The Family

by Jeff Sharlet

  “For our God is a consuming fire”—Hebrews 12:29—was the conference’s theme. What did this mean? “God is the God of power,” said one of the first speakers. God is not the God of ethics, of morality; God is great, God made this order and chose its leaders. Prince Gottfried Hohenlohe opened the meeting on a Thursday evening. “God gave me my place in the world,” he told 150 assembled worthies, a statement not of pride, in his mind, but of humility, a modesty shared by his audience, men and women now trained for several years, through weekly cell meetings, in Abram’s religion of key men and destiny.

  General Speidel was there, as was Rohrbach the propagandist: There were representatives from the major German banks and from Krupp and Bosch, and there was the president of Standard Oil’s German division. There was at least one German cabinet member, parliamentarians, mayors, a dozen or more judges. A U-boat commander, famed for torpedoing ships off the coast of Virginia, cut a dashing figure. A gaggle of aristocrats, minor princes and princesses, barons and counts and margraves, were intimidated by some of the best minds of the old regime. There was the financial genius Hermann J. Abs, and a fascist editor who had once been a comrade of the radical theorist Walter Benjamin before throwing his lot in with the Nazis.

  Wallace Haines spoke for Abram. He stayed up all night before his lecture, praying for the spirit that spoke aloud to his mentor. The Americans, God told him to say, were thrilled with the “eagerness” of the Germans to forget the war. The Americans came to the Germans humbled, he told them. Haines brought proof of their newfound wisdom: a letter of repentance for the sins of denazification signed by more than thirty congressmen including Wiley and Capehart and a young Richard Nixon.

  On Saturday night, Theophile Wurm, the former Lutheran bishop of Württemberg, spoke in the White Hall, a confection of gold gilt dully shining by the light of candles. First there was music, cembalo and violin, “old music,” reported one of Abram’s Germans, a former Nazi propagandist named Margarete Gärtner. Blue darkness fell on the lake, and Bishop Wurm began to speak. All felt sacred, for here was a man of deep character. He’d been an early and enthusiastic supporter of national socialism, had helped purge the German church of dissenters, had drawn up lists of the weak, the deformed, the degenerate. This, as Fricke had said, was simply as they “all” had done. But Bishop Wurm was different; Bishop Wurm did not believe in killing. Not more than necessary, anyway. This watery conviction, he thought, made him a “resister.” His identity at the end of the war, when the clock sprang back to zero in 1945, stunde null, the Germans called it, was his identity forever. He was the man who wrote Berlin a letter asking the Reich to spare some Jews. “Not from any predisposition for Jewry,” he’d written, “whose immense influence on cultural, economic, and political life was recognized as fatal by Christians alone, at a time when almost the entire press was philosemitic.” No, Bishop Wurm wrote, his version of truth to power, “the struggle against Jewry” was correct; but shouldn’t the Reich first try to convert them?

  In the White Hall Bishop Wurm stood before a great window, the snow-covered Alps glowing purple in the dusk. A thunderstorm rolling in over the lake split the sky and boomed through the castle, setting the candles aquiver, silhouetting Wurm when lightning flashed. He spoke of the mechanization of man and the loss of faith in free enterprise, God’s delicate weavings, the idea, the promise, that God helps those who submit totally. The lightning cracked, and Frau Gärtner, Bishop Wurm, the barons and the generals and the captains of industry submitted, totally. “We are children of fear,” Prince Hohenlohe had proclaimed at the meeting’s beginning, but that night, fortified by the spirit of Wurm and electrified by lightning glaring off the lake and over the mountains, their bellies full of warm stories and good wishes from around the world, the children of fear felt like children of God, and for this fine sensation, wrote Frau Gärtner and Wallace Haines and Gedat, they sent their thanks to Abram.

  FOR YEARS, MANFRED Zapp had been Abram’s harshest correspondent, constantly warning that the “man on the street” with whom he seemed to spend a great deal of time had had enough of America’s empty promises. America had committed “mental cruelty,” he charged, holding “so-called war criminals” in red coats—the uniforms of the Landsberg Prison—awaiting execution indefinitely.

