C Street

by Jeff Sharlet

  That may be changing. He still holds the peace, but now less through the balancing act of his younger days than through brute force. He is a dictator, and dictators need enemies. For years, the enemy was a vicious rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army, but the LRA has been reduced to a few hundred child fighters at best. Enter the homosexual. Singular; an archetype, for the monster that has grabbed hold of the Ugandan imagination is a bogeyman. If genocide comes, it will have as much to do with actual queer people as Kyazze’s caricature of shape-shifting millionaires buying sex with technology. If genocide comes, it will come to the tribes, recast as a crusade for family values against one group or another said to have fallen, like the Americans, on decadent ways.

  A few days later at the Speke Hotel, I spent an hour with a boda-boda driver named Andrew Maira, a gaunt, earnest man with gallows eyes who carried with him a well-worn envelope of documents creased almost to tearing—proof, he said, that he had been framed for homosexuality. One day, he said, he received a call from a childhood friend. “A homo,” said Maira. “We all knew this, he dressed as a lady.” It was George Oundo, who, as head of an organization called Ex-Gay Uganda, had become a useful ally for Ssempa, providing “inside” information on the homosexual conspiracy. Oundo invited Maira to come meet his new friend Ssempa at Makerere University, a posh address for a poor man like Maira, who spoke little English. He didn’t have the money for the trip across town, but Oundo told him he would cover the cost. When Maira got there, Ssempa had only one question: Did Maira worship with a certain Catholic priest, Father Anthony Musaala? Maira did. Musaala was a bigger star than Ssempa, an award-winning gospel singer. So Maira wasn’t surprised when Ssempa introduced him to another man who wanted to know all about Musaala. He did wonder why the man took his picture.

  Two days later, as Maira set out to work, a news vendor called to him. “This is you?” He showed Maira a copy of Red Pepper, the national tabloid. “I SODOMISED CATHOLIC PRIEST,” blared the headline, next to a photograph of Maira. He’d been nothing more than a stone for Ssempa to throw at a rival.

  At work a driver smashed the paper into his face and his friends surrounded him, shouting, “Homo!” He fled to his family, but they wouldn’t speak to him. When he got home, his wife and kids were gone.

  “And are you gay?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “But—”

  He waved at the newspaper, which he’d unfolded before me. In the shadow of the Bahati bill, its principles already set in motion, it didn’t matter. Homosexuality was just another name for the enemy. Anybody might be one.

  A few days later, I went to meet David Bahati at his office, on the fourth floor of the Parliament building. But he wasn’t there, and when I called his cell phone, I couldn’t get an answer; nobody in Uganda uses voicemail. I waited in the hall, skipping my meeting with another member of Parliament, who’d made headlines boasting that he’d kill his son if he confessed to homosexuality, but Bahati never showed. Which was strange, since I was in Uganda because he’d invited me. He wanted to talk about the Family.

  As the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was becoming a story, I began giving interviews on the Family’s Ugandan connection. A “God-led” government of men with secret alliances, a nation caught up in a witch-hunting frenzy, the hateful far reaches of fundamentalism made law—Uganda was what ordinary Americans feared C Street could lead to. Only, it wasn’t happening in the United States; we were too busy giggling over the Appalachian Trail. It was happening in Uganda: landlocked, poorer than the hard red dirt of its roads, as spent as oxygen-starved Lake Victoria, and cursed by the new discovery of oil, which most Ugandans outside of government view as simply one more thing to be stolen from them.

  Uganda’s renewable resource is souls. There’s the happy version of that thought—so much potential! And there is the fundamentalist variation—a “harvest,” as though souls were a crop to be measured by the bushel. The week after I left Kampala, the parliament Fellowship group hosted Pastor Tom Anderson of Oklahoma, who’d come to lead a five-day crusade. Such crusades are expensive, but they can pay for themselves. Not through the “love offerings” of African attendees but through the fund-raising potential, back home, of a “mission to Africa.” Pastor Tom had written a bestselling book, Becoming a Millionaire God’s Way, and his son had written a sequel, about how to become a billionaire. Both men were going to instruct the Ugandans on how to get wealthy by getting godly. Pastor Tom brought them four gospels, a Ugandan reporter was told by a leader of the anti-gay movement called Pastor Queen.

