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The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power: An interview with author, Jeff Sharlet, by Becky Garrison
BECKY GARRISON: How did you connect with the Family?
JEFF SHARLET: Several years ago, when Peter Manseau and I were working on our first book, Killing the Buddha, we would travel around the country looking at unusual religious communities. In the midst of this, a friend calls up and she’s worried that maybe her brother has joined a cult. This guy had left his career in finance and his fiancé. So at her urging, I met him for dinner. He had always been kind of a schmuck—an anti-Semite. He wanted to apologize, and I found he was a sweeter, kinder, gentler person. He accredited this transformation to this place called Ivanwald. Now, keep in mind, it’s not just one house, it’s a complex of about twenty houses around a big mansion. So there’s definitely money here.
GARRISON: So how did you get in?
SHARLET: You have to be recommended. They assume if you’ve been recommended that means God has led you to this place.
GARRISON: What did you know about the Family prior to moving in?
SHARLET: When my friend’s brother starts referring to this group called The Family, I asked if it was an organization. He said, “No. It’s just a group of guys living together.” He added that I should check it out. He’s the guy I call “Zeke” in the book. It’s the only name I changed cause he’s the one person I worried could suffer retribution by having his real name revealed.
GARRISON: What kind of punishment would he endure?
SHARLET: His career could be ruined. If you’re a person known to be around Jesus and you’re part of the Family, that’s going to help you. They’re very open about that. But if you’re a person known not to be around Jesus, well that’s not going to help you.
GARRISON: Did you get the sense they were trying to convert you to Christianity?
SHARLET: They’re not Christian Zionists but they are very interested in Jews. In fact, they have this sort of idea that Jesus is everybody’s God. So, Jews and Muslims can follow Jesus. Also, they were interested in that fact that I was a journalist, which meant that I was an influencer.
GARRISON: They knew you were a journalist and yet they still let you in?
SHARLET: I had to go through this interview process in order to get in. There’s no point in lying. They can Google me and see what I’ve written. But they didn't seem to care. They had this remarkable uncuriosity that comes from being at the center of power for over seventy years. They’ve been challenged so infrequently that they believe genuinely in their own goodness.
GARRISON: What was it like living there day-to-day?
SHARLET: I was having a wonderful time. Once you’re in you have full run of the grounds. It’s like a utopia.
GARRISON: At what point did you realize this was more than a just a community of Christian brothers?
SHARLET: After the first couple of days, there was a visit from Jesse Helms. Within a day or two after that, the Prime Minister of Norway came by. So that was clue number one that there’s some power there, and that it wasn’t just the ordinary Christian Right. Clue number two, we had these leadership lessons. When I first wrote about this for Harper’s, we had to decide how much Hitler can we put in the story because it’s such a regular part of the rhetoric. As I studied the Family over the years, I learned this was not accidental. The head of the Family, Doug Coe argues that dictators like Hitler, Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot understood Jesus better than any other leader of the 20th century. They used Jesus’ secrets of power. As it says on some of the video they show, Mao ordered the Red Guard to chop off someone’s head and he could do that. That’s right out of the New Testament. That’s total commitment.
GARRISON: What finally prompted you to leave?
SHARLET: I didn't want to leave but my sister was having a difficult pregnancy. I wanted to go and be there with her. One of the senior men told me I couldn’t leave. He quoted scripture to the effect that sometimes you have to hate your mother, father, brother, sister if you want to serve Jesus. Learn to hate your family if you want to love Jesus. I said, “You got to be kidding?” He said that if I go, I may not be able to come back. They are not a cult but that was cultish.
GARRISON: Moving on to their belief systems. Care to elaborate on their mantra Jesus Plus Nothing?
SHARLET: When Doug Coe was counseling Congressman Tom Tiahrt of Kansas, Tiahrt was giving him the standard Christian Right line, you know about abortion, prayer in the schools and those kinds of things. Coe turned to him and said, “That’s all fine, that’s good. But that’s so limiting a view. For example, I don't hear you talking about what Jesus has to say about say Social Security, about building roads.” Historically, the Family’s answer to that question has almost been privatization. When they say ‘Jesus plus nothing’ they’re referencing the theological heart of elite fundamentalism, the idea that elites should rule unencumbered by government regulation, that God chooses his ruling class and the rest of us should just get out of the way. Jesus plus Nothing, that sounds awesome if you’re a Christian. But think about it -- there’s no history, no scripture, no church, no law, no responsibility to a democracy in which not everybody believes in Jesus. None of that. So when you put Jesus Plus Nothing into action, you get elected and you promptly forget about our constituency. You go into a cell group and you ask, what would Jesus want? And remarkably Jesus almost always wants what’s good for your political career. They’ve got a pretty decent record of self-interest by proxy. A politician gets a message from God that says he should get involved in this act, which is funneling money to Central Asia republics. That’s action is going to be great by the way for Koch Industries, which happens to be his biggest financial backer.
