by Jeff Sharlet
It would have been absurd if it hadn’t been so bloody. Siad, freed from even his veneer of socialism, devolved from an autocrat into the worst thing that had ever happened to Somalia. His heroes, he declared, were Kim Jong Il and the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. He decided to allow American-style democracy, then killed his opposition as well as those he suspected of opposing him, and those who might grow up to be opponents. His secret police developed techniques to spy even on nomads. He sent his troops to machine-gun their herds. He poisoned their wells. For his urban enemies, he developed torture chambers he considered world-class, and his men concluded that rape proved especially productive of useful information.
To his neighbors, he preached the virtues of the United States, but his creed was “Koranic Marxism,” illustrated by a triptych of portraits hung throughout the nation depicting Marx, Lenin, and Siad as the new Muhammad. His official portrait shows him as a young general in a khaki uniform and a mustache he seems to have copied from Hitler. He bombed more civilians than rebels, reduced an entire city to rubble, and directed his air force to strafe refugees. He turned his country into a garden of land mines that continue to blossom to this day.
Before Coe found Siad through a West German Bundestag member, Siad waged war on Ethiopia. After they met, he waged war on his own nation. For the past seventeen years, there has been no nation, only war. If Coe ever said a word about the killings, it was not recorded in the documents I found. “I don’t wish to embarrass people,” Coe said of his relationships with dictators in 2007. “I don’t take positions. The only thing I do is bring people together.”
In 1981, Family members made contact with Siad on behalf of his then-enemy, Kenyan dictator Daniel arap Moi—a brutal American ally—whom Siad agreed to meet. The Family took this news to General David Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and a Family member), who in thanks invited Siad to the Pentagon, a visit that resulted in a special breakfast in America for the dictator, with General Jones, members of congress, and Department of Defense officials. In 1983, Coe arranged for the dictator his own international prayer cell, which included the Bundestag member, Rudolf Decker; a defense contractor, William K. Brehm; and the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A year later Coe strengthened Siad’s hand by proposing Mogadishu as the site for a “fellowship meeting” with two other anti-Soviet dictators, arap Moi and Gaafar Nimeiry of Sudan.
From America, Coe sent Siad Senator Chuck Grassley, ultraright Iowa Republican (still serving as of 2008). But Coe was distracted; his twenty-seven-year-old son, Jonathan, was fighting lymphoma. He rallied, though—Doug, that is—when he put Christ’s social order before his father, his mother, his brother, his sister, and even his own grief to use what must have been one of the saddest days of his life to reach out to the general: “You are much in my thoughts today,” wrote Coe. “Jonathan my son to whom you were so kind died this morning. You influenced his life for God and he never forgot you.”
“I did not have the occasion to meet him,” Siad wrote by way of condolences.
A document titled “Siad Barre’s Somalia and the USA,” prepared for the Family and marked “Very Confidential,” is one of the rare Family documents to move beyond what Elgin Groseclose called “the facade of brotherhood.” It is undated but appears to have been written near the beginning of the relationship. Siad, it begins, is the only head of state to have expelled the Soviets, and the only regional leader to offer “full military, air, and naval bases.” He pledges, too, to provide for a pro-American successor, and to purge his government of all officials linked to Somalia’s former patron, excepting himself, presumably. Then he notes that he has already supplied the Pentagon with a list of armaments he needed to fight the Cubans. Received.
In 1983, Somalia’s minister of defense went to Washington at Coe’s invitation to meet with the new chairman of the joint chiefs, General John J. Vessey. The United States nearly doubled military aid to the regime, pouring guns into a country that before the decade was out would achieve a moment of unity it has not seen since, when nearly everyone—politicians, warlords, children—united in opposition to Siad. He fled in 1991, taking refuge in Kenya with arap Moi. One of his last acts as Somalia’s key man was to scorch as much of his enemy’s land as he could, a biblical punishment for a nation that had resisted God’s appointed authority. Three hundred thousand died in the famine that followed. It’s considered Siad’s legacy. It was also the Family’s gift to Somalia.
ON ONE OF my last days at Ivanwald, a group of brothers returned from a trip to the movies. They’d gone to see Black Hawk Down, the story of nineteen American soldiers killed in 1993 in a battle with one of the Somali militias that have terrorized the country for most of the seventeen years since Siad’s downfall. The movie had made such an impression on the brothers that Jeff C., one of the house leaders, decided to convene the boys to talk about the responsibilities of followers of Christ. Some of the men took a hard lesson from the film: you can’t help savages. But Jeff C. corrected them. There was an international crew there at the time—men from Ecuador, Paraguay, the Czech Republic, Benin—but this, Jeff C. knew, was an American affair. “We help people,” he said. “That’s what we do. Even if they’re, I don’t know, ‘savages.’ We’ll just keep loving on ’em.”
