting the king’s wars. And she becomes pregnant.

  So David tries to cover it up. He summons Bathsheba’s husband, a brave soldier named Uriah, back from the front. Take a break, David tells him, go home, see your wife—sleep with her, that is, so you’ll think the child is yours. Uriah refuses to enjoy himself while his comrades are at war. All right, says David, but wait here another night. The next morning, David sends a message to the soldier’s commander: “Set Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retreat from him, that he may be struck down and die.”

  It works. Uriah, the memory of his good king and his good wife fresh in his mind, presses hard against the enemy, driving them back toward their city until Uriah stands with his sword at the gate, the enemy broken, Uriah and his men strong. Only, there are no men. They’ve fallen back. Then, an enemy archer rises from the walls and puts an arrow in Uriah’s heart.

  So David wins his widow. There are consequences—God kills their first child, the one conceived in sin—but their second baby, the one born of marriage, thrives; they name him Solomon.

  Yes, says Sanford, David “fell in very, very significant ways. But then picked up the pieces and built from there.” The key, Sanford declared, is humility. And he could do humility. He did some right there, apologizing to his cabinet, making clear he wasn’t going to resign. Like David, he had a calling. He was chosen. God had put him in office, and God would take him out; until then, Mark Sanford would remain governor of South Carolina.

  This logic forms one of the foundations of C Street: the alchemy by which men elected by citizens persuade themselves that they were, in fact, selected by God. That sounds impossibly arrogant but it is, as Sanford said, a kind of humility. The chosen politician does not take credit for his success, he does not suppose that it was his virtue that led the people to elect him. He is just another sinner. But God wants to use him, as He used David. “God appoints specific leaders to fulfill a mission; He doesn’t hold a popular vote,” writes John C. Maxwell, a management guru on C Street’s Prayer Breakfast circuit, in a Bible study titled Leadership: Deliberate Selection vs. Democratic Election.

  The other side of such humility is the abdication of responsibility. One chosen for leadership isn’t accountable for his own actions. That’s not what the rabbis teach when they speak of King David, of course, nor is it the real meaning of Calvinism’s doctrine of God’s elect. It’s American fundamentalism, a response to what one Family leader once lamented as the “substitution of democracy for religion.” The bastardization of the King David story reverses the process, replacing democracy with religion. Mark Sanford used that reversal to justify his own power in defiance of the minor sin of adultery. If David got a pass for murder, so, too, should Sanford be excused the contemplation of a beautiful woman’s “tan lines,” on which he’d rhapsodize in the love letters soon made public.

  That calculation seems reasonable enough, if self-serving, until one considers the implications. David Coe, for instance, son of Doug Coe, heir apparent to the leadership of the Family, and Sen. Ensign’s C Street moral counselor, puts the application of the King David story in starker terms. The first time I ever heard King David invoked within the Family, in fact, was when David Coe visited the men with whom I was living at Ivanwald, a house I describe in The Family. They were a group of young future leadership prospects, and David Coe had come to do some spiritual training. Like his father, David Coe is tall, dark, lanky, and slow-moving, so calmly charismatic one forgets he is teaching; Coe lessons seem like gentle musings. That day, David Coe mused on King David, who “liked to do really, really bad things.” Why, then, should we revere him?

  The men were stumped. Maybe because I was raised around Judaism, a half-Jew who once celebrated Passover and Easter, I knew the answer. “Because he was chosen,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Coe. “Chosen. Interesting set of rules, isn’t it?” Then he turned to another man. “Beau, let’s say I hear you raped three little girls. And now here you are at Ivanwald. What would I think of you, Beau?”

  Beau, a good-natured jock who loved wrestling, dancing, and long walks in the woods, supposed that Coe wouldn’t think well of him at all. But that wasn’t so, Coe answered. Beau, he explained, was one of God’s tools; that’s what it mea
ns to be chosen. The normal rules don’t apply. Morality—a human construct—doesn’t even apply. “Moral orders,” he said, “that’s for kids. God’s will is beyond morals.” It wasn’t that Coe thought Beau should rape three little girls, or that he wouldn’t be horrified if Beau did; but such crimes would be beside the point. “We simply obey,” Coe said. Genghis Khan, Coe suggested, provided a good example. According to Coe, Genghis Khan had conquered not for greed but because God told him to. When some monks asked him what justified his bloody conquests, Genghis answered, “I don’t ask. I submit.” Coe applied this logic to contemporary politics: “We elect our leaders,” he said, “Jesus elects his.”