II. Jesus Plus Nothing - Vietnamization

Vietnamization

Rivals

Saigon, 1966. At t he Hotel Caravelle, t he swankiest address in the
city, a middle- aged missionary named Clifton J. Robinson slips out
a page of hotel stationery to write a report on his conquests for
Christ in Vietnam. R obinson is big and br oad-chested, dark-br owe d,
looks good i n a suit, at the rooftop bar popular with reporters from
NBC, CBS, and the New York Times, ashing a smile of absolute
certainty. He’s associate secretary general for the Fellowship in
Southeast Asia. That means he’s Abram’s man. He’s writing back
to Abram’s headquarters in Washington—although Abram, his
beautiful voice gone soft and sleepy with age, spends most of his
time in a retirement community called Leisu re World. Robinson
is writing to than k Senator Carlson, who’s sent a stri ng of letters of
introduc tion to precede Robinson on his grand tour of t he region’s
friendly regimes. In each country Robinson visits, the American
ambassador stands ready to receive hi m and pass him along to local
power brokers. Robi nson feels as if Jesus himself is opening doors,
a neatly trimmed savior in a linen suit. He knows, however, that
the name of a U.S. senator on the Foreign Relations Committee,
not Christ’s, is the reason the diplomatic corps genu ects before
him. A “capital” notion, thinks Robinson. “Invaluable ‘inside’ help
they’ve been able to be to us,” he scrawls beneath the Hotel Cara-
vel le’s logo.1


206 | JEFF SHARLET
Among his most fruitful meetings was time spent with William H.
Sullivan, U.S. ambassador to Laos. As chair of the State Department’s
Vietnam Working Group in 1963, Sullivan had been one of the archi-
tects of the war, a de facto “ eld marshal,” according to General Wil-
liam Westmoreland.2 Such a man was an unlikely source of inspiration
for Robinson, who called himself a Quaker. But preaching Abram’s
Idea overseas had put him at odds with the Society of Friends. Like
another lapsed Quaker, Richard Nixon, Robinson had no patience for
paci sm. He saw himself as a man of action, a “ jungle” missionary on
the move. He spoke with the quick velvety voice of an old-time radio
announcer and used it to dispense axioms and analogies about the need
for key men in the Cold War, Bruce Barton jingles as interpreted by
James Jesus Angleton, top man religion as geopolitical strategy. Sulli-
van provided fodder for Robinson’s commando theology.
“He said the strategy of the VC was the same as International
Christian Leadership’s,” gushed Robinson, “except applied physically
and militarily.” Robinson’s vision of Worldwide Spiritual O ensive
could not yet accommodate Ho Chi Minh’s tactics, but Sullivan con-
vi nced hi m their enemy was a worthy one. “They spend hours, days,
weeks, whatever time is necessary setting up for the LEADERS and
then either by ambush, assassination, or other i ntrigue, they do away
with them—not the people, the leaders. He said to kill 32 top level
people”—as the Vietcong had done the previous month—“was tan-
tamount to immobilizing thousands.”
The lesson was that the Fellowship should understand itself as a
guerrilla force on the spiritual battle eld. Speci cally, Sullivan, who
directed the CIA’s “secret air war” in Laos and turned its Hmong
minority into cannon fodder against the North Vietnamese, wanted
the Fellowship to recruit Buddhist businessmen to collaboration by
matching them with Jaycees u nder the guise of a “ ‘brotherhood of
leadership’—or some such slogan.” But Robinson also took Sullivan’s
words as an endorsement of Abram’s key man strategy.
“The strength of the wolf is the pack,” Abram reminded his dis-
ciples that year, retreating into parable as he advanced into his last
days, “ but the strength of the pack is the wolf.”3


