Authors: Jeff Sharlet
The Family
The Secret Fundamentalism
at the Heart of American Power
In memory of Nancy Goodlin Sharlet
THE AVANT-GARDE OF AMERICAN FUNDAMENTALISM
T
HIS IS HOW THEY
pray: a dozen clear-eyed, smooth-skinned “brothers” gather in a huddle, arms crossing arms over shoulders like the weave of a cable, leaning in on one another and swaying like the long grass up the hill from the house they share, a handsome, gray, two-story colonial that smells of new carpet, Pine-Sol, and aftershave. It is decorated with lithographs of foxhunters and pictures of Jesus, and, in the bunk room, a drawing of a “C–4” machine gun given to them by their six-year-old neighbor. The men who live there call the house Ivanwald. At the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac in Arlington, Virginia, quiet but for the buzz of lawn mowers and kids playing tag in the park across the road, Ivanwald is one house among many, clustered like mushrooms, nearly two dozen households devoted, like these men, to the service of a personal Jesus, a Christ who directs their every action. The men tend every tulip in the cul-de-sac, trim every magnolia, seal every driveway smooth and black as boot leather. Assembled at the dining table or on their lawn or in the hallway or in the bunk room or on the basketball court, they also pray, each man’s head bowed in humility and swollen with pride (secretly, he thinks) at being counted among this select corps for Christ, men to whom he will open his heart and whom he will remember when he returns to the world not born-again but remade, no longer an individual but part of the Lord’s revolution, his will transformed into a weapon for what the young men call
spiritual war.
“Jeff,” says Bengt, one of the house leaders, “will you lead us in prayer?”
Surely, brother. I have lived with these men for close to a month, not as a Christian—a term they deride as too narrow for the world they are building in Jesus’ honor—but as
a follower of Christ,
the phrase they use to emphasize what matters most to their savior. Not faith or kindness but obedience. I don’t share their faith, in fact, but this does not concern them; I’ve obeyed, and that is enough. I have shared the brothers’ meals and their work and their games. I’ve wrestled with them and showered with them and listened to their stories: I know which man resents his father’s fortune and which man succumbed to the flesh of a woman not once but twice and which man dances so well he is afraid of being taken for gay. I know what it means to be
a brother,
which is to say I know what it means to be a soldier in the army of God. I have been numbered among them.
“Heavenly Father,” I begin. Then, “O Lord,” but I worry that doesn’t sound intimate enough. I settle on “Dear Jesus.” “Dear Jesus, just, please, Jesus, let us fight for Your name.”
T
HIS IS A
story about two great spheres of belief, religion and politics, and the ways in which they are bound together by the mythologies of America. America—not the legal entity of the United States but the idea with which Europe clothed a continent that it believed naked and wild—America has been infused with religion since the day in 1630 when the Puritan John Winthrop, preparing to cross the Atlantic to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, declared the New World the
city upon a hill
spoken of by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. Three hundred and fifty-nine years later, Ronald Reagan, during the last days of his presidency, would see in Washington’s traffic jams that same vision, like a double exposure: “a tall proud city, built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed.” In his farewell address he’d call it a
shining
city upon a hill. This is a story about that imaginary place, so real in the minds of those for whom religion, politics, and the mythologies of America are one singular story, and how that vision has shaped America’s projection of power onto the rest of the world.
My “brothers” were members of a very peculiar group of believers, not representative of the majority of Christians but of an avant-garde of the social movement I call
American fundamentalism,
a movement that recasts theology in the language of empire.
Avant-garde
is a term usually reserved for innovators, artists who live strange and dangerous lives and translate their strange and dangerous thoughts into pictures or poetry or fantastical buildings. The term has a political ancestry as well: Lenin used it to describe the elite cadres he believed could spark a revolution. It is in this sense that the men to whom my brothers apprenticed themselves, a seventy-year-old self-described “invisible” network of followers of Christ in government, business, and the military, use the term avant-garde. They call themselves “the Family,” or “The Fellowship,” and they consider themselves a “core” of men responsible for changing the world. “Hitler, Lenin, and many others understood the power of a small core of people,” instructs a document given to an inner circle, explaining the scope, if not the ideological particulars, of the ambition members of this avant-garde are to cultivate.
