Interesting Blood
The Reverend Rob Schenck, the founder of a ministry
called Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital—a knocko of the
Family, the theological equivalent of fake Gucci—is one of the most
unusual fundamentalist activists in Washington. He has the glad,
plastic face and quick wit of a Borscht Belt comedian and the big
brown eyes of a pitbull puppy. There’s an echo of Brooklyn in his
voice, which he ampli ed on my behalf. We had two things in com-
mon, we discovered when we met one day for sauerbraten at Schenck’s
favorite restaurant: a fasci nation with Jonathan Edwards and Charles
Finney, and the fact that we’re both “ half-Jews,” born of gentile
mothers and Jewish fathers. “Makes for very interesting blood!” said
Schenck. This realization was an occasion for Schenck to dust o his
Yinglish, the mix of Yiddish and English usually reserved for bar
mitzvahs, funerals, and Fiddler on the Roof revivals. It was probably the
only time Jonathan Edwards has been described as a luft mensch and
Finney as a schmoozer. (Between us, MOT, we agreed that Billy
Graham is a theological schlimazel.) Schenck was that rarest of crea-
tures: an ironic true believer.
Where I’d made sense of my half-Jew, half-Christian self by
writing about those without doubts or divisions, Schenck, seventeen
years old at the tai l end of the hippie “Jesus People” movement in the
early 1970s, decided to become one. With his twin brother, Paul, in
tow, he began attending late-night stoner prayer- and-gospel guitar
sessions. But that wasn’t enough. It’s a strange trut h of American
258 | JEFF SHARLET
fundamentalism that several of its public ideologues—Marvin Olasky,
the former communist who converted and coined the phrase compas-
sionate conservatism, and Howard Phillips, a Yiddish- speaker who
converted and recruited Jerry Falwell to create a “Moral Majority,”
and Jay Sekulow, the converted legal genius behind many of the
movement’s courtroom victorie s—came up i n the deradicali zed
world of postwar American Jewry. It’s as if, casting about for the
political passion of thei r immigrant fathers and mothers, they settled
on Christian fundamentalism as the closest approximation of that
vanished world, its socialist u nions and communist cells.
Schenck took it further than most: he helped or ganize Operation
Rescue, the militant anti- abortion crusade that special ized in gro-
tesque protests—the twin Schencks waved aborted fetuses like
ags—and “direct action,” such as a full-throated prayer vigil outside
the home of a Bu alo abortion provider, Dr. Barnett Slepian, in
1997. A year later, an Operation Rescue volunteer named James
Kopp shot Slepian to death. “My brother and I felt very badly about
the shooting,” Schenck told a reporter.1
It was true—by then Schenck had realized that there was a
quicker path to power. He had begun praying in Washington with a
risi ng star in the Senate from Missouri, John Ashcroft. He took to
riding what he called the “vertical chapel”—the elevators of congres-
sional o ce buildings—hoping to bump into more catches li ke
Ashcroft. Instead, he kept runni ng into members of the Family, on
their way to meetings not just with fundamentalist fellow travelers
such as Ashcroft but the entire spectrum of the political elite. “The
mystique of the Fellowship,” Schenck observed, “ has allowed it to
gain entrée into almost impossible places i n the capital.”
Schenck found a donor to buy him a town house across from the
Supreme Court, where he began practici ng a Coe- style ministry to
judiciary sta ers. In 20 00, he prayed with Justice Antonin Scalia a
day after the Supreme Court decision that made Bush president, and
since 2001, Schenck has been able to penetrate the White House with
ease, counseling sta ers on their spiritual responsibilities. He does
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 259
the same for congressmen in the quiet garden behind his town house,
and fundamentalist activists from the provinces make Schenck’s HQ
a regular stop on their pilgrimages to power. But he’s still, by his own
admission, third tier. He remains an outsider with inside connections.
As such, he has become a sharp study of how the power he wants
actually ows. In the rst rank of fundamentalist i n uence, there are
the old lions: James Dobson and Focus on the Fam ily; Pat Robertson,
batty but too rich to ignore; Chuck Colson, the “scholar in residence”
in the house of fundamentalism. “Then you have the B list,” which is
comprised of dozens of m id-sized organizations with big membership
rolls but little name recognition outside activist circles: American
Values, led by Gary Bauer, a former top Reagan aide who worked
with the Family in the 1980s; and the Traditional Values Coalition,
led by Louis P. Sheldon, a longtime Family ally who uses their C
Street House for “ faith- based diplomacy” in the ght against what he
calls the “Marxist/Leftist/Homosexual/Islamic coalition”—a clumsy
coinage that marks him as too crass for the Family’s inner circle.
“Where does the Family t on this scale?” I asked.
O the charts, said Schenck. Not more powerful; di erently
powerful. The big Christian lobbying groups push and shout; the
Fam ily simply surrounds politicians with prayer cells. They don’t try
to convert anyone. They don’t ask for anything. They’re as patient as
a glacier. “ It works. It works extremely well. Inside the beltway, if
you’re going to enjoy the platform of the National Prayer Breakfast—I
mean, really enjoy it, not be invited courteously to show up, if you’re
going to have the force of that thing behind you, Coe’s approval is a
big deal. It’s the kosher seal.”
Coe doesn’t demand doctrinal loyalty, only a willingness to do
business behind the scenes, and liberals are free to join him in the
back room. Testifying before Congress about global warm ing in
2007, Al Gore came under angry assault from Senator James Inhofe,
a longtime member of the Family. Gore blunted the attack by invok-
ing their “mutual friend, Doug Coe,” with whom, he suggested, he
and Inhofe ought to meet away from the cameras. “You know what
260 | JEFF SHARLET
I think of when I think of Doug Coe? ” Schenck asked, his voice thick
with admiration and laced with envy. “I think literally of the guy in
the smoky back room, you can’t even see his face. He sits in the cor-
ner, and you see the cigar, and you see the ame, and you hear his
voice—but you never see his face. He’s that shadowy gure. Nobody
ever sees him. At the Prayer Breakfast, he’s never on the dais, but he
puts the whole thing together. Nobody speaks from that podium,
including the president, without Doug’s nod of approval. It’s a deli-
cate play: He bri ngs everyone together.”
For instance, says Schenck, Senators Sam Brownback and Hillary
Clinton, partners in prayer at Coe’s weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast.
The Family is dedicated to spiritual war, not the intramural combat
of party politics, Schenck explained. Coe doesn’t have a systematic
theology, he has a vision of power. Not just to come, but as it exists.
“They’re into living with what is,” said Schenck. “But you don’t want
to alienate them, you don’t want to antagonize them. You need them
as your friends. Even Hillary will need them. They keep a sort of
cultural homeostasis in Washington. Washington right now is a town
where if you’re going to be powerful, you need rel igion. That’s just
the way it’s done.”
