by Jeff Sharlet
The more he failed, the higher his star rose. He invoked the populism of the South without bringing along its baggage. “The Sanfords understood the trap of race southern politicians fall into,” says civil rights activist Gray. To be successful, most Republicans and many Democrats make coded appeals to racial antagonism—waving the Confederate flag or railing against “entitlements,” and transferring already scarce resources from poor black communities into middle-class white ones. Sanford ducked the flag and avoided racially tainted economic policy by ignoring the needs of the poor of every color. He used religion—“our strategy,” says Will Folks, a former press secretary, “was to pay lip service to the social conservative issues”—but only when he had to. “He never mentioned the Bible unless it was to support some kind of frugal measure he wanted passed.” He sounded like Reagan, says Gray, but not as scary; like Clinton, but not as Bubba.
But if he possessed the past presidents’ ability to connect, he lacked their driving desire to do so. He was ruled by fight or flight. When he wasn’t working to demolish government, he was running away from it, on what he called “adventure trips.” The disappearance that ended his presidential ambitions wasn’t his first. Since the beginning of his political career, Sanford periodically had left Washington and his family behind. Two weeks after his first son was born he took off with friends to climb Mount. Rainier. “Mark’s balance,” Jenny would write, “is like a gyroscope; he has to keep spinning to feel calm at the center.”
And when he spun out of control, C Street was there to cover for him. Sanford never moved into C Street, but the Fellowship became his family in Washington, a bond that increasingly displaced those back home. By the end of his time in Congress, he’d grown so distant from Jenny—“the world Mark lived in illuminated the image, the superficial, the part that was calculated to be unknowable”—that she was beginning to wonder, Why bother? Why should she have to pass another test in her life with Mark Sanford? So Sanford did what any man would do: he asked his C Street “brothers” to talk sense to his wife. Jenny listened. Still Catholic, she’d learned from South Carolina the political uses of evangelicalism, and that private group prayers were the modern equivalent of a backroom cigar.
Staying True is studded with scripture, fundamentalist-style—stripped of context, memorized, and trotted out as proof of one’s virtue. Jenny begins before marriage, when Mark first taught her the method with his life verses, Galatians 5:22, a tribute to self-control, and Matthew 5:16: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and praise your Father in heaven.” Soon, Jenny has her own. Psalm 127, a verse adopted by the self-declared biblical patriarchy movement as guidance for mothers: “Like arrows in the hands of a fighting man are sons born to a man in his youth. Happy is he who has a quiver full.” She rolls out Psalm 139, one of the proof-texts of the anti-abortion movement, to take her own measure: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.”
She explains the verse thus: “My heart has been pained but it is clean.” Maybe, but Psalm 139 isn’t. It’s venomous. “Oh, that you would slay the wicked, O God!” declares the passage before Jenny’s. “And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with perfect hatred. I count them my enemies.”
That dodge—the Bible’s pretty words presented without the rough ones that give them their depth—is the C Street shuffle, the bait-and-switch exegesis of American fundamentalism. By ignoring the apparent contradictions of scripture, fundamentalism ignores its questions, reducing its complexity to implicit equations. Hate equals love; obedience is freedom.
C Street’s instructions for Jenny followed a similar line. When her pride was wounded by Sanford’s neglect, C Street advised her to find her dignity in abjection. “A member of the group, whom I’ll call Jack”—the only pseudonym Jenny grants in Staying True—“advised me that staying angry with Mark was not an option. If I wanted to heal the relationship, I had to open my heart and be kind, even if Mark was in the wrong. They would work on Mark.” Jack had sexual advice for Jenny, too: “he told me not to withhold it.” Jack and his brothers lectured her on the pressures of public life and instructed her in the ways of the good wife, and if Jenny accepted their direction, as she claims she did, she seemed to do so with gritted teeth: “Move on and let go of the anger I did,” she says, the Yoda-speak resolution that led her to remain married.
