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

by Jeff Sharlet

  Everyone was feeling pretty high at the dinner later that evening. They dragged four long tables into a giant square on the second floor of the restaurant, an Italian joint that doubled as the kind of comedy club that brings in sidekicks from Howard Stern’s radio show. I sat between the Patriot Pastor, still in costume, and Bill Federer, an accidental place of honor that seemed to make some of the event’s local field organizers a little jealous. Across the table sat Pastor Rusty and Reverend Flip. Flip threw his tie over his shoulder and leaned back in his chair. The waitress, a handsome middle-aged woman named Anna, looked crushed when she learned that the whole group, out of respect for the nondrinkers among them, would be sticking to iced tea. Several of the men asked her where her accent was from. She said she was Polish-Russian, but when she came around to Flip, he said, “Hola, Señorita,” and asked her where she was from. Anna rolled her eyes. We ordered, most of us the buffet. Anna came back to refill our iced tea. She tried to tally the orders, which the pastors kept changing. “You ordered the buffet?” she asked Flip.

  Flip took a toothpick from his mouth, fixed her with a stare. He owned the room. “I think I already had a buffet,” he said, pronouncing the word as Buffy. “Now I’d like to try an Anna.”

  Nobody missed a beat. The party went on.

  I thought, Here’s where it would be easiest to unravel the whole tapestry of fundamentalism. To dismiss it as rank hypocrisy, a bunch of bullies cloaking their lusts, for sex or money or power, in piety. But to do so would be to ignore the anointing. Flip doesn’t command whatever small following he has in the movement because he’s a good man but because he’s God’s chosen man. “God uses who he chooses,” a North Carolina preacher once told me, the essence of John Calvin’s dense theology of election boiled down to an advertising slogan. Flip obeyed orders, and that made him a key man.

  “Obedience is my greatest weapon,” Coach Dave told me after dinner. He took off the ball cap he’d had made, blue black with a red cross, and ran his hand through his white hair. In obedience, he said, he found strength. Coach Dave was built like an old can of beans, squat and solid with muscle except for a bulge in the middle. I imagined him lecturing his former football team. Obedience, he continued, was a gift from God; but you needed the Holy Spirit to open it. “The Holy Spirit is like the software,” he said.

  He tried to explain. “We may need another 9/11,” he declared slowly, a teacher reciting a lesson, “to bring about a full spiritual revival.” He must have seen my surprise. “Now, you don’t get that, do you?” I admitted that I did not. Well, he continued, history’s horrors are just like God spanking a child. “That’s a perfect example of where you need the software to understand what I just said, or else you’re gonna say, ‘Coach, you mean he spanks us by killing people?’ You need the software. What’s the software? Well, it’s history. You gotta understand what history is. It’s collective. Are you getting the software? Collective. History.”

  Now I got it. Fundamentalism blends the concept of a God involved in our daily affairs with the Enlightenment’s rationalization of that deity as a broader, more vague “common good.” The fundamentalist God is first and foremost all-powerful, his divinity defined by his authority; the “common good” is all-inclusive, its legitimacy established by democracy. Fundamentalism, as a theology, as a “worldview,” wants both: the power and the legitimacy, divine will and democracy, one and the same. As theology, such confusion may be resolved with resort to miracles, but as politics, it is broken logic, a story that defeats itself. Why, then, does it prosper?

  Secularists like to point out that many of the Founders were not, in fact, Christian but rather Deists or downright unbelievers. Fundamentalists respond by trotting out the Founders’ most pious words, of which there are many (Franklin proposing prayer at the Constitutional Convention; Washington thanking God for His direct hand in revolutionary victories; etc., etc.). Secularists shoot back with the founders’ Enlightenment writings and note their dependence on John Locke; fundamentalists respond that Locke helped South Carolina write a baldly theocratic constitution. Round and round it goes, a lucrative subgenre of popular history, “founder porn,” that results in spasms of righteous ecstasy—secular as well as fundamentalist—over the mystical authority of origins.

  But fundamentalist historians can also point, accurately, to the subsequent instances of overlooked religious influence in American history: not just Sergeant York’s Christian trigger finger and Stonewall Jackson’s tragic example, but also the religious roots of abolitionism, the divine justification used to convert or kill Native Americans, the violent pietism of presidents: not just Bush and Reagan, but also Lincoln and McKinley and Wilson and even sweet Jimmy Carter, the first born-again president, led by God and Zbigniew Brzezinski to funnel anticommunist dollars to El Salvador, the most murderous regime in the hemisphere. Historians enmeshed in the assumptions of Enlightenment rationalism naturally seek rational explanations for events, and in so doing tend to deemphasize the religious beliefs of historical actors. Fundamentalist historians go straight to those beliefs; as a result, they really do see a history missed by most secular observers.