  Abram agreed, and sent to the occupation government letters signed by dozens of congressmen demanding action.

  America prevented German industry from feeding the nation, Zapp argued.

  Abram agreed, and intervened time and again on behalf of German factories. He saved as many as he could, though a steel foundry named for Herman Göring was beyond even his powers of redemption.

  America had put leftists and trade unionists and Bolsheviks in power, Zapp complained.

  Abram agreed. The cleansing of the American occupation government became an obsession, the subject of his meetings with the American high commissioner John J. McCloy and his weekly prayer meetings with congressmen.

  “Idealists” were prevented from serving their people, said Zapp. The man on the street was losing faith in the American religion. “Freedom in their interpretation is the ideal for which we shall fight and die but the reality is nothing else but a beautiful word for services for Western powers…The word freedom is not taken seriously anymore.”

  Within a few years, nobody cared. The “Morgenthau Boys” were as much a part of the past as the history no German cared to speak of. “Tabula rasa,” declared Konrad Adenauer when he took power as the Bonn Republic’s first post-Hitler ruler.46 Abram met with Adenauer on several occasions, but the “Old Man of Europe,” a creature of the Weimar Republic’s forgotten tradition of conservative reformers, never took to him; Adenauer was a Moral Re-Armament man, a great friend of Buchman’s. But by then Buchmanism had diluted its fundamentalist flavor, had become 100 percent Cold War spirits, suitable for men and women of any faith who hated Bolshevism. More, Adenauer was too Roman Catholic to really embrace Abram’s religion—even, one might say, too Christian. A former mayor of Cologne, he had been deposed as soon as the Nazis took power in 1933, and had spent most of the next twelve years gardening and reading theology. At the heart of European politics for two decades after the war, by inclination he was a monastic, his face disfigured by an accident in his youth, his old bones subject to chills that led him to wrap himself in blankets on long journeys. His Christian Democratic Union (CDU)—the German equivalent of the Republican Party—was ascetic in its devotion to purging Germany of leftist tendencies but liberal in its economy. Adenauer did not like to see his Germans go hungry.

  Given Abram’s influence in postwar Germany—if Adenauer kept his distance, many of his ministers did not—what kept the nation from falling into the orbit of American fundamentalism? Why did its Christian Democratic Union, Germany’s most powerful party, not become part of a Christian bloc within the Western bloc, the foundation of an evangelical supranationalism beside which the strength of the contemporary movement would pale?

  Part of the answer lies in its Christianity, essentially Catholic, and its Democracy, which was, with occasional hiccups, actually democratic, in the most pedestrian sense—that of dull bureaucratic order. More, it was a political party; in the United States fundamentalism grew during the 1950s and ’60s by presenting itself as a greater force, to which men of either party could pay tribute in return for divine favors.

  But most of all there was old, wrinkled Adenauer himself, more blatantly Christian in his pronouncements than any American politician could ever be, but also more cautious. Keine Experimente, “No Experiments,” was an official campaign slogan. The “values and sense of justice of Western Christendom”47 was the political plank on which he plodded forth, but it was the very lack of such a sense that made of Adenauer’s Germany a secular nation. For it was a nation with no concept of sin. That had gone into the dustbin right along with history when Adenauer in his first act as chancellor dropped all charges against—privileged was the official term—ne
arly 800,000 minor Nazi officials, many of whom would become the functionaries of his blank-slate regime.