  The Gospel of Punctuality. Ugandans are poor, he said, because they don’t look at their watches. Make the trains run on time. Wealth will follow.

  The Gospel of Work. Ugandans are poor, he said, because they’re lazy.

  The Gospel of God-Fearing. Self-explanatory.

  The Gospel of Purity. Ugandans, he said, have a special opportunity: They can stop the homosexuals before they get started.

  The Family’s view was subtler. “I know of no one involved in Uganda with the Fellowship here in America, including the most conservative among them, that supports such things as killing homosexuals or draconian reporting requirements,” declared a spokesman, Bob Hunter. The statement contained a fine distinction. Nobody “here in America” supported the worst elements of that legislation, but Ugandan members of the Fellowship certainly do. Hunter seemed to be suggesting that, for all the rhetoric of a “worldwide family of friends,” some brothers counted less than others. He wouldn’t see it that way, but there was no clear way out for him: either the rhetoric is real, in which case the Ugandan members represent the Family as much as Hunter does; or Washington’s in charge—“the world’s Christian capital,” as an early Family leader put it.

  The kill-the-gays bill wasn’t conceived at C Street or the Cedars. The Uganda Fellowship that launched the bill was. The Family didn’t pull the trigger; they provided the gun. The weapon was an idea: “God-led government” in lieu of democracy, scripture in place of law, and the structure of a special anointed through which to achieve it, with high priests of the American religion—politicians—to consecrate it. The bill is a bullet, and whether or not it’s made law, it’s already been fired. What’s left for the Family is damage control.

  After the sex scandals, the Family called in media allies to advise them, including conservative columnist Cal Thomas and one of Rick Warren’s top PR men. Some within the ranks thought it was time to surface. Former representative Tony Hall proposed a website, but Doug Coe held the line. They would stay quiet and wait for the storm to pass. The irony is that the origin of the Family’s relationship with the current Ugandan regime is the only piece of “our worldwide family” that’s been public all along. Public, that is, as a parable that Doug Coe has repeated so often that it turns up in evangelical books and magazines and sermons across the country, stripped of the particulars and recast as a story about the power of prayer and the fate of a nation.

  Doug Coe made a bet with a skeptical friend, the story goes: pray for something every day for forty-five days, and if God didn’t grant it, Coe would give him five hundred dollars. What to pray for? They settled randomly on Uganda. And it worked! Through divine intervention, Coe’s friend met a woman who worked with a Ugandan orphanage, traveled to Uganda, and met the president of Uganda. According to Coe, the American said to the president, “ ‘Why don’t you come and pray with me in America? I have a good group of friends—senators, congressmen—who I like to pray with, and they’d like to pray with you.’ ” The president said yes, continues Coe, and he came to the Cedars, where he met Jesus. “And his name is Yoweri Museveni, and he is now president of all the presidents in Africa. And he is a good friend of the Family.”

  Documents in the Family’s archive tell a different story. The skeptical friend was Hunter, a former government official who has lived across the street from the Cedars since the early 1980s. He did indeed travel to Uganda, many times, and he met the last dictat
or and the current one, who became a close friend. He submitted two memos about his travels to Coe, whom he calls “the prime source of what’s happening all over the world,” a prophetic figure with the power “to replicate Christ (i.e. put part of the Spirit) in a few who can go on to take the delegation from Christ.” Who are the few? In “A Trip to East Africa—Fall 1986” and “Re: Organizing the Invisible,” he cites a distinctly political cast of characters. Not just Ugandan officials but American ones, too, Sen. Chuck Grassley, “friends on the Hill,” and Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Chester Crocker. Grassley was by then an old Family hand. Crocker wasn’t, but he thought like one. An advocate of “reconciliation” rather than confrontation with South Africa’s white supremacist government, he oversaw the U.S. abandonment of the United Nations arms embargo against South Africa during Reagan’s first term; a tenfold increase in arms shipments to the apartheid regime followed.

