The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

by Jeff Sharlet

  Part Three, “The Popular Front,” carries that story into the present. The current manifestation of fundamentalist power is only—only!—the latest revival of emotions stirred by Jonathan Edwards nearly three hundred years ago, the fear of an angry God, the love of a personal Jesus, and the ecstasy wrought by the Holy Ghost. That trinity of sentiments was bound together then by the belief that to the European conquerors of the New World was given the burden of spreading their light—their power—to all of humanity.

  This is not a book about the Bible thumpers portrayed by Hollywood, pinched little hypocrites and broad-browed lunatics, representatives of that subset of American fundamentalism that declares itself a bitter nation within a nation. Rather, it’s a story that begins on Ivanwald’s suburban lawn, with a group of men gripping each other’s shoulders in prayer. It is the story of how they got there, where they are going, and where the movement they joined came from; the story of an American fundamentalism, gentle and militant, conservative and revolutionary, that has been hiding in plain sight all along.

  AWAKENINGS

  IVANWALD

  NOT LONG AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, a man I’ll call Zeke1 came to New York to survey the ruins of secularism. “To bear witness,” he said. He believed Christ had called him.

  He wandered the city, sparking up conversations with people he took to be Muslims—“Islamics,” he called them—knocking on the doors of mosques by day and sliding past velvet ropes into sweaty clubs by night. He prayed with an imam (to Jesus) and may or may not have gone home with several women. He got as close as possible to Ground Zero, visited it often, talked to street preachers. His throat tingled with dust and ashes. When he slept, his nose bled. He woke one morning on a red pillow.

  He went to bars where he sat and listened to the anger of men and women who did not understand, as he did, why they had been stricken. He stared at photographs and paintings of the Towers. The great steel arches on which they’d stood reminded him of Roman temples, and this made him sad. The city was fallen, not just literally but spiritually, as decadent and doomed as an ancient civilization. And yet Zeke wanted and believed he needed to know why New York was what it was, this city so hated by fundamentalists abroad and, he admitted after some wine, by fundamentalists—“Believers,” he called them, and himself—at home.

  At the time Zeke was living at Ivanwald. His brothers-in-Christ, the youngest eighteen, the oldest in their early thirties, were much like him: educated, athletic, born to affluence, successful or soon to be. Zeke and his brothers were fundamentalists, but not at all the kind I was familiar with. “We’re not even Christian,” he said. “We just follow Jesus.”

  I’d known Zeke on and off for twelve years. He’s the older brother of a woman I dated in college. Zeke had studied philosophy and history and literature in the United States and in Europe, but he had long wanted to find something…better. His life had been a pilgrim’s progress, and the path he’d taken a circuitous version of the route every fundamentalist travels: from confusion to clarity, from questions to answers, from a mysterious divine to a Jesus who’s so familiar that he’s like your best friend. A really good guy about whom Zeke could ask, What would Jesus do? and genuinely find the answer.

  His whole life Zeke had been searching for a friend like that, someone whose words meant what they meant and nothing less or more. Zeke himself looks like such a man, tall, lean, and muscular, with a square jaw and wavy, dark blond hair. One of his grandfathers had served in the Eisenhower administration, the other in Kennedy’s. His father, the family legend went, had once been considered a possible Republican contender for Congress. But instead of seeking office, his father had retreated to the Rocky Mountains, and Zeke, instead of attaining the social heights his pedigree seemed to predict, had spent his early twenties withdrawing into theological conundrums, until he peered out at a world of temptations like a wounded thing in a cave. He drank too much, fought men and raged at women, disappeared from time to time and came back from wherever he had gone quieter, angrier, sadder.

  Then he met Jesus. He had long been a committed Christian, but this encounter was different. This Jesus did not demand orthodoxy. This Jesus gave him permission to stop struggling. So he did, and his pallor left him. He took a job in finance and he met a woman as bright as he was and much happier, and soon he was making money, in love, engaged. But the questions of his youth still bothered him. Again he drank too much, his eye wandered, his temper kindled. So, one day, at the suggestion of an older mentor, he ditched his job, put his fiancée on hold, and moved to Ivanwald, where, he was told, he’d meet yet another Jesus, the true one.

