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

by Jeff Sharlet

  The story opens with the “Ladies Night Dinner” of a small town Rotary Club, and Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, an expert on “Child Culture,” lecturing a group of concerned citizens in eveningwear. Her sermon could have been lifted directly from Abram: “I tell you, my friends, the trouble with this whole country is that so many are selfish! Here’s a hundred and twenty million people, with ninety-five per cent of ’em only thinking of self, instead of turning to and helping the responsible business men to bring back prosperity! All these corrupt and self-seeking labor unions! Money grubbers! Thinking only of how much wages they can extort out of their unfortunate employer, with all the responsibilities he has to bear!

  “What this country needs is Discipline.”

  The novel’s voice of reason is the local newspaper editor, one Doremus Jessup, into whose mouth Lewis packs a dense but brief account of the authoritarian strain in American history.

  Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Ku Klux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut “Liberty cabbage” and somebody actually proposed calling German measles “Liberty measles”? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist…Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?…Remember the Kentucky nightriders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!21

  And yet that fruit was never plucked. The United States did not then—and has not yet—succumbed to fascism. Nor, for that matter, does the contemporary Christian Right embrace even a modern strain of “national socialism.” Many of the ingredients are there: militaristic patriotism, a blurry identification of church with state, a reverence for strong men, a tendency to locate such men at the top of corporate hierarchies, even a hated “other” (for American fundamentalists, Jews and Catholics gave way to communists, and now the populist front of the movement is divided over whom to demonize more, Muslims or gay people).

  But other elements of European-style fascism never emerged in the United States. Despite the nation’s near constant involvement in one war or another for the last sixty years, it has never adopted an ideology that explicitly celebrates violence. Nor do we have a significant secret police force. And it is Christianity itself that has prevented fundamentalists, America’s most authoritarian demographic, from embracing the cult of personality around which fascist states are organized. No matter how much the movement may revere Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush or the next political savior to arise, such men must always accept second billing to Jesus—The Man Nobody Knows, in the words of Bruce Barton’s 1925 best seller, perhaps the most influential forgotten book of the twentieth century.

  Barton’s publisher boasted that the book could be read in two hours, but most readers could bounce through it in half that time. Less a narrative than a collage of advertising copy, The Man Nobody Knows offered Christ on the cheap as “the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem!”22

  Exclamation points come by the bushel in Barton’s work. “A failure!” the book opens—and here the exclamation point must be read as an incredulous question mark, a quotation of the supposed liberal view of Christ as “weak and puny,” an effeminate sadsack who died on the cross because he could not do better. Barton responds with the greatest Fortune magazine story ever told: “He picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.”

  Barton himself was such a man. Shaped like a shoe box, he had a flat-faced head atop a rectangle of a body but was handsome all the same in that lock-jawed manner that makes some men look like they were born to captain industry. Barton’s name lives on as one fourth of the advertising giant Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborne, but his slim volume on Christ as the ultimate salesman exists now only as an academic curiosity, evidence to historians of the “secularization” of religion during the 1920s. Published in the same year as the Scopes monkey trial took place, The Man Nobody Knows has long looked to such observers like proof that the chief concern of secularism—business—had subsumed theology. Barton made Jesus into a management guru, and profit trumped prophet. Even in the era of a president who touts as his twin qualifications a business degree and his intimate relationship with Jesus, Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby and Lewis’s Babbitt are celebrated as the definitive texts of that earlier age, the stories that shaped the later course of the nation.

  And yet in the 1920s, The Man Nobody Knows outpaced them both. It was the book read on streetcars and the title punned on by admirers, the volume distributed in bulk at Christmas to friends and employees. So, too, its themes thrive now, far more so than Fitzgerald’s despair or Lewis’s contempt for capitalism. Gatsby and Babbitt may still be debated in high school English classrooms, but Barton’s entrepreneur-Christ prospers on a broader scale, the “Master,” as Barton called him, of best sellers such as God Is My CEO: Following God’s Principles in a Bottom-Line World, and Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership, and, most influentially, Rick Warren’s spiritual time-management manual, The Purpose-Driven Life—more than 25 million copies sold since publication in 2002.

  In Barton’s own day, Frank Buchman declared The Man Nobody Knows one of the “three outstanding contributions to [his] life and work.”22 Abram did not record whether he, too, had read it, but he wouldn’t have had to; Barton’s business-faith had entered the bloodstream of American Christianity. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the rise of Abram’s elite evangelicalism absent the precedent of “top man” religion set by The Man Nobody Knows. If the book espoused a literally fundamentalist Jesus—a Christ stripped clean of all that Barton considered feminizing cultural accretion—Barton was not, himself, a fundamentalist. He was less interested in the doctrinal battles of separatist religion than in the driving force of Christianity as the best means for national efficiency. In this sense, he followed the example set by one of his chief theological advisers, Harry Emerson Fosdick, even as he hewed to a morality and politics more akin to that of Billy Sunday.