  Fundamentalism embraces its mythic past; secular liberalism declares its own myth simply a matter of record. Liberalism proposes in place of nationalist epic a “demystified” state based on reason. And yet the imagination with which we, the levelheaded masses, view the “demigod” Founders and the Civil War, the Good Fight against Hitler, and the American tragedy of Vietnam (the tragedy is always ours alone) is almost as deeply mystical as that of fundamentalism’s, thickened by “destiny,” blind to all that which does not square with the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a nation. There are occasional attempts at recovering these near-invisible pieces, “people’s history” and national apologies and HBO specials about embarrassing missteps in the march of progress, usually related to race and inevitably restored to forward motion by the courage of some “key man” of liberalism, Jackie Robinson at first base, 1947, Rosa Parks on the bus, 1955, Muhammad Ali refusing to fight in Vietnam, 1966. But such interventions are not so different from fundamentalism’s addition of Martin Luther King to its pantheon; they are attempts to convince ourselves that the big We of nationalism was better than the little people of history actually were.

  Likewise our attempts to shunt fundamentalists into the outer circle of kooks and haters and losers and left-behinds, undemocratic dimwits who do not understand the story the rest of us have agreed to live by. Our refusal to recognize the theocratic strand running throughout American history is as self-deceiving as fundamentalism’s insistence that the United States was created a Christian nation.

  The actual past no more serves the secular imagination than that of fundamentalism. While fundamentalism projects providence onto the past, secularism seeks to account for history with tools of rationalism. But history cannot be demystified; it is dependent as much on mystery—that which we recognize we cannot know about the past—as on the rationally understood. If we believe the aphorisms of literature—“The past isn’t dead, it’s not even past,” and “The past is a foreign country”—then we believe in mystic history. We are not so secular after all. Fundamentalism knows this, and that is why, for now at least, those we’ve misunderstood as the dupes, the saps, and the fools—the believers—prefer its reenchanted past, alive to the dark magic with which all histories are constructed, to the demystified state’s blind certainty that it is history’s victor.

  Most of us outside the influence of fundamentalism ask, when confronted with its burgeoning power, “What do these people want? What are they going to do?” But the more relevant question is, “What have they already done?” Consider the accomplishments of the movement, its populist and its elite branches combined: foreign policy on a near-constant footing of Manichean urgency for the last hundred years; “free markets” imprinted on the American mind as some sort of natural law; a manic-depressive sexuality that puzzles both prudes and lib
ertines throughout the rest of the world; and a schizophrenic sense of democracy as founded on individual rights and yet indebted to a higher authority that trumps personal liberties.

  Run that through Coach’s software; look through a glass darkly. This, then, is what American fundamentalism understands democracy to mean, this is what it understands as “freedom of religion”: the freedom to conform, to submit, to become one with the “biblical worldview,” the “theocentric” parable, the story that swallows all others like a black hole. Within it time loops around, past becomes present, and the future is nothing but a matter of return. Not to the Garden but to the Mayflower, the Constitution, or Stonewall Jackson’s last battle, moments of American purity, glimpses of the Camelot that haunts every nationalist imagination, fundamentalist or secular. History is God’s love, its meanings revealed to his key men, presidents and generals, preachers and a schlemiel with a shofar. As for the rest of us, we are simply not part of the dream. Fundamentalism is writing us out of history.

  “What is to be done?” the unbelievers ask. Oh, it’s simple: think up a better story, a creation myth that is as rich as American fundamentalism’s. We cannot just counter fundamentalism’s key men with our own; nor can we simply switch out the celebratory model of history for an entirely grim chronicle of horrors. Rather, we must continue to revisit the history of American fundamentalism—which is to say, we must reconsider the story we speak of when we say “America.”

  THIS IS NOT THE END

  1. SUFFERING

  She was as pretty as any nineteen-year-old girl thinned down to near nothing. Hair smooth and blonde, eyes big and blue, and her lips, pale red on white skin, were quivering. She stood between me and the door to the bar in which she’d just struck out at begging change from the last round of drinkers. She carried a piece of cardboard, the sum of her life to date scrawled with black marker in a hand too shaky to read. So she put it to a sort of song, a practiced routine she chanted with artificial sadness while something real inside actually broke down. “Mister, I just got to Portland, I got nowhere to go. They won’t give me my TB card and, you know, so…I need money for a shelter, I slept under a bridge. Mister, I just got to Portland, I’m scared, I need somewhere to go.”

  I scrounged in my pocket and came up with a thin wad of twenties and small bills; I peeled off two singles and gave them to her.

  “Thank you, Mister,” she said.

  I said, “Good luck.” She began weeping. “Good luck,” I said again.

  “Thank you.”

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Thank you.” She turned and went out the door; as it swung shut behind her, she doubled over, sobbing.

  I gave her a minute to gain some ground, and then I left, too. She was halfway up the block. I went to my rental car and took my bags out of the trunk. I was staying in a room above the bar, in Portland searching out the Family’s early days in archives and at addresses long since given over to purposes other than Abram Vereide’s or Doug Coe’s. I hadn’t found a trace. I was killing time.

  The girl spotted me rolling my suitcase across the parking lot. She approached as if I might hit her. The yellow streetlight made her face look as if it had color; she was even prettier than she’d been inside. “Mister,” she said, “I just got to Portland, I got nowhere to go…” Word for word the same song.

