Jesus + 0 = X
In 2003, I published a portion of the account of Ivanwald
with which I begin this book in Harper’s magazine. I might have left it at
that, were it not for a series of phone calls. In June of that year, I re-
ceived an e-mail from a man named Greg Unumb, who wrote that
he’d read my article and wanted to talk to me. “I grew up with the
Coe family, went to school with their sons (that is, from elementary
school to through college), and was a part of the original group at
Ivanwald; however, I had a fal ling-out with them a number of years
ago.” Greg thought I was correct i n “some of [my] conclusions, but
certainly not on al l of them.” He wanted to o er me “insight.”
Greg was nance manager for Pride Foramer’s operation in oil-rich
Angola. Pride Foramer is a division of Pride International, which
drills in or o the coasts of more than thirty nations. The Pride Fo-
ramer division took care of business in ve countries besides Angola:
Brazil, Indonesia, India, South Africa, and Ivory Coast. Al l six, as it
happens, have long been of special interest to the Family. But Greg
didn’t want to talk about any of that. It was hard to tel l what he did
want to talk about. When I reached him on the phone in Angola (ask
for “Mr. Greg,” he wrote, “not Mr. Unumb”), he did not seem to re-
call any “falling-out.” In fact, he was more interested in me. Such a
fascinating subject, he said—was I writing a book? Where did I live?
How much had I been paid for the article? How had I gotten in to Ivan-
wald? Who recommended me?
At the time, I lived on top of a hill in rural upstate New York. As
242 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
I talked to Greg, I sat in a lawn chair, looki ng out across miles of
farmland, shooing bees away from my ankles. Ivanwald, the Family,
its intrigues—beneath the bright summer sun, it all seemed hard to
take seriously.
Greg wasn’t the only one who got in touch. There was a corpo-
rate lawyer from Seattle, who claimed to have no connection to the
Family but asked the same questions Greg had; I discovered that he
had worked with several of the Family’s visible fronts. End of conver-
sation.
There were many devout Christians who contacted me. There
was a Presbyterian pastor named Ben Daniel, a former member of
the Fam ily who’d quit after his rst National Prayer Breakfast, where
he was horri ed to encounter the very same Central American death
squad politicos he’d been reading about in the papers. There was an
old, well-connected Republican lawyer named Clif Gosney, who on
his visits to New York has introduced me to some of the city’s most
beautiful churches. After years of high-level service to the Family as
a liaison to Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Zulu nation, he started
drifting out in the early 1990s. When he asked Coe why almost no
liberal Christian leaders were included in the National Prayer Break-
fast, Coe raged at him, a rare instance of the sphinx’s anger. Clif re-
members hanging up the phone and realizing he’d just been purged.
When I went to Germany to speak on a panel about fundamen-
talism at the University of Potsdam, my German host told me that
the U.S. embassy, a cosponsor of the lecture series, had refused to
cover my expenses. I was, in the alleged words of Ambassador Dan
Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana, “an enemy of Je-
sus.” If Coats really did say that, it didn’t faze the German Christians
with whom I shared a delicious meal that night.
And then there was Kate.* She wrote asking to have co ee with
me because she was a fan. When a gorgeous blonde walked into the
restaurant we’d agreed on and immediately said she loved my article,
* After she’d revealed her tr ue purp ose in contacti ng me, the woman I call “Kate” asked that I not
identify her.
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 243
I thought, journalism has its rewards. But an hour into our conversa-
tion, I started making connections. She’d been living in An napolis,
Maryland, where the Family has a group of homes much li ke the
compound in Arlington. She’d recently left a job at the National
Security Agency. She’d been raised fundamentalist, but she’d left it
behind; she wanted a relationship with Jesus untainted by tradi-
tion. So I asked her, “Do you know anyone i n the Fami ly? ” Silence. I
asked her again. For whatever reason— Christian conscience?—she
confessed that she did know someone in the Family, David Coe.
“He’s like a father to me.” In fact, she admitted, she’d been sent to
spy on me.
We ended up talki ng for three more hours and drinking a lot of
wine. I tried to persuade her that the Family was a secretive, undemo-
cratic organization that aided and abetted dictators. She agreed, only
she thought that was a good thing. She said the Fami ly still loved me.
