by Jeff Sharlet
And yet there was also a certain facelessness to the glee with which liberals mocked C Street’s new chosen. To reduce the meaning of a political sex scandal to hypocrisy is another kind of evasion, an escape into euphemism. Not the polite kind; the satirical kind. But satire, like manners, serves the social order. Manners enact it; satire keeps it in line. So it was with C Street. As a hidden establishment, it embodies the arrogance of Washington; as a subject for derision, it reassures us that its excesses were departures from the norm.
The Family’s apostates—those who’d belonged and had left it behind—saw it differently. For them, the ethos of C Street is the norm. As insiders, they saw firsthand that for its adherents the elitist fundamentalism exemplified by C Street isn’t an aberration but business as usual. That is, for the many politicians within the orbit of C Street, its religion expresses one of the dominant sensibilities of our times. Simply put, it’s the idea that what we want is what God wants. That suggests aspiration, but in practice it amounts to stagnation, the preservation of the present order. At the mass-market level, that idea translates into spiritual self-help tomes such as preacher Joel Osteen’s ostensibly apolitical bestsellers, Become a Better You, Your Best Life Now, It’s Your Time. Books like these offer the promise of individual betterment in exchange for obedience. But obedience to what? American fundamentalists, unlike their Puritan ancestors, for the most part lack a vision of what society should be that goes beyond the artificial nostalgia of a mass-produced painting by evangelical artist Thomas Kinkade (a cozy cottage in the woods) or the megahit Christian novel The Shack (in which God cooks pancakes for the hero in a cozy cottage in the woods).
But there’s an implicit politics to such messages: it’s your time, not anybody else’s. And there’s an even more troubling theology: the abandonment of Christianity’s prophetic tradition, the call to “contradict what is,” in the words of philosopher Cornel West. “To prophesy,” he argues, invoking the practice not just as a religious vocation but as a basic form of democratic speech, “is not to predict an outcome but rather to identify concrete evils.”
In the life of an ordinary believer, the trade of obedience for peace is harmless enough. But amplified to a national politics, it becomes something more dangerous: the conflation of obedience and peace, the confusion of the status quo and a godly order, under the cover of piety, humble belief.
Following the C Street scandals, a young man who’d been raised in the Family began sending me documents from his youth. The young man’s father, an oilman, was a fund-raiser for the group’s activities, but the young man had decided to blow the whistle—anonymously, lest he be banished from his own family. “I guess I should also add,” he wrote, “that although I grew up within this organization, I do not share their sentiments.” What changed? Nothing more dramatic than college, some philosophy courses, the application of logic—the realizations, first, that when the Family speaks about Jesus it is speaking about itself; and, second, that it is projecting that self out onto the world.
The first document to catch my eye was a snapshot of Col. Oliver North, the point man in a scandal of far greater proportions: the 1980s Iran-Contra affair. To fund right-wing Nicaraguan “freedom fighters,” which Congress had forbidden, North ran an illegal program of secret arms sales to Iran. North has since become a Christian Right leader and a drum major for spiritual war, actual and literal—see his FOX News series War Stories, featuring 2008’s American Heroes: In the Fight Against Radical Islam—but his involvement with the Family is more benign, if still well armed. Every year, according to correspondence sent to me by the whistle-blower, North organizes a fund-raiser called Godly Guys with Guns. It’s a duck hunt. “Ammunition will be needed for ducks (#2 steel), upland birds (#7½ lead) and sporting clays (skeet loads),” wrote North in 2000, announcing the eleventh year of his fund-raiser (the whistle-blower sent me invitations up to 2009). The colonel takes care of the dogs, the luxury accommodations, and servants to clean the kill for those who prefer not to do it themselves. “In the inimitable words of our beloved friend and mentor, the late Senator Harold Hughes”—the Family’s liberal beard in the 1970s, a happy, holy fool who believed in the good intentions of any dictator the Family sent him—“ ‘This may be the most expensive duck you ever shot… but it also may be the pearl of great price.’ ”
The money goes to the Wilberforce Foundation, listed on the Fellowship Foundation’s tax forms as a “supportive ministry.” What does Wilberforce do? “Aid, train, educate, and encourage young people in the principles of faith and relationship skills [and] provide food and shelter if needed,” according to its tax forms. I was one of those “young people” back in 2002 (I was thirty at the time), when I lived for several weeks at Ivanwald, a house then owned by the Wilberforce Foundation. No one mentioned Wilberforce; we spoke only of the Fellowship or the Family, synonymous. The “principles of faith” I encountered and which I’ve since learned from other alumni include instruction in “biblical capitalism,” “faith in foreign policy,” and “God-led” political organizing. More often, though, they were abstract: studies in correct gender relations (the brothers shouldn’t court women with abuse in their pasts, because they’ll only want more); lessons on the nature of loyalty gleaned from history’s strongmen (Hitler, Stalin, and Mao owed their achievements to management techniques they copied from Jesus); and the idea that such loyalty, put in the service of a Fellowship of the elite, could change the world. “Talk to the people who rule the world,” David Coe told us, “and help them obey. Obey him.” Jesus, that is.