And then Mark met the woman he’d call his soul mate, Maria Belen Chapur, an elegantly handsome brunette with a businesswoman’s mind, Jenny without the politics and the Bible verses. The meeting occurred on another adventure trip, this one to South America; he met Chapur at a dance. She spoke four languages, including Chinese, and her idea of a good beach read was a book by Alan Greenspan. She was a fine dancer, and so was Sanford, and that’s all it was: economics and dancing.
The beginning of the affair waited until a government junket to Argentina in early 2008. Sanford’s come-on seems to have been the same one that had worked two decades previously with Jenny: he talked about his farm. If that sounds silly, consider the romance of New Year’s Day 1988, as recorded by Jenny. The morning after the party, he woke her early and dressed her in hunting gear for an expedition, and as the sun rose he introduced her to the farm’s inhabitants, egrets and blue herons, palmettos and oak trees veiled by Spanish moss. It was a “place outside of time,” she’d write, a place “where Mark’s heart resided.”
Maria would feel the same way. “Don’t know why you think you bore me with the description of your farm,” she wrote Mark, on July 4, 2008. “I am an urban girl but that doesn’t inhibit me from loving other things, especially if they are the ones you love. I was able to imagine the place with every single detail.”
Much would eventually be made of Sanford’s penchant for reciting such details. The media would mock him for writing to his Argentinean lover about his tractor. And yet, Sanford’s tractor e-mail—hacked from Chapur’s computer, possibly by a jealous ex-lover, and sent to a South Carolina reporter—is the loveliest thing he ever wrote, true romance, the quirky, unpredictable, and deeply personal kind:
Though I have started every day by 6 this morning woke at 4:30, I guess since my body knew it was the last day, and I went out and ran the excavator with lights until the sun came up. To me, and I suspect no one else on earth, there is something wonderful about listening to country music playing in the cab, air conditioner running, the hum of a huge diesel engine in the background, the tranquility that comes with being in a virtual wilderness of trees and marsh, the day breaking and vibrant pink coming alive in the morning clouds—and getting to build something with each scoop of dirt. It is admittedly weird but one of my more favorite ways of escaping the norms, constant phone calls and formalities that go with the office—and it probably fits with my weakness in doing rather than being—though you opened up a new chapter last week wherein I was happy and content just being.
“I hate to see anybody I love fall,” Cubby Culbertson, Sanford’s lifeline to Christianity for the elite, would declare. Cubby, Sanford’s “spiritual giant,” had been thrice-married himself. With such a rich well of experience to draw from, and with money rolling in from court-reporting contracts all over South Carolina, Cubby and wife #3 devoted themselves to conducting relationship boot camps for well-to-do South Carolina couples, including the Sanfords. When the Sanfords’ turn at boot camp came (there’s a waiting list), Mark and Jenny volunteered the governor’s mansion for the sessions of prayer and Bible study on correct relations between man and woman. Cubby taught that as Christ is to his bride, the church, so must the husband be in his wife’s eyes: revered and obeyed. In return, he should be to her like Christ, a “suffering servant,” ready to die for his sheep—her—and in charge because of that commitment. It’s an interpretation of the Christ story based not on the world of the Gospels but on the modern-day fundamentalist romance with the wo
rld of chivalry. Women submit to male headship—those are the terms of art—because men sacrifice, or at least make it clear that they’d be willing to sacrifice, in defense of womanly virtue. It’s an even exchange, goes the thinking; the relationship is “separate but equal,” husband and wife each able to claim the title of “servant leader.”
That’s a revealing label, self-applied in a broader political context not just by C Streeters but also by powerful people across the spectrum. On its surface, it makes no more sense than Sanford’s self-annihilating statement that “the biggest self of self is indeed self.” But then, reason is not its justification. The paradox of humility as authority that’s inherent in the term “servant leader” is the essence of the fundamentalist threat to democracy: not brute force but seduction. It’s the promise of support and intimacy in return for power. “The idea of the power,” a Family leader named Bob Hunter says of the Family’s prayer cells for servant leaders, “is that through the relationships, you can stand before the country and say, ‘Look, we love each other. This country can be different.’ ” “God-led,” that is, according to the Family’s understanding of Jesus plus nothing. “Maybe it’s power, but it’s sort of bottomed in love. It’s a little tricky.”