  When he came up to New York, his sister asked if I would take him out to dinner. What, she wanted to know, was Zeke caught up in?

  We met at a little Moroccan place in the East Village. Zeke arrived in bright white tennis shorts, spotless white sneakers, and white tube socks pulled taut on his calves. His concession to Manhattan style, he said, was his polo shirt, tucked in tight; it was black. He flirted with the waitress and she giggled, he talked to the people at the next table. Women across the room glanced his way; he gave them easy smiles. I’d never seen Zeke so charming. In my mind, I began to prepare a report for his sister: Good news! Jesus has finally turned Zeke around.

  He said as much himself. He even apologized for arguments we’d had in the past. He acknowledged that he’d once enjoyed getting a rise out of me by talking about “Jewish bankers.” (I was raised a Jew by my father, a Christian by my mother.) That was behind him now, he said. Religion was behind him. Ivanwald had cured him of the God problem. I’d love the place, he said. “We take Jesus out of his religious wrapping. We look at Him, at each other, without assumptions. We ask questions, and we answer them together. We become brothers.”

  I asked if he and his brothers prayed a great deal. No, he said, not much. Did they spend a lot of time in church? None—most churches were too crowded with rules and rituals. Did they study the Bible in great depth? Just a few minutes in the morning. What they did, he said, was work and play games. During the day they raked leaves and cleaned toilets, and during the late afternoon they played sports, all of which prepared them to serve Jesus. The work taught humility, he said, and the sports taught will; both were needed in Jesus’ army.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Back up. What leaves? Whose toilets?”

  “Politicians,” he said. “Congressmen.”

  “You go to their houses?”

  “Sometimes,” Zeke answered. “But mostly they come to us.”

  I was trying to picture it—Trent Lott pulling up in a black Lincoln, a toilet badly in need of a scrub protruding from the trunk. But what Zeke meant was that he and his brothers raked and polished for politicians at a retreat called the Cedars, designed for their spiritual succor.

  “Really?” I said. “Like who?”

  “I can’t really say,” Zeke answered.

  “Who runs it?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Who pays?”

  “People just give money.” Then Zeke smiled. Enough questions. “You’re better off seeing it for yourself.”

  “Is there an organization?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, chuckling at my incomprehension. “Just Jesus.”

  “So how do you join?”

  “You don’t,” he said. He smiled again, such a broad grin. His teeth were as white as his sneakers. “You’re recommended.”

  ZEKE RECOMMENDED ME to Ivanwald, and because I was curious and had recently quit a job to write a book about American religious communities, I decided to join for a while. I had no thought of investigative reporting; rather, my interest was personal. By the time I got there, I’d lived for short spells with “Cowboy Christians” in Texas, and with “Baba lovers,” America’s most benign cultists, in South Carolina, and in Kansas with hundreds of naked pagans. I thought Ivanwald would simply be one more bead on my agnostic rosary. I thought of the transformation Ivanwald had worked on Zeke,
and I imagined it as a sort of spiritual spa where angry young men smoothed out their anxieties with new-agey masculine bonding. I thought it would be silly but relaxing. I didn’t imagine that what I’d find there would lead me into the heart of American fundamentalism, that a spell among Zeke’s Believers would propel me into dusty archives and the halls of power for the next several years. I had never thought of myself as a religious seeker, but at Ivanwald I became one. Since then, I’ve been searching, not for salvation, but for the meaning behind the words, the hints of power, that I found there.

  Zeke was gone by the time I arrived. He had returned to finance, a path the brothers approved of, and to his fiancée, whom they did not—she was a graduate student and a free-spirited Scandinavian who loved to party. Jeff Connally, one of the Ivanwald house leaders who picked me up at Union Station in Washington one April evening, told me he thought Zeke might have made the wrong choice. Zeke’s fiancée did not obey God. She was, he said, a “Jezebel.” Jeff was a small, sharply handsome man with cloudy blue eyes above high cheekbones. When he said “Jezebel,” he smiled.