1
Or, as a former Ivanwald brother who’d used his Ivanwald connections to find a foothold in the insurance industry told my brothers and me during a seminar on “biblical capitalism,” “Look at it like this: take a bunch of sticks, light each one of ’em on fire. Separate, they go out. Put ’em together, though, and light the bundle.
Now
you’re ready to burn.”
Hitler, to the Family, is no more real than Attila the Hun as drafted by business gurus who promise unstoppable “leadership” techniques drawn from history’s killers; or for that matter Christ, himself, as rendered in a business best seller called
Jesus, CEO
. The Family’s avant-garde is not composed of neo-Nazis, or crypto-Nazis, or fascists by any traditional definition; they are fundamentalists, and in this still-secular age, fundamentalism is a religion of both affluence and revolution.
“Fundamentalist” is itself a relatively recent and much-contested word, coined early in the last century by a conservative Baptist who wanted to clear away the confusion about what Christians, by his lights, were supposed to stand for.
2
What they stood for, in fact,
was
confusing. One of the biggest surprises to be found in “The Fundamentals,” a series of dense pamphlets published between 1910 and 1915, is the argument that evolution is reconcilable with a literal reading of scripture. Much has changed since then; such is the evolution of American fundamentalism. Imagine it traveling a path twisted like that of a Möbius strip, the visual paradox made popular in M. C. Escher’s optical illusions, from liberation to authoritarianism. American fundamentalism’s original sentiments were as radically democratic in theory as they have become repressive in practice, its dream not that of Christian theocracy but of a return to the first century of Christ worship, before there was a thing called Christianity. The “age of miracles,” when
church
was no more than a word for the great fellowship—the profound friendship—of believers, when Christ’s testament really was new, revelation was unburdened by history, and believers were martyrs or martyrs-to-be, pure and beautiful.
Is fundamentalism too limited a word for such utopian dreams? Lately some scholars prefer “maximalism,” a term meant to convey the movement’s ambition to conform every aspect of society to God. In contemporary America—from the Cold War to the Iraq War, the period of the current incarnation’s ascendancy—that means a culture remade in the image of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior who hates the carnage he must cause, a man-god ordinary men will follow as he conquers the world in order to conform it to his angry love. These are days of the sword, literally—wealthy members of the movement gift one another with real blades crafted to battle standards, a fad inspired by a Christian best seller called
Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul
. As jargon, then, maximalism isn’t bad, but I think fundamentalism still strikes closest to the movement’s desire for a story that never changes, a story to redeem all that seems random, a rock upon which history can rise.
I offer these explanations not as excuses for the consequences of American fundamentalism, an expansionist ideology of control better suited to empire than democracy, but to point to the defining tension of a creed that is both fearful and proud even as it proclaims itself joyous and humble. It is a martyr’s faith in the hands of the powerful, its cross planted in the blood-soaked soil of manifest destiny. It is the strange and dangerous offspring of two intensely fertile sets of stories, “America” and “Christianity.”
Before moving into Ivanwald, I spent several months on the road, researching God in America for an earlier book. My quarry soon became the gods of America: a pantheon. Not Vishnu or Buddha or the Goddess, though they reside here too, but a heaven crowded with the many different Christs believed in by Americans. There’s a Jesus in Miami’s Cuban churches, for instance, who seems to do nothing but wrestle Castro; a Jesus in Heartland, Kansas, who dances around a fire with witches who also consider themselves Christians; a Jesus in Manhattan who dresses in drag; a baby Jesus in New Mexico who pulls cow tails and heals the lame or simply the sad by giving them earth to eat; a muscle-bound Jesus in South Central L.A. emblazoned across the chest of a man with a gun in his hand; a Jesus in an Orlando megachurch who wants you to own a black Beamer.