I told her about some of the killers the Family had supported. She
rallied by pointing out that we’re all sinners, and thus shouldn’t judge
those whom God places in authority. “Je ,” she said, holding my
eyes, twisting her wine stem between her ngers, “ in your heart,
have you ever lusted for a woman? Isn’t that just as bad? ”
So by the time Greg Unumb called, I wasn’t too concerned about
Family surveillance, which seemed to lead to nothing but good meals
and bizarre come-ons. I answered Greg’s questions as if he was the
jittery one, the reporter looking over his shoulder. Relax, I wanted
to say. Eventually, he did. For a moment, our conversation stalled.
Then he said, “You know, I used to run Ivanwald.” And, he
added, other Family houses just like it. That was a long time ago,
before his oil career. He’s since married a Frenchwoman, and he va-
cations in Sicily, and he goes to Washington only on business, the
nature of which he said he’d rather not talk about. He remembered
Ivanwald fondly, but now—“Generally, I don’t see the Coes unless I
run into them.” He wouldn’t explain why he’d broken o from them
or why he conti nued to run into them.
But he still respects them. Their problem, he said, is one merely
of “screening.” They let “con artists” in. Scam mers. People who raise
244 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
money and disappear. People who “use an endorsement improperly.”
These are nothing but “relational problems.”
All that other stu , he said, just talk. Like the Hitler “stu .” “I
heard those same illustrations used twenty years ago.” The goal wasn’t
emulation but distillation. To look at “what they accomplished for
evil, and turn it to good.” I didn’t say anything. I’d learned not to ask
what a “good ” genocide looked like.
He adm itted that “sometimes, what they say is not what they do.”
And then there is the question of what they don’t say. “What’s secret
is the top guys working with the leadership. It’s not unlike a busi-
ness. Busi ness is a network. This is a Christian network, with a few
people running it.” Same deal as Pride International, he explained.
There are people responsible for cities, and above them people re-
sponsible for regions, and above them people responsible for coun-
tries. And above them, there is Doug Coe.
“He’s l ike [St.] Paul,” Greg explained. He wanted me to under-
stand Coe’s famous $500 bet: that if a man prayed for something for
forty days, he’d get it. Belief didn’t matter. Jesus doesn’t need your
belief; he demands only your prayers, by which Greg seemed to
mean obedience. Legend holds that Coe has never lost the bet. If you
wager with him, he prays for you, so you can’t lose. “He’s con dent
enough in his relationship with Christ that he can ask for things,” said
Greg. And he’ll get them. “Doug talks to Jesus man-to-man.”
“Je ,” Greg said, “I advise you to explore that pro cess. The pro-
cess of becoming intimate with God.” I was a smart guy. I could do it.
For a lot of men, that relationship with God, it was nothi ng but per-
sonal. For a few, though, it meant something greater. “There are two
types of people at Ivanwald. Sharp guys, with leadership potential,
and problem kids. The sharp ones use Ivanwald to build their net-
work. If they do become successful, there’s an emphasis on maintain-
ing contact.
“That,” he said, “is how Doug uses Ivanwald.”
By now I was out of my lawn chair and pacing with the phone in
hand. Was I actually being recruited back to Ivanwald? It seemed
impossible. But I didn’t know how else to interpret it. Greg thought
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 245
I might have “leadership potential,” might be someone Doug Coe
could “use.”
For what?
“The leadership work is secretive,” Greg said. “ It has to be. There
is the problem of separation of church and state. And you can get so
much more accomplished in secret.” He boasted of the Family’s
behi nd-the- scenes negotiations with Israel, of Yasir Arafat’s visit to
the Cedars —an o -the-record event that had taken place long after
Greg claimed to have broken with the Family. “Or Suharto,” he said.
The fact that Suharto had murdered 500,0 00 of his countrymen, as
I’d written, was news to him. But so what? “ Say he did kill a half mil-
lion people. Let me ask you this: did he kill them before or during his
relationship with Doug?”
Suharto’s killing started before he knew Coe. In fact, it was the
killing that caught the Family’s attention. Since I’d left Ivanwald, I’d
been doing some research on Indonesia; I thought that in the Fam ily’s
relationship with a Muslim dictator there might be a clue to solving
the problem of Jesus plus nothi ng. This is what I found out.
In September of 1965, a communist-led rebellion attempted to
topple the aging hero of Indonesian independence, Sukarno, by then
withered into an incompetent dictator. It fell to young General Su-
harto to beat back the rebellion, which he did easily, and to prevent a
recurrence. This he accomplished by leading a nationwide slaughter
of communists. “Communist” schoolchildren, babies, entire villages.
