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

by Jeff Sharlet

  “All right, how do we do that?” Tiahrt asked.

  “A covenant,” Doug Coe answered. The congressman half smiled, as if caught between confessing his ignorance and pretending he knew what Doug Coe was talking about. “Like the Mafia,” Coe clarified. “Look at the strength of their bonds.” He made a fist and held it before Tiahrt’s face. Tiahrt nodded, squinting. “See, for them it’s honor,” Coe said. “For us, it’s Jesus.”

  Doug Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers”: “Look at Hitler,” he said. “Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, bin Laden.” The Family possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the “total Jesus” of a brotherhood in Christ.

  “That’s what you get with a covenant,” said Doug Coe. “Jesus plus nothing.”23

  THE REGIMEN AT Ivanwald was so precise it was relaxing: no swearing, no drinking, no sex, no self. Watch out for magazines and don’t waste time on newspapers and never watch TV. Eat meat, study the Gospels, play basketball; God loves a man who can sink a three-pointer. Pray to be broken. “O Heavenly Father. Dear Jesus. Help me be humble. Let me do Your will.” Every morning began with a prayer, some days with outsiders—a former Ivanwald brother, now a businessman, or another executive who used tales of high finance to illuminate our lessons from scripture, which he supplemented with xeroxed midrash from Fortune—and Fridays with the women of Potomac Point. But most days it was just us boys, bleary-eyed, gulping coffee and sugared cereal as Bengt and Jeff C. laid out lines of Holy Word across the table like strategy.

  The dining room had once been a deck, but the boys had walled it in and roofed it over and unrolled a red Persian carpet, transforming the space into a sort of monastic meeting hall, with two long tables end to end, ringed by a dozen chairs and two benches. The first day I visited Ivanwald, Bengt cleared a space for me at the head of the table and sat to my right. Beside him, Wayne slumped in his chair, his eyes hidden by a cowboy hat. Across from him sat Beau, an Atlantan with the build and athletic intensity of a wrestler, still wearing the boxers and T-shirt he’d slept in. Bengt alone looked sharp, his hair combed, golf shirt tucked tightly into pleated chinos.

  Bengt asked Gannon to read our text for that morning, Psalm 139: “O Lord, you have searched me and you know me.” The very first line made Bengt smile; this was, in his view, an awesome thing for God to have done.

  Bengt’s manners and naive charm preceded him in every encounter. He was kind to his brothers and excellent with small children, tall and strong and competent with any tool, deadly whenever he got hold of the ball—any ball; all sports seemed to Bengt just a step more challenging than breathing. His eyes were deep and kind of sad, but he liked to laugh, and when he did he sounded like a friendly donkey, an Eyore for whom things were suddenly not so bad. When you told him a story, he’d respond, “Goll-y!” just to be nice. When genuinely surprised, he’d exclaim, “Good ni-ight!” Sometimes it was hard to remember that he was a self-professed revolutionary. He asked Gannon to keep reading, and then leaned back and listened.

  “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.”

  Bengt raised a hand. “That’s great, dude. Let’s talk about that.” The room fell silent as Bengt stared into his Bible, running his finger up and down the gilded edge of the page. “Guys,” he said. “What—how does that make you feel?”

  “Known,” said Gannon, almost in a whisper.

  Bengt nodded. He was looking for something else, but he didn’t know where it was. “What does it make you think of?”

  “Jesus?” said Beau.

  Bengt stroked his chin. “Yeah…Let me read you a little more.” He read in a monotone, accelerating as he went, as if he could persuade us through a sheer heap of words. “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb,” he concluded. His lips curled into a half smile. “Man! I mean, that’s intense, right? ‘In my mother’s womb’—God’s right in there with you.” He grinned. “It’s like,” he said, “it’s like, you can’t run. Doesn’t matter where you turn, ’cause Jesus is gonna be there, just waiting for you.”

  Beau’s eyes cleared, and Gannon nodded. “Yeah, brother,” Bengt said, an eyebrow arched. “Jesus is smart. He’s gonna get you.”

  Gannon shook his head. “Oh, he’s already got me.”

  “Me, too,” Beau chimed. Then each man clasped his hands into one fist and pressed it against his forehead or his chin and prayed, eyes closed and Jesus all over his skin.

