The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
by Jeff Sharlet
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jeff SharletBrand: MyBook
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-06-02
ISBN: 0060560053
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Book Reviews of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
Book Review: An extremely important work on a neglected organization of the Religious Right
Summary: 5 Stars
I learned of this book by hearing Jeff Sharlet interviewed on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. The entire conversation was both bizarre and disturbing. What he talked about was a secret organization that calls itself The Family that cultivates a special brand of elite fundamentalism that focuses on cultivating relationships with political and business leaders. Started in the 1930s by Abram Vereide and later headed by David Coe, The Family abandons the traditional focus of fundamentalism upon mass evangelicalism - the approach taken by Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, D. L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham - to work exclusively with people in positions of power. The Family is, in fact, obsessed with power, and not merely sources of righteous power. Coe talks constantly with others of Hitler and Stalin as role models as leaders. Not as moral exemplars, but as examples of people who would do anything for what they believed.
The Family's obsession with moral monsters as examples of great leaders is one of the most disturbing aspects of this organization. I think any morally sensitized person will not take either Hitler or Stalin as anything other than monsters, not to be emulated or admired in any fashion. It is also difficult to reconcile any aspect of their leadership styles with those aspiring to Christian leadership. Why would you want to do that when you have so many Christian leaders to use as models? I suspect because most Christians do not aspire to raw power. Or at least to the degree that they live their lives as Christians. And with the way that the Family is willing to get in bed with dictators, one senses that they would have been willing to work with Hitler, though not the anti-capitalist Stalin (above all else, the Family was, in the days of the Cold War, fanatically anti-Communist). Indeed, after World War II, Abram Vereide worked extensively with ex-Nazis ("ex" more because Germany lost the war than for any change of heart) in building an elite fundamentalism in post-war Germany.
Abram and Coe were drawn to power through the dubious theological assumption that if you put the idea of Jesus together with a person of great power, God will be able to work through them to bring about great things. There are so many problems with this idea that I don't know where to begin, not least Jesus claiming that his kingdom was not of this world and his explicit refusal to translate his mission into political terms. It also smells of a bizarre conception of God's own power, as if God cannot bring any divine plans to fruition unless assisted by the Family's machinations and dealing with despots and men of power. And what did they want to accomplish through associating themselves with power? They desired and still desire a world dedicated to Jesus and to following the principles of free market capitalism. They want abortion made illegal. Surprisingly, they do not apparently want a theocracy, unlike fellow travelers like the Christian Reconstructionists or Dominionists. They do, however, very much want to tear down the wall between church and state. And to achieve this they cultivate the economically and politically powerful, while gleaning the lessons of ultra right wing dictators like Hitler and fighting labor movements and anything they think smacks of socialism.
Their influence has been both hidden and surprisingly widespread. They've been able to influence both ideas and political action. They were able to influence American policy with Indonesian mass murder Suharto, both with Democratic and Republican leaders. In fact, while, most of their acolytes have been Republican, they've worked with a number of Democrats as well. Through the National Prayer Breakfast that Abram Vereide started in the 1950s, they've reached out to both parties. John Ashcroft was a member of the Family, as was Mark Hatfield. Shockingly, Hillary Clinton has close ties with the Family, though she is not a full member (reading that part of the book was one of the more depressing parts). They've established relationships with numerous world leaders, capitalists, and heads of states. They by no means control the world or dominate American foreign or domestic policy, but they've influenced it more than most people will feel comfortable with. As Sharlet notes near the end of the book, many of their fondest causes, such as an extreme free market capitalism, have come to be taken for matters of course in American life.
For me one of the most disturbing aspect of the thinking prevalent among the Family and their fellow travelers is the highly selective logic they employ. For instance, they constantly preach against consumer society (something that as many or perhaps even more secular critics are aware of as fundamentalist ones) while at the same time passionately embracing free market capitalism, which has the creation of consumer culture at its very core. They also employ a highly selective reading of history and real life events. 9/11 is seen as a rebuke of America for its abandonment of God, a truly speculative fantasy. When Sharlet wrote of one minister who viewed history in these terms and then added that his wife had recently died of lymphoma, I wondered why he didn't view that as a divine rebuke of his own life. They seem to have no real interpretive criterion except that events have the meaning that they ascribe to them. That opposite or at least very different lessons can be applied escape them. For me the lesson of 9/11 is: fundamentalists are scary.
