The Family

by Jeff Sharlet

  5. The Family’s role in U.S.-Somali relations is documented in extensive correspondence in folders 18–24, box 254, collection 459, BGCA.

  INTERLUDE

  1. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso, 1997).

  11. WHAT EVERYBODY WANTS

  1. The stories of individual believers related in this chapter were gathered during two reporting trips to New Life Church, the first in January 2005, and the second in April 2005. Between these visits I corresponded with some of the members of the church. Where I draw from sources other than interviews conducted during this period, I’ll provide additional notes.

  2. Pastor Ted Haggard, the former leader of New Life, has since disputed that the location of the Air Force Academy was a consideration, in contradiction of information provided me by church representatives.

  3. Cara Degette, “All the President’s Men,” Colorado Springs Independent, November 13, 2003.

  4. This account of Pastor Ted’s founding of New Life is drawn from personal interviews and Pastor Ted’s Primary Purpose: Making It Hard for People to Go to Hell From Your City (Charisma House, 1995). The missionary in question, Danny Ost, is the son of Joseph Ost, a longtime collaborator of the Fellowship’s on African work. In 1965, Joseph Ost went to work full-time for the Fellowship “behind the scenes” in West Africa. Ost introduced Doug Coe and Gustav Adolf Gedat, then in the late stages of his West German political career, to senior Ivory Coast and Liberia government officials. (Coe to Vittoria Vaccari, December 1965, folder 1, box 362, collection 459, BGCA. Coe to Gedat, December 30, 1965, folder 11, box 219, collection 459.) Coe included short reports of Ost’s involvement—including his meetings with African heads of state—in November/December 1965, and April/May 1966 “confidential” briefings he prepared for congressional members of the Fellowship. (Folder 2, box 362, and folder 19, box 449, collection 459, BGCA.) This is, of course, not evidence of any organizational connection between Haggard and the Family; rather, it is simply an illustration of the small world of American fundamentalism’s elites.

  5. In Primary Purpose, Haggard writes of confronting men outside a gay bar he’d discovered with one of his associate pastors. “Two days later, I had a meeting scheduled with one of the men in the church. On my way there, I had to go near the intersection where the bar was located and wondered how many cars would be in the parking lot of that bar in the middle of the day.” After observing for a while, Ted spotted a member of his church. Ted jumped out of his car. “‘Jesus sent me here to rescue you,’” he called. His friend got into Ted’s car and cried while Ted ministered to him. See pp. 107–8.

  6. Ibid., p. 26.

  7. Ibid., p. 33.

  8. Ted Haggard, Dog Training, Fly Fishing, and Sharing Christ in the 21st Century (Nelson Books, 2002), p. 9.

  9. Ibid., p. 48.

  10. The first populist church to successfully adopt the cell structure was not American, but South Korean, the work of Pastor Paul Cho, who built a congregation of nearly eight hundred thousand, the largest single church in the world, using a cell-group structure that thrived under that nation’s Cold War authoritarianism. Steve Brouwer, Paul Gifford, and Susan D. Rose, Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism (Routledge, 1996), p. 2.

  11. Haggard, Primary Purpose, p. 160. Pastor Ted is aware that his martial plans alarm some outsiders; in Primary Purpose he also writes that when he began his campaign for Colorado Springs, “spiritual warfare was not a popular subject…I didn’t speak publicly about my own experiences” (p. 32). Even in his more mainstream position atop the NAE, Ted’s belief in less than full disclosure persisted. When the evangelical journalist Ayelish McGarvey asked Pastor Ted in 2004 why President Bush, as a Christian, had not apologized for the false assertions used to justify the Iraq War, or for the dishonest smears marshaled on his campaign’s behalf, Ted said: “I think if you asked the President these questions once he’s out of office, he’d say, ‘You’re right. We shouldn’t have done it.’ But right now if he said something like that, well, the world would spin out of control!…Listen, I think [we Christian believers] are responsible not to lie, but I don’t think we’re responsible to say everything we know.” (McGarvey, “As God Is His Witness,” American Prospect online edition, October 19, 2004, http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8790.

  12. William Sims Bainbridge and Rodney Stark, A Theory of Religion (Lang, 1987); Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (Rutgers University Press, 1992); Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (University of California Press, 2000). Since I wrote this chapter, Stark has published a new book that signals his shift from scholarship into wholesale Christian triumphalism of a variety barely distinguishable from Pastor Ted’s: The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random House, 2005).

  13. Stark and Finke, Chapter 8, “A Theoretical Model of Religious Economies,” in Acts of Faith.

  14. Haggard, Dog Training, p. 12.

  15. Ibid., pp. 35–39.

  16. Ibid., p. 24.

  17. Both organizations have their roots in the dubious late-nineteenth-century science of boyology, practiced by mostly Protestant, upper-class men concerned about the degenerative effects of “city rot,” immigrants, and professional female educators on future generations of men. The Boy Scouts was the most militant of many groups that started up, but over the years, it grew soft—or maybe Christian fundamentalists grew harder in spirit. (Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 [Harvard University Press, 2001].) An Assemblies of God preacher named Johnny Barnes founded the Royal Rangers in 1962, blatantly copying the Scouts and adding an extra dose of scripture. It has since prospered on the conservative fringe. New Life’s success with the program, though, has been a big factor in moving it toward the mainstream. The Scouts still offer a “God and Country Program,” but that can’t compare with the Rangers’ emphasis on foreign missions, adventures that appeal to kids and fundamentalist parents alike. http://royalrangers.ag.org/.

