by Jeff Sharlet
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The first of these leaders, for the Family, was Arthur B. Langlie, who was elected mayor of Seattle in 1938. Three years earlier, on a night in April, God had come to the founder of the Family, a Norwegian immigrant named Abraham Vereide. Christianity, God told Abram, as Vereide was known, had been getting it wrong for nearly two thousand years, devoting itself to the poor, the weak, the down-and-out. God told Abram that night that Abram’s calling would be the “up and out,” not life’s “derelicts, its failures,” as a friend wrote in a hagiography of Abram, Modern Viking. Rather, it should serve “those even more in need, who live dangerously in high places.” Abram immediately set to work organizing a committee of nineteen wealthy businessmen to break the spine of organized labor—Satan’s legions—in Seattle. Arthur Langlie, a thirty-five-year-old teetotaling lawyer, was their hammer. “It can be done,” he said, at one of Abram’s early prayer meetings. “I am ready to let God use me.”
God—plus the financial backing of that early cadre, a network of church workers organized by Abram, and a sieg-heiling, uniformed fraternity called the New Order of Cincinnatus—used Langlie, indeed, installing him in a city council seat vacated in fear of Langlie’s New Order men. From there he moved first to the mayor’s office—over the combined opposition of Democrats and Republicans who accused him of fascism—and then, in 1940, to the governor’s mansion, where he set about instituting God’s will as he’d learned it from Abram. It wasn’t about church or vice or soft concerns about pious women: it was about capitalism—and the invisible hand of the market with which Langlie purged the welfare rolls and ground the unions into corruption or contrition. The defining moment of Abram’s early ministry, one to which he’d return again and again over the decades, featured a labor leader named “Jimmy”—Abram rarely remembered union men’s last names—giving his teary testimony to a gathering of seventy-five God-led businessmen, apologizing for his rebelliousness in the past and pledging himself to Abram’s program, the result of which would be “no need for a labor union.” One of the businessmen clapped a hand on the humbled union man’s shoulder. “Jimmy,” he said, in words Abram would always remember, “on this basis we go on together.”
On that basis, Abram took his program—the Idea, he called it—first national and then international. By 1942 he’d organized businessmen’s committees in dozens of cities, and relocated himself first to the other Washington, the capital. In the midst of a January snowstorm, he assembled his first meeting of congressmen to hear the Christian testimony of Howard Coonley, the ultraright president of the National Association of Manufacturers. Coonley saw a third front for the war, after Europe and Asia, right there in Washington, against Franklin Roosevelt’s socialism and the death of a Christian nation in which God’s chosen vessels—the Up and Outers—were free to produce wealth for all to enjoy by way of trickle-down religion. The Up and Outers won their first battle the next year with the passage of the Smith-Connally Act, the beginning of the New Deal’s repeal. “It is the age of minority control,” prophesied Abram; democracy, he believed, had died back in 1935, no match for communism or fascism. He proposed instead what he called then—and what C Streeters call now—“the Better Way,” Up and Outers, guided by God, making the hard decisions behind closed doors.
By war’s end those doors belonged to a four-story mansion on Embassy Row in Washington, purchased with the help of a beautiful socialite widow, Marian Aymar Johnson. Abram called this prototype for C Street a “Christian Embassy,” headquarters for the movement he’d by then incorporated as International Christian Leadership (ICL). And international it was: in 1946, Abram undertook his first overseas mission with a mandate from the State Department to examine Nazi prisoners for conversion potential. He found more than a few willing to switch out the führer for the American father-god, men such as Hermann Abs, a leader of ICL’s German division and the wizard of the West German miracle—until, decades later, he was discovered by Jewish Nazi hunters to have been “Hitler’s leading banker.” But Abs was an innocent compared to many of the men Abram recruited, men from whom he learned not fascism—a European disease, to which American fundamentalism even at its most authoritarian has always been immune—but the power of forgetting. The blank slate, the sins of the powerful wiped clean—that was an idea, Abram realized, that would flourish in cold war America.
