The Family - Introduction

THE AVANT - GARDE OF AMERICAN FUNDAMENTALISM

This is how they pray: a dozen clear – eyed, smooth - skinned
“ brothers” gather in a huddle, arms crossing arms over shoul-
ders 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 hand-
some, 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 drawi ng of a “C –4” ma-
chine gun given to them by thei r six-year-old neighbor. The men
who live there c all the house Ivanwald. At the end of a tree-lined
cul-de- sac in Arlington, Virgi nia, quiet but for the buzz of lawn
mowers and kids playing tag i n the park across the road, Ivanwald is
one house among many, clustered like mushrooms, nearly two dozen
house holds devoted, like these men, to the service of a personal Je-
sus, 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 bas-
ketball 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 wil l 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 revolu-
tion, his will transformed into a weapon for what the young men call
spiritual war.

2 | JEFF SHARLET
“Je ,” 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 esh 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 ght for Your name.”


This is a story about two great spheres of belief, religion and politics,
and the ways i n 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 Wi nthrop, preparing to cross the Atlan-
tic 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 fty-nine years later, Ronald Reagan, during the last
days of his presidency, would see in Washington’s tra c 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 ad-
dress 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

THE FAMILY | 3
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 l ives
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 el ite cadres he believed could spark
a revolution. It is in this sense that the men to whom my brothers ap-
prenticed themselves, a seventy-year-old self-described “ invisible” net-
work 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 nd
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, l ight each one of ’em on re. Separate, they go out. Put ’em to-
gether, 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 ren-
dered 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 tradi-
tional de nition; they are fundamentalists, and in this still-secular age,
fundamentalism is a religion of both a uence 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

4 | JEFF SHARLET
confusing. One of the biggest surprises to be found in “The Funda-
mentals,” 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 evolu-
tion 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. Amer-
ican fundamentalism’s original sentiments were as radically demo-
cratic in theory as they have become repressive in practice, its dream
not that of Christian theocracy but of a return to the rst century of
Christ worship, before there was a thing called Christianity. The “age
of m iracles,” 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 i ncarnation’s ascendancy—that means a cul-
ture remade in the image of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior who
hates the carnage he must cause, a man-god ordi nary 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 stan-
dards, 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 move-
ment’s desire for a story that never changes, a story to redeem all that
seems random, a rock upon which history can rise.
I o er these explanations not as excuses for the consequences of
American fundamental ism, an expansionist ideology of control bet-
ter suited to empire than democracy, but to point to the de ning
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

THE FAMILY | 5
powerful, its cross planted in the blood- soaked soil of mani fest des-
tiny. It is the strange and dangerous o spring of two intensely ferti le
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 di erent 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 re with witches who also consider them selves 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. embla-
zoned 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 begin ni ng another Christ has been vying
for control, the ecstatic Christ of the Great Awakeners, Jonathan
Edwards and Charles Grandison Finney, the angry farmer god Wil-
liam Jenni ngs Bryan saw cruci ed on a cross of gold, the sword-
tongued, re-eyed Revelation Jesus of a thousand street-corner
ranters. A Christ of absolute devotion, not questions. A volatile, exu-
berant, 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 divi ne are nding 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.
• • •

6 | JEFF SHARLET
“You 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 sitti ng on Ivanwald’s porch, listening to the c rickets and watch-
ing a silvery moon over t he 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 hi mself 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: Sena-
tor James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, for instance, who’d trav-
eled across Africa on the Fam ily’s behalf, insisting that the conti nent’s
leaders hear hi m out about his American Christ before any busi ness
could occur, and Representative Joe Pitts, Republican of Pennsylva-
nia, a leader of the anti- abortion movement since the 1970s who of-
ten stopped by the Cedars, a Family retreat for political leaders. But
such elected o cials—means to an end—didn’t really impress Gan-
non 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 somethi ng another brother, Pavel, had said. He
was Czech. His father had been in uential in the former communist
regime and the post-Soviet one that followed, but now he was a busi-
nessman, which was why, Pavel told me, he had sent him to Ivan-
wald. “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 FAMILY | 7
the brothers he possessed what might be called a sense of irony. “This
is not America,” he replied.
But it is.


