The Family National Prayer Breakfast According to Other Born Again Christians

The Family: The Hole-and-corner Fundamentalism at the Centre of American Power
Past Jeff Sharlet
Hardcover, 464 pages
Harper
List Price: $25.95

Affiliate One

The Family, or the Fellowship, is in its own words an "invisible" association, though it has e'er been organized around public men. Senator Sam Brownback (R., Kansas), chair of a weekly, off -the-record meeting of religious right groups chosen the Values Action Team (VAT), is an active member, every bit is Representative Joe Pitts (R., Pennsylvania), an avuncular would-exist theocrat who chairs the House version of the VAT. Others referred to as members include senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina, chairman of the Senate Steering Committee (the powerful conservative conclave co-founded back in 1974 by some other Family acquaintance, the late senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska); Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa); James Inhofe (R., Oklahoma); Tom Coburn (R., Oklahoma); John Thune (R., S Dakota); Mike Enzi (R., Wyoming); and John Ensign, the bourgeois casino heir elected to the Senate from Nevada, a brightly tanned, hapless figure who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling-fortune proper noun. Some Democrats are involved: representatives Bart Stupak and Mike Doyle, leading anti-abortion Democrats, are longtime residents of the Family'due south C Street Firm, a former convent registered as a church and used to provide Family unit-subsidized housing for politicians supported by the Family. A centrist occasionally stumbles into the fold, simply the Family is mostly conservative. Family unit stalwarts in the House include Representatives Frank Wolf (R., Virginia), Zach Wamp (R., Tennessee), and Mike McIntyre, a difficult correct Due north Carolina Democrat who believes that the Ten Commandments are "the fundamental legal lawmaking for the laws of the United States" and thus ought to be on display in schools and court houses.

The Family unit's celebrated roll call is fifty-fifty more striking: the belatedly senator Strom Thurmond (R., South Carolina), who produced "confidential" reports on legislation for the Family's leadership, presided for a time over the Family's weekly Senate coming together, and the Dixie-crat senators Herman Talmadge of Georgia and Absalom Willis Robertson of Virginia — Pat Robertson's father — served on the behind-the-scenes lath of the arrangement. In 1974, a Family prayer group of Republican congressmen and sometime secretary of defense Melvin Laird helped convince President Gerald Ford that Richard Nixon deserved not just Christian forgiveness merely besides a legal pardon. That same year, Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist led the Family's get-go weekly Bible report for federal judges.

"I wish I could say more than about it," Ronald Reagan publicly demurred back in 1985, "only information technology's working precisely because it is private."

"We desire to see a leadership led by God," reads a confidential mission statement. "Leaders of all levels of gild who straight projects as they are led by the spirit." Some other principle expanded upon is stealthiness; members are instructed to pursue political jujitsu by making use of secular leaders "in the piece of work of advancing His kingdom," and to avoid whenever possible the characterization Christian itself, lest they warning enemies to that advance. Regular prayer groups, or "cells" as they're ofttimes chosen, accept met in the Pentagon and at the Section of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered potent ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries.

The Family's use of the term "cell" long predates the discussion's current association with terrorism. Its roots are in the Cold War, when leaders of the Family deliberately emulated the organizing techniques of communism. In 1948, a group of Senate staffers met to discuss ways that the Family's "jail cell and leadership groups" could recruit elites unwilling to participate in the "mass meeting arroyo" of populist fundamentalism. Ii years later, the Family unit declared that with democracy inadequate to the fight against godlessness, such cells should function to produce political "atomic energy"; that is, deals and alliances that could not exist achieved through the impuissant machinations of legislative argue would instead radiate quietly out of political cells. More than recently, Senator Sam Brownback told me that the privacy of Family unit cells makes them safe spaces for men of power — an appropriation of another term borrowed from an enemy, feminism. "In this closer relationship," a document for members reads, "God will give you more insight into your own geographical area and your sphere of influence." I'southward cell should become "an invisible 'believing grouping'" out of which "agreements reached in organized religion and in prayer effectually the person of Jesus Christ" lead to activeness that will appear to the world to be unrelated to any centralized system.

In 1979, the former Nixon adjutant and Watergate felon Charles W. Colson — born again through the guidance of the Family and the ministry building of a CEO of arms manufacturer Raytheon — estimated the Family unit's strength at 20,000, although the number of defended "associates" around the globe is much smaller (around 350 as of 2006). The Family maintains a closely guarded database of associates, members, and "primal men," only it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities.

"The Motion," a member of the Family's inner circle once wrote to the group's chief South African operative, "is just inexplicable to people who are not intimately acquainted with information technology." The Family unit'south "political" initiatives, he continues, "have always been misunderstood by 'outsiders.' Equally a effect of very biting experiences, therefore, we have learned never to commit to newspaper any discussions or negotiations that are taking place. There is no such thing every bit a 'confidential' memorandum, and leakage always seems to occur. Thus, I would urge you lot not to put on paper annihilation relating to whatsoever of the work that you are doing ... [unless] you know the recipient well enough to put at the top of the page 'PLEASE DESTROY AFTER READING.'"

"If I told you who has participated and who participates until this day, yous would non believe it," the Family'due south longtime leader, Doug Coe, said in a rare interview in 2001. "You lot'd say,'You mean that scoundrel? That despot?'"