When it was done, Suharto was untouchable—especially with his
newfou nd friends, the Americans. LBJ, dom inoes on the mind, was
willing to cut deals with any devil God gave him if it meant he could
move at least one Southeast Asian nation permanently out of the
communist column.
American fundamentalists were even more enthusiastic about
the Muslim dictator. In 1968, Abram declared Su harto’s coup a “spir-
itual revolution,” and Indonesia under his rule an especially promis-
ing nation, hope for the future i n Abram’s last years.1 The CIA would
246 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
eventually admit that the Indonesian massacre was “one of the worst
mass murders in the 20th century.” But that wasn’t the mood at the
dawn of Suharto’s reign, as Clif Robinson, the Fam ily’s chief Asian
representative, discovered in 1966, when he visited the American
ambassador to Indonesia, Marshall Green. “ The emergency,” as Rob-
inson called it, made demands on the ambassador’s time, but the two
men spent an afternoon together. Robinson wasn’t able to see the
Indonesian diplomat who’d originally introduced him to Jakarta pol-
itics though. He was in prison, one of 750,000 Indonesians jailed or
sent to concentration camps for political crimes.
Robinson didn’t try to intervene on behalf of his friend. But then,
the ambassador would hardly have been the man to ask for help. In
1990, Green acknowledged the long- suspected fact that the American
embassy had been busy at that time compiling for Suharto what one of
Green’s aides called a “shooting l ist”: the names of thousands of leftist
political opponents, from leaders identi ed by the CIA to village-level
activists, the kind of data only local observers—conservative mission-
aries, classically—could provide. “We had a lot more information
about [them] than the Indonesians themselves,” Green boasted. Green
and his aides fol lowed the results of their gift closely, checking o
names as Suharto’s men killed or imprisoned them. “No one cared, so
long as they were communists, that they were butchered,” said one of
Green’s aides. Another, acknowledging that the list had left “a lot of
blood ” on American hands, argued, “But that’s not all bad. T here’s a
time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”2
One such moment occurred for Suharto in December 1975,
when Portugal relinquished its claims to the ti ny island nation of East
Timor. It declared independence; nine days later Suharto’s army in-
vaded, on the pretext that its neighbor was com munist. Two hundred
thousand people—nearly a third of the island’s population—were
killed during the long occupation, to which the United States gave its
blessing. Gerald Ford, the only president to have been a member of
an actual prayer cell (when he was in Congress, with Representatives
John Rhodes, Al Quie, and Melvin Laird, a cell that reconvened in
1974 to pray with Ford about pardoning Nixon),3 told Suharto, “We
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 247
will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand
the problem and the intentions you have.” K issinger, with Ford in
Jakarta, added, “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly
[because] the use of U.S.-made arms could create problems.” Suharto
did not succeed quickly—the killing continued for decades—but he
never lacked for champions in the U.S. Congress, which saw to it
that American dollars kept his regime in bul lets until he was driven
out in 1998.
The massacre of Indonesia preceded Suharto’s friendship with the
Fam ily, but the slaughter and slow strangulation of East Timor coin-
cided with it. A document in the Family’s archives titled “Important
Dates in Indonesian History” notes that in March 1966, the Commu-
nist Party was banned and Campus Crusade arrived in April. Suharto
wasn’t a Christian, but he knew that where missionaries go, investors
follow. He also wanted to use God—any God—to pacify the popula-
tion. In 1967, Congressman Ben Reifel sent a memo to other Fellow-
ship members in Congress noting that a special message from Suharto
calling on Indonesians to “seek God, discover His laws, and obey
them” was broadcast at the same time as a Fellowship prayer session in
the Indonesian parl iament for non-Christian politicians. T he Fellow-
ship never asked Indonesians to renounce Islam, only to meet around
“the person of Jesus”—considered a prophet in Islam—in private,
under the guidance of the Fel lowship’s American brothers.
