by Jeff Sharlet
Ten yards to my right stood Jeff C., lit by a pale yellow full moon.
“Secret orders, man,” I said. “Going to have to kill you.” The joke was as lame as Jeff C.’s, and neither of us laughed. I walked slowly in his direction, debating whether I should tell him I was out there for meditation or for exercise. Phone calls—contact with the outside world—was allowed but discouraged for new brothers. A late-night run, I decided. Endurance was something the brothers respected, endurance and strength and coordination, honing your body with exercise just as you hone your soul with prayer. Cardiovascular health was especially important if you wanted to have a heart for spiritual war.
But that night, Jeff C. had a heart for contemplation. “Look at the old fort,” he said, gesturing down the hill at Ivanwald. “Guys come here and get changed. I think of all the guys that have gone through here over the years, and I wonder, How many of ’em come back? How many of ’em end up staying at the mansion?”
Along with Bengt, Jeff C. was a house leader, but if you asked him what he did for a living, he would cock his head, half smile, crinkle his sapphire-blue eyes like a natural-born southern lawyer—which is what his father was—and say, “Well, I work for the revolution.” He’d studied rhetoric at Chapel Hill, and he loved making declarations that begged a conversation mainly because he’d laced them with subtle, nagging aggression.
“Maybe you’ll come back to the Cedars one day,” he said. He squeezed my shoulder. “C’mon, brother,” he said, his fingers digging in and guiding me down the hill. “You can make your calls tomorrow.”
The next morning, Jeff C. and I were up early, lacing our sneakers for a run down by the river. Sitting on the porch, he asked me why my Bible was a King James. I said I liked the passion of the language. “Yeah,” Jeff C. said—he always agreed with everything, at first. Then he looked up from his sneakers as if something had just occurred to him. “You know, I’m not sure it’s about passion.”
“No?” I said.
“No, I think it’s about Jesus.”
“Not the Old Testament,” I said.
“Well,” said Jeff C., “you take Psalms, for example, every one of them, the way to read it is like it’s just another piece of Jesus.” He stared at me, half smiling, head cocked.
“Which part,” I asked, “would you say is in Psalm 137?” Jeff C.’s lip twitched, his eyes shifted. “You know,” I said, “‘O Daughter of Babylon’?” He arched his left eyebrow. “‘O Daughter of Babylon,’” I recited, “‘who art to be destroyed, happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us, happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.’ Which part of Jesus is that?”
Jeff C. smiled fully and nodded. “Brother,” he said, clapping a hand on my knee. “I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure He’ll let you know when it’s time.” Then he stood up and ran, waving over his shoulder as he went. He knew he was too fast for me.
WE WERE AT Ivanwald, a Family associate named Terry instructed, to study “the fundamentals, as opposed to the fancy plays,” by which he meant “discipline,” as opposed to “sissy stuff,” an authoritarian faith, not a questioning one. Terry—golf-shirted and twitchy, drumming his fingers on our dining room table—was one of the many middle-aged men in the cul-de-sac who seemed to have no other job than to dispense wisdom. We should pray to be “nothing.” We were there to “soften our hearts to authority.” Democracy, we were told, was “rebelliousness.” We instituted a rule that every man must wipe the toilet bowl after he pisses, not for cleanliness but to crush his “inner rebel.”
Jeff C. crushed his by abstaining from “shady” R-rated movies, lest they provoke lusty dreams. He was a beautiful man, but he was indifferent to the effect he had on the opposite sex. The Potomac Point girls brought him cookies; the wives of the Family’s older men asked him to visit. One night, when the guys went on a swing-dancing date with the Potomac Pointers, more worldly women flocked to Jeff C., begging to be dipped and twirled. The feeling was not mutual. “I just don’t like girls as much as guys,” he told me one day while we painted a new coat of “Gettysburg Gray” onto Ivanwald. He was speaking not of sex or of romance but of brotherhood. “I like”—he paused, his brush suspended midstroke—“competence.”