  Jeff had come with two other brothers: Gannon Sims, the Baylor grad, and Bengt Carlson, the other house leader, a twenty-four-year-old North Carolinian with spiky brown eyebrows. In the car, after a long silence, he said, “Well, I think you’re probably the most misunderstood Ivanwalder ever.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “I didn’t really know how to explain you to the guys,” Bengt went on. “So I just told him we got a new dude, he’s from New York, he’s a writer, he’s Jewish, but he wants to know Jesus. And you know what they said?”

  “No,” I answered, my fingers curling around the door handle.

  “Bring him on!” My three new brothers laughed, and Gannon’s Volvo eased down tree-lined streets, each smaller and sleepier than the last, until we arrived at the gray colonial that was to be my new home. Bengt showed me my bunk and two drawers in a bureau and a cubbyhole in the bathroom for my toiletries. One by one, a dozen men drifted by in various states of undress, slapping me on the back or the ass or hugging me, calling me “brother.” Someone was playing the soundtrack to Hair. One man crooned the words to “Fellatio,” but then he said he was just kidding, and another switched out Hair for Neil Young’s “Keep On Rockin’ in the Free World.” Pavel the Czech winked.

  Ready for bed, the men introduced themselves. From Japan there was Yusuke, a management consultant studying Ivanwald in order to replicate it in Tokyo; from Ecuador, a former college soccer star named Raf, a Catholic who was open about his desire for business connections. From Atlanta there was thick-necked Beau and bespectacled Josh, best friends who’d put off their postcollege careers; from Oklahoma, Dave, a tall, redheaded young man with a wide, daffy smile on a head of uncommon proportions. “Our pumpkin on a beanpole,” one of the brothers called him, a “gift” to our brotherhood from former representative Steve Largent, who Dave said had arranged with Dave’s father for Dave to be sent to Ivanwald to cure him of a mild case of college liberalism.

  Before the lights went out after midnight, they came together to pray for me, Jeff Connally’s voice just above a whisper, asking God to “break” me. Dave, already broken, mumbled an amen.2

  IVANWALD, WHICH SITS at the end of Twenty-fourth Street North in Arlington, was known only to its residents and to the members and friends of the Family. The Family is in its own words an “invisible” association, though it has always been organized around public men. Senator Sam Brownback (R., Kansas), chair of a weekly, off-the-record meeting of religious right groups called the Values Action Team (VAT), is an active member, as is Representative Joe Pitts (R., Pennsylvania), an avuncular would-be theocrat who chairs the House version of the VAT. Others referred to as members include senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina, chairman of the Senate Steering Committee (the powerful conservative caucus cofounded back in 1974 by another Family associate, the late senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska); Pete Domenici of New Mexico (a Catholic and relatively moderate Republican; it’s Domenici’s status as one of the Senate’s old lions that the Family covets, not his doctrinal purity); Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa); James Inhofe (R., Oklahoma); Tom Coburn (R., Oklahoma); John Thune (R., South Dakota); Mike Enzi (R., Wyoming); and John Ensign, the conservative casino heir elected to the Senate from Nevada, a brightly tanned, hapless figure who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling-fortune name. “Faith-based Democrats” Bill Nelson of Florida and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, sincere believers drawn rightward by their understanding of Christ’s teachings, are members, and Family stalwarts in the House include Representatives Frank Wolf (R., Virginia), Zach Wamp (R., Tennessee), and Mike McIntyre, a North Carolina Democrat who believes that the Ten Commandments are “the fundamental legal code for the laws of the United States” and thus ought to be on display in schools and courthouses.3

  The Family’s historic roll call is even more striking: the late senator Strom Thurmond (R., South Carolina), who produced “confidential” reports on legislation for the Family’s leadership, presided for a time over the Family’s weekly Senate meeting, and the Dixiecrat senators Herman Talmadge of Georgia and Absalom Willis Robertson of Virginia—Pat Robertson’s father—served on the behind-the-scenes board of the organization. In 1974, a Family prayer group of Republican congressmen and former secretary of defense Melvin Laird helped convince President Gerald Ford that Richard Nixon deserved not just Christian forgiveness but also a legal pardon. That same year, Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist led the Family’s first weekly Bible study for federal judges.4

  “I wish I could say more about it,” Ronald Reagan publicly demurred back in 1985, “but it’s working precisely because it is private.”

