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

by Jeff Sharlet

  And yet the Jesus at the heart of Prison Fellowship is not the commonplace Christ of mainstream evangelicalism, but a distinct entity growing out of Colson’s political past and his subsequent philosophical passions. Colson’s work is shot through with a cagey regard for Plato’s “noble lie,” by which the elite must govern masses who don’t know what’s good for them, and a reverence for “leadership” as a semimystical quality bequeathed to a small elect who already possess the kind of confidence others might call arrogance. The idealization of strength that manifests itself even in Colson’s peculiar sense of humor is the foundation of Colson’s faith. “We should look at our churches exactly the way you look at Marine Corps training for combat because that’s what it is!” he instructs his followers. “That is how we are preparing today for the spiritual combat in which we live, and we should take it every bit as seriously as soldiers in the Marines preparing to go to war.”48 His first literary step as a follower of Christ was not the Bible but some of the more overlooked pages of C. S. Lewis, in which Lewis decries “men without chests.” Colson preaches Lewis’s “manly” Christ with the moral authority of a man who does, after all, dedicate his life to prisoners, and the political savvy of one who has been in the trenches of the culture wars since before the battle had a name. That combination allows Colson to escape the scrutiny afforded James Dobson or the Southern Baptist Convention.

  It has also resulted in what might be best understood as a powerful new religious movement. Faith-based initiatives, compassionate conservatism, and servant-leadership, a term popular with evangelical politicians who insist that they consolidate power the better to help widows and orphans, can all be traced back to the model of Colson’s Prison Fellowship, a radical revision of the “Social Gospel” of the early twentieth century. Evangelicals have always been at the forefront of aid work with the poor and the suffering, but they traditionally came from the left wing of the movement—the branch that seemed to die with William Jennings Bryan, the “Great Commoner,” back in 1925. In the years that followed, evangelicals, and especially fundamentalists—elite and populist—disdained “good works,” aid to the poor, as irrelevant to salvation. The only help the poor needed was Jesus. Colson thought so, too, but he understood that for people to accept the rule of Christ, they’d need some prep work. But it wasn’t his idea; it was Coe’s.

  To understand where it came from, we must go back several years to 1968, the morning of April 4, when an assassin’s bullet slammed into Martin Luther King Jr. while he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis. King was a Christian like Coe. Like Coe, he believed in the “beloved community,” the Kingdom of God realized here on Earth, and like Coe, he was willing to work with those who didn’t share his beliefs. But that is where the similarities end. Coe preaches a personal, private submission; King fought and died in public for collective liberation. Coe believes Jesus has a special message for the powerful; King believed God has a special message for everyone. Most important, in 1968, as Coe was constricting the already narrow vision of the Fellowship, King was doing as he had done his whole life: broadening his dream. King died just as he was raising his voice to speak out not only for racial justice but also for economic justice. He would pursue it not through private prayer cells but through public solidarity. And when James Earl Ray murdered him, millions of Americans expressed their solidarity with the dead not through polite mourning but through fury.

  Following King’s murder, the Fellowship’s city on a hill, Washington, D.C., burned. More than 200 fires roared throughout the capital. White suburbanites in Arlington and Alexandria looked across the river and saw a sunrise at midnight, a terrifying new day dawning. Many white residents of the District had feared it for years. White flight from Washington began not with the civil rights movement but in the 1940s; it actually slowed down in the 1960s, but only because so many white people had already retreated to the suburbs. Even so, between 1960 and 1970, those suburbs grew in population by 61 percent, putting their numbers far higher than those of Washington proper, which remained static at around 800,000. In 1967, the city got its first black mayor since Reconstruction, the aptly named Walter Washington; but in 1968, twelve dead in the street after clashes between the people and the police (and then the National Guard), whole neighborhoods smoldering like they were part of Hanoi, the city seemed doomed.49

  For Coe, this would not do. The Fellowship’s Christian Embassy remained in the heart of the city. It had to be saved. Perhaps, too, Coe felt some modicum of guilt; even as he and his underlings courted the strongmen of Africa, he had paid almost no attention to African Americans. A letter to Coe during his early days in Washington suggests that his neglect was a conscious choice: “Are any of your [converts] Negroes,” wrote a friend from Oregon, “or are you still discriminatory?”50 Coe did not bother to answer. But in 1968, faced with what appeared to be revolution—Stokely Carmichael, dressed like a guerrilla commander to promote his book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, told Howard University, “I’ve come to Washington to stay, baby…this is our town.”—Coe turned the Fellowship’s considerable resources toward those closest at hand, Washington’s African Americans.51

  Working with Halverson, a group of wealthy white businessmen, a black preacher named William Porter, and a former professor of Carmichael’s, John Staggers, Coe oversaw the recruitment of “street dudes,” black ex-cons, to become a paramilitary security force called the Black Buffers—the Fellowship’s answer to black power. Like the Panthers, the Buffers patrolled inner-city streets. They even wore dashikis, bought in bulk on Coe’s orders. But their African garb and their two-way radios were paid for by white businessmen, and Coe’s counselors trained them to preach not black power but black capitalism. “They called us a spy group,” remembers Reverend Porter, the first supervisor of the program, “because we’d find out what was happening”—in terms of black militance—“and shut it down if it happened.”52

  Drawing funds from the city government and the U.S. Labor Department (through the intervention of Fellowship brother Congressman Al Quie, who at the time was spearheading the GOP attack on federal aid for schools), the Buffers were supposed to be secular. They weren’t. Everything they did—from running after-school martial arts classes for boys and “charm school” for girls, to monitoring street corners for militance, to violently enforcing discipline within their own ranks—was filtered through the fundamentalism of Jesus plus nothing.

