The Family

by Jeff Sharlet

  “I went in search of things,” he said. “I went in search of things that are eternal,” he murmured.

  One night, he got up while his family was sleeping. “I remember going over my résumé.” Sitting in his silent house, in the middle of the night, a scar beneath his ribs where death had, for the time being, been carved out of his body, he looked down at that piece of paper and thought, “This must be who I am.” And then he thought, “What is this paper?” And then, “It’s not going to last.”

  Brownback turned, held my gaze. “So,” he said, “I burned it.”

  He paused. He was waiting to see if I understood. He had cleansed himself with fire. He had made himself pure.

  “I’m a child of the living God,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “You are, too,” he said.

  He pursed his lips as he searched the other tables. “Look.” He pointed to a man across the room, a Democratic senator from Minnesota. “He’s a liberal.” But you know what else he is? “A beautiful child of the living God.” He continued. Ted Kennedy? “A beautiful child of the living God.” Hillary? Yes. Even Hillary. Especially Hillary.

  Once, Brownback said, he hated Hillary Clinton. Hated her so much it hurt him. But he reached in and scooped that hate out like a cancer. Now, he loved her. She, too, is a beautiful child of the living God.

  HILLARY

  Hillary may well be God’s beautiful child, but she’s not a member of Coe’s Family. Rather, I’d been told at Ivanwald, she’s a “friend,” less elect then a member, but more chosen than the rest of us. A fellow traveler but not a sister. Her goals are not their goals; but when on occasion they coincide, Hillary and the Family can work together. Such collaborations, as much as the endeavors of true believers such as Brownback, are a measure of the mainstreaming of American fundamentalism. The theology of Jesus plus nothing is totalitarian in scope, but diplomatic in practice. It doesn’t conquer; it “infects,” as Abram used to preach. Within the body politic, it doesn’t confront ideas, it coexists with them, its cells multiplying by absorbing enemies rather than destroying them. It’s not cancerous, it’s loving. In place of conflict, love. In place of debate, love. In place of tolerance, love. In place of democracy, loudmouthed, simmering mad and crazy hopeful democracy—love, all-encompassing.

  In her memoir Living History, Hillary describes her first encounter with the Family. It was at a lunch organized on her behalf in February 1993 at the Cedars, “an estate on the Potomac that serves as the headquarters for the National Prayer Breakfast and the prayer groups it has spawned around the world. Doug Coe, the longtime National Prayer Breakfast organizer, is a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God.”2 Or with the kind of politically useful friends one might not make otherwise. For the eight years she lived in the White House, Clinton met regularly with a gathering of political ladies who lunch: wives of powerful men from both parties, women who put aside political differences to seek—for themselves, for their husbands’ careers—an even greater power. Among Clinton’s prayer partners were Susan Baker, the wife of Bush consigliere James and a board member of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family; Joanne Kemp, the wife of conservative icon Jack, responsible for introducing the political theology of fundamentalist guru Francis Schaeffer to Washington; Eileen Bakke, an activist for charter schools based on “character” and the wife of Dennis Bakke, then the CEO of AES, one of the world’s largest power companies; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat. The women sent her daily scripture verses to study, and Baker, the wife of one of the Republican Party’s most cutthroat strategists, provided Hillary with spiritual counsel during “political storms.”

  Hillary’s Godtalk is more sincere than it sounds, grounded in the influence of a Methodist minister named Don Jones whom she met when he was a twenty-eight-year-old youth pastor in Park Ridge, Illinois. Jones continues to counsel Hillary to this day. He calls the theological worldview behind her politics a third way, a reaction against both old-fashioned separatist fundamentalism and the New Deal’s labor-based liberalism. He describes the theology he taught as in the tradition of “Burkean conservatism,” after the eighteenth-century reactionary philosopher’s belief that change should be slow and come without the sort of “social leveling” that offends class hierarchy. Elites rule because they rule; tradition is its own justification, a tautology of power neither left nor right but circular.