Sam
The senator looks taller than he is, looks broader than he is. He is
slight, but you notice the narrow cut of his suits, the weightlessness
of the man, only after you have been with him for a while. His face is
wide and at and smooth across the cheekbones. His ski n is
Washington-pale but thick, like leather, etched by windburn and sun
from years of working on his father’s farm in Parker, Kansas (popula-
tion 281 and falling). You can hear it in his voice: slow, distant but
warm, almost a baritone, spoken out of the left side of his mouth in
half sentences with very few hard consonants. It sounds like the voice
of someone who has learned how to wait for rain.
As a freshman in the House, part of the Republican revolution of
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 261
1994, he spoke with approval of his supporters’ feeli ngs about Con-
gress: “ blow it up,” they demanded. He refused at rst to sign the
“Contract With America,” Newt Gingrich’s right-wing manifesto,
not because it was too radical but because it wasn’t fast enough.
Don’t just reform government, he insisted; erase it. He wanted to
start by abolishi ng the departments of Education, Energy, Com-
merce, and the IRS. He wanted to do these things, he said, for the
poor. He topped the National Review’s list of rising stars. Less than
two years later, he was a senator. He grabbed his seat out from under
Bob Dole’s anointed successor.
He calls himself a “faith-journey man.” He considers human
rights his forte. He has been to Darfur and Iraq. He welcomes “pro-
American” refugees. (Those who don’t speak English, he has said,
“would not work well i n Kansas.”) He worries a great deal about
sexual slavery. He’d li ke to censor violent videos, but he’s steadfast
against making gay bashing a hate crime. “Religious freedom” is a top
priority, and it may require force. He has suggested Iran, Syria, Saudi
Arabia, and Sudan as military targets, and proposed sending troops
to the Philippines, where rebels killed two American m issionaries.
“T here’s probably a higher level of Christians [being persecuted] dur-
ing the last ten, twenty years than . . . throughout human history,”
he told Chuck Colson’s radio program. He takes solace from scrip-
ture. “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,”
reads Matthew 5:10, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” He be-
lieves he can feel it when people are praying for him.
Brow nback’s staff often seem puzzled by the intensity of his
religion. They worry when the only thing he eats for lunch is a
wafer, the Body of Christ, at the noontime mass he tries to attend
daily since his conversion to Catholicism. On weekends he gets up
early so he could catch a mass before meeting his fam ily at Topeka
Bible, the city’s biggest evangelical church. He calls this routi ne a
“great mixture of the feeding.” One Sunday morning I joined hi m.
His preferred seat was in the back row of the balcony. A guest
262 | JEFF SHARLET
preacher from Promise Keepers, a revival of nineteenth-century
“musc ular Christianity,” had arranged for two men to perform a
melodrama about golf and fatherhood. The senator chuckled when he
was supposed to, sang every song, nodded seriously when the preacher
warned agai nst “Judaizers” who would “poison” the New Testament.
After the service, Brownback i ntroduced me to a white-haired
man with a yellow Viking mustache. “ This is the man who wrote
‘Dust in the Wind,’ ” the senator announced proudly. It was Kerry
Livgren, of the band Kansas, born again. Brownback likes to take
Livgren on fact- nding missions. He wants to take him to Israel,
because he t hi nks songwriters are very spi ritual, and he thin ks Jews
are also very spiritual. “Carry on, my wayward son . . . ,” the sena-
tor warbled, trying to remember the words to the other big hit by
Kansas.
When he ran for the House, Brownback was a Methodist, simple
and proper. When he ran for the Senate, he was an evangelical, lled
with Holy Ghost power. Now he’s a Catholic, baptized not in a
church but in the “Catholic Information Center,” a chapel tucked in
between lobbyists’ o ces on K Street i n Washington, run by Opus
Dei, a secretive lay order founded by a saint who saw in Generalis-
simo Franco, the late dictator of Spain, an ideal of worldly power.
Brownback prefers Mother Teresa. He studies Torah with an ortho-
dox rabbi. “Deep,” says the rabbi. His daughter once told him that
di erent churches have di erent aromas, and that there is a scent for
everyone. Brownback wants to hu them all. “ I am a seeker,” he told
me, an u nderstatement of grand proportion. Brownback’s faith is
complicated, like American fundamentalism in the twenty- rst cen-
tury. The movement’s two great strands—the populist, pulpit-
pounding tradition of its masses and the mannered evasions of its
elite—are coming together, intertwi ning to become the mutant
DNA of men such as Sam Brownback, the next generation of spiri-
tual warriors.
“Politics is a false god,” Brownback once wrote. What he meant,
he explained to me, is that God doesn’t require brilliant leaders, eru-
dite lawmakers. All he wants is those who submit. It’s as simple as
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 263
the love between father and child. Love, not the sharp-edged coexis-
tence made possible by tolerance, is the fundamentalist covenant
with America. Love, not the never-ending arguments of democracy.
Whe n Brow nback was growing up, he was more concerned with
the weight of his hogs than the wages of sin. His parents still live in
the dusty white one- story farmhouse in which he was raised, on a dirt
road outside of Parker. Brownback likes to say that he ghts for tradi-
tional family values, but his father, Bob, was more concerned with
the price of grain, and his mother, Nancy, had no qualms about hav-
ing a gay friend. Back then, moral values were simple. “Your word
was your word. Don’t cheat,” his mother told me. “I can’t think of
anything else.” Her son played football (“quarterback” she said, “never
very good ”) and was elected class president and “Mr. Spirit.” Li ke
most kids in Parker, he just wanted to be a farmer. But that life was
already gone by the time he graduated from high school. If he couldn’t
be a farmer, Brownback decided, he’d be a politician. In 1975, he
went o to Kansas State University. There he joined a chapter of the
Navigators, a fundamentalist m inistry for young men and women
fou nded by Doug Coe’s rst mentor, Dawson Trotman. The summer
before his se nior year, Brownback worked in Washington as an in-
tern for Bob Dole. “ The Prayer Breakfast folks had rented a sorority
house for the summer, for people who were working on the Hill. I
made contact.” That was Brownback’s rst introduction to the Fam-
ily, and to Coe. That fall, Brownback returned to K State with a new
sense of the potential synergy between politics and rel igion.