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Evangelical steamrollers such as the Billy Graham Crusade might
win millions, but the Fellowship could neutralize the enemy—“ bold
Satanic forces,” as Abram described it, the Vietcong’s “sweep of com-
munism,” America’s “secular cyclone”—by conquering the select few
souls of the strong. “Assassination” was just a gure of speech to Robin-
son; Abram wanted elites to “die to the sel f,” to subm it totally to Jesus
of their own volition even as they held on tightly to the power that
could advance His kingdom. Long after Abram’s death—and Ho’s to-
tal victory in Vietnam—the Fellowship would distribute a tract pur-
porting to be “ten steps to commitment from a Viet Cong soldier.” 4
Robinson was writi ng not to Abram but to Doug Coe. Abram
was technically retired, although he still maintained top spiritual
authority in the Fellowship. The question of succession was one no-
body discussed, but Robinson was surely thinking of it. He’d recently
opened a wedge for the Idea in India by recruiting the nation’s minis-
ter of defense productivity into a Christian prayer cell. Whether that
led to the kind of results Abram would have called “tangible” —a re-
lationship with a Fellowship- approved defense contractor, a commit-
ment to pul ling India’s left-leani ng government rightward—it at least
provided the Fellowship with the kind of bragging rights that im-
pressed American congressmen: the Fellowship had connections
everywhere, even in non- Christian nations. Robinson may have imag-
ined himself the man for Abram’s job.5 But three years earlier, he’d
angered Abram when he wrote that Indians are “more adept than wet
eels in squirming out” of responsibility. “ I feel we need to let the In-
dians know the ‘world’ is our battle eld.” With the stakes so high,
they were “expendable.”6
Abram agreed—except for the part about letting the Indians know
their place in the Fellowship’s hierarchy. As the Fellowship grew along
the military trade routes of the Cold War, its “ eld representatives”
learned to ape and polish the politics of attery by which powerful na-
tions make weak ones feel crucial to the cause. But Robinson was too
hot for the Cold War Christ. He genuinely believed he was spreading
old-time religion revamped for the space age, not a new empire in
democratic disguise. “Is this ICL message a kind of Christian fringe


208 | JEFF SHARLET
bene t, a casual sophistication, a pink tea variety of discussion sub-
ject?” he demanded of the Fellowship. “Or is it a revolution? ”
Writing for Abram, a third would-be heir named Richard Halv-
erson responded sharply. 1. Stop challenging Abram’s vision. 2. You
don’t understand Abram’s vision, anyway. 3. Here’s what it’s really
about: “A revolution can be anarchy, Clif, or it can be tyranny. It can
be noisy and rambunctious and spectacular like a Fourth of July re-
works celebration, or it can be quiet and penetrating and thorough
like salt, like benevolent subversion.” 7
That was the key—subversion. There was bad subversion, like that
of the Vietcong, and good subversion, also like that of the Vietcong,
only in the name of Jesus, a subtle practice of persuasion. Robinson
took the lesson, committing himself to raising funds directly for the
Indian work so that its costs wouldn’t be on the Fellowship’s books,
and inviting in Fellowship speakers, such as a British member of Parlia-
ment named John Cordle, who lectured the Indians on “Corruption,”
a subject about which he knew more than he let on. He would later be
exposed as one of Britain’s most amboyantly crooked politicians.
Another speaker was Halverson, who lectured to a ve-man “core
cell ” of U.S. embassy personnel on “In ltrating Secular Society with
the Spirit of Christ.”8 It wasn’t a matter of proclaiming the gospel
boldly; it was a trick of getting the heathen to ght your battles for you.


Robinson fa iled in his succession bid; as would Halverson. Robi n-
son’s mistake was to take the Fellowship’s internationalism too
literally—far o in Asia, he failed to court Abram’s favor personally.
When he swept in from the eld, he’d regale rooms full of Fellowship
men with his adventures, forgetting that his audiences were composed
of politicians used to being the center of attention themselves. Robin-
son extended the Fellowship’s reach across Asia at a time when Amer-
ican power most wanted behind-the- scenes men in the Far East, but
never understood that he also needed to be a behind-the-scenes man
in Washington, too. The details of Doug Coe’s victory are murky—at
the time, few suspected quiet Coe would be Abram’s heir—but Coe,