  Under Jones’s mentorship, Clinton learned about theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Liberals may consider Niebuhr their own, but the Niebuhr whom Hillary Rodham studied with Jones and later at Wellesley College was a Cold Warrior, dismissive of the progressive politics of his earlier writing. “He’d thought that once we were unionized, the kingdom of God would be ushered in,” Jones says, explaining Niebuhr as he and Hillary came to see him. “But the effect of those two world wars and the violence that they produced shook [his] faith in liberal theology.” The late Niebuhr replaced his devotion to messianic unionism with a darker view of humanity and replaced his emphasis on domestic social justice with a global realpolitik, easily hijacked by liberal hawks in rhetorical need of a justification for aggressive American power.

  Tillich also enjoys a following among conservative Christian intellectuals for arguments on behalf of revising the once-radical Social Gospel to favor individual redemption, the heart of conservative evangelicalism. Hillary once said she regretted that her denomination, the Methodists, had focused too much on Social Gospel concerns—that is, the rights of the poor—“to the exclusion of personal faith and growth.” Abram, once a Methodist himself, had made the very same observation a half century before. The spirit, conservative Christians believe, matters more than the flesh, and the salvation of the former should be a higher priority than that of the latter. In worldly terms, religious freedom trumps political freedom, moral values matter more than food on the table, and if might doesn’t make right, it sure makes right, or wrong, easier. Taken together, Niebuhr and Tillich as Hillary encountered them represent the most reactionary elements of her “worldview”: a militantly aggressive approach to foreign affairs and a domestic policy of narrow horizons. Under the spiritual tutelage of the Family, Hillary moved further rightward, drifting from traditional liberalism toward the kind of privatized social welfare the Family has favored ever since Abram reacted in horror to the New Deal.

  The Reverend Rob Schenck’s favorite example? Clinton’s collaboration with Brownback on anti–sex trafficking legislation condemned by the very activists it should have helped. Brownback and Chuck Colson, one of the leading thinkers behind the law, were more interested in extracting pledges of purity than in helping the already fallen. That resulted in the de-funding of longtime federal partners that, for instance, provide health care for prostitutes, and increased funding for faith-based groups that simply preach Christ and abstinence to foreign sex slaves. And it’s not just those who are trapped in involuntary sex work who are ill served by the switch; epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, notoriously resistant to sermonizing, ripple out into the general population. It’s bad law for everyone. But Clinton was willing to lend her name, and her fundamentalist friends noticed. “I welcome that,” says Colson.

  Hillary fights side-by-side with Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it. Practically speaking, such work appeased evangelical elites without drawing the notice of liberals who thought Hillary stood for separation, but such tunnels genuinely undermine the foundations.

  For instance, a law she backed to ensure “religious freedom” in the workplace that so distorts the meaning of the words that it makes even Republicans such as Senator Arlen Specter uneasy about its encroachments on First Amendment freedoms. It’s a sort of Bartleby option for those “who prefer not to”: p
harmacists who refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions, nurses who refuse to treat gay or lesbian patients, police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics. And then there was the passage, during Bill’s presidency, of the International Religious Freedom Act, a move supported by Hillary. Like the workplace bill, it seemed sensible. Who’s opposed to religious freedom? But in reality it shifted the monitoring of religion in other countries from the State Department to an independent, evangelical-dominated agency that drew much of its leadership from the Christian Legal Society, creating a platform for U.S. evangelicals to use religious freedom ratings as leverage for a sort of shadow foreign policy. Hillary’s stance toward Iran, more hawkish than that of many Republicans, is just one example of a position long held by elite fundamentalists mainstreamed through the work of an ostensibly liberal ally.

  Liberals, says Clinton’s prayer partner Grace Nelson, are welcome in the Family as long as they submit to “the person of Jesus.” Jesus, not ideology, “is what gives us power.” But the Jesus preached by the Family is ideology personified. For all of the Family’s talk of Jesus as a person, he remains oddly abstract in the teachings they derive from him, a mix of “free market” economics, aggressive American internationalism, and “leadership” as a fetishized term for power, a good in itself regardless of its ends. By eschewing the politics of the moment—party loyalties and culture wars—Family cells cultivate an ethos of elite unity that allows long-term political transformation, whereby political rivals aren’t flipped but won over gradually through fellowship with former enemies, as in the case of former Representative Tony Hall.

