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Jeff
Sharlet is a smart guy and a talented long-form journalist who has made his
bones looking into some of the odder corners of the American religious
landscape. He’s a man of the left who has dedicated himself to reminding his
ideological fellows that (yes, Virginia) religion really exists in America and,
not only that, it can make a big difference in how Americans do their
respective things. And so it was, that having been tipped off about a curious
religious group operating in Washington called the Family, he set out to
investigate. He pretended to be interested in joining up, spent some time
living at the group’s headquarters, and came away with a notable story for Harper’s. Here was a distinctive
organization of national leaders and up-and-coming wannabes that was devoted to
Jesus, maybe not so committed to the democratic processes that had brought some
of them to power, and eager to keep their light under a bushel–except when it
came to ushering selected newcomers into their ranks. The Family is their story–and then some.

The
big payoff came because, besides hanging out with the members and taking their
spiritual and ideological pulses, Sharlet learned that the group had dumped
cartons and cartons of its records into the Billy Graham archive at Wheaton
College. So off went our investigator to bury among what turned out to be documents
on the Family’s doings going back to its origins in the 1930s. And by far the
most valuable part of his book has to do with what he learned there–all the
more valuable because, it seems, the Family is now keeping the stuff away from
prying eyes.

Sharlet
uses the archives to tell the story of Abram Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant who
got the group going as the result of a deep-seated Christian pietism and his
distress at the social disruption created by the Depression. Vereide’s Big Idea
was to sell Jesus to whatever powerful people he could get to, in the
expectation that getting them together would be a way to maintain the
socio-economic status quo. He made his way to Washington, hooked up with a
sufficient number of the powerful, and created prayer cells and a network that eventually
reached around the world. The pitch didn’t involve a particular church or even
exactly Christianity: It was Jesus alone, via Bible-reading and praying
together. Forty years ago, leadership of the group passed to Doug Coe, a rather
more secretive character than Vereide, who managed to achieve a kind of cult
status among a portion of the Washington elite. Altogether, over the course of
70 years, the powerful attracted to the Family have included a few Democrats
along with the Republicans, and some unsavory foreign leaders. Being part of the
Family network did not hurt their careers.

It
is unfortunate, especially in light of the closing of the archives, that
Sharlet did not provide a more systematic account of the Family’s activities. That
would have made the book more academic, but more useful. As it is, it
is not easy to determine to what extent the Family’s activities have actually made
a difference. In any group that seeks to have an impact, insiders tend to
exaggerate their importance: We had a terrific meeting with X, Y told us what a
difference we’re making in country G, the speech was greeted with vast
enthusiasm, etc. While Sharlet allows as how the Family experienced failure
from time to time–e.g. in Germany after the war–his claims about its importance
in advancing the causes of, for example, Suharto in Indonesia and Siad Barre in
Somalia, require a far more comprehensive account than he provides. The
problem, simply, is that whatever the Family network may done to advance this
or that individual, this or that issue, it was not (necessarily) alone in doing
the advancing.

That’s
important in assessing the Family’s influence in Washington generally.
Arguably, the organization was at its most influential during the early years
of the Cold War, when its establishmentarian style of bringing like-minded leaders
together across party lines was most in tune with the national inclination. But
Sharlet portrays Vereide as the key figure in giving America’s conduct of the Cold
War its religious spin. There’s no mention of John Foster Dulles or Henry Luce,
of the role of the Catholic Church, of the way “Judeo-Christian” language was
fashioned to provide a religious umbrella for including Americans of (as it then
seemed) all faiths in the common cause of fighting Communism. Sharlet does make
brief reference to Reinhold Niebuhr (though he gets the dating of his
intellectual evolution wrong)–but the point is, the Family was simply swimming
in a much larger tide. There is a hermetic, conspiracy-hunting quality to the
book that leads Sharlet to miss the forest for his tree.

Nor
is it just the forest of Cold War religiosity. Sharlet’s father was a
Sovietologist who advised the CIA, and he himself might best be described as a
Fundamentologist, one who teases out the inside story of American religious evil
behind the scrim of public utterances and appearances. For The Family offers up what amounts to a secret history of religion
in America, as seen through what Sharlet calls “fundamentalism” (or sometimes “American
fundamentalism”). This is not fundamentalism as historians of American religion
know it–that is, the fundamentalism of the particular theological propositions
advanced in the pamphlet series, The
Fundamentals. Sharlet is not unaware of that
fundamentalism, which he once or twice refers to as “theological
fundamentalism.” No, his fundamentalism is a different animal–or rather, two
different animals: elite and populist. The Family represents elite
fundamentalism; a species of politically engaged conservative evangelicalism
(including mainstream religious right organizations) represent the populist
wing.