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 209
alone, seems to have understood that in an organization that denies
being an organization, power goes to the man least visibly concerned
with pomp and circumstance. And yet Robinson and Halverson still
matter to the story of the Fellowship. In part because they remained
signi cant players, representatives of American fundamentalism to
government around the world. And in part because they illustrate the
di erent streams feeding into Coe’s vision. Robinson was the publ ic
man, the character you put in the front of the room to tell stories.
Halverson was more complicated.
Halverson’s story, like that of the Family’s, began in 1935, when
he got o a bus in Hol lywood fresh from North Dakota, where he’d
grown up with the unl ikely ambition of being an actor. Blandly hand-
some by small-town standards, in Los Angeles he hardly looked like
movie star material: his lips were too full, his cheeks too chubby, his
eyes too deeply set. He wasn’t bad looking, but he wasn’t Clark Gable,
either. His strength was a certain gee-whiz sincerity, an earnestness
augmented by intelligence. Dick Halverson wasn’t a good guy because
he didn’t know any better; he was a good guy because he’d calculated
the angles and concluded that decency was his best bet in this world.9
Thereafter, he pursued it mightily. In later years, Halverson would
help build up one of the world’s largest relief agencies, World Vision,
a Christian out t that supplies food for the starving and medicine for
the wounded and gospel tracts only to those who ask. Although it has
long been plagued by acc usations of serving as a CIA front, World
Vision’s veri able record is admirable—the sort of Christian e ort
to which Abram paid lip service and nothing more. But Halverson
also helped build the Fellowship i nto a network of truly international
scope, introducing the American Christ to any number of nations.
Halverson, in other words, was an imperialist of the old school,
bringi ng light to the natives and clearing the way for other men to
extract a dollar. He was no hypocrite. He believed with all his heart
he was helping, and he never thought too deeply about whom. Halv-
erson loved public speaking, and he was good at it, too, i nvited to
preach in pulpits around the world. He wrote popular books and
mailed out newsletters and presided over a conservative Presbyterian


210 | JEFF SHARLET
church outside of Washington that was popular with politicians. In
1981, Ronald Reagan would make him Senate chaplain, the pinnacle
of his career.10
Coe, meanwhile, was all along studying Abram, learning the
methods of self-e acing persuasion. And studying, too, other sources
of authority, strong men of history whose biographies he consumed
and distilled into the leadership lessons he dispensed to his disciples
the same way he cited, always smil ing, scripture verses intended to
“ break” the powerful men to whom he ministered, the jujitsu of an
alpha male proclaiming his desire to serve. God’s word, not his; so it
was written.
Coe brought to the Fellowship a radically di erent spirit than
Halverson’s, a darker appeal. Raised in a small town, middle-class
home in Oregon, he’d gone to college at Willamette in the state
capital of Salem, where he majored in physics and got serious about
God. He’d been something of an Elmer Gantry—a good-looking
irt, friendly with everyone, close to none—according to Roy Cook,
his sidekick for the last six decades. It was Cook, then an unsmil ing,
bespectacled boy with a crooked pompadour, who led Coe to Jesus.
What kind of Jesus? In a talk to a group of fundamentalist activists
years later, Coe ticked o what he gave up for his new Lord: smoking,
drinking, dancing, and most of his friends. At twenty, he married an
eighteen-year-old girl named Jan. Soon they had the rst of six chil-
dren, all born before Coe reached his early thirties. And as the 1950s
opened, that might have been all: a pulpit, maybe, in rural Oregon, a
brood of children, a stern but conventional God.
But Coe had fallen under the “discipleship” of Dawson Trotman,
the founder of a worldwide ministry called the Navigators. Daws was
a square-jawed, wavy-haired, bear-hugging man, a cruder version of
Abram. Like Abram, who called him a “very dear friend,” Daws
scorned old-school fu ndamentalists who considered themselves “sep-
arate” from the culture, and like Abram, he’d begun his ministry in
the 1930s, in opposition to the economic liberalism of the New Deal.
Both men had little use for denom inational distinctions, but Daws,
unlike Abram, didn’t understand them to begin with. He hated ideas;