In 1983, Brownback was fresh out of law school and considering
a career in politics. He searched through Kansas history for a role
model and settled on the forgotten Republican senator Frank Carl-
son. “ He stood at the center of power when the U.S. had no peer,”
Brownback remembers thi nki ng. In 1968, the last year of Carlson’s
Senate career—long before the term culture war was invented—he
wrote an article for U.S. News calling for a “man to stand” agai nst
what Brownback now term s de cadence. Brownback wondered, Could
264 | JEFF SHARLET
I be the one? Carlson was still al ive, so Brownback drove out to Con-
cordia, Kansas, and as the light died one summer eve ning he sat on
Carlson’s porch, listening to stories. Tales from the Senate, legends
of spiritual war, Carlson’s now-ancient Worldwide Spiritual O en-
sive. Brownback thought he’d found a mentor. “He became a model
to me.”
In the years that followed, he stayed in touch with Carlson, and
the Family stayed in touch with him, but Coe didn’t invite Brown-
back to join a prayer cell until he went to Washington as a congress-
man in 1994. “I had been working with them for a number of years,
so when I went into Congress I knew I wanted to get back into that,”
he says. The group was all Republican and all male. Conversation
tended toward the personal. Or, according to the old fem inist
maxim, the personal as political. “Personal transformation will in-
evitably have cultural and ultimately, political implications,” Brown-
back has said. He still meets with the prayer cell every Tuesday
eve ning. The rules forbid Brownback to reveal the names of his fel-
low members, but those in the cell likely include some of the men
with whom he lived in the Family’s C Street House for congressmen:
Representative Zach Wamp of Tennessee, former representative
Steve Largent of Oklahoma, and Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma,
then a representative and a medical doctor who took the personal as
political to new depths when he shanghaied Hil l sta ers into a base-
ment o ce for a slide show of genitals mutilated by sexually trans-
mitted diseases, a warning agai nst sex outside of marriage that
Coburn underlined by advocating the death penalty for abortion pro-
viders.
Coe must have seemed like a voice of reason next to Brownback’s
new friends. He pointed out scripture verses to the congressman,
mailed him poems, gave him books to study. In a nation under Jesus
plus nothing, Coe explained, Brownback would ultimately have to
answer to only one authority. Everything—sex and taxes, war and
the price of oil—would be decided upon not according to democ-
racy or the church or even, strictly speaki ng, scripture. In a prayer
cell, Christ speaks directly to his anointed. “Typically,” Brownback
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 265
explained, “one person grows desirous of pursuing an action” —a
piece of legislation, a diplomatic strategy—“and the others pull in
behi nd.”
In 1999, Brownback teamed up with two other Family
associates —former senator Don Nickles and the late senator Strom
Thurmond—to demand a criminal investigation of Americans
United for Separation of Church and State. In 2005, Senator Coburn
joined Brownback in stumping for the Houses of Worship Act, to al-
low tax-exempt churches to endorse politicians. Brownback’s most
in uential e ort is as chair of the Senate Values Action Team, a cau-
cus that gathers on Tuesdays, before his Family cell meeting. Every-
thing that is said is strictly o the record, and even the groups
themselves are forbidden from discussing the proceedings. It’s a little
“cloak- and-dagger,” says Brownback’s press secretary. The VAT, as
it’s called, is a war council, and the enemy, says one participant, is
“secularism.”
The Senate VAT grew out of a House version chaired by Repre-
sentative Joe Pitts, a burly, white-haired conservative from Pennsyl-
vania Amish country who’s a regular at the Family’s Arlington
mansion. The VAT was then-Representative Tom DeLay’s creation, but
as far back as 1980, Pitts had been one of the regional activists who’d
helped push a relatively new concern for evangelicals—abortion—to
its place at the center of American politics. In 2002, Brownback,
whose concern with what he refers to as a “ holocaust” against a
womb- bound nation of fetal citizens, was the logical man for the job
of leading the VAT’s Senate version. The VAT demands a bridge
builder’s sensibility, the ability to convince fundamentalism’s popu-
lar front, which demanded its creation, that it’s taken seriously by
more elite conservatives.
The VAT uni es their message and arms congressional sta ers
with the data and language they need to pass legislation. Working
almost entirely in secret, the group has directed the ghts against
gay marriage and for school vouchers, against hate-crime legislation
and for “abstinence only” sex education, against diplomac y with
North Korea, and for war with Iran. The VAT is li ke a closed circuit
266 | JEFF SHARLET
between elite and popular fundamentalism, with Brownback at the
switch.
Every Wednesday at noon, he trots upstairs from his o ce to a
radio studio maintained by the Republican leadership to rally support
from Christian America for the VAT’s agenda. One participant in the
broadcast, Salem Radio Network News, reaches more than 1,500
Christian stations nationwide, and Dobson’s Focus on the Fam ily of-
fers access to an audience of 1.5 m illion. During the broadcast I sat in
on, Brownback explained that with the help of the VAT he hoped to
defeat a measure that would sti en penalties for violent attacks on gays
and lesbians. Members of the VAT mobilized their ocks: An e-mail
sent out by the Family Research Council warned that the hate-crime
bill would lead, inexorably, to the criminalization of Christ. When it
comes to “impacting policy,” Tony Perkins, president of the Family
Research Council, told me, “day to day, the VAT is instrumental.”
The VAT’s e orts often go beyond strictly spiritual matters, rally-
ing fundamentalism’s popular front around laissez-faire pol icies—tax
cuts, deregulation—in line with elite fundamentalism’s long- standing
dream of not just a nation but an economy under God. At its best, that
makes for a paternalistic capital ism where bosses placed in authority
by God, according to Romans 13, treat their employees with respect
and compassion, to which the employees respond with devotion, lead-
ing to big pro ts, high wages, and smiles in every cubicle. More
often—well, the world we live in is the “more often,” an economy in
which employers treat their employees as com modities and employees
respond with fear and boredom. Only the big pro ts are the same.
In 1999, Brownback worked with Pitts to pass the Silk Road
Strategy Act, designed, Brownback told me, to block the growth of
Islam in Central Asian nations, essentially buying their oil and natu-
ral gas resources for American corporations through lucrative trade
deals, granted with little concern for the abysmal human rights rec-
ords of the region’s dictatorships. Brownback also sits on the board
of trustees of the U.S. Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce, an organi-
zation created by the Azeri government with funds from eight oil
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 267
companies, including Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron. Current and for-
mer members include Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Iraq War ar-
chitect Richard Perle—a neoconservative trinity too cynical for
prayer cells—and two of Brownback’s Fam ily brothers: Pitts and
former attorney general Ed Meese. One of the Silk Road Act’s provi-
sions, which Brownback fought for, li fted U.S. sanctions on Azerbai-
jan, imposed in response to the Azeri blockade against neighboring
Armenia. Azerbaijan is 94 percent Muslim; Armenia is predomi-
nantly Christian. Brownback apparently issues indulgences where oil
is concerned.