By 1969, the Fellowship claimed as its man in Jakarta Suharto’s
minister of social a ai rs, who presided over a group of more than
fty Muslims and Christians i n parliament. Another Fellowship as-
sociate, Darius Marpaung—he’d later claim that God spoke through
him when he told a massive rally that the time had come to “purge
the com munists,” an event that helped spark the massacre—led a
similar group in Indonesia’s Christian community.4 “President Su-
harto is most interested and would like to increase his contact through
this medium with the other men of the world,” wrote Coe’s rst fol-
lower, Senator Mark Hat eld, in a memo to Nixon that year. “He has
indicated he would like to meet with the Senate [prayer] group if and
when he comes to the United States.”5
248 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
In the fall of 1970, Suharto did both. Coe often boasted that no-
body but congressmen, himself, and maybe a special guest attended
such meetings, but this time Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and
Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Sta ,
joined the Indonesian dictator.6 In October 1970, Coe wrote to the
U.S. ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry. Suharto had just become
the rst Muslim to join the Fellowship’s o -the-record Senate prayer
group for a meeting “sim ilar to the one we had with Haile Selassie,”
the emperor of Ethiopia. Korry was too busy to celebrate; October
1970 was the month his plot to overthrow Chile’s democratically
elected president, Salvador Allende, came to a botched end, opening
the door to the more murderous scheme that brought General Au-
gusto Pinochet to power three years later.7 (“The sun is just now be-
gi nning to shine again,” the Family’s key man in Chile, the head of a
right-wing civil ian faction cal led the “O cialists,” wrote Coe, prom-
ising to tell him the “real story” of Pinochet’s coup in person.)
In 1971, Coe entertained a small gathering at the Fellowship
House with stories from his most recent round of visits to interna-
tional brothers, “men whom God has touched in an unusual way.”
Among them was General Nguyen Van Thieu, the president of South
Vietnam, who arranged for Coe to tour the war zone in the personal
plane of his top military commander; the foreign mi nister of Cambo-
dia, “most eager to carry on our concept”; and Suharto. In Clif Rob-
inson’s telling, “Doug and I were escorted up the steps of the palace,
no attempt to make any secret of it, and the president there so
warmly welcomed us and the rst thing he said as I walked i nto the
room was to express his appreciation for what had been done, and to
say that the momentum that we have seen started in this must not be
allowed to slacken . . . Along toward the end, one of the men sug-
gested it would be good if we had prayer together. And Darius Mar-
paung and Colonel Sombolem were present with us. And Darius
Marpaung suggested that the businessman who was there would lead
us in a prayer. And I think I have seldom been in a meeting where the
prayer was so
God-inspired.” 8
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 249
Coe and Robi nson weren’t the only representatives of the Fel-
lowship to seek such inspiration with Suharto. In 1970, a memo to
Fellowship congressmen from Senator B. Everett Jordan, a North
Carol ina Dixiecrat, reported that Howard Hardesty, the executive
vice president of Continental Oil, listed as a key man in the Fellow-
ship’s con dential directory, had traveled to Indonesia to spend a day
with the Fellowship prayer cells and join Su harto for dinner.9 The
followi ng year, Senator Jordan himself traveled to Jakarta on the
Fam ily’s behalf, where a special prayer breakfast meeting of forty
parliamentary and m ilitary leaders was assembled for him by the vice
president of Pertami na, the state oil and gas company that functioned
like a family business for Suharto. Such corporate/state/church chum-
miness was hardly limited to dictatorial regimes. Jordan may well
have traveled to the meeting on an ai rplane provided that year for
congressional members of the Family by Harold McClu re of Mc-
Clure Oil, and the year previous, he’d boasted in a memo to congres-
sional Fam ily members, oil executives and foreign diplomats had
used the National Prayer Breakfast in Washi ngton to meet for “con -
dential” prayers.10
By 1972, some of Abram’s old hands were concerned about the
moral vacuum the Family now called home. Elgin Groseclose, the
American economist who’d helped the Shah ru n Iran in the 194 0s,
worried that Muslims who saw through the facade of the “ brotherhood
of man” would ask, “Down what road am I being taken? ” And, per-
haps, decide to take Americans for a ride instead. “ This has been one
of the aspects of the . . . movement that has long troubled me,” con-
cluded Groseclose. “Where does pol itics end and religion begin?”11
Poor Groseclose. He could not grasp power. Suharto got it. “We
are sharing the deepest experiences of our lives together,” Clif Rob-
inson wrote of his brother the dictator. “It was at this point when I
was with President Suharto of Indonesia that he said, ‘In this way we
are converted, we convert
ourselves—No one converts us!’ ”12
In the spring of 1975, Bruce Sundberg, a Family missionary to
the Filipino government of the dictator Ferdi nand Marcos, began
250 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
planning with Marcos’s chief nancial backer for a summit in Jakarta.