Tricky, indeed. In To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, Bethany Moreton, a historian of religion at the University of Georgia, traces “servant leader” back to its origins in a 1968 essay by a New Age management consultant named Robert K. Greenleaf. As a form of management—of control—the logic becomes clear. Employees resent rigid, authoritarian bosses, while study after study has shown that productivity improves when the people in charge humble themselves, rhetorically, at least. Greenleaf’s servant leadership wasn’t a redistribution of power; it was a revision of its presentation, similar to Doug Coe’s decision to “submerge” the institutional identity of International Christian Leadership, rebranding its now-hidden hierarchy as simply “a worldwide family of friends” and pursuing God-led government without recognition.
“Putting aside your ego like Christ,” Moreton writes of the concept, “did not mean renouncing your ambitious career goals, but rather furthering them through other people.” Remarkably, this is understood as humility, not cynicism. By the same logic, “male headship” is a burden, a selfless choice by a husband to assume authority as a form of sacrifice. It’s lonely at the top! Power—the willingness and the ability to define what counts as “sacrifice”—is love.
For C Streeters, though, it really is lonely at the top, since to get there—whether “there” is a corner office in Washington or control of a woman—one must maintain a stubborn denial of what Martin Luther King Jr., outlining a different version of servant leadership, called “the drum major instinct.” Everybody wants to be drum major, King taught; everybody wants to lead the parade. That is, everybody wants to be recognized. Ego is real, said King. It’s desire. If it’s acknowledged and harnessed, desire can make you a drum major for justice. If it’s denied, desire will seek other channels—money, status, power. King’s Christianity liberated desire and set it to work beating freedom’s drum. Fundamentalism hides desire and then monitors its escapes—flashes of joy—and its perversions, desire twisted by repression. Fundamentalism calls both “sin,” and trades in them like currency.
Cubby Culbertson’s boot camp for the Sanfords culminated in Date Night, spousal counter-interrogations before God and the rest of Cubby’s chosen pairs. It was theater for what Abram Vereide used to call “soul surgery,” cutting into the self and exposing one’s desires in front of a small group of social equals. The price of admission is a controlled confession of one’s sins, but those sins, shared in secret, then become a badge of one’s belonging. As Abram saw it, they also became a form of control, each “top man” aware of and protecting, if necessary, the weaknesses of the other. “They’re into living with what is,” says the Reverend Rob Schenck, a fundamentalist activist, of C Street’s version of private prayer meetings for the elite. That is, preserving “what is,” defending the God-given order. Defined by status rather than suffering (as in the case of groups like Alcoholics Anonymous), soul surgery—or C Street, or Cubby’s boot camp—substitutes class for accountability.
It’s “pretty intense,” Cubby told a reporter for the Associated Press. It was the only interview he granted; he was stung, perhaps, that even his evasions would be interpreted as meaningful. “When asked if he had met Maria, Culbertson paused, then looked up, an embarrassed smile creasing his face. ‘I’m not going to comment,’ he said.” The truth was that he had. He’d chaperoned a date between her and Sanford.
In November 2008, the Republican Governors Association made Sanford their chairman. To celebrate, Sanford and some of the governors went to Ireland to shoot birds. Then, without telling Jenny, he went to Manhattan. He was having some quiet time alone in the city, he explained when she tracked him down. He told her the pressure was building. He said his bald patch was growing. He insisted he wasn’t avoiding her. He just needed to be by himself, to consider what was happening. She thought he meant his political ascendancy. But he was with his lover. He was searching, he’d later say, for “the key to [his] heart.” The servant leader wanted to be neither for a while.
That January, Jenny was looking for some documents related to a dispute about the farm between Sanford and his siblings. She says she decided to peek in a file labeled “B” because she thought it stood for “Bill,” Mark’s brother. Instead, she found “Belen,” and a collection of their e-mails.