What follows, “Awakenings,” 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 a airs of the
nation. From Ivanwald I traveled backward, to American fundamen-
talism’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 eventu-
ally 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 fundamen-
talism takes as its battleground domestic politics, to be conquered
and conformed to the will of God; elite fundamentalism sees its mis-
sion 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.”
Secular America recognizes radical religion only when it marches
into the public square, bellowing its intentions. When Charles Finney
built the nation’s rst megachurch 170 years ago —at Broadway and
Worth, in lower Manhattan—he understood that making a spectacle
of faith provided a foundation for power. More recently, Jerry Fal-

8 | JEFF SHARLET
well and Pat Robertson translated the tent revivals of old i nto politi-
cal networks, moral majorities, and Christian co alitions. But now,
even that modernization has become shiny with age. Falwell is dead;
Robertson is a farce. The secular media nds itself wondering—as it
has periodically ever since the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925—
whether theocratic pol itics are gone for good from America.
Not likely. From Jonathan Edwards and the Revolutionary War
that followed the First Great Awakeni ng to the War on Terror, the
theocratic strand has been woven into the American fabric, never
quite dominant but always stronger and more enduring than those
who imagine religion to be a personal, private a air realize.
Part Two, “Jesus Plus Nothing,” brings the elite thread into the
twentieth century through the story of the founder of the Family, a
Norwegian immigrant named Abraham Vereide, and his successor,
Doug Coe. Vereide counseled presidents and kings and was spiritual
adviser to more senators and generals than Billy Graham has prayed
with in all his days of bowing to power. And yet his story is un-
known. He preferred it that way; God, thought Vereide, works
through men who stay behind the scenes. In Vereide’s day, the Fam-
ily maintai ned a formal front organization, International Christian
Leadership. In Coe’s, it “submerged,” following instructions he is-
sued in 1966, an era of challenge to the kind of establishment power
Vereide and Coe protected as God-ordained.
Why haven’t we seen them and their work? The secular assump-
tion since the Scopes trial has been that such beliefs are obsessions of
the fringe. In their populist mani festations—prurient antipornogra-
phy crusaders, rabid John Birchers, scream ing foes of abortion wield-
ing bloody fetuses like weapons —they often are. But there is another
thread of American fundamentalism, i nvisible to secular observers,
that ran through the post-Scopes politics of the twentieth century,
concerned not so much with individual morality as with “Christian
civilization,” Washington, D.C., as its shining capital. It is this elite
thread, the avant- garde of American fundamentalism, and the ways
in which it has shaped the broad faith of a nation and the uneasy poli-
tics of empire, that is at the heart of my story.

THE FAMILY | 9
Part Three, “The Popular Front,” carries that story into the pres-
ent. The current manifestation of fundamentalist power is only—
only!—the latest revival of emotions stirred by Jonathan Edwards
nearly three hundred years ago, the fear of an angry God, the love of
a personal Jesus, and the ecstasy wrought by the Holy Ghost. That
trinity of sentiments was bound together then by the belief that to
the Europe an conquerors of the New World was given the burden of
spreading their light—their power—to all of humanity.
This is not a book about the Bible thumpers portrayed by Holly-
wood, pinched little hypocrites and broad- browed lunatics, repre-
sentatives of that subset of American fundamentalism that declares
itself a bitter nation within a nation. Rather, it’s a story that begins on
Ivanwald’s suburban lawn, with a group of men gripping each other’s
shoulders in prayer. It is the story of how they got there, where they
are going, and where the movement they joined came from; the story
of an American fundamentalism, gentle and militant, conservative
and revolutionary, that has been hiding in plain sight all along.