  In place of the very real dangers of German romanticism, the bloodlust of Wagner, Adenauer offered modest family values. A depoliticized philosophy of inward-looking households, the moral conformism of proper Germans. The man-on-the-street in the era of Adenauer, lamented Zapp, nostalgic for the thunder of the “new conception” now past, wants only “his job, his food, his movie, and his sport.”48

  In the end, Abram and the Americans learned more from the Germans than the other way around. It was after the CDU turned family into cultural code that American fundamentalism found a way to make the term both modern and traditional, used to describe—and shape—the postwar suburban world as well as that of a mythical small-town past. Abram finally retired normalcy, the Harding-era neologism that for two decades had defined his mission, his Christ, and his politics. It was a notion to which postwar Americans studiously subscribed even as they celebrated the myth of themselves as rugged individuals, but family captured that paradox more neatly, a nation of cozy little kingdoms ruled by Father. And the new evangelical alliances, forged along the lines of spiritual war rather than the eradication of vices traditionally considered masculine—drinking, gambling—made sure that Father knew best about not only his little unit’s material welfare but also its spiritual morale, once the province of Mother. “Men must reclaim the Bible from their wives,” Abram’s “prophet,” Baron von der Ropp, taught the workers of the Ruhr, a succinct statement of the old nineteenth-century muscular Christianity that took on new meaning in the postwar era.

  And then there were the questions of sin and of history, inescapable in Europe and thus ignored. But sin and history presented more nuanced dilemmas to American fundamentalism. Not its prewar mild sympathy for fascism—the blood of D-Day had wiped that record clean as far as most Americans were concerned—but the drag the actual, awful past put on the movement’s new global ambitions. What were they? Nearly the same as those of the nation’s. For a muddled period after the war, the United States had pretended that it could shrink back to its prewar isolationist ways, but by 1947, with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in place, it was firmly committed to the “new world order” hoped for by Abram and Senator Wiley and their bipartisan alliance of Christian internationalism.

  “The United States has been assigned a destiny comparable to that of ancient Israel,” Harold Ockenga, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, had declared at its inception, reviving the old notion of manifest destiny and extending it around the globe.49 But manifest destiny, the original westward thrust that erased a continent of Native souls, burns history like coal and knows no sin but that of its enemies. So, too, Abram’s dream, in both its religious and secular manifestations. And in this regard, too, the Americans learned from the Germans, who understood that mythology makes of the past a parable, smooth and enigmatic, best understood by those who ask no questions.

  7.

  THE BLOB

  THE MOST UNEXPECTED EARLY fruit of Abram’s prayer breakfasts was The Blob, a 1958 B-movie about the creeping horrors of communism. “Indescribable…Indestructible! Nothing can stop it!” warned the tagline. It is mindless glop from outer space. The Blob absorbs the residents of a small town, growing bigger, grosser, and more ravenous until the townspeople discover they can defeat the Blob by freezing it—the Cold War writ small and literal. The Blob was the result of an unlikely collaboration between a screenwriter named Kate Phillips and an evangelical minister named Irvin “Shorty” Yeaworth. The two met at the 1957 Presidential Prayer Breakfast. Phillips, a former actress who’d appeared in forgotten films such as Free, Blonde, and 21 and Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise, wasn’t known for her faith. She attended the Prayer Breakfast as a guest of a friend from Islip, Long Island—probably Abram’s patron, Marian Aymar Johnson, at whose Islip estate Abram did much of his planning.1 Phillips was accustomed to Hollywood glamour, but she felt lost amid the crowd of congressmen and business titans gathered for breakfast in a ballroom of Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. “All of a sudden,” Phillips later told a fan, “a chap came out of the hotel and said that somebody had suggested he talk to me because I was a writer.”

  The chap was Yeaworth, a director of “Christian education” films looking to subliminally broadcast his message into the mainstream. Shorty had backing for a full-length science fiction flick. The catch was that it had to be “wholesome.” And as if by providence, here was a screenwriter at a prayer breakfast. “I would like to have you be a part of the picture,” Shorty declared, and a few days later he traveled up to Phillips’s Long Island home to show off a two-pound coffee can full of the blob stuff that would come to serve as the Cold War’s most ridiculous metaphor for communism.