  The purpose of Hunter’s trips was a different kind of reconciliation. When Museveni came to power, Hunter says now, he was seen as a “left-wing fanatic.” The memos seemed to suggest that part of Hunter’s mission was to bring Museveni into a religious relationship with American politicians. In “A Trip to East Africa,” Hunter conveyed the prayer request of a Ugandan politician, for whom he recommended financial support, “that the most Christian country in Africa not take the wrong ideological direction”; shared plans for a prayer cell with the minister of state, who, Hunter notes approvingly, “witnesses at every opportunity, including at political meetings with the President”; and investigated Museveni’s faith directly. He found it in need of repair, the sort of spiritual “discipling” that is the Family’s specialty. “Particularly at this time of crossroads in the life of the country—with Kadaffi and Korea beckoning,” he concluded, “Jesus Christ is the key man in Uganda’s immediate future.”

  Today, Hunter insists it was simply a humanitarian mission—and it’s true that he raised millions for two hospitals in Uganda at a time when few Americans cared about Africa at all. (He was especially pleased by a missionary administrator who’d called a meeting of four hundred staff members to announce “that no corruption or sin would be tolerated [and] that a pregnant, non-married nurse would be fired.”) It’s also true that Museveni came to Washington the following year for meetings with Reagan, Bush, Crocker, and World Bank officials, and that he soon forgot all about socialism, shelved his human rights commission, and made Christianity a regular part of his speeches, stoking the fires of what became a world-famous evangelical revival. Uganda, meanwhile, became America’s proxy in the region. Coincidence, Hunter says. “That was not my goal.”

  The goal, as spelled out in “Organizing the Invisible,” was much grander, the formation of an expanded “core group” that would coordinate the efforts of Hunter and figures such as Crocker and Grassley to bring Christ to Africa. Of course, Africans already had Christ, if they wanted him. Hunter meant governments, a leadership led by God. Coe had assigned him the task of studying Exodus 18:17–21, a passage on the delegation of authority at all levels, “officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens.” Hunter interpreted it as Coe’s call for “key men” to represent Coe “in Kartoom [sic] or Bombay or on the Hill.” Citing Marshall McLuhan, Hunter proposed digitalizing the network: databases of embassy contacts in every country, State Department briefings, “key men” loyal to the Family throughout Africa. He wanted limbs, organs, blood, the Body of Christ as an international network of influential people, all “led by the head, which gives it its purpose and direction.”

  If the Family is understood as the Body of Christ, he argued, then it suffered from a learning disability; a failure to fully exploit “opportunity nations” such as Uganda. “I know that this family is at work on this question already, but are we succeeding?” What was needed, he argued, was greater organization. “I am convinced that the Lord’s headship must be linked to the body of Himself by an invisible central nervous system and that it is a servant’s role, behind the scenes, supporting the visible in quiet efficiency.”

  After I told both versions of the story, Coe’s and that of the documents, on NPR’s Fresh Air, Hunter wrote to host Terry Gross. He was angry that I’d described him as a former Ford administration official—he’d been federal insurance administrator under both Ford and Carter, a consumer advocate fighting insurance companies since, and considers himself a liberal—and that I’d inaccurately dated the Uganda National Prayer Breakfast, which he had helped found, to the late 1990s (I’d trusted an account in a book by evangelist Luis Palau; it began in 1991, a few years after Museveni took power.) And he took serious issue with my characterization of the Family as conservative, faulting me for failing to mention “key left wing Democrats in ‘The Family’ like Tony Hall and Jim Slattery.”

  It was true that I’d left them out of the story; but then they’re not exactly on the left. Hall, for instance, is anti-abortion and anti-gay, although he was first elected as a liberal. He attributes his changes of position to his Family-guided conversion. “I think I was getting fed from the Fellowship. I was getting fed, and I was growing as a believer,” he told an evangelical interviewer. As for Jim Slattery, politics seems to be about the money. Moderately liberal on social issues, he’s a big-business conservative when it comes to government oversight. His clients at Wiley Rein include the wireless industry association represented by C Streeters Chip Pickering and Steve Largent, and steel giant Nucor, a major donor to his Senate campaign for which he testified to Congress against climate change regulations.