There
is something Humpty-Dumptyish about this usage, as in Through the Looking Glass:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a
rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more
nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean different
things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

Sharlet
means to be the master of an American fundamentalism that stretches all the way
back to Jonathan Edwards in the 1730s, stretches through the Second Awakening,
and remains alive and more powerful than ever today. The key elements of this
spiritual ideology are, he claims, “heart religion” à la Edwards (not George
Whitefield?) and permanent revival à la the 19^th-century revivalist Charles
Grandison Finney–plus a commitment to theocracy, a concomitant distaste for
democracy, and a thirst for empire. Theocracy in Sharlet’s hands is also a bit
Dumptyish, or at least confused. Protestant revivalism–which lies at the core
of American evangelicalism–is much better seen as expressing a democratic
impulse; that’s the theme of Nathan Hatch’s celebrated book on the Second
Awakening, The Democratization of American Christianity. Certainly there are theocratic moments in
American religious history–including Puritan Boston and Brigham Young’s Mormon
Zion. But Sharlet is not interested in these. One can point to an exaggerated
sense of American exceptionalism in Landmarkism–a peculiar Baptist variant that
sunk deep roots from Tennessee to Texas–but Sharlet has nothing to say about
that. Nor does he mention the Student Volunteer Movement, which sought to win
the world for Christ in the late 19^th and early 20^th
centuries. The confusion is between theocracy–rule by some species of clergy in
God’s name–and the desire to exercise the Great Commission and Christianize
humankind. The latter has always been a prime aim, the prime aim, of evangelicals. But that does not make them
theocrats, notwithstanding Sharlet’s reproach for “[o]ur refusal to recognize
the theocratic strand running throughout American history.”

What’s
lurking behind Sharlet’s view is the old-fashioned American Studies approach to
American history represented by Vernon Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought. American history is thereby a left-liberal
story of good versus evil, which is to say, the forces of Jeffersonian
democracy versus the forces of business capitalism. Parrington saw the 20^th
century in gloomy terms, the consequence of Jeffersonian farmers making common
cause with greedy businessmen to create a particularly noxious form of
capitalist hegemony. So Sharlet sees the 21^st century as witnessing
the combined forces of elite and populist fundamentalism, more powerful than
either ever was alone. The good guys of American religion barely make an
appearance–a bit of William Jennings Bryan here, a bit of Martin Luther King,
Jr. there. The fundamentalists, by contrast, have a lot to their credit:

Consider the accomplishments of the movement,
its populist and its elite branches combined: foreign policy on a near-constant
footing of Manichean urgency for the last hundred years; “free markets”
imprinted on the American mind as some sort of natural law; a manic-depressive
sexuality that puzzles both prudes and libertines throughout the rest of the
world; and a schizophrenic sense of democracy as founded on individual rights
and yet indebted to a higher authority that trumps personal liberties.”

Whew!

What might a preferable account of the Family
and its more public contemporary allies be? Let me hazard a sketch. The
organization emerges not out of the broad stream of revivalist evangelicalism but
simply from the peculiar businessman’s Christianity of the 1920s. (In this,
Sharlet is not wrong to call attention to Bruce Bartlett’s The Man Nobody Knows.) After World War II, it glommed on to the
Eisenhower revival, making a permanent place for itself on the Washington scene
via its National Prayer Breakfast. It participated in what Jeremy Gunn calls
(in his book Spiritual Weapons) the
American National Religion–one that combined governmental theism with a
commitment to capitalism and a military second to none. Like other
establishmentarian groups, the Family made connections for its friends; unlike them, it
had a secret creed accessible only to those in the inner circle. Its
effectiveness was based to no small degree on the fact that it was able to
attract–indeed, was bent on attracting–fellow travelers who enjoyed the
spiritual fellowship and networking but knew nothing of the full Jesus program.
Did those people advance that program? Not so much.

In due course, along came a revived American
evangelicalism and the familiar religious right. Were they the creation of the
Family? Nope. Were some religious rightists drawn into the Family orbit? Of
course. But so were the likes of Hillary Clinton, who (Sharlet notes) was a
frequent visitor to the now notorious C Street house as late as 2005. “How much
power can a movement have if it’s sufficiently vague in its principles to
encompass both Sam Brownback and Hillary Clinton?” Sharlet reasonably asks. His
answer is the consummate anti-establishmentarian’s conviction that the entire
enterprise of bringing The Key People together to serve the cause of social order is necessarily
a bad, anti-democratic thing. No doubt, Hillary is a quintessentially establishmentarian creature, from her Renaissance
Weekends to her C Street Reformation. And establishments can mess up badly. But
there is something to be said for the establishmentarian project as well. It
could be argued, for example, that nothing has more disserved the country than
the Reagan-era enterprise of creating an ideologically pure
counter-establishment of conservative and neo-conservative think tanks and
foundations.

The Family has now been subjected to its own
worst nightmare, publicly mocked as a den of creepy Christians scurrying to
keep their sins under wraps. Doubtless, some of the insiders see themselves
following in His footsteps, wending their way to Calvary as they are pelted by
the Maddows and Trudeaus. The fellow travelers keep their silence and wait till
the commotion blows over. No doubt, the Prayer Breakfast will take place as
usual next February, with all the powerful, up to the president, in attendance.
But thanks to Gov. Sanford and Sen. Ensign, and Jeff Sharlet too, the Family
will never again bask in the splendor of secret celebrity. It’s about time.