“Sweetest,” he begins one of his love letters. He stammers about politics, “the VP talk,” the governors association. “There are but 50 governors in my country and outside of the top spot, this is as high as you can go in the area I have invested the last 15 years of my life.” That is, his life with Jenny: the career they’d built together. And then, rhetorically, he throws it away—deliberately, rhapsodically:
I have been specializing in staying focused on decisions and actions of the head for a long time now—and you have my heart. You have oh so many attributes that pulls it in this direction. Do you really comprehend how beautiful your smile is? Have you been told lately how warm your eyes are and how they softly glow with the special nature of your soul. I remember Jenny, or someone close to me, once commenting that while my mom was pleasant and warm it was sad she had never accomplished anything of significance. I replied that they were wrong because she had the ultimate of all gifts—and that was the ability to love unconditionally. The rarest of all commodities in this world is love. It is that thing that we all yearn for at some level—to be simply loved unconditionally for nothing more than who we are—not what we can get, give or become…. As I mentioned in our last visit, while I did not need love fifteen years ago—as the battle scars of life and aging and politics have worn on this has become a real need of mine. You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that is so fitting with your beauty. I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night’s light…
Tan lines. Following Sanford’s confession, he’d be mocked for those two words almost as relentlessly as for hiking the Appalachian Trail. But there is nothing cheap about this letter, neither its love nor its lust, and certainly not its anguish, its need. Later, when he wept before Jenny, the tears were not for her or for the lover he then thought he might never see again, but for himself. “He had always been so good, so dutiful,” Jenny writes. He had been a servant for the people, “true to his conservative principles in his political career although doing so meant going against a considerable tide.” This was for himself.
It was, for Mark Sanford, the beginning of honesty. Not the service part, the self part. But desire had been down so long that it was stunted. Deep, yes; but narrow. His
recognition of himself, and of his lover, did not help him see others. Not Jenny, to begin with, but also not “the people” for whom he thought he had sacrificed himself. By the spring of 2009, under C Street’s counsel, he committed himself to falling in love with his wife again—an act not of will but of obedience to God’s order. It was a moral austerity plan. At the same time, he was committing South Carolina, a poor state hit harder than most by recession, to something similar, only economically. The weak governor had found his power, and it was to say no: to $700 million in federal funds. Weakness, he preached in an endless succession of appearances, should not be rewarded. Liberty must stand on its own.
Mark Sanford, meanwhile, needed to see his lover. Please? he begged Jenny.
She turned to Cubby. He agreed to escort Mark to Manhattan for one last meeting. “His willingness to help Mark and me discreetly was a tremendously generous and selfless act,” writes Jenny. That night, after Cubby, Mark, and Maria had finished dinner, Cubby texted: “Sleep well. He played by the rules.”
Sanford had done so well over the years under Cubby’s tutelage. He had stayed focused on what mattered: cutting taxes, privatization. If he did not quite speak God’s word—he was never a thumper—he paid it lip service whenever required. For fifteen years he had “invested” himself. What had he accomplished? Very little, but that wasn’t a problem. The goal wasn’t change, it was order. Later he would confess that there had been a “handful” of other women, but that he’d never quite “crossed the ultimate line.” Which line was that? Sex, depending on how you define sex. Sanford would say he didn’t have any. And if that didn’t make him a saint, it meant at least that he was trying.
Slippage wasn’t the point, the point was power. Not to change anything; not to build a theocracy; simply to preserve what God has already created, a world of privilege and charity, to each according to God’s wisdom. The day after Jenny discovered the e-mails, Sanford asked her to call C Street “Jack,” the Family man who’d patched their marriage together once before. His advice was the same this time, and Jenny meant to follow it. “Jack understood men in power well,” writes Jenny. “If Mark said things that hurt or upset me, I was not to respond…. I should hand these hurts to Jack, who would confront Mark in a way that my tears would derail. This method would allow me, Jack said, to be like ‘the Bride of Christ.’ ”