So many Jesuses. And yet there has always been a certain order to America’s Christs, a certain hierarchy. For centuries, the Christ of power was high church, distant, and well mannered. The austere, severe god of Cotton Mather, the Lord of the Ivy League and country club dinners. But from the beginning another Christ has been vying for control, the ecstatic Christ of the Great Awakeners, Jonathan Edwards and Charles Grandison Finney, the angry farmer god William Jennings Bryan saw crucified on a cross of gold, the sword-tongued, fire-eyed Revelation Jesus of a thousand street-corner ranters. A Christ of absolute devotion, not questions. A volatile, exuberant, American god, almost democratic, almost totalitarian. This wild Christ is not supplanting the old, upper-crust Jesus; rather, the followers of these two visions of the divine are finding common cause. The elite and the populist Jesuses are merging, becoming once again a Christ who thrives not so much as a deity or through a theology as what the historian Perry Miller called in
The New England Mind
, his 1939 classic account of Puritanism, a
mood.
“Y
OU CAN’T PUT
a heart in a box,” one of my Ivanwald brothers, a Senate aide named Gannon Sims, told me one night. He was trying to make me understand why political terminology,
left
and
right, liberal
and
conservative,
could not contain the movement’s vision. We were sitting on Ivanwald’s porch, listening to the crickets and watching a silvery moon over the Potomac River wink through the trees. Gannon, former student body president of Baylor University, twisted his class ring. He had blue eyes and blond hair and a voice like an angel born in Texas; he sang in a choir and wrote songs about Jesus and hoped one day to be a senator like the one he worked for, Don Nickles, then the second-ranking Republican. Gannon wanted power. Not for himself but for God. It wasn’t up to him; Jesus would use him. “I don’t try to explain,” he told me. “I just get involved.”
Gannon referred to Senator Nickles as a member of the Family, and he dropped names of others he called members with ease: Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, for instance, who’d traveled across Africa on the Family’s behalf, insisting that the continent’s leaders hear him out about his American Christ before any business could occur, and Representative Joe Pitts, Republican of Pennsylvania, a leader of the anti-abortion movement since the 1970s who often stopped by the Cedars, a Family retreat for political leaders. But such elected officials—means to an end—didn’t really impress Gannon because in the end he hoped for, the kingdom of heaven on earth toward which both he and the congressmen in the Family were working wouldn’t be a democracy.
“It won’t?” I asked.
“King
-dom,” said Gannon.
I remembered something another brother, Pavel, had said. He was Czech. His father had been influential in the former communist regime and the post-Soviet one that followed, but now he was a businessman, which was why, Pavel told me, he had sent him to Ivanwald. “Contacts,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. One time we had a visitor, a Venezuelan evangelist, who asked Pavel if he had come to Ivanwald to learn about the American way of life. Pavel smiled. He was very tall, and he had a head shaped like a lightbulb. Alone among the brothers he possessed what might be called a sense of irony. “This is not America,” he replied.
But it is.
W
HAT FOLLOWS
, “A
WAKENINGS
,” begins with my own, at Ivanwald. Not to the exclusive truth of Ivanwald’s Christ but to what Charles W. Colson, the Watergate felon who was born again through the Family, called in his memoir,
Born Again
, “a veritable underground of Christ’s men all through government.” This so-called underground is not a conspiracy. Rather, it’s a seventy-year-old movement of elite fundamentalism, bent not on salvation for all but on the cultivation of the powerful, “key men” chosen by God to direct the affairs of the nation. From Ivanwald I traveled backward, to American fundamentalism’s forebears: Jonathan Edwards, there at the creation of the First Great Awakening in 1735, and Charles Grandison Finney, who awakened the nation again a century later.
Edwards, remembered mostly for one violent phrase—“We are sinners in the hands of an angry God”—gave to what would eventually become American fundamentalism not its fury but its “heart,” a sentimental story shaped and softened ever since by elite believers. Finney, the great revivalist of the Second Great Awakening, provided to the growing evangelical movement the theatrical tools for rallying its masses. Edwards and Finney are ancestors of the two great strands of American fundamentalism, elite and populist. Populist fundamentalism takes as its battleground domestic politics, to be conquered and conformed to the will of God; elite fundamentalism sees its mission as the manipulation of politics in the rest of the world. Both populists and elites call their attempts to control the lives of others “evangelism.”