Included would be Marcos, Suharto, and General Park, the South
Korean dictator. Sundberg called it “The Jakarta Idea,” the “Idea” to
be pondered the same one that had come to Abram forty years earlier
in Seattle. That it had not evolved since 1935 was, to the men of the
Family, proof of its eternal truth: the Idea that God’s method is the
“man-method,” that God chooses His key men according to His con-
cerns, not ours. That conviction enabled Coe to ignore Elgin Grose-
close’s concern about foreign nationals using them for their
connections. People didn’t use people, according to the Idea. People
didn’t do anything. Rather, they were used by God, and their only
two choices were to struggle against the inevitable, or to allow God
to pull their strings. Was Su harto using them? Only if God wanted
him to. Everything the Family did for Suharto—the connections,
the prayers, the blessings —they did for God.
On December 6, 1975, G erald Ford blessed Suharto’s invasion of
East Timor. Twelve hours after Ford left Jakarta, Suharto’s forces,
armed almost entirely with American weapons, attacked East Timor’s
population of 650,00 0 on the premise that the island nation was
planning a communist assault on Indonesia, a nation of 140 million
people.
Here are the words of the last broadcast from East Timor’s na-
tional Radio Dili, in the nation’s capital: “Women and children are
being shot in the streets. We are all goi ng to be killed, I repeat, we
are all going to be killed. This is an appeal for international help.
Please help us . . .”
The conservative estimate of Suharto’s death toll, in East Timor
and Indonesia proper, is 602,000, but most scholars of Indonesia be-
lieve it is two or even three times greater, ranking Suharto next to
the Cambodian madman Pol Pot as one of the worst mass murderers
of the twentieth century. What role the Family played, or did not
play—which of their “deepest experiences” they shared—in the long
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 251
occupation of East Timor that followed the invasion, a period during
which it was transformed into “islands of prisons hidden with is-
lands,” I can’t say. The Family restricted its archives before I could
follow the story into the next decade. All I know is that in 20 02 my
Ivanwald brothers proudly proclaimed that one of Suharto’s succes-
sors, President Megawati, had bent her knee to the Jesus of the
Cedars.
I shared some of Suharto’s story with Greg. I wanted to make
some kind of connection. Not of politics to religion but between us,
“man-to-man,” as the Fam ily likes to say. I knew almost nothing
about him, but his tone reminded me of Bengt Carlson, one of his
successors as leader of Ivanwald, and that made me think that like
Bengt, Greg was probably a decent sort absorbed into a movement
the awful shape of which he simply didn’t see. It wasn’t that I wanted
to school hi m. I wanted him to know that I got it. That I understood
good intentions and where they could lead. That I appreciated that
diplomacy requires doing business with bad men. That I knew there
had been honorable Cold Warriors—my father, a Sovietologist who
advised the CIA near the end of Eastern Europe an communism, was
one of them—who believed that the threat of the Soviet Union justi-
ed terrible alliances.
But what I wanted him to say—and I admit it, I wanted him to
answer for Coe, for Carlson, for the whole goddamn bunch, because,
after all, here he was, apparently asking me to join them—was that
making Suharto a brother, at least, had been a mistake. Why hadn’t
Coe risked his access, risked the Family’s friendships in big oi l,
risked even his certainty about the biblically sanctioned authority of
whichever strongman ends up in charge, to tell Suharto —after a
prayer, maybe—to stop killing his own people? To hold him ac-
countable, as the Family likes to say. For if the Family had not done
so—if they had, in fact, greased Suharto’s economic machine, voted
for weapons, praised him to the world as a champion of freedom —
they were accomplices. Brothers i n blood, yes, but not that of the
lamb.
252 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Greg preferred to look on the bright side. “If not for Doug,” he
said, “maybe Suharto would have killed a m illion.”
Greg’s math wa s the calculus used by Stalin when he said that a
single death is a tragedy, but a million is no more than a statistic.
Stalin, monster that he was, spoke not of esh-and- blood murder but
of politics by narrative, the stories to which even a dictator must re-
sort if he is to wield the power he takes by the gun. As a human be-
ing, Stalin may have been worse than worthless, but as a fabulator, he
was astute. A single death does make a better story. Suharto’s
victims— 602,0 00, 1.2 million, or 1.8 m illion—may never nd a
place in literature. But they deserve a place in history, and to win
them that, one small problem must be solved here i n America, that of
Jesus plus nothing, the logic of faith that allows American politicians
to contribute to the nightmares of other nations, and the rest of us to
vote for them.
