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

by Jeff Sharlet

  Coe, meanwhile, was all along studying Abram, learning the methods of self-effacing persuasion. And studying, too, other sources of authority, strong men of history whose biographies he consumed and distilled into the leadership lessons he dispensed to his disciples the same way he cited, always smiling, scripture verses intended to “break” the powerful men to whom he ministered, the jujitsu of an alpha male proclaiming his desire to serve. God’s word, not his; so it was written.

  Coe brought to the Fellowship a radically different spirit than Halverson’s, a darker appeal. Raised in a small town, middle-class home in Oregon, he’d gone to college at Willamette in the state capital of Salem, where he majored in physics and got serious about God. He’d been something of an Elmer Gantry—a good-looking flirt, friendly with everyone, close to none—according to Roy Cook, his sidekick for the last six decades. It was Cook, then an unsmiling, bespectacled boy with a crooked pompadour, who led Coe to Jesus. What kind of Jesus? In a talk to a group of fundamentalist activists years later, Coe ticked off what he gave up for his new Lord: smoking, drinking, dancing, and most of his friends. At twenty, he married an eighteen-year-old girl named Jan. Soon they had the first of six children, all born before Coe reached his early thirties. And as the 1950s opened, that might have been all: a pulpit, maybe, in rural Oregon, a brood of children, a stern but conventional God.

  But Coe had fallen under the “discipleship” of Dawson Trotman, the founder of a worldwide ministry called the Navigators. Daws was a square-jawed, wavy-haired, bear-hugging man, a cruder version of Abram. Like Abram, who called him a “very dear friend,” Daws scorned old-school fundamentalists who considered themselves “separate” from the culture, and like Abram, he’d begun his ministry in the 1930s, in opposition to the economic liberalism of the New Deal. Both men had little use for denominational distinctions, but Daws, unlike Abram, didn’t understand them to begin with. He hated ideas; he loved “jokes.” He installed a remote control for his doorbell beneath his dining room table so he could send underlings running to answer it over and over, and he planted firecrackers set to explode in umbrellas when they opened. He actually wore a squirting flower in his lapel. And yet he’d publicly rebuke staffers he thought were “playing games with God,” and he could drive even the manly men with whom he surrounded himself to tears. In place of a traditional ministry, Daws offered a pared-down concept of “discipleship” by which an evangelist picks a target and sticks with him until his “disciple” submits totally to Jesus as the discipler teaches him, the theological equivalent of hazing. Daws wasn’t stupid; he was a strategist who understood that fundamentalism was too intellectual for the men he wanted to reach, men like him—or, more often, men who wanted to be like him. He boiled it down to Jesus plus nothing. “Daws really had only one string on his guitar,” wrote an admiring biographer, “and he plunked it often and loud.”11

  That brute simplicity was what Coe, newly born again, missing his old habits and his old friends, wanted to hear. He went on a retreat to Daws’s headquarters in Colorado Springs, a gothic castle called Glen Eyrie, moated and inhabited by suits of armor and graced by very little sun; it was deep in a canyon, and the sky above it was narrow. There Coe prayed to Jesus for a way out of what seemed the small but overwhelming life of a father and a churchman. How can I do it, God? How can I finish school and provide for my family and make time for the Bible and pray every day? Coe thought his faith demanded the memorization of a rule book over a thousand pages long. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t keep Nehemiah and Jeremiah and Esther straight. You don’t have to, Jesus told him. What then? Coe asked. That was when Coe discovered, or decided, that all of Christianity, 2,000 years of faith and ideas and mistakes and miracles and arguments and signs and wonders, could be reduced to one word: love. And what did love mean? “Obey.” That’s what Jesus told him. “Obey, then teach.”12

  Coe taught. At Willamette, he led one of his professors, a young political scientist named Mark Hatfield, into evangelicalism. Hatfield, in turn, led a parade of students singing hymns to file his candidacy for the state legislature. Stories would later circulate that it was Hatfield who, when he moved up to the U.S. Senate, invited Coe to Washington, but it was the younger Coe who nudged Hatfield onto the national stage and Coe who went to the capital first. And yet, outside of evangelical circles, he made little impression as a college man; his picture appears in yearbooks only once, a gangly, unsmiling dark-haired boy with big features, posing with the golf team. An odd man out, wearing hunter’s plaid, a townie among the preps. It was an image of modesty he’d use to advantage in the years to come as he pledged himself to older men in the Fellowship—Halverson, Robinson, Germany’s Gus Gedat, and most of all Abram—and then supplanted them.