He wasn’t gay. He wasn’t, technically, anything. He was twenty-five, but he was a virgin. He had kissed a girl once, and the experience had not moved his heart like Jesus did every day. He asked me once what sex with a woman was like, “emotionally,” but before I could even think of how to answer, he silenced me. Sex for him was pure and nonexistent in the natural order of things, a myth, elusive and sweet. Jeff C. didn’t need to sully it with details for it to be true.
He ran nearly every day, often alone, down by the Potomac. On the basketball court anger sometimes overcame him: “Shoot the ball!” he would snap at Rogelio, a shy eighteen-year-old from Paraguay, one of several internationals and the youngest brother. But later Jeff C. would turn his lapse into a lesson, citing scripture, a verse we were to memorize or else be banished, by Jeff C. himself, to a night in the basement. Ephesians, chapter 4, verses 26–27: “In your anger do not sin: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.”
Jeff C.’s pride surfaced in unexpected ways. Once, together in the kitchen after lunch, I mentioned that I’d seen the Reverend Al Green perform, up in Massachusetts, no less. This bothered Jeff C. He was a southerner and I was not, and he did not like this news of Yankee privilege. Also, he was certain I considered him racist, because that’s what he believed all New Yorkers thought about all North Carolinians. He wanted me to know that as a southern white man, he was blacker than me. “I got an Alabama blacksnake in my pants,” he said. He was not just black, he was a black man. “Brother, you’re nothing but a white boy.”
“Agreed,” I said, hoping to calm him down.
But he could not be soothed. He left the room and returned with a box and put in a CD and cranked up Al Green. He started to groove. His hands balled into fists, his blue eyes wide. He began singing, a honey falsetto. “Here I a-a-m…” He grabbed his crotch and shook his head like a rag, wrenched his shirt up and ran his hand over his hard stomach, going deeper and deeper into Green. Then he froze, dropped back to his ordinary voice as if he was narrating. “In college, I used to work in this pizza parlor,” he said. “It was a buncha, I dunno, junkies. Heroin.” He grinned. “But, man, they loved Al Green. We had a poster of him. He was, he was—man! Shirtless, leather pants. Low leather pants.” Jeff C. tugged his waistband down. “Hips cocked.” He slid across the floor and grabbed my waist so tight I could feel his pulse beating. Then he moonwalked away and snapped his knees together with his feet spread wide, hands in the air, testifying, baring his smooth, flat torso.
THE SPIRITUAL BONDS among Family members were, Doug Coe reminded us, expressions of love, though he used the term not merely to connote affection. Love in the Family was the love that “conquers,” the love that “consumes.” It was the love of competition, the love that “breaks a man down”; the love without which one was “a nothing,” “a minus,” “a zero.” But with it one was a “plus,” a “warrior,” a man. The love, a Family elder once explained to me, that Jesus himself proclaimed when he said, “I came not to bring peace but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother.” The senior brother who quoted Christ’s sword at me did not mean anything so blunt as an actual blade but rather the divisiveness of a faith that scorns earthly affections that come between Jesus and his soldiers. The word heart was similarly unmoored in the Family’s vocabulary, made weirdly functional, an expression of a quality or skill. A leader, for instance, was said to have a “heart for the Lord”; a man lower down in rank might have a “heart for His Word,” a “heart for laborers” (not the working class but missionaries), or, like my brothers and me, the men-in-training, a “heart for spiritual war.”