Brownback’s biggest nancial backer is Koch Industries—the
largest privately held company in the United States, with extensive
oil and gas interests around the world. “The Koch folks,” as they’re
known around the senator’s o ce, are headquartered in Wichita, but
the company is one of the worst polluters across the country. In
2000, the company was slapped with the largest environmental civil
penalty in U.S. history for i llegally discharging 3 million gallons of
crude oil in six states. That same year, Koch was indicted for lying
about its emissions of benzene, a chemical linked to leukemia, and
dodged criminal charges in return for a $20 million settlement with
the federal government, an inexpl icably cheap price to pay. Brown-
back has received nearly $121,000 from Koch and its employees.
During his neck- and-neck race in 1996, a shell company called Triad
Management provided $410,00 0 for last-minute advertising on
Brownback’s behalf. A Senate investigative committee later deter-
mined that the money came from the two brothers who run Koch
Industries.
With Brownback, it’s nearly impossible to draw the line be-
tween the interests of his corporate backers and his own moral pas-
sions. Everyone applauds his ght to keep the murder of hu ndreds
of thousands of Sudanese refugees prioritized in U.S. foreign pol-
icy. And by standing up to the regime in Sudan, he’s also send ing a
warning to China, which has been willing to overlook the Sudanese
government’s murderous campaign in exchange for access to the
268 | JEFF SHARLET
country’s oil. Of cou rse, Koch Industries might be i nterested in
that, too.
Is that all there is to Brownback? Cash in an envelope? No—there
is not even that. A Kansas businessman who calls Brownback his
friend and has known him for years told me that the de facto price of
doing business with the senator—the cost of admission for a single
meeting—was, last he checked, $2,00 0. In that, Brownback is unex-
ceptional. Many congressmen expect just as much from those who
want face ti me. It’s not illegal, just slimy. The di erence with Brown-
back, said the businessman, is that he never touches the money. The
businessman is used to putting a check directly i nto the hands of the
politician whose help he needs. But whenever he visited Brownback’s
o ces, a sta er always quietly intervened, relievi ng the businessman
of the check beyond the senator’s sight lines. “Sam,” the businessman
told me, “doesn’t talk money.”
One afternoon, I met Brownback in his corner o ce to talk Bi-
ble. On his desk, there was a New Testament open to the Gospel of
John. I sat on a sofa beneath a portrait of Mother Teresa. There was
also a painting of a little blond girl in a eld of sun owers. “What can
I help you with? ” Brownback asked, sm iling. Two scripture passages,
I said. Leviticus 20:13, and Romans 1, the proof texts on which most
Christian conservatives base their opposition to homosexuality. Brown-
back frowned. He wasn’t aware of the passages. His hatred of homo-
sexual ity derived not from an engagement with scripture—which
academic Bible scholars say is not actually clear on the matter—but
on what he considered direct revelation. “It’s pretty clear,” he said,
his ngers folded into a temple beneath his chin, “what we know in
our hearts.” Brownback calls this knowledge “natural law.” To legis-
late against it or any other practice his heart tells him is sin is not
theocratic, it’s “natural.”
“There’s a sacredness to it,” he said. He meant heterosexuality.
“You look at the social impact the countries that have engaged in ho-
mosexual marriage.” He shook his head in sorrow, thi nki ng of Swe-
den. “You’ll know ’em by their fruits.” He paused, and an awkward
silence lled the room. We both knew he was citing scripture—
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 269
Matthew 7:16—but he’d just declared gay Swedes “ fruits.” He re-
gretted that. Hate the sinner, love the si n, Brownback believes. In
the Family, he’d learned to love everybody.
Although Brow nback’s 20 02 Catholic conversion was through
Opus Dei, an ultra-orthodox order that, like the Family, specializes
in cultivating the rich and powerful, the source of much of his reli-
gious and political thinking is Chuck Colson. “When I came to the
Senate,” Brownback remembers, “I sought him out. I had been listen-
ing to his thoughts for years, and wanted to get to know him some.”
The admiration was mutual. Colson spotted Brownback’s potential
not long after Brownback joined a Family prayer cell. At the time,
Colson was holding classes on “ biblical worldview” for leaders on
Capitol Hill. Colson taught that abortion is a “threshold” issue, a
wedge with which to i ntroduce fundamental ism into every question.
Brownback, who’d been quietly pro- choice before he went to Wash-
ington, recognized the political utility of the anti- abortion ght and
developed what is now a genuine hatred for the very idea that a wom-
an’s body is her own. It is not, he learned from Colson; it belongs to
God, just like that of a man, a line of reasoning by which Colson
claims that his fundamentalist faith is more egalitarian than femi-
nism, an analysis he extends beyond the womb into an implicit cri-
tique of democracy itself. The two men began coordinati ng their
e orts: Colson provided the philosophy, and Brownback translated it
into legislative action.
For all his talk of moral values, much of Brownback’s real work
as a senator revolves around the same kind of “quiet diplomacy” prac-
ticed by his forebears in the Fam ily, the art of backroom dealing
perfected by Senator Frank Carlson. Liberals dismiss him as a prud-
ish hayseed from Kansas, but to do so is to underestimate both the
man and the place. Brownback, like Carlson before him, is yet an-
other wheeler- dealer from the plains, possessed of a savvy in interna-
tional a airs that is faith-based and rooted in the corn elds of
Kansas.
270 | JEFF SHARLET
In 2002, Brownback followed his pastor onto the stage of Topeka
Bible—the minister had just told a joke about Muslim terrorists and
vi rgins—to talk about a recent trip to Israel and Jordan. Jordan,
Brownback explai ned, matters not just spiritually but strategically.
The “person of Jesus” is a key diplomatic tool in winning its coopera-
tion with the United States. Brownback said he’d met with King
Abdullah about starting a fellowship group, a fellowship group around
the person of Jesus. It wasn’t a casual suggestion. Brownback gave
Abdullah the name and number of a Christian brother with whom he
wanted the king to meet. Before Brownback left Jordan, Abdullah let
him know that he’d made contact with the senator’s man and agreed
to “ fellowship” with him on a regular basis. “His father, King Hus-
sein,” mused Brownback, “was really quite interested in Jesus, and
attended the National Prayer Breakfast several times.” Since then, so
has Abdullah. In 2005, he came to the prayer breakfast to conduct
diplomacy, so he said, with American evangelicals.
Brownback doesn’t demand that everyone bel ieve in his God—only
that they bow down before Him. The senator is part holy warrior,
party holy fool. The faith he wields in the public square is blunt and
heavy, brass knuckles of the spirit. But his intentions are only to set
people free. He is utterly sincere in his belief that his particular idea of
God is as universal as his faith in the free market. The religion of his
heart is that of the woman whose story led him deep into his unearthly
devotion, Mother Teresa; it is a kiss for the dying. He sees no tension
between his intolerance and tenderness. Indeed, their successful recon-
ciliation in his political self is the miracle, the cold fusion, at the heart
of the new fundamental ism, of Hallmark and hell re. “I have seen him
weep,” says Colson, his own voice thick with admiration. There can be
no higher praise for a man of power who proclaims his own humility.