  Hall, one of the few Democrats appointed by Bush in his first term (he was made ambassador to the UN for hunger issues, a position he used to push the Monsanto corporation’s genetically modified crops onto African nations) was brought into the Family in the 1980s by Jerry Regier, an ultra-right Reagan administration official in the Department of Health and Human Services who went on to work with James Dobson. Upon his conversion, Hall abandoned his liberal social views and became a vocal opponent of abortion and, eventually, same-sex marriage. He also championed a bill establishing a National Day of Prayer with an event at the White House organized by Dobson’s wife, Shirley. But he didn’t switch parties, and the Family would never ask him to. Hall isn’t a Republican; he’s a Democrat who called on his fellow party members to follow President Bush’s example by injecting more religion into their rhetoric. Hillary did just that in 2007, boasting of the “prayer warriors” who carried her through Bill’s infidelities, a bit of spiritual warfare jargon instantly recognizable to evangelicals who worried about her feminism.3

  The Family wants to “transcend” left and right with a faith that consumes politics, replacing fundamental differences with the unity to be found in submission to religious authority. Conservatives sit pretty in prayer and wait for liberals looking for “common ground” to come to them in search of compromise. Hillary, Rob Schenck noted, became a regular visitor to the Family’s C Street House in 2005. “She needs that nucleus of energy that the Coe camp produces.” That summer, she appeared as part of a threesome that shocked old school fundamentalists: Bill, Hillary, and Billy, live in New York for Graham’s last crusade. Before tens of thousands, the patriarch of Christian conservatism said Bill “ought to let his wife run the country.” Bonhomie and cheap blessing, maybe, but it was the kind of endorsement that Bill never won, despite Graham’s custom of speaking sweet nothings to power.

  A THING AND ITS SHADOW

  How much power can a movement have if it’s sufficiently vague in its principles to encompass both Sam Brownback and Hillary Clinton? If measured only according to the advocates of domestic “moral values” who choose fights in part for the clarity of their “sides”—abortion, yes or no? homosexuality, yes or no?—it would seem like the Family doesn’t have much influence at all. Neither abortion nor sex will be legislated away soon. But the fact that fundamentalism, a faith that by definition aims to address the totality of human experience, is measured according to a handful of issues decided by a yea or a nay is, itself, evidence of the broad success of Abram’s Idea.

  Following the Scopes trial of 1925, American fundamentalism split in two. One branch busied itself with the creation of new institutions, Bible colleges, and “parachurch” ministries, the foundation for a populist faith that could stand on its own in the face of secular ridicule—often enough, a real problem—and fight for control of the public sphere. The second, elite branch concerned itself with what believers saw as threats to the nation itself. That was a move that conflated the nation with the faith. This new civil religion was what enabled Cold Warriors, liberal as well as conservative, to project the shadow of American freedom around the globe.

  But a thing and its shadow are not the same. Even as American power fueled nightmares in Vietnam, in Indonesia, in Haiti, in dozens of other nations whose histories disappeared into the blob of the Cold War, real freedom has endured and even prospered within the borders of the United States. It’s the relatively bright prospects of domestic democracy—even at its most endangered moments—that have blinded us to the shadow it casts. “Freedom,” more than one general has declared from the pulpit of the National Prayer Breakfast, comes at a cost. Liberals scoff at such an apparent oxymoron, but the lesson of elite fundamentalism is that it’s true; for that matter, the last seventy years of history prove even the Christian doctrine of blood atonement. Only, the blood is not Christ’s, and despite the very notable exception of tens of thousands of American soldiers killed overseas, it’s not ours, either. It’s the rest of the world that pays for American fundamentalism’s sins, and for the failure of American liberalism to even recognize the fundamentalist faith with which it has all too often—in Vietnam, in Indonesia, in Haiti—made common cause.