DOUG COE DID not pull any triggers in Somalia, did not poison any wells, and the Family was not one of the warring clans that obliterated what was left of the nation’s infrastructure. For all the Family’s talk of the “man-method,” of “relationships,” its members did not know Somalia very well. They treated it as a piece on a playing board. This Somalia wanted friends in Washington, so the Family became Somalia’s friend. This Somalia wanted guns, so the Family helped it get guns. This Somalia wanted to be called “brother,” so the Family called Siad Barre “brother.” Families, as Coe would be the first to point out, are about love. Not accountability, ultimately, and there does not seem to have been any for Brother Siad.
Jesus plus nothing, remember, does not depend on scripture, its nuances, its hard lessons. Jesus plus nothing does not include, for instance, the ninth verse of the fourth chapter of the Book of Genesis. God asks Cain, who has just murdered Abel, where his brother is. “I do not know,” replies Cain. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” It’s a genuinely difficult question. God never answers it directly, instead responding with what sounds like divine distress: “What have you done?” To Cain’s existentialism, God answers with a demand for history. That’s a more straightforward query, one I’ve attempted to answer with regard to the Family. But Cain’s question, that one’s too hard for me. To one who proclaims fellowship, as do the members of the Family, the answer is simple: “Yes, I am my brother’s keeper.” That was Jeff C.’s answer. But the Family has more often served as an accomplice, not a keeper. Where does that leave the rest of us? The Family works through the men and women we put in power. Sam Brownback. Hillary Clinton. Pick your poison. In the calculus of party politics, these two do occupy distant coordinates, but in the geometry of power politics, the Family knows, they are on the same plane, and the distance between them is shrinking. They mean well, both of them, and I’m more partial to the views of one of them, but I can’t help looking at that narrowing spectrum and thinking, This is an awful tight space into which to fit a democracy.
III.
THE POPULAR FRONT
INTERLUDE
Every revolutionary class must wage war on the cultural front.
—LEWIS COREY, THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM (1934)
LEWIS COREY, A JOURNALIST and radical political theorist who helped fight just such a battle, saw the shape, if not the tone, of the future. I first learned about Corey in a history of the United States’ original cultural front, an alliance of radical workers, artists, and intellectuals that briefly flourished in the 1930s, guided by Stalin’s invisible hand, and then was thought to have disappeared. Or so held conventional wisdom, until Yale scholar Michael Denning discovere
d that the cultural politics of those years were an unstable mix of totalitarian influence and wild diversity that didn’t dead-end with the close of the decade. Rather, the cultural front of the 1930s flowed into postwar American life in diluted but more widespread form. The cultural front—the spirit of a more tightly defined “Popular Front” of antifascist political parties, sects, and factions—transformed class politics in America: it gave classes a sense of themselves as struggling over not just wages but also ideas, aesthetics, rituals, customs, the imagination of things to come.1
The idea of “classes” disappeared from America following World War II, absorbed into the great blob of the Cold War. And yet a cultural front survived. The evidence? The so-called culture war fought to this day between fundamentalism and secularism.
That American fundamentalism contains within it a multitude of beliefs, impulses, traditions, politics—just a few of which have been explored here—must lead us to question the other side of the battle. Secularism, of course, conceives of itself as rational and thus open to all empirical data. And yet it, too, is subject to the broad brush with which it’s easiest to paint social conditions. Culture war was a label created by conservative elites who wanted to demand of the public the old question of union battles: which side are you on? But the lesson of elite fundamentalism is that the sides are not just blurry; they’re interwoven.
The Cold War liberalism that led to American wars and proxy wars, for example, ran parallel with elite fundamentalism’s sense of its own divine universalism. The Family’s Worldwide Spiritual Offensive infused America’s global mission—the economic reconstruction of Western Europe and the militaristic destruction of Southeast Asia alike—and that imperial project in turn sparked the imaginations of elite fundamentalists, providing them with an alternative to traditional fundamentalist separatism. Domestically, the establishment practice of containing political argument within such narrow confines that most Americans could barely conceive of the radicalisms, left and right, that shape politics throughout the rest of the world sat comfortably with the desire of elite fundamentalists for a politics of no politics. The results include elections based on “character” rather than ideas, debates as rituals meant to result in reconciliation, the consensus of the powerful represented as a reasonable process in which everyone gets some small piece of the action. We call this “compromise,” and consider our democracy healthy.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, it was the Left that recognized that American democracy was drifting toward empire, and that the democratic project had never been anywhere near complete to begin with. Since then, it has been the Right that discerned the cracks in democracy’s veneer and the hollowness behind it. From that perception arose the conservative movement that declared culture war. Culture war as a slogan may be relatively new, but we can easily identify its antecedents on the San Francisco docks in 1934, or with Jonathan Edwards sitting beside Abigail Hutchinson’s bed in Northampton in 1735. In both cases—and now—culture war revolves around an implicit critique of what Abram called “materialism.”