  THE SWEETEST WORDS of devotion I heard at Ivanwald came from the one man there who thought Jesus had a message more complicated than “Obey.” Riley was the son of a Republican businessman from Wisconsin, but he sounded like a Spaniard who’d learned his English in Sweden. He’d “spent time overseas,” he explained, and the accent had just rubbed off. Nobody believed him—he was clearly the most pretentious follower of Jesus since Saul changed his name to Paul and declared himself a Christian—but nobody scorned him for his airs. Riley wore his dirty brown hair long and tied in a braided ponytail, and if it was cool outside he favored a Guatemalan-style poncho. He didn’t share the views of the other brothers; in fact, he stayed only long enough to attend a demonstration in Washington against Plan Colombia, a nearly $5-billion military aid package for that country’s right-wing regime and U.S. defense contractors that began in 1999.

  The Saturday of the demonstration, Riley slipped out before dawn, and I woke up early to attend a three-hour prayer meeting at the Cedars with some elder brethren: a Republican political couple from Oregon, an old stalwart of the movement who had for many years presided over a Family retreat in Bermuda called Willowbank, and John Nakamura, a businessman who that year was volunteering as host of the Cedars. We met in a room appointed with statues of bald eagles and photos of friends of the Family: there was Richard Nixon, scowling over the sofa, and there was Jimmy Carter, the first openly evangelical chief executive, flashing his toothy smile in a frame on the coffee table.24 We got on our knees and held hands, and together we prayed, some of us rocking, some of us approaching the gift of tongues, Jesus-Jesus-Jesus, praying with Nakamura’s guidance for Dick Cheney’s ailing heart and for Bush, “who has said he knows the Lord.” Roy Cook, one of Doug Coe’s oldest friends, prayed for Jesus to “turn the evil” in the hearts of journalists, who “tell stories that go against the work Jesus is doing at the Cedars.” Then we began praying about the demonstration Riley was attending. We prayed that the “stratagems of evil and wickedness”—that’d be Riley—would be washed from the streets by God’s rain.

  That night the brothers had their weekly house meeting. There was serious business. While I’d been praying at the Cedars, Riley had been arrested at the demonstration. Released after several hours, he hunkered down on Ivanwald’s floor cross-legged and unraveled a tale of crowds and cops, handcuffs, and what he believed to be gentle heroism. He’d ridden in a police van with an old man, impossibly frail, soaked from the rain. “I asked him if he knew Jesus,” Riley said, “and this old man smiled. So I asked him why he had done this thing, let himself be put into jail, and do you know what he said?” The brothers did not. “He said, ‘For me it is a form of prayer.’” After the police let Riley go, he took the metro to Arlington and walked to Ivanwald in a driving rain. “At first I was not happy. But then I thought about what that old man said, and the rain began to change, or maybe I did. As I walked home to you brothers, the rain felt like a baptism.”

  The brothers were quiet. Finally, Jeff C. spoke up from across the room. “Thank you, brother.” Murmurs rippled around the circle. Nervous laughter followed. Beau said, “Riley, can we pray for you?” and Riley said yes. Beau then asked Riley if he would lead us in this prayer. He would. So we closed our eyes and prayed with Riley for the old man soaked to the bone and then for the police and for an end to Plan Colombia, at which point the men�
�s prayers sputtered into confusion; wasn’t military aid between one God-led government and another a good thing? The brothers were relieved when Riley announced he was going back to Wisconsin. He walked into the pouring rain with his backpack and his sleeping bag. It was a mile and a half to the station. Nobody offered him a ride.

  After Riley left, the brothers stood up and started moving furniture. “Okay,” Jeff C. said, clapping his hands. “You ready, brothers?” I looked around. My brothers were blank-faced or smirking, clearing a space on the floor. “Jeff,” Jeff C. said to me, “Andrew”—the other new man, a balding Australian who said he’d come to Ivanwald at the recommendation of a conservative Australian politician named Bruce Baird—“you guys are going to arm wrestle. Think of it,” he said, putting a finger on his chin and mocking a pose of thoughtfulness, “as a test of your manhood.”