  In 1922, Fosdick had preached a sermon that drew the battle lines and became a manifesto of sorts for modernist Christians. “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” attempted to prove that they couldn’t. Ironically, it also established the political and theological vision that would allow more sophisticated fundamentalists such as Abram to build for the future.

  “We must be able to think our modern life clear through in Christian terms, and to do that we also must be able to think our Christian faith clear through in modern terms,” Fosdick preached from the pulpit of New York’s First Presbyterian Church. Reminding his congregation of advances in science and, even more dangerously, biblical scholarship—the German “higher criticism” which held that the Bible could be better grasped with a knowledge of its historical context—he declared that “the new knowledge and the old faith [have] to be blended in a new combination.”

  Fosdick imagined that combination to be cosmopolitan and literary, shaped by a grasp of metaphor and a benign disdain for the literalists of years past. He had no concept of the other meanings future Christian conservatives would take from his call, s
huffling the parts around not in the service of high-minded liberalism but of sophisticated, science-fueled fundamentalism. Fosdick’s accommodationist vision of modernism illuminated the path for a traditionalist crusade in which later fundamentalists—influenced, not so indirectly, by Marx, whom some read with the idea of turning his ideas to conservative ends—realized that they could seize the means of cultural and political production. They could make better radio than the liberals, better propaganda, and most of all, they could shape and run and finance better politicians. Not just morally superior legislators but better hacks—men (and, eventually, women) who took from modernism only its rule book, not its goals, and bested its pure champions at the game they thought they’d invented.

  Fosdick smoothed the way with his powerful denunciation of denominations, soon to become a bête noire of Christians who defined their faith by the “fact” of spiritual war, in which there are ultimately only two sides, theirs and the enemy’s, Christ’s and Satan’s. “If,” preached Fosdick, “during [World War I], when the nations were wrestling upon the very brink of hell and at times all seemed lost, you chanced to hear two men in an altercation about some minor matter of sectarian denominationalism, could you restrain your indignation? You said, ‘What can we do with folks like this who, in the face of colossal issues, play with the twiddlywinks and peccadillos of religion?’”

  Of course, those “twiddlywinks” are the intellectual marrow of Christianity and the convictions that prevent its more ancient precepts from merging too easily with modern politics. Barton, like Fosdick, saw no reason not to do so. Upon returning to the United States from a European tour in 1930, he wondered, “How can we develop the love of country, the respect for courts and law, the sense of national obligation, which Mussolini has recreated in the soul of Italy?”23

  He praised Mussolini’s “efficiency and progress” and Hitler’s mastery of the adman’s science, psychology, after another European visit in 1934. “Only strong magnetic men inspire great enthusiasm and build great organizations,” he’d noted in The Man Nobody Knows. He wasn’t defending the dictators’ disregard for rights, he insisted, but he had to admire Hitler’s anti-Semitic propaganda, so detailed in its documentation of Jewish influence in Germany that one could easily see why Hitler’s rise “was not an unnatural thing to have happen.”24 Declaring himself of a “generous” frame of mind, he said that he preferred Roosevelt, whom he considered an antibusiness “dictator,” to Hitler. Still, he seemed to see more similarity between them than difference. “Every new deal has to have some one to blame when all the promises do not come true. We blame the reactionaries; Hitler blames the Jews.” Four years later, Barton entered Congress as a leading isolationist, opposed not only to war with the Axis powers but to aid to the Allies as well.

  But Barton was not a fascist in the vein of Henry Ford (whom he quoted as an authority on Christian business in the Man Nobody Knows) or even fuzzy-brained Frank Buchman. He was an advertising man, an optimist. In an editorial for the Wall Street Journal titled “Hard Times,” Barton quoted the Journal’s publisher on the necessity of poverty: “What is taking place on this earth is a great experiment in the development of human character. The Creator is not interested in money or markets, but in more enduring men…suffering develops them.”25 That the subjects of this great experiment were not as interested in this development as were the captains of industry mildly puzzled Barton but did not bother him. He felt certain that they could be persuaded with a jingle and a catchy slogan, a “juster” peace.

  Such newspeak represents the chummy self-satisfaction of a mind that mistakes the efficiency of short phrases for depth of meaning. In The Man Nobody Knows Barton tells the story of a newspaperman assigned to cover an unnamed great issue of the day in a single column. When the reporter protested that one column was not enough space, his editor told him to review the Book of Genesis—all of creation summed up in a tidy 600 words. Not for Barton the lingering work of theologians, who find in scripture at least as many questions as answers. Nor was he a man for the thickets of political theory, a limitation which, given his stated sympathies for strongmen, may have saved him from a more frightening path. Mein Kampf? That doorstopper weighed in at nearly 1,000 pages. Barton simply lacked the patience for fascism; Hitler was too deep for him.

