The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
Jeff Sharlet
Harper, May 2008
464 pages, $25.95
Some say science and religion don’t mix, but there’s no argument where politics is concerned. Religion has been part of American political life since Thomas Jefferson found a place for “Nature’s God” in the opening salvo of the Declaration of Independence. Since then, faith has occupied a peculiar space on the national stage: hemmed in by a wall of separation, yet obvious and unavoidable in public life. Look to the rhetoric of the current election if you are in doubt.
Of all religion’s forays into American governance, perhaps none seems so innocuous at first glance as the National Prayer Breakfast, the annual gathering of representatives, senators, and invited guests that could cause one to wonder if, wall of separation be damned, this is a Christian nation after all.
It is only a passing relief to learn, in Jeff Sharlet’s excellent new book, that the National Prayer Breakfast is not an egregious example of state-sponsored religion. It is, in fact, an undertaking of a secretive group of well-connected religious power-players called the Fellowship Foundation, or “the Family.”
Contrary to what most religion watchers say, the big story in American religion right now is not mega-churches. It is instead “small group” prayer gatherings: flexible, amorphous collections of individuals who function, in their own terminology, as “cells.” They mean this in the cloak and dagger sense, with each cell not unlike an isolated unit of agents working toward a common goal. But there is a biological meaning as well. The small-group approach to spreading influence—religious, secular, or a compound of the two—acknowledges that to effect change on a massive scale, change must occur on the cellular level.
Thus while some concerned about the separation of church and state tilt at the windmills of civic piety (such as “In God We Trust” on our currency), the real influence of religion in American politics has gone over the wall.
In Sharlet’s telling, there is no better example than the Family. Founded in the United States by Norwegian immigrant Abraham Vereide in the 1930s, the group was religious and political from the start, using prayer breakfasts to warn against what they saw as the rising Socialist threat of labor unions. Vereide, and then the current leader of the Fellowship Foundation, Douglas Coe, soon saw their influence over small groups of politicians and businessmen shape global events, all the while using what President George H.W. Bush once described as “quiet diplomacy—I wouldn’t say secret diplomacy.”
Yet secrecy is at the heart of the organization. “The Movement,” one of its leaders once wrote, “is simply inexplicable to people who are not intimately acquainted with it.” Its political initiatives, he adds, “have always been misunderstood by ‘outsiders.’ As a result... we have learned never to commit to paper any discussions or negotiations that are taking place.”
With no official membership, the Family is known by many as “the Christian mafia,” whose reach is taken for granted by those in the know. Sharlet painstakingly documents their influence among senators, members of Congress, and even higher. The Family is not a conspiracy theory, however. It is, instead, a diagnosis of the precarious health of the body politic, a story of how a few small cells can spread and grow until they become dangerously inseparable from the life around them.
Peter Manseau is the editor of Search.