  Coe is, in fact, a striking man in both appearance and personality, gifted with a force field of charisma far greater than the more conventional appeal of Halverson and Robinson, backslappers both. He is tall, with strong facial bones and dark skin; he has been mistaken for an American Indian more than once. He is both ugly and handsome, in the manner of Lincoln, his features oversized and his entire being dominated by his broad smile. He dresses in golf shirts—after Jesus, golf has always been his passion—or in suits that look like they had to be pinned together around him, as if he’s some loping, natural creature not meant to be bound by jacket and tie. He speaks with slow-motion intensity, his words languid and separated by silences in which listeners can ponder their meanings. There is something about his voice, a resonant, solid sound like an old oak tree talking, that makes you want to listen even if you disagree with everything he’s saying. His fascination with the leadership secrets of Hitler extends to the Führer’s speaking style, made over in Coe’s loose-limbed mannerisms. He emphasizes his points by making his right hand into a fist and shaking it, even as his left hand slips into his pocket, a mixture of ego and insecurity that suggests an inner conversation the speaker would like to keep private. It is perhaps a tribute to his magnetism that a small group of fringe fundamentalists have dedicated themselves to investigating the question of whether he is the anti-Christ, believed to be a charming fellow with international inclinations. Coe would not be insulted; almost nothing insults him.

  After college, he moved so quickly into leadership, spiritually “discipling” not just other recent graduates but business executives, politicians, even senior pastors, that it’s hard to believe he needed much mentoring from Daws or, eventually, Abram. He was a natural leader: amiable, casual, not intimidated by anyone and interested in everyone, or so it seemed to those at whom he directed his devotion. Like Abram, he did not demand theological orthodoxy of his recruits. “Doug hates church,” one of his followers, a former aide to Hatfield, told me. (Coe considers church irrelevant to the real Jesus encountered in one’s prayer cell.)13

  One of his associates later noted that Coe’s wife, Jan, deserved much of the credit for her husband’s work; he’d rarely met a woman “so uncomplaining and one who stayed put and waited patiently.” Not as much could be said for the evangelical enterprises Coe left behind when he went to Washington in 1959 to work for Abram. The communal homes he’d organized, early prototypes of Ivanwald, were in danger of collapse, their inhabitants lost without Coe’s effortless authority; churches were splitting over Coe’s new doctrine; worst of all, young wives were in revolt, acting out the fears of all those who believed that Alfred Kinsey’s 1953 report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, would set in motion chain reactions of feminine hysteria. “I definitely believe Jewell…is demon possessed,” one of the Oregon brothers wrote Coe. “In fact, I have talked with her (in Helen’s presence) and the demon coursed through her.” That wasn’t all. “I have also come to believe that Jim’s wife is in the same boat. In fact she said she was, but you would have to see and talk to them to appreciate this. The other night she went into a rage when Jim was just sitting on the davenport and tore his shirts off of him. Then she said she was out to get love and had solicited
the devil’s help. You can imagine Jim is having a tough time.”14

  Spiritual war had changed since the early days of the Fellowship. Whereas for Abram the fight manifested itself physically between godless strikers and the forces of law and order, for Coe it was more personal, a matter of marriages, a battle fought in bedrooms. Such was the changing tone of American fundamentalism, echoes of Jonathan Edwards’s fascination with Abigail Hutchinson suddenly amplified as feminism emerged to challenge fundamentalism. Coe’s correspondence with his demon-plagued friend, as with all his old Salem associates, was at once blandly pious and marked by a new militant mysticism. Coe regularly received news from Oregon of individual men, churches, whole companies tipping over from “lukewarm” Christianity into on-fire faith. “We are still facing some opposition,” a Baptist pastor wrote Coe, and families were breaking off, but “in the main we are all divining the will of God.”15 Coe occasionally responded with advice, but more often he sent his friends form letters. The Salemites did not complain. “Mr. Douglas Coe, Big Wheel, City of the Wheels” one man addressed a letter in full earnestness.16 They sent him checks, new suits, shoes in which they liked to think of him walking the halls of Congress and parliaments in distant lands. Coe’s response would be a canned account of a meeting with “top men,” who were being “used” by God to put him in touch with more top men. Senator X or Ambassador Y or Mr. Smith, president of ACME Products, was here, he’d respond. “Please pray he will understand the idea of saturating every community and every state with the gospel of Jesus Christ.” There’d be a word about golf; he’d ask for their prayers; and then he’d sign off with scripture, a citation without explanation. “Amos 8:11–12,” he closed one batch of letters, a passage that reads like a warning: Behold, the days come, saith the Lord GOD, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD: And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro and seek the word of the LORD, and shall not find it.17