  But Hunter’s greatest grievance was my statement that he had gone to Uganda at the behest of the U.S. government. He didn’t go at the government’s behest, he’d declare; “they”—the American politicians he took to Uganda—“came with me at my behest.” He didn’t work for politicians; they worked for him.

  My copy of Hunter’s letter to NPR came to me by a circuitous route—via Uganda. Hunter had e-mailed not just Terry Gross but also Tim Kreutter, the author of the Family’s Eight Core Aspects and its permanent American point man in Kampala. Kreutter had shared Hunter’s letter with someone who shared it with me. Hunter’s phone number was at the bottom, so I called him. His anger was intense enough to make him speechless for a moment when I explained why I was calling. I made my pitch fast: If the Family could forgive Suharto—Indonesia, a million dead—and the Somali dictator Siad Barre, then one American writer shouldn’t be a problem. Right? There was a long pause. “Reconciliation?” I said, asking for a meeting. And then, to my surprise, Hunter agreed.

  We met at his house across the cul-de-sac from the Cedars. He is a tall, broad-shouldered man with a thatch of white hair, an imposing figure gone genially soft with age. But there was something about his voice, an oddly confident stammer, that suggested the formidably handsome man I guessed he’d once been. His memory fails him sometimes, he said, but he could be quick-witted when he wanted to, and sharp as well. He’d prepared for our meeting with a notepad full of questions and a tape recorder (he’d have our conversation professionally transcribed). Whether he normally wears as dour a face as he did to meet me, I can’t say; he twitched up a smile when we shook hands, but it vanished inside. His house was dark, but his office, with windows nearly all the way around, was a brilliantly lit shambles. There was a picture of him with Museveni by the phone.

  Coe’s account of Hunter’s relationship with Museveni wasn’t true, he said. “The essence is the same, but the facts aren’t the same.” First of all, there was no bet—only prayer. He chose Uganda “because Idi Amin was in the papers.” There was a woman, Gwen Whitaker, but no orphanage. It was a hospital, and she was a missionary. Hunter decided to visit. And that’s all it was, to begin with, one Christian helping another Christian help some very poor people.

  Hunter had been a Presbyterian, he said, until 1978, when “I became a believer.” Not just a Christian but “first-century,” searching for a faith as raw and immediate a
s that of the first disciples. Doug Coe, a friend of a friend, offered it to him. “ ‘If you guys’ ”—Hunter had joined a small group of men connected to his church—“ ‘really stick together for twenty-five years and pray for Africa, you’ll begin to see Africa’s problems solved on the backstroke.’ ”

  “He’s a golfer,” Hunter explained, “so he uses those kinds of analogies.”

  Hunter, meanwhile, is an actuary, a human calculator of variables not easily quantified. He presented me with a careful case study of the Family’s modus operandi as seen through his eyes.

  On Hunter’s second trip, in the midst of the Ugandan civil war, “I said, ‘This is crazy. We’re pumping money into here. The whole country’s falling apart. I’ve got to start working on finding ways to bridge gaps.’ ” He went to see the speaker of the Parliament. “Thousands of people trying to get in to see him. They parted like the Red Sea because I was white.”

  “They would see you as a missionary?”

  “Yeah, which I was, in a way. And I said, ‘Basically, all I’m trying to do is find some people who might sit down together and talk about ways to end this. Do you want to keep doing this? Do you want your children doing this and your grandchildren? It doesn’t make sense.’ ”

  He discovered he could get in the door, but he couldn’t get anything done. The Ugandans weren’t willing to act on his advice. He needed a bigger name, he thought, “a rock star”—someone whose presence was such a draw that he could provide cover for Hunter’s Ugandan friends to meet and plan. “I called Andrew Young.” At the time, Young was mayor of Atlanta. Once, he’d been Martin Luther King Jr.’s right hand—King’s cautious lieutenant, the one who said, “Go slow.” Over the years, that caution turned into conservatism. These days he’s a lobbyist, selling Walmart and the interests of big oil to Africa, and African dictators to Washington.