The rst day I met Brownback, I was to bear witness to him among
his interns at a luncheon in the Senate dining room. But when his
press secretary and I arrived, there were no interns. Brownback saw
me, though, and led me i nto the Senate dining room, where the
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 271
maître d’ seated the three of us at a table set for eight. Brownback began
speaki ng about his faith. Only, he called it his cancer. This wasn’t a
metaphor; it was a melanoma on his side he discovered in 1995.
Brownback’s green- black eyes opened wide. He took his jacket o .
His shoulders slumped. He began to talk about “solitude,” about
“meditation,” about the dark night of the soul.
Once, he said, he was a bad man, just any other politician, in it for
himself. And then came cancer, li ke a message from heaven. Only at
rst it brought not certainty but doubt. Brownback found himself
wonderi ng, What does anything mean?
For a short spell i n his youth, Brownback was a radio broadcaster.
It’s easy to imagine his voice on the radio dial, deep in the darkness
on a Kansas highway, not preaching so much as whispering to itself
across the airwaves, creating a cocoon around the listener. The Sen-
ate di ning room faded into silence. I saw Hillary Clinton, but I
couldn’t hear her. I saw John McCain slapping backs, but he seemed
very far away. The powerful and the ugly swam past us like sh in the
ocean, and Brownback kept talking, completely lost in the strangely
serene recollection of his former fear. The doctors scooped out a
piece of his esh, a m inor procedure, but in his mi nd, he had lost
hold of everything. He asked himself, “What have I done with my
life? ” The answer seemed to be nothi ng.
“I went in search of things,” he said. “I went in search of things
that are eternal,” he murmured.
One night, he got up while his family was sleeping. “I remember
going over my résumé.” Sitting in his silent house, in the middle of
the night, a scar beneath his ribs where death had, for the time bei ng,
been carved out of his body, he looked down at that piece of paper
and thought, “This must be who I am.” And then he thought, “What
is this paper?” And then, “ It’s not going to last.”
Brownback turned, held my gaze. “ So,” he said, “I burned it.”
He paused. He was waiting to see if I understood. He had cleansed
himself with re. He had made himself pure.
“I’m a child of the living God,” he said.
I nodded.
272 | JEFF SHARLET
“You are, too,” he said.
He pursed his lips as he searched the other tables. “Look.” He
pointed to a man across the room, a Democratic senator from Minne-
sota. “He’s a liberal.” But you know what else he is? “A beautiful child of
the living God.” He continued. Ted Kennedy? “A beautiful child of the
living God.” Hillary? Yes. Even Hillary. Especially Hillary.
Once, Brownback said, he hated Hillary Clinton. Hated her so
much it hurt him. But he reached in and scooped that hate out like a
cancer. Now, he loved her. S he, too, is a beautiful child of the living God.
Hillary
Hillary may well be God’s beautiful chi ld, but she’s not a member of
Coe’s Fam ily. Rather, I’d been told at Ivanwald, she’s a “friend,” less
elect then a member, but more chosen than the rest of us. A fellow
traveler but not a sister. Her goals are not their goals; but when on
occasion they coincide, Hillary and the Family can work together.
Such collaborations, as much as the endeavors of true believers such
as Brownback, are a measure of the mainstreaming of American fu n-
damentalism. The theology of Jesus plus nothing is totalitarian in
scope, but diplomatic in practice. It doesn’t conquer; it “infects,” as
Abram used to preach. Within the body politic, it doesn’t confront
ideas, it coexists with them, its cells multiplying by absorbi ng ene-
mies rather than destroying them. It’s not cancerous, it’s loving. In
place of con ict, love. In place of debate, love. In place of tolerance,
love. In place of democracy, loudmouthed, sim mering mad and crazy
hopeful democracy—love, all- encompassing.
In her memoir Living History, Hillary describes her rst encounter
with the Family. It was at a lunch organized on her behalf in February
1993 at the Cedars, “an estate on the Potomac that serves as the
headquarters for the National Prayer Breakfast and the prayer groups
it has spawned around the world. Doug Coe, the longtime National
Prayer Breakfast organiz er, is a unique presence in Washington: a
genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 273
party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with
God.”2 Or with the kind of politically useful friends one might not
make otherwise. For the eight years she lived in the White House,
Clinton met regularly with a gathering of political ladies who lunch:
wives of powerful men from both parties, women who put aside po-
litical di erences to seek—for themselves, for thei r husbands’
careers —an even greater power. Among Clinton’s prayer partners
were Susan Baker, the wife of Bush consigliere James and a board
member of James Dobson’s Focus on the Fam ily; Joanne Kemp, the
wife of conservative icon Jack, responsible for introducing the pol iti-
cal theology of fundamentalist guru Francis Schae er to Washing-
ton; Eileen Bakke, an activist for charter schools based on “character”
and the wife of Dennis Bakke, then the CEO of AES, one of the
world’s largest power companies; and Grace Nelson, the wife of
Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat. The women
sent her daily scripture verses to study, and Baker, the wife of one of
the Republican Party’s most cutthroat strategists, provided Hillary
with spiritual counsel during “political storms.”
Hillary’s Godtalk is more sincere than it sounds, grou nded in the
in uence of a Methodist minister named Don Jones whom she met
when he was a twenty-eight-year-old youth pastor in Park Ridge, Il-
linois. Jones continues to counsel Hillary to this day. He calls the
theological worldview behind her pol itics a third way, a reaction
against both old-fashioned separatist fundamentalism and the New
Deal’s labor-based liberalism. He describes the theology he taught as
in the tradition of “Burkean conservatism,” after the eighteenth-
century reactionary philos opher’s belief that change should be slow
and come without the sort of “social leveling” that o ends class hier-
archy. Elites rule because they rule; tradition is its own justi cation,
a tautology of power neither left nor right but circular.
Under Jones’s mentorship, Clinton learned about theologians
such as Reinhold Niebu hr and Paul Tillich. Liberals may consider
Niebuhr their own, but the Niebu hr whom Hillary Rodham studied
with Jones and later at Wellesley College was a Cold Warrior, dis-
missive of the progressive politics of his earlier writing. “ He’d thought
274 | JEFF SHARLET
that once we were unionized, the kingdom of God would be ushered
in,” Jones says, explaining Niebuhr as he and Hillary came to see
him. “But the e ect of those two world wars and the violence that
they produced shook [his] faith in liberal theology.” The late Niebuhr
replaced his devotion to messianic unionism with a darker view of
humanity and replaced his emphasis on domestic social justice with a
global realpolitik, easily hijacked by liberal hawks in rhetorical need
of a justi cation for aggressive American power.