Sp
iritual war was a struggle to be fought everywhere, at all times. Through witnessing and activism and proselytizing and the passage of laws—or, rather, the “discovery” of laws already written for us by God—and, most of all, through prayer. The brothers prayed after sports and before every meal, over Froot Loops in the morning and steaks at night. At the beginning of each workday, or before we went out on a “date”—chastely accompanying a group of Potomac Point sisters to a suitable movie, or an evening of swing dancing—we prayed. Our prayers were contradictions: We prayed because God was “awesome,” because we were “nothing,” and because the only thing we were good for was His praise. But we also prayed because we wanted things, like, say, a BMW, or divine guidance for our leaders, or a sunny day on which to paint the house. “Prayer,” Andrew the Australian told me, “is everything you need.” A gentle sentiment, at first blush, seemingly uncontroversial. But consider what Andrew did not think one needed: “rights,” a word I put in quote marks because he did. “Rights,” the Family taught, are the product of an arrogant mind—an infringement on God’s sovereignty.
The more I learned about the Family, the more difficulty I had in classifying its theology. It is Protestant, to be sure, though there are Catholic members. Its leadership regards with disdain not only the mainline denominations, but also evangelicals they consider “lukewarm.” And yet they distance themselves from the bullying of televangelists and moral scolds as well, in part because of theological differences (Jesus, they believe, instructs them to cultivate the powerful regardless of their doctrinal purity) and in part based on style (the Family believes in a subtler evangelism). “They take the same approach to religion that Ronald Reagan took to economics,” says a Senate staffer named Neil MacBride, a political liberal with conservative evangelical convictions that put him at odds with the Family’s unorthodox fundamentalism. “Reach the elite, and the blessings will trickle down to the underlings.”
Based on the almost-ecumenical face it presents at the National Prayer Breakfast—that of a Jesus to whom the Family welcomes non-Christians to pray—the Family might be considered neo-evangelical. Neo-evangelicals distance themselves from populist fundamentalism, which they consider a “folk”—read: white trash—religion, given to unseemly displays of emotion and tied too closely to cultural traditions. Whereas populist fundamentalists are strident and hectoring, neo-evangelicals pride themselves on flexibility. Unlike many pre-millennialists who, awaiting Christ’s imminent return, merely do their best to stay out of trouble and to keep their eyes shut in prayer, neo-evangelicals are willing to engage the world in the hope that they can neaten things up in time for His arrival. They hew to Calvin’s belief that worldly power can help shape a holy community, but they resist any kind of ethics or man-made morality, which they dismiss as legalism and consider almost a sin in itself.
But at Ivanwald, or in a prayer cell at the Cedars, or in conversations with world leaders, the Family’s beliefs appear closer to a more marginal set of theologies sometimes gathered under the umbrella term of dominionism, characterized for me by William Martin, a religious historian at Rice University and Billy Graham’s official biographer, as the “intellectual heart of the Christian Right.” Dominionist theologies hold the Bible to be a guide to every decision, high and low, from whom God wants you to marry to whether God thinks you should buy a new lawn mower. Unlike neo-evangelicals, who concern themselves chiefly with getting good with Jesus, dominionists want to reconstruct early Christian society, which they believe was ruled by God alone. They view themselves as the new chosen and claim a Christian doctrine of covenantalism, meaning covenants not only between God and humanity but at every level of society, replacing the rule of law and its secular contracts. Since these covenants are signed, as it were, in the Blood of the Lamb, they are written in ink invisible to nonbelievers.
ONE NIGHT I asked Josh Drexler, a brother from Atlanta who was hoping to do mission work overseas, if I could look at some materials the Family had given him. “Man, I’d love to share them with you,” he said, and retrieved from his bureau drawer two folders full of documents. While my brothers slept, I sat at the end of Ivanwald’s long, oak dining table and copied passages from them into my notebook.
In a document titled “Our Common Agreement as a Core Group,” members of the Family are instructed to form a core group, or a cell, which is defined as “a publicly invisible but privately identifiable group of companions.” The cell has “veto rights” over each member’s life, and everyone pledges to monitor the others for deviations from Christ’s will. A document called “Thoughts on a Core Group” explains that “Communists use cells as their basic structure. The mafia operates like this, and the basic unit of the Marine Corps is the four man squad. Hitler, Lenin, and many others understood the power of a small core of people.”