But for all the rhetoric, the Wilberforce Foundation also has a more mundane function. Eric Fellman, a Fellowship employee, put it succinctly to World, a Christian conservative magazine: the organization was created “to hold properties” for the Fellowship Foundation.
If I left it at that, the Family would sigh, disappointed. They’d say, “You’re missing the point. It’s not about what you can see. It’s about what you can’t see.” Or, as Tim Coe explained, in a letter to the whistle-blower’s father, speaking of the real meaning of the work they’d undertaken together: “Usually these things have to do with some commitment or covenant I have made and are almost always invisible!”
That’s a spiritual term, not a conspiratorial one. American fundamentalism resists the idea that it is political because its ambitions, ultimately, are not. Or, at least, not conceived as such. Evangelicalism, from which fundamentalism grows, emphasizes the salvation and transformation of individuals. And on an individual basis, that transformation most often really isn’t political. But applied to power as it already exists, the recruitment of elites, it becomes what one Family leader called “benevolent subversion.” A means of achieving political transformation without conflict. Inasmuch as the rest of us accede to that seductive idea, inasmuch as we cling to the myth of harmony at the cost of democracy, we become collaborators. Not in the rise of fundamentalism, but in the exchange of democracy for stability.
The fundamentalist threat of this book’s subtitle isn’t a barbarian at the gate. Nor is it an ideology that erects statues, a theology in jackboots. It’s far more practical than that. It’s a religion that asks, like Doug Coe does, “What does Jesus have to say about building roads?” And just as important, Who’ll get the contract? What’s the margin? We’ve reached a point where piety and corruption aren’t at odds but are one and the same. It’s a familiar moment to students of history: the late stage of empire, hairline fractures shooting through the foundations of society. They’re like cracks in the sidewalk; by the time you see them, the damage has already been done.
So consider this chapter a postmortem. I tried to trace the course of the disease, to follow the money and the power out from C Street into the world. The first stop was the Pentagon. Next was Sri Lanka, where the trail ran right up to the edge of a war. I followed it to Lebanon, where the Family’s theology of “reconciliation” has been strung like a fuse; and that fuse led me into the sche
mes of a crooked congressman on the Family payroll, and a senator with a “heart for the poor,” as fundamentalists say. It’s a phrase that all too often means little more than a paternalistic cover for the predatory instincts of believers who are rich in love, for their own righteousness, and poor in mercy, for the millions who become collateral damage in elite fundamentalism’s crusade for the hearts of kings and dictators.
In 1976, Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright, a former candy salesman who’d built up one of the largest evangelical organizations in the world by recruiting students, created a new agency for their guardians. Our guardians; Bright, inspired by Family founder Abram Vereide, was moving off campus, up and out to the highest reaches of American power. “Yeast in the capital,” an evangelical newsletter called his new ministry. Bright called it Christian Embassy, the same name Vereide had given his original foray into Washington. “There are 435 congressional districts,” Bright put it, “and I think Christians can capture many of them by next November.” The cofounder of Christian Embassy, John Conlan, a Republican congressman from Arizona obsessed with un-Christlike “income-redistributing policies,” was not even that genteel: he got into political evangelism after being forced to suffer a Jewish opponent for his seat, an opponent who, Conlan’s supporters deduced, lacked “a clear testimony for Jesus Christ.” A vote for Conlan, the congressman told Arizonans, “is a vote for Christianity.”