Abram had grasped the cold war before most, declaring at World War II’s end the immediate commencement of World War III. In 1955, Sen. Frank Carlson, with whom Abram had launched the annual ritual that would become the National Prayer Breakfast in 1953 by calling in favors from a reluctant Eisenhower, coined the phrase that would serve as the movement’s motto: Worldwide Spiritual Offensive. In 1959, Sen. Carlson took the fight to Haiti, where he decreed François “Papa Doc” Duvalier God’s man for the island nation and thus worthy of U.S. support, the guns and butter that kept Papa Doc—one of the most lunatic killers of the Western Hemisphere—and then his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc,” in business for decades. What was in it for ICL? Help the weak by helping the strong. They helped Papa Doc and Papa Doc helped the businessmen who traveled to Haiti with Carlson, and the businessmen helped Carlson and the Republican Party: help all around that somehow never trickled down to the Haitian people. In 1966, ICL moved on to Indonesia, where General Suharto had come to power through what the CIA would later call “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century.” Abram called the coup a “spiritual revolution,” and began sending delegations of congressmen and oil executives who became champions of the genocidal regime. Help the weak by helping the strong: Suharto, ICLers believed, helped the weak of Indonesia resist the temptations of communism, by any means necessary.
Abram’s lanky young new lieutenant, Doug Coe, brought a new spirit to the organization. Abram had frowned on publicity as low-class, the currency of the masses, and Coe embraced secrecy as an expression of his religion, a mystic commitment to quiet authority expressed not through a central organization but a proliferation of “cells,” as the movement called the building blocks of their power. Each unit “should work behind the scenes,” Coe wrote. “It should have no stationery, no publicity.” Budgets should be off the books, the official sums nothing more than seed money. “It is important to note what God is doing in terms of finances that is not visible to the casual observer.” Each cell, each front, might incorporate separately, Coe wrote, but “in all cases the concept remains the same.”
What was the concept? “Men who are picked by God!” Not the many, but the few. Under Coe’s guidance, Family politicians embraced the idea that God prefers the services of a dedicated elite to the devotion of the masses. “I have had a great and thrilling experience reading the condensed version of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” one of Coe’s lieutenants wrote him after Coe had given him a reading list for “the Work,” as their mission was often called. “Doug, what a lesson in vision and perspective! Nazism started with seven guys around a table in the back of an old German Beer Hall. The world has been shaped so drastically by a few men who really want it such and so. How we need this same kind of stuff as a Hitler or a Lenin.” That is, for Jesus, of course.
In 1964, Abram, his leadership dwindling, contributed to the movement a distillation of his Up and Out theology. “The Fellowship”—so ICL had come to be called—“recognizes that no one cometh into the Father and into the family relationship except by Him.” That’s a paraphrase of Matthew 11:27, the same verse I’d hear former attorney general Ed Meese open a Family prayer meeting with nearly four decades later. “The strength of the wolf is the pack,” Abram continued, “but the strength of the pack is the wolf.”
Once I asked a young Family leader about the dictators and thugs and white-collar criminals it seems to specialize in. “I don’t worry whether some of them are wolves,” he said, “because I’d rather let a wolf in than keep any sheep out.” I pointed out that there are no sheep in the Family, since the organization was only
interested in leaders. “Yeah,” he agreed, “but don’t the wolves need Jesus most of all?”
As Coe’s authority grew, so did the Fellowship’s reach around the globe, with cells in the governments of seventy nations by the late 1960s, more than double that of just a few years earlier. The Catholic generals and colonels who rotated coup by coup through the leadership of Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador, and other Latin American countries consented to the Protestant ministrations of the Fellowship in return for access to American congressmen. Indonesia’s Suharto, ostensibly a Muslim, declared of his Christian prayers in the presence of American oilmen, “In this way we convert ourselves, nobody converts us!” Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie, who believed he was himself God, gladly became a financial backer of the Fellowship in return for the flow of American foreign aid facilitated by its members. It was a pray-to-be-paid scheme, by savvy foreign leaders who could flatter the moral imaginations of American politicians in exchange for military dollars. Sometimes the Family made possible a relationship that might not otherwise have occurred, but mostly it cloaked realpolitik in religion, allowing its politician members to imagine they were doing God’s work as they funneled guns and cash and power to dictators such as Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Spain, General Park Chung-hee in South Korea, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.