  He instructed us to lie down on our bellies. We lay like snakes facing each other and rose up on torsos, gripping hands, awaiting the signal.

  “Fumble!” someone shouted. “Fumble! Fumble!”

  I twisted around to find out what they meant, but not in time—all I saw was a blur of T-shirts and legs flying at me, and then the first man hit, slapping me back to the floor and flattening my lungs into empty airbags. Then the second man landed, and the third, and someone shouted, “Get his arms!” Did they think I was a stratagem of wickedness? Had they decided that the evil in my journalist’s heart could not be overcome even by Jesus? I swung my one free fist and felt it collide with a stomach that remained unmoved because it was being pressed down by the weight of two, three more men, each of them flailing away at my ribs. I felt my face redden and my ears fill with a roar, and if I’d had any breath left, I would have screamed. But then I heard the brothers laughing, and in between blows I felt hands slapping my ass and ruffling my hair, and I understood what was happening. This was scripture in action, the verses we all memorized together (failure to do so meant sleeping in the cold basement): Ecclesiastes 4:9, “Two are better than one”; Philippians 2:2, “fulfill ye my joy that ye be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.” The brothers were of one mind and thirteen bodies, crushing Christ into me, and there was nothing I could do but to give in to their love. They wanted to welcome me. To brotherhood, to Jesus, to the Family. I gasped. A man near the bottom of the pile on top of me squeaked. “I can’t breathe,” someone above me whispered. One more man fell on top of us, jumping from the couch onto the tower. The Australian, who’d somehow escaped full fumble, gave it a push. It tumbled, I was free, and Jeff C. offered me his hand. Ecclesiastes 4:10: “If one falls down, his friend can help him up.”

  “Congratulations, brother,” he said. “You’re one of us.”

  A FEW WEEKS into my stay, David Coe, Doug’s son, dropped by Ivanwald. My brothers and I assembled in the living room, where David had draped his tall frame over a burgundy leather recliner like a frat boy, one leg hanging over a padded arm.

  “You guys,” David said, “are here to learn how to rule the world.” He was in his late forties, with dark, gray-flecked hair, an olive complexion, teeth like a slab of white marble, dark eyes so big they didn’t need to move to take in the room. We sat around him in a rough circle, on couches and chairs, as the afternoon light slanted through the wooden blinds onto a wall adorned with a giant tapestry of the Last Supper. Rafael, a wealthy Ecuadoran, had a hard time with English, and he didn’t understand what David had said. He stared, lips parted in puzzlement. David seemed to like that. He stared back, holding Raf ’s gaze like it was a pretty thing he’d found on the ground. “You have very intense eyes,” David said.

  “Thank you,” Raf mumbled.

  “Hey,” David said, “let’s talk about the Old Testament.” His voice was like a river that’s smooth on the surface but swirling beneath. “Who”—he paused—“would you say are its good guys?”

  “Noah,” suggested Ruggi, a shaggy-haired guy from Kentucky with a silver loop on the upper ridge of his right ear.

  “Moses,” offered Josh, a lean man from Atlanta more interested in serving Jesus than his father’s small empire of shower door manufacturing.

  “David,” Beau volunteered.

  “King David,” David Coe said. “That’s a good one. David. Hey. What would you say made King David a good guy?” He giggled, not from nervousness but from barely containable delight.

  “Faith?” Beau said. “His faith was so strong?”

  “Yeah.” David nodded as if he hadn’t heard that before. “Hey, you know what’s interesting about King David?” From the blank stares of the others, I could see that they did not. Many didn’t even carry a full Bible, preferring a slim volume of New Testament Gospels and Epistles and Old Testament Psalms, respected but seldom read. Others had the whole book, but the gold gilt on the pages of the first two-thirds remained undisturbed. “King David,” David Coe went on, “liked to do really, really bad things.” He chuckled. “Here’s this guy who slept with another man’s wife—Bathsheba, right?—and then basically murdered her husband. And this guy is one of our heroes.” David shook his head. “I mean, Jiminy Christmas, God likes this guy! What,” he said, “is that all about?”

  “Is it because he tried?” asked Bengt. “He wanted to do the right thing?” Bengt knew the Bible, Old Testament and New, better than any of the others, but he offered his answer with a question mark on the end. Bengt was dutiful in checking his worst sin, his fierce pride, and he frequently turned his certainties into questions.