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 211
he loved “ jokes.” He installed a remote control for his doorbell be-
neath his dining room table so he could send underlings running to
answer it over and over, and he planted recrackers set to explode in
umbrellas when they opened. He actually wore a squirting ower in
his lapel. And yet he’d publicly rebuke sta ers he thought were “play-
ing games with God,” and he could drive even the manly men with
whom he surrounded himself to tears. In place of a traditional minis-
try, Daws o ered a pared-down concept of “ discipleship” by which
an evangelist picks a target and sticks with him until his “disciple”
submits totally to Jesus as the discipler teaches him, the theological
equivalent of hazing. Daws wasn’t stupid; he was a strategist who
understood that fundamentalism was too intellectual for the men he
wanted to reach, men li ke him —or, more often, men who wanted
to be l ike him. He boiled it down to Jesus plus nothing. “Daws really
had only one string on his guitar,” wrote an adm iring biographer,
“and he plunked it often and loud.”11
That brute simplicity was what Coe, newly born again, missing his
old habits and his old friends, wanted to hear. He went on a retreat to
Daws’s headquarters in Colorado Springs, a gothic castle called Glen
Eyrie, moated and inhabited by suits of armor and graced by very little
sun; it was deep in a canyon, and the sky above it was narrow. There
Coe prayed to Jesus for a way out of what seemed the small but over-
whelming life of a father and a churchman. How can I do it, God? How
can I nish school and provide for my fam ily and make time for the
Bible and pray every day? Coe thought his faith demanded the memori-
zation of a rule book over a thousand pages long. He couldn’t do it. He
couldn’t keep Nehemiah and Jeremiah and Esther straight. You do n’t
have to, Jesus told him. What then? Coe asked. That was when Coe
discovered, or decided, that all of Christianity, 2,000 years of faith and
ideas and mistakes and miracles and arguments and signs and wonders,
could be reduced to one word: love. And what did love mean? “Obey.”
That’s what Jesus told him. “Obey, then teach.”12
Coe taught. At Willamette, he led one of his professors, a young
political scientist named Mark Hat eld, into evangelicalism. Hat eld,
in turn, led a parade of students singing hym ns to le his candidacy for


212 | JEFF SHARLET
the state legislature. Stories would later circulate that it was Hat eld
who, when he moved up to the U.S. Senate, invited Coe to Washing-
ton, but it was the younger Coe who nudged Hat eld onto the national
stage and Coe who went to the capital rst. And yet, outside of evan-
gelical circles, he made little impression as a college man; his picture
appears in yearbooks only once, a gangly, unsmiling dark-haired boy
with big features, posing with the gol f team. An odd man out, wearing
hunter’s plaid, a townie among the preps. It was an image of modesty
he’d use to advantage in the years to come as he pledged himsel f to
older men in the Fellowship—Halverson, Robinson, Germany’s Gus
Gedat, and most of al l Abram—and then supplanted them.
Coe is, in fact, a striking man in both appearance and personality,
gifted with a force eld of charisma far greater than the more conven-
tional appeal of Halverson and Robinson, backslappers both. He is
tal l, with strong facial bones and dark skin; he has been mistaken for
an American Indian more than once. He is both ugly and handsome,
in the manner of Lincoln, his features oversized and his entire being
dominated by his broad smile. He dresses in golf shirts—after Jesus,
gol f has always been his passion—or in suits that look like they had to
be pinned together around him, as if he’s some loping, natural crea-
ture not meant to be bound by jacket and tie. He speaks with
slow-motion intensity, his words languid and separated by silences in
which listeners can ponder their meanings. There is something about
his voice, a resonant, solid sound like an old oak tree talking, that
makes you want to listen even if you disagree with everything he’s
sayi ng. His fascination with the leadership secrets of Hitler extends to
the Führer’s speaking style, made over in Coe’s loose-limbed manner-
isms. He emphasizes his points by making his right hand into a st and
shaking it, even as his left hand slips into his pocket, a m ixture of ego
and insecurity that suggests an inner conversation the speaker would
like to keep private. It is perhaps a tribute to his magnetism that a
smal l group of fringe fundamentalists have dedicated themselves to
investigating the question of whether he is the anti-Christ, believed to
be a charming fellow with international inclinations. Coe would not
be insulted; almost nothing insults him.