  What did it mean? Coe did not explain. His admirers were left to wonder: Would they find it? Were they exempted from God’s, from Coe’s, judgment on a secular nation? Who among them would enter the circle of the saved, the elect, with Coe and his mysterious “top men” in Washington, in London, in Berlin, and in other more exotic cities Coe mentioned, Jakarta, Addis Ababa, Brasilia?

  Shortly after Coe arrived in Washington, D.C., he wrote home to his parents to tell them of his immediate success; or, rather, that of Jesus, working through him. “God has gone before us to prepare hearts,” he wrote, noting that he followed in one of several private planes that had been put at his disposal.18 One of his first conquests was Haiti, then just entering a long darkness of dictatorship that still reverberates today. Winning Catholic Haiti’s acquiescence to U.S.-style Cold War evangelicalism had been a Fellowship ambition since 1955, when an Abram associate had declared it a “soft spot of communism” that would require the ministrations of “Magnificent Americans” preaching a new equation of Christ and free markets. “I have been expecting to hear that you are making this your personal prospect,” joked one of Coe’s Oregon friends, a man who claimed to have been led by the Lord into building a small trucking parts empire. It wasn’t God, though, who the trucking boss thought would draw Coe to the island nation, one of the poorest in the world. “Am told they have wonderful golf courses.”19

  Coe counseled a Haitian senator and then Haiti’s ambassador to the United States, easing both into commitments to a Christ-led nation, with the understanding that the Christ Coe preached led not toward the socialism that tempts any bitterly poor people but toward an economics of “key men” who would share their wealth as God instructed them. Senators Frank Carlson and Homer Capehart, both members of the Foreign Relations Committee, did the follow-up work, leading a Fellowship delegation of twelve businessmen to instruct the Haitian parliament in prayer cell politics. François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who would declare himself not only president for life but also the nation’s official “Maximum Chief of the Revolution” and “Electrifier of Souls”—he was the weirdest and most vicious dictator in the Western Hemisphere—impressed the senators with his spirituality.

  Perhaps he told them, as he was fond of saying, that he literally personified Haiti, that he was a stand-in for God. A personality! That was the Fellowship’s whole theology in a nutshell, so they didn’t bother to ask questions about his Vodoun-driven militia, the Tonton Macoute assassins. Instead, they promised to twist arms in Washington on Papa Doc’s behalf: foreign aid, exemptions on sugar tariffs. It wouldn’t be a hard sell. The Cold Warriors in State, under Ike and every administration that followed, preferred Papa Doc’s public proclamations of Christian brotherhood to a free black nation that might seek support from the Soviet Union.20

  And so it went through the 1960s, Coe and Halverson and Robinson and dozens of lesser brothers traveling the world for the Fellowship, almost always finding their way through Christ’s leading to the next hot spot in the Cold War. Not only did South Korea host a prayer breakfast, but its dictator, General Park Chung Hee, tried to use the Fellowship to channel illegal funding to congressional candidates of Nixon’s selection. (Nixon’s representative, a Fellowship man named John Niedicker, declined.) Coe and Carlson double-teamed Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, a strategic prize in the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Selassie, who like Papa Doc considered himself an embodiment of the divine, depended on his Fellowship brethren to represent his interests in the United States.