  “The biggest problem that blacks face in this country today happens to be the black man himself,” Staggers would say. “Racial conflicts do exist in our country. Their solutions are not to be found in the passing of laws and other kinds of legislation, but only when man accepts God totally in his life.”53

  That was the idea the Buffers began with in 1968, the first seeds of what would become compassionate conservatism. The Buffers were a fundamentally right-wing organization—authoritarian, violent, and dedicated to the maintenance of established power—but they sometimes functioned like left-wing radicals, acting as literal buffers between black Washingtonians and the nearly all-white police force. About the police, they harbored no illusions. “If you ever have a confrontation with the police,” Reverend Porter counseled the Buffers, “make sure there’s five or six of you. Don’t start nothing but defend yourself. He might kill one of you, but make sure you get him.”

  In the end, Coe got them. Not long after they were up and running, Coe installed a white staffer from the evangelical group Young Life in authority over the Buffers. Revered Porter realized that the Buffers were losing local control; the goal, he suspected, was to fold them into Young Life as a diversity program the almost all-white organization could boast about. He couldn’t be sure; Coe surrounded his intentions with secrecy. Secrecy, in fact, was official policy. Coe and the white businessmen who financed the Buffers wanted tight control of the group, but they didn’t want credit. Instead, they wanted to create the impression of spontaneous outbreaks of black submission
(to Christ) instead of black power. They thought it might catch on. When it didn’t, the financiers pulled the plug after not much more than a year, satisfied that order had at least been returned to Washington. Compassionate conservatism, beta version, was complete.

  Staggers went to work for the Republican senator Richard Lugar. Coe began staking out suburban properties for the Fellowship, and in keeping with his new Ozzy and Harriet white-flight ethos, began calling it the Family. The Buffers drifted apart, and some went back to prison. Porter moved on to a pulpit in Maryland, although he kept attending Coe’s inner-city prayer breakfasts until he finally grew tired of what he heard as Coe’s broken-record message of “reconciliation” without substance. Porter was a theologically conservative Christian. He believed in prayer. But he also believed in power, and he quit the Fellowship—or the Family—when he realized that the men who ran it would never really share any with a brother who had nothing to trade, not even a whispered threat of revolution.

  And Colson? He was just getting started. At the beginning, he seemed to enjoy boasting of his new Family connections, the smoothest political machine he’d ever encountered. But he soon learned the art of quiet diplomacy, Coe-style. He Vietnamized. In 1977, he appeared on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club program with his newest brother in Christ: Eldridge Cleaver, a founder of the Black Panthers. On the run in revolutionary Algeria, lost and far from home, Cleaver experienced a vision of Jesus that would have been immediately recognizable to the Family. “I was looking up at the moon,” he’d later recount, “and I saw the man in the moon and it was my face.” Then the face began to morph, becoming first one of Cleaver’s strongman heroes, then another. From Cleaver himself to Castro to Mao to the strongest man of all, Jesus Christ, glowering down from the African night. Cleaver fell to his knees and wept, praying the Twenty-third Psalm, committed to memory as a child, and then the tears dried and Cleaver was ready at last to repent for black power—to surrender to American justice and the American Jesus.54

  Cleaver, Colson told Pat Robertson, had joined a prayer cell with him, former senator Harold Hughes—by then working full time for the Family—and Tommy Tarrant, a former Klansman in prison for bombing a Jewish family. Cleaver, declared Colson, was reconciled.

  In 1980, Cleaver, Panther no more, endorsed Ronald Reagan.

  JESUS + 0 = X

  IN 2003, I PUBLISHED a portion of the account of Ivanwald with which I begin this book in Harper’s magazine. I might have left it at that, were it not for a series of phone calls. In June of that year, I received an e-mail from a man named Greg Unumb, who wrote that he’d read my article and wanted to talk to me. “I grew up with the Coe family, went to school with their sons (that is, from elementary school to through college), and was a part of the original group at Ivanwald; however, I had a falling-out with them a number of years ago.” Greg thought I was correct in “some of [my] conclusions, but certainly not on all of them.” He wanted to offer me “insight.”

  Greg was finance manager for Pride Foramer’s operation in oil-rich Angola. Pride Foramer is a division of Pride International, which drills in or off the coasts of more than thirty nations. The Pride Foramer division took care of business in five countries besides Angola: Brazil, Indonesia, India, South Africa, and Ivory Coast. All six, as it happens, have long been of special interest to the Family. But Greg didn’t want to talk about any of that. It was hard to tell what he did want to talk about. When I reached him on the phone in Angola (ask for “Mr. Greg,” he wrote, “not Mr. Unumb”), he did not seem to recall any “falling-out.” In fact, he was more interested in me. Such a fascinating subject, he said—was I writing a book? Where did I live? How much had I been paid for the article? How had I gotten in to Ivanwald? Who recommended me?