Jes us plus nothing. Phrased like that, as Coe puts it, it doesn’t
sound like a problem at all. One who preaches Jesus plus nothing
claims to be in possession of pure Godhead. Not Jesus plus the his-
tory of his believers and what they’ve done in His name, or Jesus plus
the culture through which we view Him now, or Jesus plus the best
e orts of the m inds God, presumably, gave us, or Jesus plus human-
ity itself. Not Jesus plus scripture, since scripture, after all, contains
a great deal besides Jesus. No burning bush, no voice in the whirl-
wind, no Daniel, no lions. Coe and his inner circle do believe in the
trinity; a Washington fundamentalist activist told me, “but they’ll
give the Father and the Holy Ghost the weekend o . Because they
clutter the conversation. Jesus is so easily presented.”13
And what is it about Jesus that Coe presents? Not the teachings of
Christ; simply the fact of His being, “the Person of Christ,” as Coe
called it in a four-part lecture series he presented to a conference of
evangelical leaders in January 1989, recorded on two videotapes lent
to me by an evangelical scholar distressed by Coe’s peculiar concept
of God. The lectures took place at the Glen Eyrie Castle i n Colorado
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 253
Spri ngs, the Navigators headquarters at which Coe rst conceived of
Jesus plus nothing. With a great stone hearth lit by two murky yel-
low lanterns behind him, Coe, in a dark suit and tie, his black hair
slicked across his skull, doesn’t drive toward his points; he ambles up
to them. He tells a story about touring forty-two small nations in the
Paci c with a member of Reagan’s National Security Council, an
Australian politician, and some American businessmen. On the tar-
mac of each country’s airport, they pray for a key man, a power bro-
ker, and then they go o to meet a top man, the one with the
power.
What am I supposed to say to them? asks the Australian.
“We wanna be your friend,” says Coe.
Okay, says the Australian, but how?
“Tell ’em, ‘By learni ng to love God, together, centered around
Jesus Christ.’ ”
The Australian, who used to work i n the foreign ministry, doesn’t
think he can say that. He’ll sound crazy. He’ll sound stupid. So Coe
makes him a bet: i f it doesn’t work after two countries, they’ll go
back to Australia and play golf. But there’s to be no golf in his near
future, because on every little island they visit, Yap and Truk and
Palau, this delegation of First World power nds prime m inisters,
presidents, parliamentarians, strangely receptive to their message.
The NSC man, David Locke, a veteran of a similar trip with Coe,
described it once. “It reminded me of the story in World War II,
where the British sent an OSS type i nto Borneo . . . And this guy
parachuted out of the sky and they had never seen anything like this
so they looked on him as—he had blonde hair and white skin and he
was a white god who had come out of the sky to mobilize them. Ob-
viously his side was going to win so they had no trouble aligning
themselves. Well, from the point of view of a lot of these l ittle island
countries, we were something akin to that.”14
“All through these last forty years,” Coe continues, “I’ve had the
privilege of traveling to countries, I’ve been in China, in Vietnam
with the Vietnamese, the Vietcong, Communists in Panama, Com-
munists in Rus sia, the Red Guard in China, Nazis in Germany.”
254 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
(Coe’s rst visit to Germany was in 1959. Did he know more about
the past of Abram’s key men in Germany than they liked to acknowl-
edge?) “And you know, I discovered that the same things that they
make people give vows to keep, are the same things that Jesus
said . . . The only thing that was changed was the goal, the only thing
that changed was the purpose. In essence, it was all the things that
Jesus taught in private to the disciples. I began to realize why they were
so successful in human terms.”
Coe cites one of his favorite scripture verses, Matthew 18:20,
“When two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in
the midst of them.” “Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler were three men.
Think of the im mense power these three men had, these nobodies
from nowhere. Actually, emotional and mental problems. Prisoners.
From the street. But they bound themselves together in an agree-
ment, and they died together. Two years before they moved into Po-
land, these three men had a study done, systematically a plan drawn
out and put on paper to annihilate the entire Polish population and
destroy by numbers every single house”—he bangs the podium, dop,
dop, dop—“and every single building in Warsaw and then to start on
the rest of Poland.”