Tillich also enjoys a following among conservative Christian in-
tellectuals for arguments on behalf of revising the once-radical Social
Gospel to favor individual redemption, the heart of conservative
evangelicalism. Hillary once said she regretted that her denomina-
tion, the Methodists, had focused too much on Social Gospel
concerns —that is, the rights of the poor—“to the exclusion of per-
sonal faith and growth.” Abram, once a Methodist himself, had made
the very same observation a half century before. The spirit, conser-
vative Christians believe, matters more than the esh, and the salva-
tion of the former should be a higher priority than that of the latter.
In worldly terms, religious freedom trumps political freedom, moral
values matter more than food on the table, and if might doesn’t make
right, it sure makes right, or wrong, easier. Taken together, Niebuhr
and Tillich as Hillary encountered them represent the most reaction-
ary elements of her “worldview”: a militantly aggressive approach to
foreign a airs and a domestic policy of narrow horizons. Under the
spiritual tutelage of the Family, Hillary moved further rightward,
drifting from traditional liberalism toward the kind of privatized so-
cial welfare the Family has favored ever since Abram reacted in hor-
ror to the New Deal.
The Reverend Rob Schenck’s favorite example? Clinton’s collab-
oration with Brownback on anti–sex tra cking legislation con-
demned by the very activists it should have helped. Brownback and
Chuck Colson, one of the leading thinkers behind the law, were
more interested in extracti ng pledges of purity than in helpi ng the
already fallen. That resulted in the de-funding of longtime federal
partners that, for instance, provide health care for prostitutes, and
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 275
increased funding for faith- based groups that simply preach Christ
and abstinence to foreign sex slaves. And it’s not just those who are
trapped in involuntary sex work who are ill served by the switch;
epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, notoriously resistant to
sermonizing, ripple out into the general population. It’s bad law for
everyone. But Clinton was willi ng to lend her name, and her funda-
mentalist friends noticed. “I welcome that,” says Colson.
Hillary ghts side- by- side with Brownback and others for legisla-
tion dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state
than to tunneling beneath it. Practically speaking, such work ap-
peased evangelical elites without drawing the notice of liberals who
thought Hillary stood for separation, but such tunnels genuinely un-
dermi ne the foundations.
For instance, a law she backed to ensure “religious freedom” in
the workplace that so distorts the meaning of the words that it makes
even Republicans such as Senator Arlen Specter uneasy about its en-
croachments on First Amendment freedoms. It’s a sort of Bartleby
option for those “who prefer not to”: pharmacists who refuse to ll
birth-control prescriptions, nurses who refuse to treat gay or lesbian
patients, police o cers who refuse to guard abortion cli nics. And
then there was the passage, during Bill’s presidency, of the Interna-
tional Religious Freedom Act, a move supported by Hillary. Like the
workplace bill, it seemed sensible. Who’s opposed to religious free-
dom? But in reality it shifted the monitoring of religion in other
countries from the State Department to an independent, evangelical-
dominated agency that drew much of its leadership from the Chris-
tian Legal Society, creating a platform for U.S. evangelicals to use
religious freedom ratings as leverage for a sort of shadow foreign
policy. Hillary’s stance toward Iran, more hawkish than that of many
Republicans, is just one example of a position long held by elite fun-
damentalists mainstreamed through the work of an ostensibly liberal
ally.
Liberals, says Clinton’s prayer partner Grace Nelson, are wel-
come in the Family as long as they submit to “the person of Jesus.”
Jesus, not ideology, “is what gives us power.” But the Jesus preached
276 | JEFF SHARLET
by the Fam ily is ideology personi ed. For all of the Family’s talk of
Jesus as a person, he remains oddly abstract in the teachings they
derive from him, a mix of “ free market” economics, aggressive
American internationalism, and “leadership” as a fetishized term for
power, a good in itself regardless of its ends. By eschewing the poli-
tics of the moment—party loyalties and culture wars—Family cells
cultivate an ethos of elite unity that allows long-term political trans-
formation, whereby political rivals aren’t ipped but won over grad-
ually through fellowship with former enemies, as in the case of
former Representative Tony Hall.
Hall, one of the few Democrats appointed by Bush in his rst
term (he was made ambassador to the UN for hunger issues, a posi-
tion he used to push the Monsanto corporation’s genetically modi ed
crops onto African nations) was brought into the Family i n the 1980s
by Jerry Regier, an ultra-right Reagan administration o cial in the
Department of Health and Human Services who went on to work
with James Dobson. Upon his conversion, Hall abandoned his liberal
social views and became a vocal opponent of abortion and, eventu-
ally, same- sex marriage. He also championed a bill establishi ng a
National Day of Prayer with an event at the White House organized
by Dobson’s wife, Shirley. But he didn’t switch parties, and the Fam-
ily would never ask him to. Hall isn’t a Republican; he’s a Democrat
who called on his fellow party members to follow President Bush’s
example by injecting more religion into their rhetoric. Hillary did
just that in 20 07, boasting of the “prayer warriors” who carried her
through Bill’s in delities, a bit of spiritual warfare jargon instantly
recognizable to evangelicals who worried about her femi nism.3
The Family wants to “transcend” left and right with a faith that
consumes politics, replacing fundamental di erences with the unity
to be found in submission to religious authority. Conservatives sit
pretty in prayer and wait for liberals looking for “common ground”
to come to them in search of compromise. Hillary, Rob Schenck
noted, became a regular visitor to the Fam ily’s C Street House in
2005. “She needs that nucleus of energy that the Coe camp produces.”
That summer, she appeared as part of a threesome that shocked old
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 277
school fundamentalists: Bill, Hil lary, and Billy, live in New York for
Graham’s last crusade. Before tens of thousands, the patriarch of
Christian conservatism said Bill “ought to let his wife run the coun-
try.” Bonhomie and cheap blessing, maybe, but it was the kind of en-
dorsement that Bill never won, despite Graham’s custom of speaki ng
sweet nothings to power.
A Thing and Its Shadow
How much power can a movement have i f it’s su ciently vague in its
principles to encompass both Sam Brownback and Hillary Clinton? If
measured only according to the advocates of domestic “moral values”
who choose ghts in part for the clarity of their “sides”—abortion,
yes or no? homosexuality, yes or no?—it would seem like the Family
doesn’t have much in uence at all. Neither abortion nor sex will be
legislated away soon. But the fact that fundamentalism, a faith that by
de nition aims to address the totality of human experience, is mea-
sured according to a handful of issues decided by a yea or a nay is,
itself, evidence of the broad success of Abram’s Idea.