Jesus, continues the document, does not relate to all souls equally. “He had levels of relationships much like concentric rings.” The masses were the outermost fringe; next were the hundreds who saw Jesus after he rose from the dead, and then came a ring of seventy, and so on until one reached the “inner circle.” “It’s quite obvious,” the document concludes, “that he revealed more of himself to these.” Later, I’d learn that the Family had drawn up blueprints for an underground chapel-cum-bunker beneath the Cedars, its altar designed on this concentric model of access to Christ’s love. At its heart would stand Doug Coe, said by the brothers to be as close to Jesus as the disciple John. That’s why Coe could walk into any politician’s office, went their thinking; Jesus held the doors to power open.
Another document sets forth self-examination questions:
“4. Do I give only verbal assent to the policies of the Family or am I a partner in seeking the mind of the Lord?” The Family is aware that politicians and businessmen use it for strictly worldly ends, but it constantly pushes even its most cynical members toward sincerity. The Family does not ask them to stop seeking power or raking in profits; rather, it wants them to believe that they do so not for their own gain but for God’s.
“7. Do I agree with and practice the financial precepts of the Family?” These precepts do not require one to tithe to good works. Rather, the Family’s two major financial principles concern appearances. To practice the precepts of the Family, one must declare one’s own fortune—great or small—wholly a gift from Jesus. It’s not yours, even if it is; you’re not really rich, even if you are. This allows Family members to be like Jesus himself by giving freely to other Family members without regard for formality—a process that has the added advantage of being off the books.
“13. Am I willing to work without human recognition?” The Family’s commitment to secrecy—they call it privacy—demands a sort of political ascetism that they think of as humility. It is nothing of the sort; the Family renounces public accountability, not power.
Long-term goals are best summarized in a document called “Youth Corps Vision.” Another Family project, Youth Corps distributes pleasant brochures featuring endorsements from political leaders—among them Tsutomu Hata, a former prime minister of Japan, former secretary of state James Baker, and Yoweri Museveni, president of Uganda—and full of enthusiastic rhetoric about helping young people to learn the principles of leadership. The name Jesus is never mentioned.
But “Youth Corps Vision,” which is intended only for members of the Family (“it’s kinda secret,” Josh cautioned me), is more direct.
The Vision is to mobilize thousands of young people worldwide—committed to the principles, precepts, and person of Jesus Christ…
A group of highly dedicated individuals who are united together having a total commitment to use their lives to daily seek to mature into people who talk like Jesus, act like Jesus, think like Jesus. This group will have the responsibility to:
—see that the commitment and action is maintained to the overall vision;
—see that the finest and best invisible organization is developed and maintained at all levels of th
e work;
—even though the structure is hidden, see that the Family atmosphere is maintained, so that all people can feel a part of the Family.
Youth Corps, whose programs are often centered around Ivanwald-style houses, prepares the best of its recruits for positions of power in business and government abroad. Its programs are in operation in Russia, Ukraine, Romania, India, Pakistan, Uganda, Nepal, Bhutan, Ecuador, Honduras, Peru, and other countries. The goal: “Two hundred national and international world leaders bound together relationally by a mutual love for God and the family.”
FROM TIME TO time, Bengt would walk down to the Cedars or next door to the house of Lee Rooker, a Department of Education official, or hop onto his bike or into his Volkswagen and drive over to—the brothers didn’t know where he went, just that he was missing. No one worried. They all knew Bengt was having leadership lessons. Bengt had been tapped to become a future father of the Family. Sometimes, though, he seemed skeptical about his patrimony.
One day not long after I’d arrived, Bengt and I drove into Washington to pick up a new brother at the bus station. I’d spent the day chipping and sanding green paint, and because there’d been no mask most of the time, I was still coughing up paint dust. “You’ll get used to it,” Bengt said.
“It’s fine,” I said. “This is what I’m here for.”
Bengt laughed. “Paint in your nose?”
“The work,” I said. “It’s a kind of prayer, right?”