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After college, he moved so quickly into leadership, spiritually
“discipling” not just other recent graduates but business executives,
politicians, even se nior pastors, that it’s hard to bel ieve he needed
much mentoring from Daws or, eventually, Abram. He was a natural
leader: amiable, casual, not intim idated by anyone and interested in
everyone, or so it seemed to those at whom he directed his devotion.
Like Abram, he did not demand theological orthodoxy of his re-
cruits. “Doug hates church,” one of his followers, a former aide to
Hat eld, told me. (Coe considers church irrelevant to the real Jesus
encountered in one’s prayer cell.)13
One of his associates later noted that Coe’s wife, Jan, deserved
much of the credit for her husband’s work; he’d rarely met a woman
“so uncomplaining and one who stayed put and waited patiently.”
Not as much could be said for the evangelical enterprises Coe left
behind when he went to Washington in 1959 to work for Abram.
The communal homes he’d organized, early prototypes of Ivanwald,
were in danger of collapse, their i nhabitants lost without Coe’s ef-
fortless authority; churches were splitting over Coe’s new doctrine;
worst of all, young wives were in revolt, acting out the fears of all
those who bel ieved that Alfred Ki nsey’s 1953 report, Sexual Behavior
in the Human Female, would set in motion chain reactions of feminine
hysteria. “ I de nitely believe Jewell . . . is demon possessed,” one of
the Oregon brothers wrote Coe. “In fact, I have talked with her (in
Helen’s presence) and the demon coursed through her.” That wasn’t
all. “I have also come to believe that Jim’s wife is in the same boat. In
fact she said she was, but you would have to see and talk to them to
appreciate this. The other night she went into a rage when Jim was
just sitting on the davenport and tore his shirts o of him. Then she
said she was out to get love and had solicited the devil’s help. You can
imagine Ji m is having a tough time.”14
Spiritual war had changed since the early days of the Fellow-
ship. Whereas for Abram the ght manifested itself physically be-
tween godless strikers and the forces of law and order, for Coe it
was more personal, a matter of marriages, a battle fought i n bed-
rooms. Such was the changing tone of American fundamentalism,


214 | JEFF SHARLET
echoes of Jonathan Edwards’s fascination with Abigail Hutchinson
suddenly ampli ed as feminism emerged to challenge fundamental-
ism. Coe’s correspondence with his demon-plagued friend, as with
all his old Salem associates, was at once blandly pious and marked by
a new militant mysticism. Coe regularly received news from Oregon
of individual men, churches, whole companies tipping over from
“lukewarm” Christianity into on- re faith. “We are still facing some
opposition,” a Baptist pastor wrote Coe, and families were breaking
o , but “in the main we are all divi ning the will of God.”15 Coe oc-
casionally responded with advice, but more often he sent his friends
form letters. The Salemites did not complain. “Mr. Douglas Coe, Big
Wheel, City of the Wheels” one man addressed a letter in full ear-
nestness.16 They sent him checks, new suits, shoes in which they
liked to think of him walking the halls of Congress and parliaments
in distant lands. Coe’s response would be a canned account of a
meeting with “top men,” who were being “used” by God to put him
in touch with more top men. Senator X or Ambassador Y or Mr.
Sm ith, president of ACME Products, was here, he’d respond. “Please
pray he will understand the idea of saturating every community and
every state with the gospel of Jesus Christ.” There’d be a word about
golf; he’d ask for their prayers; and then he’d sign o with scripture,
a citation without explanation. “Amos 8:11–12,” he closed one batch
of letters, a passage that reads like a warning: Behold, the days come,
saith the Lord GOD, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of
bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD: And they
shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall
run to and fro and seek the word of the LORD, and shall not nd it.
17
What did it mean? Coe did not explain. His admirers were left to
wonder: Would they nd it? Were they exempted from God’s, from
Coe’s, judgment on a secular nation? Who among them would enter
the circle of the saved, the elect, with Coe and his mysterious “top
men” in Washington, in London, in Berlin, and in other more exotic
cities Coe mentioned, Jakarta, Addis Ababa, Brasil ia?
Shortly after Coe arrived in Washington, D.C., he wrote home
to his parents to tell them of his immediate success; or, rather, that of