  Those interests were considerable. For two decades, the United States provided more aid to Ethiopia than to the entire rest of the continent. In return, the emperor granted the National Security Agency basing rights for the largest overseas intelligence facility in the world, a high-tech “listening post” from which the United States could keep tabs on the Middle East. He also deeded the Fellowship a prime parcel in downtown Addis Ababa from which to proselytize the rest of Africa. Just like dominoes, Coe wrote home to Salem.

  Coe was as much of an elitist as Abram, but differently so. Aristocracy didn’t impress him; more important, he never lied to himself about the virtues or lack thereof of the top men he was courting. Coe understood early on that he would be dealing with violent characters, and that didn’t bother him. Indeed, it seemed to excite him. He dreamed of their power harnessed to the new American fundamentalism, a fascination with strength and influence given clearest voice in the words of one of his disciples, attempting to grasp Coe’s vision. “I have had a great and thrilling experience reading the condensed version of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” a protégé wrote Coe, following up on reading advice Coe had given him. “Doug, what a lesson in vision and perspective! Nazism started with 7 guys around a table in the back of an old German Beer Hall. The world has been shaped so drastically by a few men who really want it such and so. How we need this same kind of stuff as a Hitler or a Lenin.”21

  Abram had thought as much, albeit phrased in stuffier terms. “An epochal opportunity is ours,” one of his tracts had advertised to the new men of his congressional Fellowship back in 1942, “to control the future of America by the simple strategy of controlling the character and ideals of [a] relatively small minority of [college-age] men and women. Hitler long ago perceived this strategy, and established his elaborate system of…leadership training. The democracies have been asleep.”22 Indeed—asleep to the Hitler method of disciplining youth into a revolutionary cadre, a concept that absent the Führer’s bloodlust would lead to Abram’s later support for groups such as the Navigators and Campus Crusade. Neither was fascist any more than Coe actually subscribed to the philosophies of Hitler or Lenin. It was the myth of brotherhood that Coe thought such men exemplified, the “7 guys around a table” that would become a trademark of his teaching. That such a view bore little correspondence with history—both Hitler and Lenin brutally pitted their supporters against o
ne another—was of no concern. What mattered was the model, the seven or the twelve, circles of access to a power defined by a personality at the center: Jesus. Contrasting American fundamentalism to secularism at a Fellowship meeting in 1962, Bill Bright, the Fellowship fellow traveler who founded Campus Crusade, one of the biggest popular fundamentalist groups in the world, put it succinctly: “We worship a person, they worship ideas.”23 That was American fundamentalism’s Christ: a person, purged of the ideas that defined him, as if what mattered most about Jesus was the color of his eyes and the shape of his beard.

  Coe understood the cult of personality better than Clif Robinson and Dick Halverson. He may even have understood it better than Abram, who, after all, was moved first and foremost by “the Idea.” Not Coe. For Coe, it was Jesus plus nothing—a formula into which he could plug any values. It was a theology of total malleability, perfect for American expansion.

  From the start of Coe’s tenure, the Fellowship began turning away from its old European allies. The German Gus Gedat found Coe impetuous; Wallace Haines, Abram’s longtime man in Paris, despaired of pleasing him. “I have retreated step by step before your desires,” he wrote the new leader. Not my desires, Coe corrected him; God’s. Haines accused Coe of tearing down the neat organization of European aristocrats and merchant-princes Abram had spent years building.

  “Wallace,” Coe replied. “I am not against structure. I am for structure. I just think it needs to be underground.”

  Other men “caught” Coe’s vision of a decentralized web that would reach not just between Europe and the United States but around the world. “I regard the program…as being the most effective for promoting the basic ideology for which the United States stands,” announced an enthusiastic supporter of Coe’s new emphasis on nations Abram had ignored. He didn’t define that ideology, but its broad outlines were known to all in the Fellowship. First and foremost, there was “free enterprise,” unrestrained capitalism, property—the foundation, fundamentalists believed, of all other freedoms. Those freedoms were more undefined. The American ideology was as amorphous as its empire, defined not by borders but by influence, invisible threads, transcendent alliances. It was, to Coe, an empire of spirit, and Coe took Worldwide Spiritual Offensive to mean more than conferences in The Hague and prayer meetings in Bavarian castles; Jesus must rule every nation through the vessel of American power.