“Leaders,” an early ICL man had written, “cannot afford misinterpretation in the public’s eyes.” In 1966, Coe took steps to ensure such misinterpretation would not be possible, urging the board of directors toward a reorganization that would, in effect, hide the organization. “Though the background organization would remain the same,” went the proposal, “yet to be more effective for the aims peculiar to the movement, its administrative operations must be moved underground.” Members should not call themselves members; if they were to identify themselves at all, it should only be as “working with” the Prayer Breakfast, never for an organization. “I work with the Prayer Breakfast folks,” Sen. Sam Brownback, whose career has been shaped by the Family from college forward, told me, Coe’s lingo precisely intact years after its concoction. At the time, Coe offered examples of men doing effective work for the movement without publicizing their connection, among them Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, the admiral in command of the Seventh Fleet, and the general in charge of the Canal Zone. “The purpose of the changes set forth,” Coe wrote, “is to submerge the institutional image of ICL.”
The C Street House would become part of that plan. Coe scrapped the name International Christian Leadership and divided its finances between several smaller offshoots, some off-the-books accounting—most of his income would be provided by gifts from supporters—and the Fellowship Foundation, its name chosen to cloak the movement’s religious intentions. But even that was too plainly evidence of an institution, so he began referring to the movement as “a family,” “our worldwide family,” and, eventually, “the Family”—a name that led some within the group to joke about themselves as the Christian Mafia, a label that stuck. He wanted to move the headquarters, too. He first set his eye on a Washington estate called Tregaron, twenty acres of historic gardens surrounding a massive Georgian-style mansion between Woodley Park and Cleveland Park, an address of sufficient status that the Soviet Union tried to purchase it for its embassy. The Washington Post reported in 1974 that Sen. Harold Hughes had raised $3.5 million to buy the home for “religious work,” and that there was talk of making it the official vice presidential residence—owned by the Fellowship Foundation. “We’ve asked the Lord to give it to us,” Hughes explained, in reference to what he said were his anonymously donated funds.
In fact, Hughes—a bighearted but none-too-bright Democrat seduced by Coe’s rhetoric of “reconciliation”—was a front man. Coe had found the money in the pockets of a North Carolina manufacturer and an oilman named Harold McClure, who’d already donated the use of a private plane to fly congressmen on missionary junkets to Africa’s newly oil-rich nations. “Tregaron, if handled properly, could on a low profile basis provide the following for our world-wide family,” wrote Coe: an “orientation center” to recruit politicians for a “leadership led by God,” a communications center for the worldwide work, and housing for members of “the Core,” the Family’s inner circle.
“Some asked how anything low profile can be done at Tregaron?” Coe continued. “If we have men of national reputation”—Coe proposed making Hughes and several Republican congressmen the faces of the operation—“it would be easy for the rest of the fellowship to use Tregaron in a manner which would be rather obscure.” Coe would be in charge, but not visibly: “My role as well would be done in the background.”
But Coe didn’t get his mansion. One of the old-timers, a retired marine general named Merwin Silverthorn, responded with fury to what he saw as dirty dealing, railing against Coe’s proposal to use “front men” for the work. Coe likely nodded appreciatively; with a voice like a woodchuck out for an amble and a big, dopey smile, Coe seems almost immune to displays of anger. He gave up on Tregaron, but four years later he got his wish, a mansion on a hill across the Potomac River with an even more distinguished pedigree. It was said to have been built by George Mason, though local historians insist it’s of a more recent vintage. It certainly looks like a manse fit for a founding father, white-columned and secluded at the end of a cul-de-sac in Arlington. The Family calls it the Cedars, and it’s the headquarters of the movement to this day. Across the street from the Cedars is a roomy house valued at $1 million (the Cedars is assessed at close to $8 million) called Potomac Point, used to shelter young women of good breeding who act as unpaid servants across the road. Next up the block is a circle of homes owned by Family associates; then Ivanwald, the house for young men I lived in for a brief period. When I was there, the C. S. Lewis Institute, yet another sister organization, dedicated to fighting the “infection of secularism,” was housed next door, and after that came a headquarters for the International Foundation—which is also the Fellowship Foundation.