  At the time, I lived on top of a hill in rural upstate New York. As I talked to Greg, I sat in a lawn chair, looking out across miles of farmland, shooing bees away from my ankles. Ivanwald, the Family, its intrigues—beneath the bright summer sun, it all seemed hard to take seriously.

  Greg wasn’t the only one who got in touch. There was a corporate lawyer from Seattle, who claimed to have no connection to the Family but asked the same questions Greg had; I discovered that he had worked with several of the Family’s visible fronts. End of conversation.

  There were many devout Christians who contacted me. There was a Presbyterian pastor named Ben Daniel, a former member of the Family who’d quit after his first National Prayer Breakfast, where he was horrified to encounter the very same Central American death squad politicos he’d been reading about in the papers. There was an old, well-connected Republican lawyer named Clif Gosney, who on his visits to New York has introduced me to some of the city’s most beautiful churches. After years of high-level service to the Family as a liaison to Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Zulu nation, he started drifting out in the early 1990s. When he asked Coe why almost no liberal Christian leaders were included in the National Prayer Breakfast, Coe raged at him, a rare instance of the sphinx’s anger. Clif remembers hanging up the phone and realizing he’d just been purged.

  When I went to Germany to speak on a panel about fundamentalism at the University of Potsdam, my German host told me that the U.S. embassy, a cosponsor of the lecture series, had refused to cover my expenses. I was, in the alleged words of Ambassador Dan Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana, “an enemy of Jesus.” If Coats really did say that, it didn’t faze the German Christians with whom I shared a delicious meal that night.

  And then there was Kate.* She wrote asking to have coffee with me because she was a fan. When a gorgeous blonde walked into the restaurant we’d agreed on and immediately said she loved my article, I thought, journalism has its rewards. But an hour into our conversation, I started making connections. She’d been living in Annapolis, Maryland, where the Family has a group of homes much like the compound in Arlington. She’d recently left a job at the National Security Agency. She’d been raised fundamentalist, but she’d left it behind; she wanted a relationship with Jesus untainted by tradition. So I asked her, “Do you know anyone in the Family?” Silence. I asked her again. For whatever reason—Christian conscience?—she confessed that she did know someone in the Family, David Coe. “He’s like a father to me.” In fact, she admitted, she’d been sent to spy on me.

  We ended up talking for three more hours and drinking a lot of wine. I tried to persuade her that the Family was a secretive, undemocratic organization that aided and abetted dictators. She agreed, only she thought that was a good thing. She said the Family still loved me. I told her about some of the killers the Family had supported. She rallied by pointing out that we’re all sinners, and thus shouldn’t judge those whom God places in authority. “Jeff,” she said, holding my eyes, twisting her wine stem between her fingers, “in your heart, have you ever lusted for a woman? Isn’t that just as bad?”

  So by the time Greg Unumb called, I wasn’t too concerned about Family surveillance, which seemed to lead to nothing but good meals and bizarre come-ons. I answered Greg’s questions as if he was the jittery one, the reporter looking over his shoulder. Relax, I wanted to say. Eventually, he did. For a moment, our conversation stalled.

  Then he said, “You know, I used to run Ivanwald.” And, he added, other Family houses just like it. That was a long time ago, before his oil career. He’s since married a Frenchwoman, and he vacations in Sicily, and he goes to Washington only on business, the nature of which he said he’d rather not talk about. He remembered Ivanwald fondly, but now—“Generally, I don’t see the Coes unless I run into them.” He wouldn’t explain why he’d broken off from them or why he continued to run into them.

  But he still respects them. Their problem, he said, is one merely of “screening.” They let “con artists” in. Scammers. People who raise money and disappear. People who “use an endorsement improperly.” These are nothing but “relational problems.”

  All that other stuff, he said, just talk. Like the Hitler “stuff.�
� “I heard those same illustrations used twenty years ago.” The goal wasn’t emulation but distillation. To look at “what they accomplished for evil, and turn it to good.” I didn’t say anything. I’d learned not to ask what a “good” genocide looked like.

  He admitted that “sometimes, what they say is not what they do.” And then there is the question of what they don’t say. “What’s secret is the top guys working with the leadership. It’s not unlike a business. Business is a network. This is a Christian network, with a few people running it.” Same deal as Pride International, he explained. There are people responsible for cities, and above them people responsible for regions, and above them people responsible for countries. And above them, there is Doug Coe.

  “He’s like [St.] Paul,” Greg explained. He wanted me to understand Coe’s famous $500 bet: that if a man prayed for something for forty days, he’d get it. Belief didn’t matter. Jesus doesn’t need your belief; he demands only your prayers, by which Greg seemed to mean obedience. Legend holds that Coe has never lost the bet. If you wager with him, he prays for you, so you can’t lose. “He’s confident enough in his relationship with Christ that he can ask for things,” said Greg. And he’ll get them. “Doug talks to Jesus man-to-man.”