That was 1976. In 2006, I reported on a Christian Embassy video of senior flag officers presenting just such testimonies for Christ, on duty at the Pentagon. I was interested in their language. “We are the aroma of Jesus Christ,” bragged Maj. Gen. Robert Caslen. But a watchdog organization called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) was interested in their uniforms, and the fact that they were lending them to a religious cause, a deep breach of military rules and tradition.
MRFF demanded an investigation. In 2007 the Department of Defense issued an inspector general’s report finding that seven top officers had violated military regulations; that the Pentagon’s senior chaplain had breached security for Christian Embassy’s staff; and that one officer, an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared Christian Embassy a “quasi-federal entity,” the same status accorded NASA. What should be done? Nothing, concluded the report. “Corrective action” was left to the judgment of some of the same men featured in the video. It was a slap on the wrist. Or maybe not even that—most of the officers who’d crossed the line, singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” seemed like they’d stepped on a fast track, adding stars to their shoulders and assuming major commands.
So MRFF asked the logical question: Who was the inspector general? Retired Lt. Gen. Claude “Mick” Kicklighter. “Even a cursory look at Kicklighter’s track record raises red flags,” says MRFF’s director of research, Chris Rodda, pointing to his refusal to investigate allegations by a Halliburton/KBR employee in Baghdad that she’d been raped by other defense contractors. But it wasn’t until 2009 that Rodda, reviewing old files, noticed that Gen. Kicklighter had served as a board member of the Fellowship Foundation, the Family’s main 501(c)(3) organization. It was my turn to review old files. In 2005, I’d interviewed one of the directors of Christian Embassy, Sam McCullough, for a profile of Sen. Sam Brownback. Because I was coming from Brownback’s office, McCullough, a dour man who communicates as much through half smiles and long silences as words, assumed I was a “friendly”—a journalist who could be counted on to represent the cause with sympathy.
When I asked him about the Fellowship, he rattled off a list of overlapping members: Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), Rep. John Carter (R-TX), and Sen. Jim Inhofe. “Mike McIntyre from North Carolina”—young, and oddly far-right for a Democrat—“is one you might want to visit with. He lives with a bunch of guys that are believers over in their C Street house.”
What was the relationship between the two organizations?
“There’s a lot of crossover,” said McCullough. “We’re really in agreement doctrinally, and cooperative on activities.”
“Crossover” should have been enough for Gen. Kicklighter to recuse himself from the investigation. Our curiosity piqued, Rodda and I started digging deeper, and soon we learned that the entire investigation was a closed loop: in 1987, Christian Embassy’s Flag Officer Fellowship had been cofounded by—Claude Kicklighter. The inspector general had found himself not guilty. (A call to Kicklighter’s civilian office was returned by the current inspector general’s chief of public affairs. He argued that Kicklighter hadn’t assumed office until April 2007 and thus wasn’t responsible, a perplexing point given that the report came out nearly three months later.)
As far as Rodda was concerned, the Kicklighter connection put the Family in MRFF’S jurisdiction. Her first step was to return to the video that had started the trouble. Before, she’d been paying attention to the officers. Now, she looked at the congressmen.
Rep. John Carter, for instance, boasts of a missionary trip to Africa funded by the organization: “We were congressmen goin’ over there to represent the Lord,” he said. The wall between church and state, he’d discovered, did not extend to the governments of nations dependent on U.S. foreign aid. “Our message was very simple. ‘We are here to tell you about Jesus of Nazareth and what he teaches.’ ”
But there was nothing in his records declaring Christian Embassy funding, a lapse that would likely be illegal under the 2007 OPEN Government Act if Carter took that same trip today. Carter’s records did show several trips funded by the International Foundation—a “doing business as” name of the Fellowship Foundation. Did the International Foundation pay for Carter’s Christian Embassy mission? Carter’s office wouldn’t answer. But to the Embassy’s Sam McCullough such overlap is natural. “There’s some trips we’ve gone on, they’ve done with us. We’ve sent some of the people that we’re working with on a trip with them.”