  “That’s nice, Bengt,” David said. “But it isn’t the answer. Anyone else?”

  “Because he was chosen,” I said. For the first time David looked my way.

  “Yes,” he said, smiling. “Chosen. Interesting set of rules, isn’t it?” He turned to Beau. “Beau, let’s say I hear you raped three little girls. And now here you are at Ivanwald. What would I think of you, Beau?”

  Beau, given to bellowing Ivanwald’s daily call to sports like a bull elephant, shrank into the cushions. “Probably that I’m pretty bad?”

  “No, Beau.” David’s voice was kind. “I wouldn’t.” He drew Beau back into the circle with a stare that seemed to have its own gravitational pull. Beau nodded, brow furrowed, as if in the presence of something profound. “Because,” David continued, “I’m not here to judge you. That’s not my job. I’m here for only one thing. Do you know what that is?”

  Understanding blossomed in Beau’s eyes. “Jesus?” he said. David smiled and winked. “Hey,” he said. “Did you guys see Toy Story?” Half the room had. “Remember how there was a toy cowboy, Woody? And then the boy who owns Woody gets a new toy, a spaceman? Only the toy spaceman thinks he’s real. Thinks he’s a real spaceman, and he’s got to figure out what he’s doing on this strange planet. So what does Woody say to him? He says, ‘You’re just a toy.’” David sat quietly, waiting for us to absorb this. “Just a toy. We’re not really spacemen. We’re just toys. Created for God. For His pleasure, nothing else. Just a toy. Period.”

  He walked to the National Geographic map of the world mounted on the wall. “You guys know about Genghis Khan?” he asked. “Genghis was a man with a vision. He conquered”—David stood on the couch under the map, tracing, with his hand, half the northern hemisphere—“nearly everything. He devastated nearly everything. His enemies? He beheaded them.” David swiped a finger across his throat. “Dop, dop, dop, dop.”

  Genghis Khan’s genius, David went on, lay in his understanding that there could be only one king. When Genghis entered a defeated city, he would call in the local headman. Conversion to the Khan’s cause was not an option, as Genghis was uninterested in halfhearted deputies. Instead, said David, Genghis would have the man stuffed into a crate, and over the crate’s surface would be spread a tablecloth, on which a wonderful meal would be arrayed.

  “And then, while the man suffocated, Genghis ate, and he didn’t even hear the man’s screams.” David stood on the couch, a finger in the air. “Do yo
u know what that means?”

  To their credit, my brothers did not. Perhaps on account of my earlier insight, David turned to me. “I think so,” I said. “Out with the old, in with the new.”

  Yes, he nodded. “Christ’s parable of the wineskins. You can’t pour new into old.” One day, he continued, some monks from Europe show up in Genghis Khan’s court. Genghis welcomes them in the name of God. Says that in truth, they worship the same great Lord. Then why, the monks ask, must he conquer the world? “I don’t ask,” says Genghis. “I submit.”

  David returned to his chair. “We elect our leaders,” he said. “Jesus elects his.”

  He reached over and squeezed the arm of Pavel. “Isn’t that great?” David said. “That’s the way everything in life happens. If you’re a person known to be around Jesus, you can go and do anything. And that’s who you guys are. When you leave here, you’re not only going to know the value of Jesus, you’re going to know the people who rule the world. It’s about vision. Get your vision straight, then relate. Talk to the people who rule the world, and help them obey. Obey Him. If I obey Him myself, I help others do the same. You know why? Because I become a warning. We become a warning. We warn everybody that the future king is coming. Not just of this country or that but of the world.” Then he pointed at the map, toward the Khan’s vast, reclaimable empire.

  THAT NIGHT, I slipped out of the house at close to eleven, padded around the pool of light cast by the streetlamp, and began making my way up the grassy hill of the park across the road. I had my cell phone with me, and behind the big oak tree at the top I hoped I could call a friend undetected. David Coe’s lesson had been more than I could take without a dose of ordinary conversation, the kind that doesn’t involve “warnings” and decapitations. But halfway up the slope a voice shot through the dark and hit me like a hardball: “Halt! Who goes there?”