  If picturing the Red Army as a carnivorous mass of Jell-O was absurd, the symbolism fit the bigger concept of Cold War, an amorphous fight that absorbed ideological nuance as it grew bigger, grosser, and more ravenous for the hearts, minds, and economies of two dueling empires. Between the rebirth of fundamentalism in the 1930s and ’40s and its emergence as a visible force during the Reagan years sits the historical blob of the Cold War, an era as bewildering to modern minds as any in American history. There is, to begin with, the question of whether the United States won this war or the Soviet Union lost it. A third school of thought wonders if both sides were losers. And then there is the more vexing question of just what we mean by Cold War.

  To today’s conservatives, it was a philosophical stance—better dead than red—that resulted in “our bloodless victory.”2 For liberals eager to reclaim a mantle of muscular progressivism, meanwhile, Cold War refers to an abstract strategy of containment—as if the Cold War didn’t explode into dozens of “regional” conflicts strategized in Moscow and Washington, “civil wars,” fought with the empires’ weapons, that killed millions. Most memorably, the dead, American and otherwise, of Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, but also the forgotten losses of the Shah’s Iran, Suharto’s Indonesia, Mobutu’s “Zaire,” Pinochet’s Chile, Papa Doc’s Haiti, the United Fruit Company’s Guatemala, and many more. One could draw up just as long a list to lay at the Kremlin’s door or Beijing’s, but it’s our own sins that most require recollection, that fade to nostalgia in the sepia-toned memories of both liberals and conservatives.

  Even those terms—liberal and conservative—befuddle us. Which was which, for instance, when Eisenhower ran against Adlai Stevenson in 1952 on a campaign promise of decreasing military spending, while Stevenson boasted that “the strange alchemy of time has somehow converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party of this country”?3 How do we categorize Cold Warriors such as Senator Mark Hatfield—a Republican from Oregon, vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, and staunch advocate of evangelical political power—versus his colleague to the north, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, a “godless” Democrat whose relentless militarism inspired neoconservative protégés such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, architects of the Iraq War?

  That the ideological spectrum in America more closely resembles a Mobius strip, left and right twisting into one another, than it does a radio dial is a basic truth of political history. But what of religious history?4 What of the role of Christianity, and particularly that branch of the faith dedicated to “fundamental” principles, whether they’re those of Christ’s sovereignty over all, or of America’s divine destiny? How did American fundamentalism intertwine with the new internationalism to create the DNA of a Cold War in which one of the nation’s most militant commanders in chief—I am thinking here of Kennedy, not Reagan—reduced the issue to one of a belief in God, “ours,” versus the Soviets’ lack thereof?

  THE CHRISTIANITY OF American fundamentalism is a faith for futurists, the sort of people who delight in imagining what is to come next, even if it’s awful. World War II had changed the steady plod of Christian futurism, quickened it. Christendom had at times raced
toward apocalypse before, but never with such technology at its disposal—no rockets, no bombers, no nuclear missiles. The stakes were higher in the new era, the enemy stronger. Fundamentalism responded with great imagination, not just following the popular trend of spotting flying saucers and aliens among us, but driving it. The aliens among us were not green men from Mars; they were red, at least on the inside, and they could be your neighbors. On the outside, they looked just like good Christian Americans. Many of them were Christians, in fact, or so supposed the conservative mind. By the end of the decade, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover would declare that communist stealth operatives, “schooled in atheistic perversity,” had made Christian pulpits a main objective—and tool—of their propaganda. A “deadly radioactive cloud of Marxism-Leninism,” he preached, was fogging America’s liberal houses of worship.5

  Hoover kept files on liberal churches; Abram kept friendlier files on Hoover, a man who seemed to naturally speak the language of holy cause-and-effect Abram had refined before the war. “The criminal is the product of spiritual starvation,” Hoover was quoted in a pamphlet Abram saved, The J. Edgar Hoover You Ought to Know. The pamphlet’s author was an ally of Abram’s, Edward L. R. Elson, a mainline Presbyterian whose paranoia placed him at the far end of the religious spectrum. Elson joined another friend of Abram’s, Charles Wesley Lowry, to create the Foundation for Religious Action in the Social and Civil Order, and Lowry, in turn, joined Abram in behind-the-scenes council of upper-crust Christian conservative leaders known as “the Twelve.”