  I stared at her. “I’m sorry. I just helped you inside.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, too.”

  “I wish I could help more.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What’s a TB card?”

  “For a test,” she said. “They got no reason not to give it to me.”

  She began crying again, her tears leaving trails of streetlight glimmer on her cheeks.

  “Good luck,” I said.

  IF I WAS a believer, I would have said, “God bless you.” If I wasn’t a believer, I should have said, “God bless you.” Either way, it would have cost me nothing and would have been so much less hopeless than wishing “good luck” to a woman who was not likely to have any. Such is the dilemma of the American city upon a hill with which I began this book, and the problem of fundamentalism’s myths versus those of liberalism with which I closed the last chapter. Both are systems of knowing, of believing, of absorbing citizens into what Doug Coe calls the “social order.” They are not means of “changing the world” but of reconciling us—the believers and the unbelievers—to its ordinary suffering.

  If I was a believer, I might think my blessing would matter; if I wasn’t, I’d know it would sound good and that it would not matter.

  But I said, “Good luck,” and the woman bent over crying again, and I left her like that, weeping on the street, and I went up to my room thinking of Christians and of “followers of Christ,” of the Family’s “heart for the poor.” I was thinking, too, that I should go back and offer the woman a place to stay; of giving her a bed to sleep in, and how I wouldn’t put any moves on her, and she would appreciate that, and she’d make me some kind of offer, and I’d decline, and I’d be a real hero. I was thinking, too, of tuberculosis, and of the cramped, airless rooms above the bar, and the germs swirling around me as I drifted off, her microscopic gratitude serving as a different kind of communion.

  And I thought of the morning, of waking up with no money.

  How would she get it? She couldn’t sneak away without waking me. Maybe she had a knife. I imagined bringing her to the room and her big eyes turning mean and her lips and teeth snarling like she was a raccoon in a corner, her bone-and-skin hand swiping my money and her backing away with her knife ready for my gut should I make a wrong gesture.

  That wouldn’t have happened. There would have been no knife, and, for that matter, I’m guessing here, she would have said no if I’d offered to share my room with her. She needed something, but it wasn’t a bed. I don’t know what it was, whether it came in a pill or a pipe or a needle.

  I asked myself, What would a believer do?

  I was thinking about some believers whom I’d met earlier in the evening, a house church of a half dozen young families and a few single men and women who met every Sunday night in the living room of a couple named Adam and Christie Parent. I’d joined them because a false lead had suggested that theirs was a church that functions as a feeder to Ivanwald—I’d come across several around the country—but the connection turned out to be no deeper than one young man nobody knew well. Still, I stuck around, because what the Parents were doing—church in their living room, “small groups,” discussions of “accountability” that denied personal responsibility—seemed to merge the methods of elite fundamentalism with the passions of the populists. I told them I was writing a book about religion in America; they welcomed me, I think, because they know they’re its future.

  Adam and Christie have three kids, two little boys and a girl, and they live in a handsome old box of a house with a real yard, in east Portland, just off the campus of Multnomah Bible College. Adam is starting his fourth year there. He is twenty-seven, tall, wide, and square in the shoulders. He grew up in San Diego and as a teenager wandered up to rural Washington, where he worked as a youth pastor until he decided to go back to school. He wears a small brown soul patch just beneath his lip and dresses like the frat boy he never was—loose plaid shirt, matching light blue ball cap—and he talks like a former surfer who has left the waves behind. He cracks smiles like they were flip tops on a six-pack, but he has developed a habit common to preachers and salesmen, of holding your eyes with his and transmitting sincerity. That it is real makes it no less disconcerting.

  His wife, Christie, is short and strawberry blonde, all buttery cheeks and bouncy energy. But at twenty-nine she’s one of the oldest in the group, and she talks with the authority befitting a young mother with more kids than any other couple in the “home community” has managed. When it came time to take all the children upstairs, Christie summoned a helper and herded them past Adam’s golf clubs and his acoustic g
uitar, leaving the rest of us sitting on couches and cross-legged on the floor, in a big circle, waiting for Adam to tell us what we’ll be discussing. First, a prayer: studded with justs: “I just want to thank You”; “I just, just really love You”; “I just pray and hope You show up tonight.”

  When I first heard the many justs of prayer at Ivanwald, I thought it was a southern thing. But here was a room of northwesterners and transplanted midwesterners and one Californian, and when I peeked during the prayer, I saw their heads nodding on the just like they were counting rhythm. Shirley Mullen, a religious historian and provost at Westmont College when I spoke with her in 2004, told me she had noticed the rise of just in evangelical prayer over the last twenty years. “It is a claim to innocence,” she said. “A disqualifier.” Just is, in its ubiquity, a word central to the self-effacing desire for influence that has driven those evangelicals who stud their prayers with it out of their churches and into “the culture,” a word they use to refer to something that is to be wrestled with and defeated. It’s a word that hides its own hunger.