GARRISON: Give us a brief breakdown of the influence of Abraham (Abram) Vereide, the founder of the Family.
SHARLET: Vereide is really one of the overlooked influential figures of the twentieth century. He was a Norwegian who experienced early on what he thought was God. Then he came to America in the early 20th century, as he thought America was “the land of the Bible unchained.” After he came here, Vereide began moving to the right. He was enamored of power. In the 1930s, he was part of a breakaway movement within Christianity of men who decided the Great Depression was a result of America’s spiritual disobedience. They thought FDR was making it worse with economic regulations.
GARRISON: How come the Family manages to stay off the radar?
SHARLET: Elite Fundamentalism in general, and the Family in particular, tend not to be very visible because their interests are synched with those of American power post World War II. For example, America had nothing to do with the Duvaliers in Haiti until the Family sent a delegation there. They came back and declared Papa Doc Duvalier, this awful dictator, as a man of God, and American support began to flow to him. But that might well have happened anyway, just as the U.S. was going to support Suharto in Indonesia, or Park in South Korea, or the generals in Brazil with or without the Family. The Family, though, became the conduit through which a lot of these relationships occurred.
GARRISON: How would you describe the overall ethos of the Family?
SHARLET: What’s key for them is the need for what they perceive to be “authenticity.” Their interest in muscular Christianity is rooted in that. The concept of muscular Christianity begins with this whole idea started in the late 19th century that British men are losing their manhood because they're becoming soft. In the 1920s and 30s, people started talking about returning to the ways of the first century Christians as a way to reclaim their faith. The cell group movement was a really influential, impacting even things like Alcoholics Anonymous, which comes out of this same place. Around this time, you see the Family describing its group of Congressmen as cells. And why do they use the cell group model? Because a cell group can achieve what working together in the public sphere what a church cannot by having a group of elites getting together. This is of course a complete distortion of first century Christianity, which is not at all about elitism. The Family is doing what empires do. They're setting up imperial, Constantinian Christianity. They are very sophisticated so it comes to you in this nice wrapping because it seems so reasonable. Why do we side with Suharto in Indonesia? Why do we set up Central Asian dictators? We do so because we must. We’re in the fight against godlessness, which was a cover for Communism and now Islam. So these are the guys we must team up with here.
GARRISON: Where are the funding streams here?
SHARLET: If you look at the legal documents, they have money coming in from say executives involved with Raytheon, Continental Oil, back in the day, Standard Oil.
GARRISON: Wouldn’t people notice if major corporations were making substantial donations to The Family?
SHARLET: They call themselves an “invisible organization” but they work through a network of nonprofits – The Fellowship Foundation, the International Foundation. When you look at the Family’s records, you start seeing money moving between these entities. One foundation lists something like 12 million dollars set aside for “making friends.” I don't know about you but I thought you should go with personality not money. A lot of this money is off the books. For instance, the income of Doug Coe, the leader, fluctuates over the years. One year, it’s 90,000 dollars, the next year he has 12,000 dollars. Yet he’s living very well. If Coe needs a new car, well one of the other brothers gives him a new car. Instead of giving money to the organization, why don’t I just give it to you cause you’re going to go and minister to, say, the Prime Minister of the Ivory Coast?
GARRISON: Does everyone there have such unholy motives?
SHARLET: There was a South African brother who got in touch with me recently. He was an honest Christian doing a good project with poor people in South Africa. His money goes through the Fellowship Foundation. He gets this memo that there’s this book coming out about the group. You might want to rearrange your finances so that the money isn’t going through us. This guy ended up writing me cause he’s so outraged by this. He told me, “I'm not doing anything wrong, then I shouldn’t have to worry about this. Why would I have to hide this?”
GARRISON: So, how did you get access to The Family’s records?
SHARLET: After I left the Family, I found that 600 boxes of papers were on file at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. They have great archives. There’s a very young John Ashcroft, who was then a nobody politician from Missouri asking Coe’s help in his political career. And Coe saying, “Yes, absolutely.” What’s really interesting was the correspondence between Ed Meese when he was Attorney General and Gary Bauer when he was in the Department of Education. They're basically imagining what would later become Faith Based Initiatives. It’s clear from these documents that Faith Based Initiatives is privatization. What’s the Family’s biggest Christian issue? It’s economics.
GARRISON: What do you say to those religious leaders who initially supported the Faith Based Initiatives?