It worked, Coe says; they killed 6½ m illion “ Polish people.” (The
actual sum was closer to 5½ million, 3 million of whom were Polish
Jews. But that, as Stalin would say, is just a statistic).
“These three men by their decision alone.” What he’s trying to
explain, Coe says, is the power of friendship: between a man and
Christ, between brothers in Christ. Once, he says, a friend who’d
been France’s foreign minister during its war with Vietnam told him
he should try to meet Ho Chi Minh. “ ‘Even though he was our en-
emy, he was amazing.’ He said, ‘[Ho] knows what it means, to be
brothers.’ ” What does it mean to be brothers? It means, Coe learns
when he nally meets one of Ho’s, a foreign minister Coe says he
happened to bump into in Mauritania, to be wil ling to—happy to—
die for your cause.
It’s late; the room is gloomy; Coe’s brothers and sisters are sitting
on hard chairs. He needs to make it very clear for them.
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 255
“These enemies of ours,” he says, “they have taken the very words
of Jesus Christ and used them for themselves.” What words is Coe
talking about? The ones about “social order.”
“That’s all that matters.” The social order: “Jesus says, ‘You have
to put me before other people, and you have to put me before your-
self.’ Hitler, that was the demand of the Nazi Party.” Coe slaps the
podium, and the Führer creeps into his mannerisms: “You have to put
the Nazi Party and its objectives in front of your own li fe and ahead
of other people!” Now he’s Coe again. “I’ve seen pictures of young
men in the Red Guard of China,” he says. “A table laid out like a
butcher table, they would bring in this young man’s mother and fa-
ther, lay her on the table with a basket on the end, he would take an
axe and cut her head o .” Now he’s Mao, punctuating his words by
slappi ng his pulpit: “ They have to put the purposes of the Red Guard
ahead of the mother-father- brother- sister—their own l ife!”
He pauses, makes the st. “That was a covenant. A pledge. That
was what Jesus said.” Now he’s Jesus: “If you do not put me, before
your father”—bang—“your mother”—bang—“your brother” —
bang—“your sister”—bang—“you cannot be my disciple.” Now as
Coe: “If you’re gonna have any movement that moves men and move-
ments, that’s” —he clenches his st again at the end of the
phrase—“you have to have that kind of commitment. Jesus knew
that. That’s the way the social order is run.”
In America, Coe says, “Today. In this country. This very day”—
that vision of social order is lost.
The next morning, Coe explains to the crowd how it can be re-
gained. Remember, he says, he is talking about love. A necessary re-
minder, perhaps, since he continues to use Hitler and Lenin, and,
today, Stalin, to illustrate the shape of the love he pursues. Why such
monsters? Why not speak of the church? Coe removes a pair of eye-
glasses from a pocket, but instead of putting them on, he twirls them
on one nger. “There is nothing in the Bible about the Christian
church. That isn’t the name of it. The name of it is the body.” The
Body of Christ, of which all believers are cells. “ His body functions
invisibly.” Coe draws an analogy to a tree. All you see are the leaves;
256 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
“you don’t know what’s going on underground.” But look at the
churches, he says, with all their pomp and circum stance, all their ti-
tles, every full-time church worker stuck in a hierarchy. It depresses
people, Coe explains, when they can see who their master is. A
movement that is visible is weak, vulnerable. It’s an organization, not
love. But the Body of Christ—“The Family,” Coe says—“we are
bound by the strongest power in the world ”—love, I think, but I’ve
lost hold of the con nections—“and the whole world is afraid of it.”
Let’s return to our problem. Let J stand for Jesus. J + 0 = X. Is X a
body of cells, or a social order, or a vision? Yes. All three. X = a vision.
The vision isn’t the Sermon on the Mount; it’s not the beatitudes; it’s
so simple it hurts (remember the Red Guard’s axe): the vision is total
loyalty. Loyalty to what? To the idea of loyalty. It’s another M. C.
Escher drawing, the one of a hand drawing the hand that is drawing
itself. The Com munist Party, plus Jesus. The Nazi Party, plus Jesus.
The Red Guard, plus Jesus. What is the common denominator? Je-
sus? Or power? Jesus plus nothing equals power, “invisible” power,
the long, slow, building power of a few brothers and sisters. J + 0 = P.
We have our formula. Now let’s run the equation for the twenty- rst
century. J + 0 = P divided by the many permutations of the Fam ily’s
present, its latest incarnation.
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