  We might quibble that point. We might ask, Which came first, American fundamentalism or the Cold War? Is American fundamentalism the essence of the economic policies by which we unraveled the New Deal, or is it simply a coincidental phenomenon of the Reagan Revolution and then “globalization”? Don’t the good intentions with which America gives billions in foreign aid for food for the starving and medicine for the sick and, yes, weapons for governments that actually use them in defense mitigate—outweigh, even—the trillions spent on weapons for governments that put them to other ends, and the uncountable sums reaped by corporations dependent on the American global order? Then again, how different are such questions from that of Greg Unumb, the Family oilman who thought Doug Coe’s culpability in the crimes of the killers for whom he served as a matchmaker depended entirely on whether they killed before or during their fellowship with Coe? Such a strange concern. As if one might be excused for giving a gun to a mass murderer because his first victims were already buried; as if Christ’s injunction to forgive demanded also that we forget. That is, in fact, exactly what the Family believes, the complexities of “reconciliation” reduced to a gross equivalence of sins. The center slouches rightward, and the faithful forget that anyone ever dreamed otherwise.

  Dick Halverson preached as much once during his tenure as Senate chaplain. He framed it as a story relayed to him by Coe and Senator Harold Hughes after a visit to the Philippines, during which he, in turn, heard the story from the Philippines’ Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin.4 Archbishop Sin was a moderate with a mixed record in relation to the Marcos regime; at its end, he helped lead the “People Power” revolution, but for years before that he preached obedience to dictatorship. “He told Harold and Doug this true story,” Halverson sermonized. One of Sin’s nuns said to him that Jesus was coming to her bed at night. Sin decided to test the apparition. “Ask Him”—Halverson, the old actor, pretended to be the Filipino clergyman—“What sins did the archbishop commit before he became an archbishop?” The nun did so and reported back to Sin. Christ’s answer? “I can’t remember.”

  Did this suggest to Sin or Halverson that the nun had simply been dreaming? Just the opposite. Th
eir Christ did not just forgive the sins of Archbishop Sin; he couldn’t remember them. That, Halverson thought, was as it should be, Christ’s mercy not a balance to justice but a gift for the powerful. The church loves the down and out, but who loves the up and out? Jesus of the Family, the Christ of Coe’s “social order.”

  “Love,” preached Halverson, “forgets. That’s what God does with your sin and mine when it’s under the Blood. He forgets all about it.”

  HERE’S ONE LAST Family story love forgot, from a country so blighted by misfortune and misrule that it’s not really a country anymore. Somalia, lost in the shadow of American fundamentalism’s freedom. Somalia—one of the last cases I found in the Family’s archives before they began closing them—is, in the correspondence I retrieved, nothing more than a web of “facts” that I’m hard-pressed to make sense of. What they add up to is too bleak, too broken. The dead who haunt the name of Siad Barre, the dictator Coe called “brother,” seem uncountable. All I can be sure about is the answer to the question Greg Unumb asked me when I told him about Coe’s support for another dictator guilty of murder: before or during? Before, during, after. I will relate the facts as briefly as I can.5

  Somalia, shaped like an upside-down musical note, wraps around the Horn of Africa, across from the Arabian Peninsula. Granted independence in 1960, it should have been a success story; its people were linguistically unified and, while poor, were heirs to a tradition of pastoral democracy that had survived colonialism roughly intact. Then General Siad Barre seized power in 1969, and the Soviet Union poured money into Siad’s regime to make it a counterweight to Ethiopia, which under Emperor Selassie was the major beneficiary of American military aid in Africa. When a Marxist coup overthrew the Ethiopian emperor, Siad saw a chance to distract his own discontented people by seizing part of Ethiopia in its moment of weakness, using his Soviet-armed military. But the Soviets backed now-communist Ethiopia, deeming its new regime more useful than duplicitous Siad, who announced that he was in the market for a new patron. After the Iranian Revolution overthrew the Shah, the U.S. puppet just across the water from Somalia, the United States put its money on Siad and his ports, which would become essential if Ayatollah Khomeini cut off the oil supply. By late 1980, the United States and the USSR had switched proxies: once-red Somalia had become an American outpost, while Ethiopia had turned into a Soviet satellite.