  “We desire to see a leadership led by God,” reads a confidential mission statement. “Leaders of all levels of society who direct projects as they are led by the spirit.” Another principle expanded upon is stealthiness; members are instructed to pursue political jujitsu by making use of secular leaders “in the work of advancing His kingdom,” and to avoid whenever possible the label Christian itself, lest they alert enemies to that advance. Regular prayer groups, or “cells” as they’re often called, have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries.

  The Family’s use of the term “cell” long predates the word’s current association with terrorism. Its roots are in the Cold War, when leaders of the Family deliberately emulated the organizing techniques of communism. In 1948, a group of Senate staffers met to discuss ways that the Family’s “cell and leadership groups” could recruit elites unwilling to participate in the “mass meeting approach” of populist fundamentalism. Two years later, the Family declared that with democracy inadequate to the fight against godlessness, such cells should function to produce political “atomic energy”; that is, deals and alliances that could not be achieved through the clumsy machinations of legislative debate would instead radiate quietly out of political cells. More recently, Senator Sam Brownback told me that the privacy of Family cells makes them safe spaces for men of power—an appropriation of another term borrowed from an enemy, feminism.5 “In this closer relationship,” a document for members reads, “God will give you more insight into your own geographical area and your sphere of influence.” One’s cell should become “an invisible ‘believing group’” out of which “agreements reached in faith and in prayer around the person of Jesus Christ” lead to action that will appear to the world to be unrelated to any centralized organization.

  In 1979, the former Nixon aide and Watergate felon Charles W. Colson—born again through the guidance of the Family and the ministry of a CEO of arms manufacturer Raytheon—estimated the Family’s strength at 20,000, although the number of dedicated “associates” around the globe is much smaller (around 350 as of 2006). The Family maintains a closely guarded database of associates, members, and “key men,”
but it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities.6

  “The Movement,” a member of the Family’s inner circle once wrote to the group’s chief South African operative, “is simply inexplicable to people who are not intimately acquainted with it.” The Family’s “political” initiatives, he continues, “have always been misunderstood by ‘outsiders.’ As a result of very bitter experiences, therefore, we have learned never to commit to paper any discussions or negotiations that are taking place. There is no such thing as a ‘confidential’ memorandum, and leakage always seems to occur. Thus, I would urge you not to put on paper anything relating to any of the work that you are doing…[unless] you know the recipient well enough to put at the top of the page ‘PLEASE DESTROY AFTER READING.’”*

  “If I told you who has participated and who participates until this day, you would not believe it,” the Family’s longtime leader, Doug Coe, said in a rare interview in 2001. “You’d say, ‘You mean that scoundrel? That despot?’”7

  A friendly, plainspoken Oregonian with dark, curly hair, a lazy smile, and the broad, thrown-back shoulders of a man who recognizes few superiors, Coe has worked for the Family since 1959 and been “First Brother” since founder Abraham Vereide was “promoted” to heaven in 1969. (Recently, a successor named Dick Foth, a longtime friend to John Ashcroft, assumed some of Coe’s duties, but Coe remains the preeminent figure.) Coe denies possessing any authority, but Family members speak of him with a mixture of intimacy and awe. Doug Coe, they say—most people refer to him by his first and last name—is closer to Jesus than perhaps any other man alive, and thus privy to information the rest of us are too spiritually “immature” to understand. For instance, the necessity of secrecy. Doug Coe says it allows the scoundrels and the despots to turn their talents toward the service of Jesus—who, Doug Coe says, prefers power to piety—by shielding their work on His behalf from a hardhearted public, unwilling to believe in their good intentions. In a sermon posted online by a fundamentalist website, Coe compares this method to the mob’s. “His Body”—the Body of Christ, that is, by which he means Christendom—“functions invisibly like the mafia…. They keep their organization invisible. Everything visible is transitory. Everything invisible is permanent and lasts forever. The more you can make your organization invisible, the more influence it will have.”