The Family is as shifty with its properties as it is with its name. Potomac Point, for instance, went from Tim Coe, Doug Coe’s son and a leader of the movement, to his parents in 1989 for $580,000. They transferred the property to the C Street Center in 1992, which then transferred it to the Fellowship Foundation in 2002—which, in turn, is the main financial backer of the C Street Center. Tim Coe, meanwhile, sold his house in Annapolis in 2007 for close to $1 million to the Wilberforce Foundation, on the board of which he served, like his brother David, for a salary of $107,000. The Wilberforce Foundation is something of a shell. It employs nobody, is headquartered in David Coe’s house, has no conflict-of-interest policy, and exists, according to a board member, “to hold properties”—that is, to protect the assets of the much larger Fellowship Foundation from liability claims. The same year it bought Tim Coe’s house, the Wilberforce Foundation turned around and sold Ivanwald—originally purchased in 1987 by Jerome Lewis, an oilman and major donor—to the Fellowship Foundation for $1 million.
Lewis, meanwhile, presides over a related organization in Colorado, the Downing Foundation, which operates an ivy-covered, $6 million estate in Englewood, donated by Lewis in 1997. Downing describes its mission as support of the Family’s Fellowship Foundation, to which it sends an average of $88,000 a year. It also supports the Denver Leadership Foundation, which produces the Colorado Prayer Luncheon. The Luncheon’s Host Committee—which includes Lewis—describes the annual event as modeled on Washington’s, intended to recruit public officials to “renew the dedication of our nation and ourselves to God and His purposes.” Where do the funds for such endeavors come from? Downing Partners Inc., an investment firm specializing in oil, gas, and real estate that donates hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to the Downing Foundation—its sole owner. Downing Partners, like Downing Foundation, is led, of course, by Jerome Lewis.
David Coe was one of three incorporators of the Foundation, but the estate’s manager says
he rarely visits. It is not a sign of disinterest. The Family is linked to so many properties—Downing, Ivanwald, the Cedars, Cedar Point Farm in Maryland, projects across the United States—that it must be hard to keep track of them all. Which is why Richard Carver, a former assistant secretary of the air force who serves as president of the Fellowship Foundation (a post of bureaucratic leadership second to Doug Coe’s spiritual authority), told a reporter investigating C Street’s tax-exempt status that “it is simply not a part of anything we do”—despite the fact that in 2002, long before the C Street scandals, he boasted of the Fellowship’s authority over the property to another reporter. To be fair, Carver has a history of confusion over good housekeeping. At the Department of Defense he was best known for a multimillion-dollar order for fancy china, and his departure for private life and Christian work was clouded by charges of “ethical relativism” related to his decision to moonlight for investment banker Smith Barney while still on the Pentagon’s payroll.
The history of C Street as real estate is even murkier. Washington’s city tax office listed as its owner until the 2009 scandals a national fundamentalist organization called Youth With a Mission, but YWAM, as the group is known, insists that it sold C Street to the Fellowship Foundation sometime in the late 1980s. Until the C Street scandals brought the Fellowship Foundation under scrutiny, it listed C Street as a “sister organization” on its tax forms, which showed at least $450,000 in operational support for the Capitol Hill town house. But in 2009, the District of Columbia revoked 66 percent of C Street’s tax-exempt status, and a group of pastors called Clergy VOICE challenged its federal tax status as a church in 2010—C Street fulfills none of the IRS’s criteria for churches, making its exemption an insult to the real thing, said the pastors. The Fellowship Foundation responded by declaring itself entirely separate from its sister. Just in time: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a good government watchdog, called for a congressional ethics investigation into what they charged was discounted rent for congressmen, which over the years added up to tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in subsidies for the Family’s political chosen. “It helps them out,” says Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the fundamentalist Traditional Values Coalition, who uses C Street himself for meetings with foreign diplomats. “A lot of men don’t have an extra $1,500 to rent an apartment. So the Fellowship house does that for those who are part of the Fellowship.”