Following the Scopes trial of 1925, American fundamentalism
split in two. One branch busied itself with the creation of new insti-
tutions, Bible colleges, and “parachurch” ministries, the foundation
for a populist faith that could stand on its own in the face of secular
ridicule—often enough, a real problem—and ght for control of
the public sphere. The second, elite branch concerned itself with
what believers saw as threats to the nation itself. That was a move
that con ated the nation with the faith. This new civil religion was
what enabled Cold Warriors, liberal as well as conservative, to pro-
ject the shadow of American freedom around the globe.
But a thing and its shadow are not the same. Even as American
power fueled nightmares in Vietnam, in Indonesia, i n Haiti, in dozens
of other nations whose histories disappeared into the blob of the Cold
War, real freedom has endured and even prospered within the borders
of the United States. It’s the relatively bright prospects of domestic
278 | JEFF SHARLET
democracy —even at its most endangered moments—that have
bli nded us to the shadow it casts. “Freedom,” more than one general
has declared from the pulpit of the National Prayer Breakfast, comes
at a cost. Liberals sco at such an apparent oxymoron, but the lesson
of elite fundamentalism is that it’s true; for that matter, the last sev-
enty years of history prove even the Christian doctrine of blood atone-
ment. Only, the blood is not Christ’s, and despite the very notable
exception of tens of thousands of American soldiers kil led overseas,
it’s not ours, either. It’s the rest of the world that pays for American
fundamentalism’s sins, and for the failure of American liberalism to
even recognize the fundamental ist faith with which it has all too
often—in Vietnam, in Indonesia, in Haiti—made common cause.
We m ight quibble that point. We might ask, Which came rst,
American fundamentalism or the Cold War? Is American fundamen-
talism the essence of the econom ic policies by which we unraveled
the New Deal, or is it simply a coincidental phenomenon of the Rea-
gan Revolution and then “global ization”? Don’t the good intentions
with which America gives bill ions in foreign aid for food for the
starving and medicine for the sick and, yes, weapons for govern-
ments that actually use them in defense m itigate—outweigh, even—
the trillions spent on weapons for governments that put them to
other ends, and the uncountable sums reaped by corporations depen-
dent on the American global order? Then again, how di erent are
such questions from that of Greg Unumb, the Family oilman who
thought Doug Coe’s culpabil ity in the crimes of the killers for whom
he served as a matchmaker depended entirely on whether they killed
before or during their fellowship with Coe? Such a strange concern. As
if one might be excused for giving a gun to a mass murderer be-
cause his rst victims were already buried; as if Christ’s injunction to
forgive demanded also that we forget. That is, in fact, exactly what
the Family believes, the complexities of “reconciliation” reduced to a
gross equivalence of sins. The center slouches rightward, and the
faithful forget that anyone ever dreamed otherwise.
Dick Halverson preached as much once during his tenure as Sen-
ate chaplain. He framed it as a story relayed to him by Coe and Senator
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 279
Harold Hughes after a visit to the Philippines, during which he,
in turn, heard the story from the Phil ippines’ Archbishop Jaime Car-
dinal Sin.4 Archbishop Sin was a moderate with a mixed record in
relation to the Marcos regime; at its end, he helped lead the “People
Power” revolution, but for years before that he preached obedience
to dictatorship. “He told Harold and Doug this true story,” Halver-
son sermonized. One of Sin’s nuns said to him that Jesus was coming
to her bed at night. Sin decided to test the apparition. “Ask Him”—
Halverson, the old actor, pretended to be the Filipino clergyman—
“What sins did the archbishop commit before he became an
archbishop? ” The nun did so and reported back to Sin. Christ’s an-
swer? “I can’t remember.”
Did this suggest to Sin or Halverson that the nun had simply been
dreaming? Just the opposite. Their Christ did not just forgive the sins
of Archbishop Sin; he couldn’t remember them. That, Halverson
thought, was as it should be, Christ’s mercy not a balance to justice
but a gift for the powerful. The church loves the down and out, but
who loves the up and out? Jesus of the Family, the Christ of Coe’s
“social order.”
“Love,” preached Halverson, “forgets. T hat’s what God does with
your sin and mine when it’s under the Blood. He forgets all about it.”
Here’s one last Family story love forgot, from a country so
blighted by misfortune and misrule that it’s not really a country any-
more. Somalia, lost in the shadow of American fundamentalism’s
freedom. Somalia—one of the last cases I found in the Family’s ar-
chives before they began closing them—is, i n the correspondence I
retrieved, nothi ng more than a web of “facts” that I’m hard-pressed
to make sense of. What they add up to is too bleak, too broken. The
dead who haunt the name of Siad Barre, the dictator Coe called
“ brother,” seem uncountable. All I can be sure about is the answer to
the question Greg Unumb asked me when I told him about Coe’s
support for another dictator gui lty of murder: before or during? Be-
fore, during, after. I will relate t he facts as brie y as I can.5
280 | JEFF SHARLET
Somalia, shaped like an upside- down musical note, wraps around
the Horn of Africa, across from the Arabian Peninsula. Granted inde-
pendence in 1960, it should have been a success story; its people
were linguistically uni ed and, while poor, were heirs to a tradition
of pastoral democracy that had survived colonialism roughly intact.
Then General Siad Barre seized power in 1969, and the Soviet Union
poured money into Siad’s regime to make it a counterweight to Ethio-
pia, which under Emperor Selassie was the major bene ciary of Amer-
ican military aid in Africa. When a Marxist coup overthrew the
Ethiopian emperor, Siad saw a chance to distract his own discon-
tented people by seizing part of Ethiopia in its moment of weakness,
using his Soviet- armed military. But the Soviets backed now-
com munist Ethiopia, deemi ng its new regime more useful than du-
plicitous Siad, who announced that he was in the market for a new
patron. After the Iranian Revolution overthrew the Shah, the U.S.
puppet just across the water from Somalia, the United States put its
money on Siad and his ports, which would become essential if Aya-
tollah Khomeini cut o the oil supply. By late 1980, the United
States and the USSR had switched proxies: once-red Somalia had
become an American outpost, while Ethiopia had turned i nto a So-
viet satellite.
It would have been absurd if it hadn’t been so bloody. Siad, freed
from even his veneer of socialism, devolved from an autocrat into the
worst thing that had ever happened to Somalia. His heroes, he de-
clared, were Kim Jong Il and the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceau-
s ¸escu. He decided to allow American- style democracy, then killed his
opposition as well as those he suspected of opposing him, and those
who might grow up to be opponents. His secret police developed
techniques to spy even on nomads. He sent his troops to machi ne-
gu n their herds. He poisoned their well s. For his urban enemies, he
developed torture chambers he considered world-class, and his men
concluded that rape proved especially productive of useful informa-
tion.
