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

by Jeff Sharlet

  Ford’s wife heard Abram speak in Detroit and insisted that he meet with her husband, no doubt guessing that Abram’s theology of biblical capitalism would sit well with the tycoon, an eccentric religious thinker who had been raised on populist American fundamentalism. Abram and Ford traded Bible verses through a series of meetings in Ford’s offices, and then Ford invited Abram to his home in Sudbury, Massachusetts. “They were together two days,” records Abram’s biographer Grubb, “[Ford] unloading about spiritual, intellectual, and business problems, and Abram seeking to give the answer for himself and the nation.” Abram thought Ford “befuddled,” full of half-baked religious notions gathered from partial readings of Hindu texts and theosophy. “The question was,” Abram thought, “How could he be untangled?”

  Their meetings continued in Michigan. Abram was drawn like a moth to the great man’s wealth—to the possibility that Ford might put his tremendous worldly resources behind a campaign for government by God. But he was frustrated by Ford’s failure to settle on one simple fundamentalist explanation of life and the universe, until, at their final meeting, Ford finally shouted, “Vereide, I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I found the release that you spoke of. I’ve made my surrender. The only thing that matters is God’s will.”

  But Ford continued to see divine will best expressed in German fascism. As Hitler’s power grew, Ford became more comfortable expressing his admiration. It was mutual; the Führer hung a portrait of Ford behind his desk and told the industrialist, on a visit Ford paid to Nazi Germany, that national socialism’s accomplishments were simply an implementation of Ford’s vision.

  That was a perspective that, unlike theosophy, gave Abram no pause. Such was the nature of Abram’s ecumenicism. For Jews he felt nothing, one way or the other, but he would no more discriminate against an anti-Semite than against a Presbyterian. He welcomed the vigor anti-Semitism brought to his cause. After the war, another major American fascist sympathizer—Charles Lindbergh—would preside for a brief period over a prayer cell modeled on Abram’s original. Lindbergh first came under FBI scrutiny, in fact, for his association with a man who would become a stalwart of Abram’s inner circle and a member of the board of the Fellowship, by then incorporated as International Christian Leadership. Merwin K. Hart was an “alleged promoter of the American Fascist movement,” according to FBI files, and denounced publicly as a Nazi in all but name by Robert H. Jackson, the FDR-era attorney general who went on to serve as a justice of the Supreme Court and chief prosecutor at Nuremberg.

  To Abram, Hart was a dapper habitué of New York’s blue blood clubs, a crucial node in his network of top men. He was a recruiter; operating out of the Empire State Building, he organized business executives bent on breaking the spine of unionism into an organization called the National Economic Council, and from those ranks he selected men for the Fellowship whose devotion to the antilabor cause was religious in intensity. Hart was Abram through a glass, darkly: if Abram could not distinguish between men of power and men of morals, Hart could not tell the difference between communists and Jews, who through “deceit” and “trickery,” he preached, threatened the “complete destruction” of the American way of life.10

  Then there were the actual Nazis who would join Abram’s prayer circles in the postwar years. But that story must wait until the next chapter. To understand Abram’s weirdly ambivalent relationship with fascism—to understand the uneasy echoes of the last century’s most hateful ideology in contemporary American fundamentalism—we must exhume an unlikely pair of “thinkers”: Frank Buchman and Bruce Barton, two of the most influential hucksters of early twentieth-century America.