  18. Our City, God’s Word (International Bible Society, 2004). “Who is the ‘Our’ in ‘Our City, God’s Word’ that the International Bible Society refers to?” asked Colorado Springs resident Susan Hindman in a letter published in the November 7, 2004, Colorado Springs Gazette. The IBS proceeded to produce editions for two more cities, further confusing the issue.

  12. THE ROMANCE OF AMERICAN FUNDAMENTALISM

  1. Anne Constable, Richard Walker, and Tom Carter, “The Sins of Billy James,” Time, February 16, 1976.

  13. UNSCHOOLING

  1. The American Republic for Christian Schools, second edition, by Rachel C. Larson, Pamela B. Creason, and Michael D. Matthews, is published by Bob Jones University Press (2000). Bob Jones University, perhaps the most traditional school in Christian higher education, is too elite to be representative of populist fundamentalism but too separatist and intolerant even within the faith to be part of elite fundamentalism. And yet its publishing arm, one of the biggest suppliers of evangelical textbooks, reaches far beyond the university’s sphere of influence. I first learned of the press and its offerings in 2005 at MacDowell, an artists’ colony in New Hampshire, as a group of writers and artists were discussing the texts they’d read as schoolchildren. One, Michelle Aldredge, had us all beat, with quick recall of an impressive sample of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, from Jonathan Edwards to Walt Whitman. What kind of amazing school had she attended? An evangelical academy, where she’d studied Dr. Raymond St. John’s two-volume American Literature for Christian Schools. I ordered Bob Jones University Press’s 2003 teachers’ edition of the text and soon realized that my secular public school education had failed to provide me an adequate grounding in American literature. Dr. St. John’s text offered
excerpts from writers I didn’t encounter until college or behind. On the other hand, students were advised to ponder how much better the already-great Melville could have been had he not been a pagan.

  2. MacArthur did more than that, according to the historian Lawrence S. Wittnew: “Despite the official policy of religious freedom and separation of church and state in occupied Japan…General Douglas MacArthur openly and actively assisted the propagation of the Christian faith…Christianity and democracy were closely tied in MacArthur’s opinion, and during the Cold War period he looked to Christianity as a major weapon against Communism in Japan.” That weapon took the form of a campaign to bring thousands of missionaries into Japan and distribute 10 million Bibles. Christianity didn’t take, but it’s possible that it did help blunt the powerful postwar appeal of Japanese leftism. “MacArthur and the Missionaries: God and Man in Occupied Japan,” Pacific Historical Review 40, no. 1 (1971): 77–98.

  3. Douthat’s article, published to mild fanfare in the August/September 2006 issue of First Things, missed the lengthy and admiring obituary published by the magazine just five years previous, William Edgar’s August/September 2001 tribute, “The Passing of R. J. Rushdoony,” in which Edgar eulogized him as “a man of extraordinary brilliance possessing an almost encyclopedic knowledge of human affairs,” and recalled with fondness his early study of Rushdoony at Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri. Schaeffer, we are told by the respectable Right, took only Rushdoony’s most civilized ideas. Which is to say, he narrowed Rushdoony’s rage down to abortionists, writing in the early 1970s of abortion as symbolic of all of secularism and thus the front line in a battle between good and evil that justified breaking laws. Some fans took action, burning and bombing hundreds of abortion clinics and shooting several doctors. See Press, Absolute Convictions (Henry Holt, 2006).

  4. Quoted in John Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation: Abraham Kuyper’s American Public Theology (William B. Eerdmans, 2001), p. 21. Bolt, a fellow with the fundamentalist Family Research Council, is at the forefront of a broad attempt to claim Kuyper as a forebear of radical Christian conservatism, part of the long-term project of constructing an intellectual history for a religious tradition that has long eschewed intellectualism.

  5. The historian James D. Bratt argues for the progressive interpretation of Kuyper in his edited Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (William B. Eerdmans, 1998). “Kuyper was and was not a Protestant ‘fundamentalist,’” writes Bratt. “He was in a manner: a militant in all things, including his anti-Modernism…He did not try to eradicate history, but grow from it” (p. 3). In responding to an early draft of this chapter, Bratt noted that while Rushdoony and other contemporary fundamentalists—notably Chuck Colson—may have thought they were Kuyperians, their rejection of Kuyper’s pluralism and socialist inclinations puts them directly at odds not only with Kuyper’s writing, which is open to interpretation, but with the historical evidence, in the Dutch state, of Kuyper’s intentions. Kuyper, he argues, would have rejected the flattened perspective implied by a fundamentalist biblical worldview.