To his neighbors, he preached the virtues of the United States,
but his creed was “Koranic Marxism,” illustrated by a triptych of
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 281
portraits hung throughout the nation depicting Marx, Lenin, and
Siad as the new Muhammad. His o cial portrait shows him as a
you ng general i n a khaki uniform and a mustache he seems to have
copied from Hitler. He bombed more civilians than rebels, reduced
an entire city to rubble, and directed his air force to strafe refugees.
He turned his country into a garden of land m ines that continue to
blossom to this day.
Before Coe found Siad through a West German Bundestag mem-
ber, Siad waged war on Ethiopia. After they met, he waged war on his
own nation. For the past seventeen years, there has been no nation,
only war. If Coe ever said a word about the kill ings, it was not re-
corded in the documents I found. “ I don’t wish to embarrass people,”
Coe said of his relationships with dictators in 2007. “I don’t take po-
sitions. The only thing I do is bring people together.”
In 1981, Family members made contact with Siad on behalf of
his then-enemy, Kenyan dictator Daniel arap Moi—a brutal Ameri-
can ally—whom Siad agreed to meet. The Family took this news to
General David Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Sta (and a
Family member), who in thanks invited Siad to the Pentagon, a visit
that resulted in a special breakfast in America for the dictator, with
General Jones, members of congress, and Department of Defense
o cials. In 1983, Coe arranged for the dictator his own interna-
tional prayer cell, which included the Bu ndestag member, Rudolf
Decker; a defense contractor, William K. Brehm; and the outgoing
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Sta . A year later Coe strengthened
Siad’s hand by proposing Mogadishu as the site for a “fellowship
meeting” with two other anti-Soviet dictators, arap Moi and Gaafar
Nimeiry of Sudan.
From America, Coe sent Siad Senator Chuck Grassley, ultraright
Iowa Republican (still serving as of 2008). But Coe was distracted;
his twenty- seven-year-old son, Jonathan, was ghting lymphoma. He
rallied, though—Doug, that is—when he put Christ’s social order
before his father, his mother, his brother, his sister, and even his own
grief to use what must have been one of the saddest days of his life to
reach out to the general: “You are much in my thoughts today,” wrote
282 | JEFF SHARLET
Coe. “Jonathan my son to whom you were so kind died this morning.
You in uenced his life for God and he never forgot you.”
“I did not have the occasion to meet him,” Siad wrote by way of
condolences.
A document titled “ Siad Barre’s Somalia and the USA,” prepared
for the Fam ily and marked “Very Con dential,” is one of the rare
Family documents to move beyond what Elgin Groseclose called “the
facade of brotherhood.” It is undated but appears to have been writ-
ten near the beginni ng of the relationship. Siad, it begins, is the only
head of state to have expelled the Soviets, and the only regional
leader to o er “ full military, air, and naval bases.” He pledges, too,
to provide for a pro-American successor, and to purge his govern-
ment of al l o cials linked to Somalia’s former patron, excepting
himself, presumably. Then he notes that he has already supplied the
Pentagon with a list of armaments he needed to ght the Cubans.
Received.
In 1983, Somalia’s minister of defense went to Washington at
Coe’s invitation to meet with the new chairman of the joint chiefs,
General John J. Vessey. The United States nearly doubled m ilitary
aid to the regime, pouring guns i nto a country that before the decade
was out would achieve a moment of unity it has not seen si nce, when
nearly everyone—pol iticians, warlords, children—united in opposi-
tion to Siad. He ed in 1991, taking refuge in Kenya with arap Moi.
One of his last acts as Somalia’s key man was to scorch as much of his
enemy’s land as he could, a biblical punishment for a nation that had
resisted God’s appointed authority. Three hundred thousand died in
the famine that followed. It’s considered Siad’s legacy. It was also the
Fam ily’s gift to Somalia.
On one of my last days at Ivanwald, a group of brothers returned
from a trip to the movies. They’d gone to see Black Hawk Down, the
story of nineteen American soldiers killed in 1993 in a battle with
one of the Somali militias that have terrorized the country for most
of the seventeen years si nce Siad’s downfall. The movie had made such
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 283
an impression on the brothers that Je C., one of the house leaders,
decided to convene the boys to talk about the responsibilities of fol-
lowers of Christ. Some of the men took a hard lesson from the lm:
you can’t help savages. But Je C. corrected them. There was an in-
ternational crew there at the ti me—men from Ecua dor, Paraguay,
the Czech Republic, Benin—but this, Je C. knew, was an Ameri-
can a air. “We help people,” he said. “That’s what we do. Even if
they’re, I don’t know, ‘savages.’ We’ll just keep loving on ’em.”
Doug Coe did not pull any triggers in Somalia, did not poison any
wells, and the Family was not one of the warring clans that obl iter-
ated what was left of the nation’s infrastructure. For all the Fam ily’s
talk of the “man-method,” of “relationships,” its members did not
know Somalia very well. They treated it as a piece on a playing board.
This Somalia wanted friends in Washington, so the Family became
Somalia’s friend. This Somalia wanted guns, so the Family helped it
get guns. This Somalia wanted to be called “brother,” so the Family
called Siad Barre “brother.” Families, as Coe would be the rst to
point out, are about love. Not accountability, ultimately, and there
does not seem to have been any for Brother Siad.
Jesus plus nothing, remember, does not depend on scripture, its
nuances, its hard lessons. Jesus plus nothing does not include, for
instance, the ninth verse of the fourth chapter of the Book of Gene-
sis. God asks Cain, who has just murdered Abel, where his brother
is. “I do not know,” replies Cain. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” It’s a
genuinely di cult question. God never answers it directly, instead
responding with what sounds like divine distress: “What have you
done?” To Cain’s existentialism, God answers with a demand for his-
tory. That’s a more straightforward query, one I’ve attempted to an-
swer with regard to the Family. But Cain’s question, that one’s too
hard for me. To one who proclaims fellowship, as do the members of
the Family, the answer is simple: “Yes, I am my brother’s keeper.”
That was Je C.’s answer. But the Fam ily has more often served as an
accomplice, not a keeper. Where does that leave the rest of us? The
284 | JEFF SHARLET
Family works through the men and women we put in power. Sam
Brownback. Hillary Clinton. Pick your poison. In the calculus of party
politics, these two do occupy distant coordinates, but in the geom-
etry of power politics, the Family knows, they are on the same plane,
and the distance between them is shrin king. They mean well, both of
them, and I’m more partial to the views of one of them, but I can’t
help looki ng at that narrowing spectrum and thinking, This is an aw-
ful tight space into which to t a democracy.
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