A friendly, plainspoken Oregonian with nighttime, curly hair, a lazy smile, and the broad, thrown-dorsum shoulders of a man who recognizes few superiors, Coe has worked for the Family since 1959 and been "Commencement Brother" since founder Abraham Vereide was "promoted" to heaven in 1969. (Recently, a successor named Dick Foth, a longtime friend to John Ashcroft, assumed some of Coe'due south duties, merely Coe remains the preeminent figure.) Coe denies possessing any authority, merely Family members speak of him with a mixture of intimacy and awe. Doug Coe, they say — nigh people refer to him by his first and last proper name — is closer to Jesus than peradventure any other homo alive, and thus privy to information the rest of u.s.a. are as well spiritually "immature" to understand. For instance, the necessity of secrecy. Doug Coe says it allows the scoundrels and the despots to turn their talents toward the service of Jesus — who, Doug Coe says, prefers power to piety — past shielding their work on His behalf from a hardhearted public, unwilling to believe in their skilful intentions. In a sermon posted online by a fundamentalist website, Coe compares this method to the mob'southward. "His Trunk" — the Body of Christ, that is, by which he ways Christendom — "functions invisibly like the mafia. ... They keep their organization invisible. Everything visible is transitory. Everything invisible is permanent and lasts forever. The more you tin can make your organization invisible, the more than influence it will have."

For that very reason, the Family has operated under many guises, some agile, some defunct: National Committee for Christian Leadership, International Christian Leadership, National Leadership Council, the Fellowship Foundation, the International Foundation. The Fellowship Foundation solitary has an annual upkeep of nearly $xiv 1000000. The bulk of it, $12 meg, goes to "mentoring, counseling, and partnering with friends around the world," but that represents only a fraction of the network'due south finances. The Family unit does not pay big salaries; one man receives $121,000, while Doug Coe seems to live on about zip (his income fluctuates wildly co-ordinate to the off-the-books back up of "friends"), and none of the fourteen men on the lath of directors (among them an oil executive, a defense contractor, and regime officials past and present) receives a penny. But inside the organization money moves in peculiar means, "man-to-man" financial support that's off the books, a abiding proliferation of new nonprofits large and modest that submit to the Family's spiritual potency, money flowing up and downwardly the quiet bureaucracy. "I requite or loan money to hundreds of people, or take my friends exercise so," says Coe.

The Family's merely publicized gathering is the National Prayer Breakfast, which it established in 1953 and which, with congressional sponsorship, it continues to organize every February at the Washington, D.C., Hilton. Some 3,000 dignitaries, representing scores of nations and corporate interests, pay $425 each to attend. For most, the breakfast is just that, muffins and prayer, but some stay on for days of seminars organized around Christ's messages for particular industries. In years past, the Family organized such events for executives in oil, defense, insurance, and cyberbanking. The 2007 event drew, among others, a contingent of aid-hungry defence force ministers from Eastern Europe, Islamic republic of pakistan's famously corrupt Benazir Bhutto, and a Sudanese general linked to genocide in Darfur.

Here's how information technology can piece of work: Dennis Bakke, former CEO of AES, the largest independent power producer in the globe, and a Family insider, took the occasion of the 1997 Prayer Breakfast to invite Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, the Family'south "central homo" in Africa, to a individual dinner at a mansion, just up the cake from the Family's Arlington headquarters. Bakke, the author of a popular business book titled Joy at Work, has long preached an ethic of social responsibility inspired by his evangelical organized religion and his free-market convictions: "I am trying to sell a way of life," he has said. "I am a cultural imperialist." That's a phrase he uses to exist provocative; he believes that his Jesus is so universal that everyone wants Him. And, apparently, His business concern opportunities: Bakke was 1 of the pioneer thinkers of energy deregulation, the laissez-faire fever dream that culminated in the meltdown of Enron. Simply there was other, less-noticed fallout, such as a no-bid deal Bakke fabricated with Museveni, the result of a relationship that began at the 1997 Prayer Breakfast, for a $500-one thousand thousand dam close to the source of the White Nile — in waters considered sacred by Uganda's 2.5-million–strong Busoga minority. AES announced that the Busoga had agreed to "relocate" the spirits of their dead. They weren't the only ones opposed; first environmentalists (Museveni had one American arrested and deported) and and so even other foreign investors revolted against a project that seemed like it might really increase the price of power for the poor. Bakke didn't worry. "We don't become away," he alleged. He dispatched a young man named Christian Wright, the son of one of the Prayer Breakfast's organizers, to be AES'south in- land liaison to Museveni; Wright was later defendant of authorizing at least $400,000 in bribes. He claimed his signature had been forged.

"I'm certain a lot of people utilize the Fellowship as a way to network, a way to gain entree to all sorts of people," says Michael Cromartie, an evangelical Washington think tanker who's critical of the Family unit's lack of transparency. "And entree they do become."

"Anything can happen," according to an internal planning document, "the Koran could even be read, but JESUS is there! He is infiltrating the earth." Too bland nearly years to merit much press, the breakfast is regarded by the Family unit as merely a tool in a larger purpose: to recruit the powerful attendees into smaller, more than frequent prayer meetings, where they can "meet Jesus man to man."

In the procedure of introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family has managed to upshot a number of behind-the-scenes acts of affairs. In 1978 it helped the Carter administration organize a worldwide call to prayer with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. At the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast, Family unit leaders persuaded their Southward African client, the Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, to stand down from the possibility of civil state of war with Nelson Mandela. But such beneficial acts appear to be the exception to the rule. During the 1960s, the Family forged relationships between the U.S. regime and some of the most oppressive regimes in the earth, arranging prayer networks in the U.S. Congress for the likes of General Costa eastward Silva, dictator of Brazil; General Suharto, dictator of Republic of indonesia; and General Park Chung Hee, dictator of South korea. "The Fellowship's reach into governments around the world," observes David Kuo, a former special assistant to the president in Bush-league'due south first term, "is most impossible to overstate or even grasp."

From The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet. Copyright 2009 past Jeff Sharlet. Published by Harper. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

adamswellow52.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120746516

Share this post