SHARLET: It all sounds nice but they have a responsibility to do their homework and not be seduced by power.
GARRISON: Moving on to power, let’s talk about the Family’s only public event, The National Prayer Breakfast.
SHARLET: This exclusive event was created in 1953 with the intention of infusing the idea of Christian Nationalism. Now people think it’s a harmless thing. Eisenhower didn't think so. He didn't want to go but was sort of maneuvered into it.
GARRISON: How does one get invited to the National Prayer Breakfast?
SHARLET: Invitations come from congress and press passes are issued by the White House. This is a serious violation of the First Amendment. You RSVP for this event through the White House and yet it’s totally paid for by a private organization that claims it doesn't exist and is accountable to no one. Here’s the real tip-off. Look at the guest list of foreign delegations. Seven out of ten times it’s someone sent to represent their nation’s interests like the Minister of Defense. A country chips in $10,000 and they get face time with the President of the United States. That’s the biggest bargain of the century. In my book I quote an anonymous government informant who states, “It totally circumvents the State Department and the usual vetting within the administration that such a meeting would require.” This is an enormous Constitutional violation.
GARRISON: How ecumenical is the National Prayer Breakfast?
SHARLET: According to an internal planning document that I quote in the book “Anything can be happen. The Koran could even be read but JESUS is there! He is infiltrating the world.”
GARRISON: Given that Doug Coe was named one of Time Magazine’s Top 25 Evangelicals and heads up the Family, what does it mean that he’s Hillary Clinton’s spiritual advisor?
COE: Hillary comes out of this establishmentarianism, paternalistic religion which Cornel West calls “paternalistic nihilism.” Hillary and Coe don’t share the same views politically but they do believe fundamentally in the rule by elite. And they believe in the status quo of the American empire.
GARRISON: What’s been the response from the Family after you spilled the family secrets?
SHARLET: Even after I wrote about them in Harper’s in 2003, they were still trying to recruit me back in.
GARRISON: Why do you describe the battle between fundamentalist groups like The Family and secularists over the role religion played in our nation’s founding as “founder porn?”
SHARLET: The arguments that both make are very satisfying to each side. It’s very satisfying for fundamentalists to say that Thomas Jefferson was actually sort of a secret Christian. But it’s very satisfying on the other hand for the New Atheists to say there’s an absolute separation of church and state. Separation is deeply written into our Constitution but it’s always been a conversation. One of the arguments of my book is that as opposed to the idea that the Right came out of nowhere in the 1970s, what you see are these theocratic strands running all the way back to the Constitutional Convention. In fact, there were those who wanted to make this a Christian nation and they lose that argument. You can’t write them out of the richness of history.
GARRISON: Any thoughts you might want to say to other religious leaders who may be veering into that gray territory where they are seen more as a partisan policy maker than a prophet?
SHARLET: The last line in the book is “always be leaving.” To me this is not just for Christians. How do you deal with Empire? To me it’s about salvation vs. deliverance. Yes, I know, salvation has a positive term. But what salvation has come to mean in America is the preservation of the status quo. Deliverance is a much stronger idea—it’s the Exodus story. Instead of authority coming from above, deliverance is the idea that we’re responsible for our own freedom, whether we believe God gave us that ability or we believe we’re all alone – deliverance is an idea that believers and non-believers alike can embrace, the idea that we have the power to free ourselves. Now go and use it. And walk away from Empire totally.
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effin' amazing interview. i read the harper's interview of this guy and my mind is reeling from the implications. unbelievable.
becky, that you have access to him has the bones for a great piece for a paying market. i hope you'll write about The Family and expand the exposure of this power brokering group that is distorting the message of the gospel. The ancient vices of greed and power and religion are clearly pulsing in The Family...
Thanks, Becky, for posting our conversation here.
Becks. I love Sharlet. I've read his stories for years and they're all good. The Harper's piece on The Family completely got me.
Great interview.
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effin' amazing interview. i read the harper's interview of this guy and my mind is reeling from the implications. unbelievable.
becky, that you have access to him has the bones for a great piece for a paying market. i hope you'll write about The Family and expand the exposure of this power brokering group that is distorting the message of the gospel. The ancient vices of greed and power and religion are clearly pulsing in The Family...
Posted by Pam Hogeweide | Posted at 10/04/2008 9:38 AMThanks, Becky, for posting our conversation here. Posted by Jeff Sharlet | Posted at 10/04/2008 10:48 AM
Becks. I love Sharlet. I've read his stories for years and they're all good. The Harper's piece on The Family completely got me.
Great interview.
Posted by Tamara Jaffe-Notier | Posted at 10/05/2008 6:47 AM