  BUCHMANISM

  In 1935, Frank Buchman was at the height of his powers, a small, well-nourished, and well-tailored man of no natural distinction, who found himself touring the world in the company of kings and queens and bright, young, rosy-cheeked lads from Oxford and Cambridge and Princeton. True, Buchman was banned from Princeton, where as a Lutheran minister he had stalked students he thought eligible for soul surgery, as he would come to call his variation on the born-again procedure; and Oxford University was contemplating legal measures to stop him from using its name for his movement. He was then calling his followers the “Oxford Group,” having discarded “First Century Christian Fellowship”—a name Abram would later consider—as perhaps boastful, not to mention inaccurate when applied to Buchman’s hundreds of thousands of twentieth-century devotees. “Oxford Group,” though, was no more descriptive of the international circuit of confessional “house parties” for the well-to-do inspired by Buchman. He had not attended Oxford (or Cambridge, though he would claim the latter in his Who’s Who biography). He was a graduate of modest Muhlenberg College in what was then Pennsylvania coal country.11

  “Moral Re-Armament,” coined by Buchman as Europe entered World War II, was the name that eventually stuck. Not quite an organization—there were no dues or membership rolls—but less democratic in spirit than a social movement, Moral Re-Armament deployed its military metaphors through Buchman’s never-ending lecture tour, propaganda campaigns, and the spiritual warfare practiced by his disciples in service of an ideology “Not Left, Not Right, but Straight,” in the words of one of Buchman’s hagiographers.12 Moral Re-Armament’s aims were so broadly utopian as to be meaningless, but in practice it served distinctly conservative purposes: the preservation of caste. “There is tremendous power,” preached Buchman, “in a minority guided by God.”13

  It is probably most accurate to name Buchman’s innovation as did the papers of his day: Buchmanism. After all, it was Buchman’s idea—later adapted and sharpened by Abram—that the mass evangelism practiced by men such as Charles Finney and Billy Sunday would never appeal to the “best people,” those whom the liquor salesman’s son from Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, had dreamed of cultivating for Christ since his first job, running a home for troubled boys in Philadelphia, had ended in abrupt dismissal.

  The cause of Buchman’s firing is murky, as is the precise nature of the charges leveled against him at Princeton. In the first case he seems to have paid too little attention to the children’s needs, and in the second, too much to the undergraduates. In particular, the university’s president resented Buchman’s fascination with the sex lives of young Princetonians. Buchman estimated that between 85 and 90 percent of all sin is sexual, and thus to him it was natural to encourage young men to confess theirs in detail.14 There is no evidence that he took advantage of the information. He had kissed a girl once when he was a boy, but thereafter lived as a sort of eunuch. In college his nickname was “Kate,” and in the drama society he played mainly female roles. Many close to him thought it obvious that he inclined toward the best-looking men of the best universities, but in terms of Christian conservatism and the anxieties that plague it today, he was ahead of his time in the fury with which he denounced homosexuality as a threat to civilization. Moreover, he was an exceedingly careful student of the crisis: In a pamphlet titled Remaking Men, he observed, “there are many who wear suede shoes who are not homosexual, but in Europe and America the majority of homosexuals do.” Also, Buchman declared, their favorite color is green.15

  Buchman’s own eyes were emerald, and capable of the most penetrating glances. His followers believed he knew their sins before they confessed them. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles and, though bald, was more than once described as “shampooed.” He loved to be clean. Most striking about his appearance was his head; despite giant, pointed ears, it seemed several sizes too small for his round body. “Frank,” as he insisted on being called, was the gnome of early twentieth-century elite fundamentalism.

  In the early 1930s, he and Abram crossed paths. Buchman was in Ottawa to perform soul surgery on Canadian members of Parliament, and Abram, fresh from what would prove to be his short-lived salvation of Henry Ford (Ford would later require renewal by Buchman, for whom he built a retreat in Michigan), was lecturing in Canada on behalf of Goodwill Industries. The two met
, and Abram suggested to Buchman that he come on with Goodwill as a chaplain, to infuse the organization with his “life-changing” evangelical fervor. Buchman answered by proposing a Quiet Time.16