  6. James I. Robertson, Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (Macmillan, 1997), p. xiii. This is by far the best of the Stonewall biographies, of interest even if the reader has no Confederate sympathies. I used it as verification for the claims made by less responsible fundamentalist Stonewalliana.

  7. Like the Family, Christian Embassy prefers to keep a low profile, but on November 2, 2005, I obtained an interview with Christian Embassy’s chief of staff, Sam McCullough. McCullough’s main business is explaining the Bible’s position on contemporary concerns to congressmen—Brownback among them, as well as Family members Senator James Inhofe and Senator John Thune; and former representative Tom DeLay, “about 80 members of Congress…in our rotation,” McCullough told me. Christian Embassy also believes it has a special calling in the Pentagon, explaining the Bible’s view on war, for example—it’s “all throughout the Bible,” points outs McCullough—to a group of forty senior officers.

  8. Diamond, Roads to Dominion, 1995, p. 173.

  9. It works: An elegant booklet that accompanies the DVD is filled not just with the testimonies of generals and congressmen, but also with those of foreign diplomats declaring Washington a sort of holy city. “The most important thing since coming to Washington from my communist-dominated society is that I have discovered God,” writes a “European ambassador,” thanking Christian Embassy. Fijian ambassador Pita Nacuva, reports the booklet, following his “years of spiritual training in Washington, D.C.,” reconfigured his country’s schools “on the model of Jesus Christ” using an American Christian curriculum designed for developing nations, currently exported to around forty countries.

  10. After I first wrote about Christian Embassy in 2006, Mikey Weinstein, a former air force lawyer and Reagan White House counsel, reviewed its video and saw not just bad theology but also a potential violation of military regulations regarding separation of church and state. Moreover, with his son—a recent graduate of the Air Force Academy—headed for Iraq, Weinstein worried that the video functioned as almost made-to-order Al Qaeda propaganda. After all, how hard would it be to convince a potential Al Qaeda recruit that the United States is fighting a Christian crusade when U.S. generals and Department of Defense officials say so in so many words? A similar concern arose around one of the Christian witnesses in the video, Major General Peter U. Sutton at the Office of Defense Cooperation in Turkey. When news of his participation in the video hit the Turkish press following my article (one Turkish paper characterized Sutton as a member of a “radical fundamentalist sect”), his Turkish counterpart demanded to know why he had appeared in the video, undermining their trust in him. Weinstein’s organization, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, pressed the Pentagon for an investigation, and on July 20, 2007, the Department of Defense Inspector General issued Report. H06L102270308, “Alleged Misconduct by DOD Officials Concerning Christian Embassy,” which found that seven top officers had violated military ethics by participating in the video in uniform, that the Pentagon chaplain had obtained approval by “mischaracterizing the purpose and proponent of the video,” and that his office had authorized contractor badge status to Christian Embassy employees, allowing them access to restricted areas. Most disturbing of all was the defense offered by one officer: Christian Embassy, he believed, was a “quasi-federal entity.” The full text of the report is available at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation’s website, http://militaryreligiousfreedom.org.

  11. Ted Haggard appropriated King’s words at the August 14, 2005, “Justice Sunday II” televised forum organized by the fundamentalist Family Research Council. Haggard invoked King, alongside famed civil rights champions Tom DeLay and Phyllis Schlafly, as part of a call for the kind of right-wing judges who’d undo Brown v. Board. And in Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction (Free Press, 2007), former Bush faith-based official David Kuo tells of drawing on King as he wrote a pivotal speech for the former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, in which Reed claimed that the Christian Right was a victim of discrimination. “I was fighting my own little civil rights battle,” writes Kuo (p. 67).

  12. There are an increasing number of scholarly sources on the Jesus people movement, but far more entertaining and revealing are two memoirs by participants. Charles Marsh, a historian, contextualizes the Jesus people in the strife of southern race relations in The Last Days: A Son’s Story of Sin and Segregation in the New South (Basic Books, 2001), while the music writer Mark Curtis Anderson evokes the strange mix of rock and roll and piety that thrilled him as a child in Jesus Sound Explosion (University of Georgia Press, 2003).

  14. THIS IS NOT THE END

  1. Quoted in Lew Daly, God and the Welfare State (Boston Review/MIT Press, 2006), p. 33.

  2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000), p. xiv.

  SEARCHABLE TERMS

  Note: Entries in this index, carried over v
erbatim from the print edition of this title, are unlikely to correspond to the pagination of any given e-book reader. However, entries in this index, and other terms, may be easily located by using the search feature of your e-book reader.

  abortion issue, 6, 198, 258, 264, 265, 269, 275, 276, 295, 314, 327–28, 357–60, 429n

  Abs, Hermann J., 166–68, 175

  Abstinence Clearinghouse, 327–29

  abstinence-only sex education programs, 328–29. See also sexual purity movement accountability. See also ethics

  Family/Fellowship tract on, 219–20