The way the whole movement avoids questions of responsibility and liability by ascribing everything to God's choice or God's annointing of monsters and idiots. A member of the Family uses the phrase "Jesus plus nothing" as their prime philosophy. But Jesus tossed about as a slogan with no additional content - the Family constantly avoids specific doctrinal commitments - is vague and empty. And it results in a failure to embrace personal responsibility. When Sharlet confronts the Family's involvement with Suharto's genocidal regime, he is told that David Coe may have reduced the staggering number of people he killed. That is seeing the glass have empty when it is not only empty but cracked along the bottom.
The finale portion of the book deals with the fundamentalist movement in a broader context, especially with the attempt to reinterpret history. This section of the book truly depressed me because it showed how willing many of the Christian Right are willing to embrace some truly bizarre readings of history. For instance, Thomas Jefferson believed only in a one-way wall separating church and state, a wall means solely to protect religion from the state. This ought to be an impossible reading if one knows the facts of Jefferson's life. His anti-clericalism is famous, as is his Deism and his hope that as America matured as a nation it would become increasingly Unitarian and embrace naturalist religion. In the last two decades of his life he became more and more depressed as evangelical revivals swept the country. The spread of Trinitarian, emotional Christianity was, in his view, a tragedy. Yet, in this new fundamentalist recreation of American history Jefferson is turned into something he would have abhorred. (I'm extremely religious myself and have none of Jefferson's biases or fears about orthodox Christianity, though I'm certainly not a fundamentalist.)
I found the part about the role of Stonewall Jackson as an icon among the home school movement fascinating. Jackson has long been one of my favorite American figures, absolutely fascinating as a military figure. I've read two biographies of him and enjoyed passages on him in many histories of the Civil War (Shelby Foote wrote especially well about him in his three-volume THE CIVIL WAR). But as much as I find him fascinating, I also consider him to be absolutely insane. At the end of the Battle of Antietam, he remarked to another general (I believe it was Hood), eating a peach beside a long stretch of ground where the bodies were stacked two and three deep for hundreds of yards, "God has been very kind to us today." His fellow general was (I think correctly) shocked. It is not easy to consider such wholesale slaughter as the kindness of God. Nor is it easy to imagine a hypochondriacal narcoleptic (Jackson actually fell asleep in one battle and could not be awakened and apparently never stayed away through any sermon) with a penchant for quack medicines as a religious icon. Mind you, I love Jackson. And I realize that he was by his own lights a pious man (interestingly, a direct descendent of his, Thomas J. J. Altizer -- Jackson had no sons so descendents through his daughters have named sons "Thomas Jonathan Jackson" along with the surname -- was one of the leading Death of God theologians, while someone I suspect is a descendent of Jackson, Thomas J. J. Lears, was an avid supporter of Obama in the past election). But while I can imagine military commanders (like Patton and Rommel) admiring and wanting to emulate him, I can't conceive of anyone taking him as a religious model. But this is the strange new world that many fundamentalists inhabit with the often bizarre warping of history.
Finally, I want to add that this is a beautifully written book. On the front cover is a blurb from Thomas Frank, who does not intend faint praise when he writes "Of all the important studies of the American Right, THE FAMILY is undoubtedly the most eloquent." Sharlet is simply an exceptional writer. There are some passages, in fact, where he writes so well that you almost get distracted from his main point. He writes beautiful sentences and he constructs beautiful paragraphs. Too few nonfiction authors write well. There have been some such animals. George Kennan was one of the great prose writers of the past century, while writing almost nothing but works on diplomacy and history. Bill James may dissect the logic of baseball statistics, but he does so while producing some unexpectedly gorgeous prose. Simon Schama writes beautifully in his wide range of history books. But you don't expect a journalist writing about elite fundamentalism to write this beautifully. The book would be well worth reading without his fine prose style, but it is certainly a wonderful enhancement.
Summary of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
They insist they are just a group of friends, yet they funnel millions of dollars through tax-free corporations. They claim to disdain politics, but congressmen of both parties describe them as the most influential religious organization in Washington. They say they are not Christians, but simply believers.
Behind the scenes at every National Prayer Breakfast since 1953 has been the Family, an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. Their goal is "Jesus plus nothing." Their method is backroom diplomacy. The Family is the startling story of how their faith?part free-market fundamentalism, part imperial ambition?has come to be interwoven with the affairs of nations around the world.
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