  Besides confession of sexual sin, Quiet Time was the core practice of Buchmanism: a half-hour-long period of silence in which the believer waited for “Guidance” from God. Guidance was more than a warm feeling. It came in the form of direct orders and touched on every subject of concern, from the transcendent to the mundane. “The real question,” Buchman would preach, “is, ‘Will God control America?’ The country must be ‘governed by men under instructions from God, as definitely given and understood as if they came by wire.’”17 Guidance meant not just spiritual direction but declaring one’s own decisions as divinely inspired. “We are not out to tell God,” Buchman announced to an assembly of twenty-five thousand in 1936. “We are out to let God tell us. And He will tell us.”18

  “What did God say to you?” Buchman asked Abram when their Quiet Time was completed. Abram believed he had heard God’s voice several times in his life, and had even considered the possibility that he might be a prophet, but he had not yet been exposed to the idea that God spoke to men regularly and in detail. “He didn’t say anything,” Abram confessed, disappointed.

  Well, Buchman replied, God had spoken to him. “God told me, ‘Christianize what you have. You have something to share.’”

  Blander words no Sunday school teacher ever spoke, but to Abram they seemed like a revelation. God had told Buchman not to join Goodwill, but that didn’t matter. What was important was the discovery that God should be consulted not just on broad spiritual questions but on absolutely everything. This, Abram decided, was what it meant to die to the self: to turn all responsibility over to God. That such a transfer meant the abdication of any accountability for one’s actions, that it provided justification for any ambition, did not occur to him.

  Thereafter he transformed his daily prayer ritual into Buchmanite Quiet Time. And, soon enough, God filled the silence with instructions: go forth, he said, and build cells for my cause like Buchman’s.

  The cell of spiritual warriors that elected Arthur Langlie was one result. That cell of men listening to God during their Quiet Time doubled itself, and the two became four, the four became eight. The many cells for congressmen and generals and lowly government clerks in the Washington, D.C., of the present are the offspring of that original mitosis, catalyzed by Buchman. But to call them Buchmanite wouldn’t be quite right. When Buchman spoke of Christianity’s “new illumination,” “a new social order under the dictatorship of the Spirit of God” that would transform politics and eradicate the conflict of capital and labor, Abram took him literally.

  Abram never actually attended a Buchman house party. Had he done so, he might have veered away from his new enthusiasm. The most successful events took place at one of the estates around the world that Buchman used as outreach stations. He had won the allegiance of a number of wealthy widows and heiresses and neglected wives of businessmen, and they regularly showered him with riches, including their great homes, to which Buchman would invite select groups for a day in the country. There would be tennis and golf and some praying, and then the group would gather for the party. A fire would be built, the lights dimmed, and Buchman or a trained confessor might begin with some minor transgression, a traffic ticket, a youthful prank. Another Buchman veteran might then up the ante. “Some lad might now turn evidence against a governess or an upstairs maid,” observed a New Yorker writer in 1932. And from there it was on to the weaknesses that afflict not just college boys but also the grand dames who flocked to Buchman and the big men they dragged in their wake, all stumbling over one another in elaborate description of their private perversions, how they had been blinded to their purpose in life by sexual desire, and how “Guidance” had saved them. Around the circle they went, spurring one another on.

  And yet Buchmanism was not purely narcissistic. Once one had been “changed,” as Buchmanites called the experience of coming through soul surgery successfully, one was ready for political action. What sort of action? On this, Buchman was vague. Like Abram, he considered industrial strife an affront to God, to be solved by “changed” men among the captains of industry. Like Abram, he considered the sharp elbows of democracy an insult to the “dictatorship of the Holy Spirit.” And it was from Buchman that Abram surely absorbed the idea of a leadership of “God-led” men organized into cells, consulting not the unchanged masses but the mandate of Jesus as He revealed Himself to them behind closed doors. Beyond that, though, Buchman rarely went. Even more than Abram, he so desired the company of powerful people that he was loath to align himself too closely with any one faction. But in 1936, in a sympathetic portrait published by the New York World-Telegram, Buchman named names.