Edwards saw as his enemy the unwitting banality of the American business society, fools who did not realize that they dangled over an abyss. Harry Bridges and the men and women whom he fought beside in San Francisco were all too aware of the abyss; they saw as their enemy the economic system that held them precariously suspended above it. The populist fundamentalism that in the late 1970s marched into the public square railed against the same familiar enemy, but now defined entirely as secularism. What does secularism do, according to this fundamentalist front? It cheapens life, it sells sex, it puts a price tag on the human soul. It makes people into commodities. And who will oppose this godless deviltry? “Followers of Christ,” a term that requires quotes to distinguish it from the much broader category of those who believe in or are born into one of the many Christian traditions no longer considered valid by the new fundamentalists. Followers of Christ—those who cleave to a unique American fundamentalism—define themselves more sharply. They are a class, a revolutionary one, no less, dedicated, in theory at least, to the transformation of American life and thus the world.
But they’re vague on the details. They’d like to abolish abortion, and they’d like to pray in school and do away with pornography, and drive queer people back into the closet (or “cure” them, say the optimists among them). And then what? What about hunger, poverty, the greed and blindness that drives global warming? All important concerns, concede American fundamentalism’s elites and populist champions. Would the steps they’ve proposed bring an end to the commodification of bodies, the pricing of souls, a culture in which dollars pass for ideas? Hardly. But the believers, the fundamentalists, those who would reshape society along lines of their idea of Christ’s order, have no further solutions. They are a cultural front without a politics. Where once there was a critique of what some might call godlessness and others might call capitalism, there is a vacuum. And in that empty space, the status quo remains unthreatened. Secular democracy, such as it is, faces no serious challenge. Nor, for that matter, does the elite fundamentalism that for the last seventy years has coexisted alongside it, ensuring that the United States was never fully secular, nor democratic.
The story so far has been about how elite fundamentalism has shaped domestic and foreign politics, how a theocratic strand ran through the “American century” and remains taut in the new one. Now the story turns inward, into the lives of ordinary Americans, toward the cultural front of fundamentalism. It’s this cultural front, converging with the political project of elite fundamentalism, that justifies the label of “Popular Front.” In the United States in the twenty-first century, the Popular Front is that of fundamentalism, the faith that promises that you can be born again, that miracles still occur, that we might yet revive the nation. This Popular Front will no more rebuild the economic and structural foundations of America or its soft empire than did that of the 1930s, but it has already transformed the way we think, the way we live, the way we feel, the way we know ourselves and the world.
Culture war, then, is a misleading term for such a metamorphosis. What the elite and populist movements of American fundamentalism have together wrought is not a culture war but a cultural evolution, one that is adapting to the twenty-first century much faster than secularism. This religion isn’t an opiate of the masses; it’s the American Christ on methamphetamine.
11.
WHAT EVERYBODY WANTS
THEY ARE DRAWN AS if by magnetic forces; they speak of Colorado Springs, home to the greatest concentration of fundamentalist activist groups in American history, both as a last stand and as a kind of utopia in the making. They say it is new and unique and precious, embattled by enemies, and also that it is “traditional,” a blueprint for what everybody wants, and envied by enemies. The city itself is unspectacular, a grid of wide western avenues lined with squat, gray and beige box buildings, only a handful of them taller than a dozen stories. Local cynics point out that if you put Colorado Springs on a truck and carted it to Nebraska, it would make Omaha look lovely. But the architecture is not what draws Christians looking for clean living. The mountains help, but there are other mountain towns. What Colorado Springs offers, finally, is a story.
Lori Rose is from Minnesota and heard rumors about this holy city when she lived on an air force base near Washington, D.C. Her husband isn’t a Christian, refuses Jesus, looks at things he shouldn’t; but she has found a church to attend without him. “I want a relationship like my relationship with God,” she says. “It’s almost like an affair.” Ron Poelstra came from Los Angeles. Now he volunteers at his church, selling his pastor’s books on “free-market theology” after services. His two teenage boys stand behind him, display models for the benefits of faith. They fold their hands in front of themselves and both smile whenever Ron glances their way. L.A., Ron says, would have eaten them up: the gangs. Adam Taylor grew up in Westchester County, an heir to the Bergdorf Goodman fortune, the so
n of artists and writers, a prince of the city. He lived the life of Augustine, and it nearly killed him. He came to Colorado Springs to learn the Bible the hard way, each word a nail pounded into sin. Now he’s a pastor, and the Bible doesn’t hurt anymore.1
The story they found in Colorado Springs is about newness: new houses, new roads, new stores. And about oldness, imagined: what is thought to be the traditional way of life, families as they were after the world wars, before the culture wars, which is to say, during the brief, Cold War moment when America was a nation of single-breadwinner nuclear families.