  But he also took one of fascism’s central premises too seriously to embrace the ideology’s violence. Fascism, the word itself derived from the Latin for a bundle of sticks bound together and thus unbreakable, promised unity. Barton wanted that: unity. As an advertising man, he believed it could be achieved through persuasion rather than force of arms. Moreover, he understood that the best way to sell a product was not fear alone but fear plus desire: to stoke the consumer’s anxiety that he or she lacked something, and then to press some button in the brain that led to the conviction that acquiring it would lead to happiness. Consumption, not fascism, was the core of his Christianity.

  FOR BARTON, AND later Abram, the something was Jesus, the ultimate “personality.” To Barton, one nation under God meant a nation of consumers, their deepest needs and greatest wants in perfect accord with the products of BBD&O’s clients, General Electric and General Motors and, in 1952, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. For Abram, unity meant the boss with his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder, Christ’s masculine love flowing through his CEO key man and into the workingman’s bones. Not fascism; in the future Barton and Abram helped forge, God’s love would be hungered for and accepted gladly. There would be no secret police, no jackboots, no Buzz Windrip, no cult of personality.

  Rather, a Babbitt cult, as one of Barton’s Christian critics put it, a cult of many personalities, all of them more or less the same, vessels filled with His manliness, His will. The “man-method” that Abram shaped from Buchman’s “Guidance” and Barton’s big business theology, the freedom he dreamed of and preached for the next three decades, was that of obedience. In a 1942 pamphlet titled Finding the Better Way,26 one of Abram’s lieutenants described the Babbitt cult Abram had created and then replicated in San Francisco (led by a former secretary of the navy), Los Angeles (chaired by an oilman), and Philadelphia (started by Dr. Dan Poling, the squeaky-clean radio preacher who would also serve as frontman for the city’s Republican machine), as well as Chicago, New York, Boston, and some sixty other cities.27

  Washington, D.C. was one of them. That year, with the help of Senator Ralph Brewster of Maine—a calculating character, both a Yankee and a Klansman, Brewster evidently recognized Abram’s more amiable Fellowship as the coming club for backroom dealing—Abram convinced dozens of congressmen to begin attending his weekly breakfast prayer meetings at the Hotel Willard. Abram himself was staying at the University Club, a clumsy old building next door to the Soviet embassy. His first meeting at the Willard took place in the midst of a blizzard in January 1942. Seventy-four men, most of them congressmen, gathered to hear addresses by Howard Coonley, the ultraright president of the National Association of Manufacturers—and Abram. “The big men and the real leaders in New York and Chicago look up to me in an embarrassing way,” he wrote his wife, Mattie.

  It was true. The president of Chevrolet requested an afternoon with Abram, and the president of Quaker Oats insisted on a morning meeting. In Chicago, he dined with steel magnates and railroad titans and Hughston McBain, the president of Marshall Field. In New York, Thomas Watson of IBM summoned a group of men to hear Abram speak at the Banker’s Club, Coonley opened doors for Abram to discuss God and labor with the president of General Electric, and J. C. Penney, one of the financial backers of modern fundamentalism, took Abram to Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue to meet Norman Vincent Peale, the apostle of “positive thinking” and possibly the most deliberately banal man in American history. Abram soon joined Peale as one of “the Twelve,” a council of Christian conservative leaders bent on working behind-the-scenes to rebrand fundamentalism in Peale’s feel-good terminology.

  In Washington, Abram was even more popula
r. “Congressman Busbey reported how respected, loved, and admired your husband was there and the contribution he had made to Congress,” he wrote Mattie. In the evenings he summoned maids and busboys to his rooms for knee-cracking prayer sessions that stretched into the night. Black people, he liked to boast, loved him, and congressmen, he claimed, flocked to him. Within a year of his arrival, he could stroll freely into nearly any office in Washington. Senators Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, Raymond Willis of Indiana, and H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey functioned as his lieutenants. Representative Walter Judd, a former medical missionary from Minnesota, later to become a red hunter nearly as cruel as McCarthy, became Abram’s man on the House floor. David Lawrence, publisher of U.S. News (now U.S. News and World Report), the most influential media conservative in the country, joined the board of directors of Abram’s newly formed National Committee for Christian Leadership. Lawrence was Jewish, but with Abram he prayed to Jesus as the only hope against communism—never mind that the Soviets were American allies at the time.

  To further spread the Idea, Abram’s Finding the Better Way explained that the Breakfast Groups—the basic unit of the Fellowship, from which some men would be recruited into cells—were nonpartisan, open to everyone. But those who chose to attend were of a distinct caste. According to the pamphlet, a “typical meeting” of the Seattle group consisted of prayers, “comments,” and personal testimonies by top executives from an array of regional and national corporations. There was a man from J. C. Penney, and the president of Seattle Gas. The president of Frederick & Nelson, then the Northwest’s largest department store—and its arbiter of upper-class tastes—offered “comments,” as did an executive from the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad. The Democratic candidate for governor and the Republican candidate for the Senate made appearances, but the Republican got the better spot: the closing prayer, following Abram’s summation. Clearly, “typical” meetings made for valuable campaign stops.