  “But think what it would mean to the world if Hitler surrendered to the control of God. Or Mussolini. Or any dictator. Through such a man, God could control a nation overnight and solve every last, bewildering problem.” He seemed to think the process had already started: “I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defence against the anti-Christ of Communism,” he told the reporter.19

  Buchman had just returned from the Olympic Games in Berlin, orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels as a visual symphony of black and red swastikas and eagles and the long, lean muscle of Aryan athleticism. Most of the world would remember the “Nazi Olympics” for the African American athlete Jesse Owens, but Goebbels’s spectacle achieved its desired effect on Buchman, who left Berlin with a surging admiration for the vigor of the Third Reich. In particular, Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the Gestapo, had impressed him as a “great lad,” a man whom he recommended to his followers in British government. The sentiment, to be fair, was not mutual. After World War II, Buchman’s followers, eager to “wash out” their leader’s past, would produce Gestapo documents condemning Buchmanism, though in terms not exactly reassuring: Himmler, it seems, saw Buchman’s Moral Re-Armament as too close of a competitor to national socialism.

  In 1936, flush with the excitement of Hitler’s Olympics, Buchman gathered some American Oxford Group men at a house party at a Lenox, Massachusetts, estate. The Oxfordites sat on the floor in their tweeds as Buchman described the vision he brought back with him.

  “Suppose we here were all God-controlled and we became the Cabinet,” he said. Then he designated the World-Telegram reporter secretary of agriculture and pointed to a recent Princeton graduate (they came to him, since he could not go to them) to replace Cordell Hull, Roosevelt’s secretary of state. Around the room he went, referring not to the talents of his followers but to their willingness to govern by Guidance.

  “Then,” he continued, “in a God-controlled nation, capital and labor would discuss their problems peacefully and reach God-controlled situations.” The distribution of wealth would remain as it was, but the workers would be content to be led by employers who were not greedy but God-controlled. Echoing the words of U.S. Steel’s James A. Farrell that had so inspired Abram in 1932, words which the Fellowship repeats to this day, Buchman declared, “Human problems aren’t economic. They’re moral, and they can’t be solved by immoral measures.”

  In 1936, when men such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh openly admired Hitler, it was still safe to name the style of government to which these words pointed. Human problems, Buchman told his little group that night in Lenox, require “a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy.” Just as good, said Buchman, would be a “God-controlled Fascist dictatorship.”

  He paused. He let his emerald eyes glide over the young manhood of Buchmanism, sitting cross-legged on the floor before him as if he was a Greek philosopher. Frank smiled and adjusted the red rose in his boutonniere.

  “THERE IS A book in the store windows in London and New York,” Buchman told an assembly at the Metropolitan Opera House in November of 1935. “The title is It Can’t Happen Here. Some of you who re
ad the very important words of the Secretary of State, ‘Our own country urgently needs a moral and spiritual awakening,’ may have said the same thing, ‘It can’t happen here.’”

  Buchman had taken the stage that evening to tell Manhattan’s wealthiest that it could. “Think of nations changed,” he told his audience, urging them to imagine soul surgery on a national scale, or something even grander: “God-controlled supernationalism.”20

  Buchman never was one for details. Had he bothered to pick up the book he considered too pessimistic, he would have discovered that the It of the volume’s title was fascism. Five years earlier, the book’s author, Sinclair Lewis, had become the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in recognition of novels such as Babbit, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry. It Can’t Happen Here wasn’t Lewis’s finest work, but it contained some of his scariest writing. Can’t happen here? Lewis’s novel contended that it already had, in countless little rooms across the country, at gatherings of Rotarians and the Daughters of the American Revolution, in hot-blooded church meetings and movie houses where gunfighters bestrode American dreams like Mussolinis in spurs. All that was wanting was the right key man to take up the sword and the cross and move into the oval office. In the novel, that man is Senator Buzz Windrip, a folksy southerner backed by a radio preacher called Bishop Peter Paul Prang and his “League of Forgotten Men.”