The Family usually foots the bill for these missionary expeditions. In 2004, the Family spent $14,980 to send Rep. Carter and Rep. Joe Pitts to Belarus. John Ensign has enjoyed travel to Japan, Jordan, and Israel that cost more than $15,000. The official list of travelers also includes Sen. Jim Inhofe, Sen. Tom Coburn, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), Rep. Robert Aderholt, and Rep. Mike Doyle, who has done the Lord’s work in Aruba and the British Virgin Islands, a popular Family destination. Even the chosen need vacations.
But most of the travel is to foreign policy trouble spots: the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Central America, Africa’s oil-rich nations. And even though the political missionaries charge their travel sometimes to the taxpayers, sometimes to the Family, they aren’t representing U.S. interests; they’re putting the weight of the U.S. Congress behind their private religious crusade. The goal? “Two hundred national and international world leaders bound together relationally by a mutual love for God and the family,” according to a document outlining the movement’s long-term vision. “The structure is hidden,” the document adds. It’s a love that walks softly, with the big stick of American power behind it.
The Work—capitalized in Family archives—proceeds under different names. Rep. Robert Aderholt, for instance, a baby-faced Alabaman best known for his crudely theocratic Ten Commandments Defense Act, met with the president of Paraguay in 2004 on behalf of Christian Embassy; he attributes a meeting with the leadership of Ethiopia, which has been fighting a U.S. proxy war in Somalia, to the Embassy, but didn’t report it as such; and the Family sent him to Israel, where the Family’s fellowship group in the Knesset is led by Likud Minister of Information Yuli-Yoel Edelstein. The International Foundation paid for seven trips for Aderholt between 2006 and 2010, totaling $62,000. His most recent trip took place in the spring of 2010, when the Family sent him to Greece and the Balkans, for “shopping and sightseeing” and to rendezvous with Family contacts at the Balkan edition of the National Prayer Breakfast, the Southeast European Gathering.
Aderholt’s travel re
cords led MRFF’s Rodda to the discovery of yet another Family entity, the Ambassadors of Reconciliation Foundation, a nonprofit that lived and died in the space of little more than a year with no publicity, its lifespan like that of a mayfly. It was born, it spawned, and then, its purpose fulfilled, it died.
The Ambassadors came into being in 2004 with a $100,100 grant from an unnamed source, quickly followed by another of $524,107, $100,000 of which came from the Fellowship Foundation—to which it listed its relationship on tax forms as “none.” The Fellowship’s accountants weren’t so coy; they named the Ambassadors a “supportive ministry.” The Ambassadors’ board of directors said “family” in every way. Along with Doug Coe and another member of the Fellowship Foundation’s board of directors, there was a father-son team: William Aramony, the former United Way chief who served six years in prison for looting the charity to pay for his affairs, and Aramony’s son, Robert, who had been on the payroll of a United Way spin-off organization.
Its first year, the Ambassadors gave a grant of $10,000 to the Fellowship Foundation. The next year, it transferred $450,469 to the Fellowship Foundation, a sizable improvement on the Fellowship Foundation’s investment, still listing the relationship between them as “none.” And then it promptly closed up shop. Its only activity in between seems to have been spending $7,612 to send Aderholt to Sri Lanka, its mission “to expose the U.S. political, business, and spiritual leadership to problems and opportunities in other parts of the world.” Aderholt (who wouldn’t comment) would have likely met with Sri Lankan government officials linked to a nonprofit called the Grassroots Foundation—granted $148,772 by the Fellowship Foundation that same year. The founder of Grassroots, a Sri Lankan telecom executive named Zarook Marikkar, also founded Sri Lanka’s Parliamentary Leadership Group, which he describes as “part of the U.S. Congress Leadership Breakfast Group”—the Family. What did they have in common? The principles of Jesus; also, guns. The American politicians had them, Sri Lanka needed more. One massive killing stroke, the Sri Lankan government believed, could end their decades-long war against the Tamil minority.