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 215
Jesus, working through him. “God has gone before us to prepare
hearts,” he wrote, noting that he followed in one of several private
planes that had been put at his disposal.18 One of his rst conquests
was Haiti, then just entering a long darkness of dictatorship that still
reverberates today. Winning Catholic Haiti’s acquiescence to U.S.-
style Cold War evangelicalism had been a Fellowship ambition si nce
1955, when an Abram associate had declared it a “soft spot of com-
munism” that would require the ministrations of “Magni cent Amer-
icans” preaching a new equation of Christ and free markets. “I have
been expecting to hear that you are making this your personal pros-
pect,” joked one of Coe’s Oregon friends, a man who claimed to have
been led by the Lord into building a small trucking parts empire. It
wasn’t God, though, who the trucking boss thought would draw Coe
to the island nation, one of the poorest in the world. “Am told they
have wonderful golf courses.”19
Coe counseled a Haitian senator and then Haiti’s ambassador to
the United States, easing both into commitments to a Christ-led na-
tion, with the understanding that the Christ Coe preached led not to-
ward the socialism that tempts any bitterly poor people but toward an
economics of “ key men” who would share their wealth as God in-
structed them. Senators Frank Carlson and Homer Capehart, both
members of the Foreign Relations Committee, did the follow-up work,
leading a Fellowship delegation of twelve businessmen to instruct the
Haitian parliament in prayer cell politics. François “Papa Doc” Duva-
lier, who would declare himself not only president for life but also the
nation’s o cial “Maximum Chief of the Revolution” and “Electri er of
Souls”—he was the weirdest and most vicious dictator in the Western
Hemisphere —impressed the senators with his spirituality.
Perhaps he told them, as he was fond of saying, that he literally
personi ed Haiti, that he was a stand-in for God. A personality! That
was the Fellowship’s whole theology in a nutshell, so they didn’t
bother to ask questions about his Vodoun-driven militia, the Tonton
Macoute assassins. Instead, they promised to twist arms in Washing-
ton on Papa Doc’s behalf: foreign aid, exemptions on sugar tari s. It
wouldn’t be a hard sell. The Cold Warriors in State, under Ike and


216 | JEFF SHARLET
every administration that followed, preferred Papa Doc’s public
proclamations of Christian brotherhood to a free black nation that
might seek support from the Soviet Union.20
And so it went through the 1960s, Coe and Halverson and Robin-
son and dozens of lesser brothers traveling the world for the Fellow-
ship, almost always nding their way through Christ’s leading to the
next hot spot in the Cold War. Not only did South Korea host a prayer
breakfast, but its dictator, General Park Chung Hee, tried to use the
Fellowship to channel illegal funding to congressional candidates of
Nixon’s selection. (Nixon’s representative, a Fellowship man named
John Niedicker, declined.) Coe and Carlson double-teamed Emperor
Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, a strategic prize in the struggle between the
United States and the Soviet Union. Selassie, who like Papa Doc con-
sidered himself an embodiment of the divine, depended on his Fel-
lowship brethren to represent his interests in the United States.
Those interests were considerable. For two decades, the United
States provided more aid to Ethiopia than to the entire rest of the
continent. In return, the emperor granted the National Security
Agency basing rights for the largest overseas i ntelligence facility in
the world, a high-tech “listening post” from which the United States
could keep tabs on the Middle East. He also deeded the Fellowship a
prime parcel in downtown Addis Ababa from which to proselytize
the rest of Africa. Just like dominoes, Coe wrote home to Salem.
Coe was as much of an elitist as Abram, but di erently so. Aris-
tocracy didn’t impress him; more important, he never lied to himself
about the virtues or lack thereof of the top men he was courting. Coe
understood early on that he would be deali ng with violent charac-
ters, and that didn’t bother him. Indeed, it seemed to excite him. He
dreamed of their power harnessed to the new American fundamen-
talism, a fascination with strength and in uence given clearest voice
in the words of one of his disciples, attempting to grasp Coe’s vision.
“I have had a great and thrilling experience reading the condensed
version of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” a protégé wrote Coe,
fol lowi ng up on reading advice Coe had given him. “Doug, what a
lesson in vision and perspective! Nazism started with 7 guys around


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 217
a table in the back of an old German Beer Hall. The world has been
shaped so drastically by a few men who really want it such and so.
How we need this same kind of stu as a Hitler or a Lenin.”21
Abram had thought as much, albeit phrased in stu er terms. “An
epochal opportunity is ours,” one of his tracts had advertised to the
new men of his congressional Fellowship back in 1942, “to control
the future of America by the simple strategy of controlling the char-
acter and ideals of [a] relatively small minority of [college- age] men
and women. Hitler long ago perceived this strategy, and established
his elaborate system of . . . leadership training. The democracies
have been asleep.”22 Indeed—asleep to the Hitler method of disci-
plining youth into a revolutionary cadre, a concept that absent the
Führer’s bloodlust would lead to Abram’s later support for groups
such as the Navigators and Campus Crusade. Neither was fascist any
more than Coe actually subscribed to the philosophies of Hitler or
Lenin. It was the myth of brotherhood that Coe thought such men
exempli ed, the “7 guys around a table” that would become a trade-
mark of his teaching. That such a view bore little correspondence
with history—both Hitler and Lenin brutally pitted their supporters
against one another—was of no concern. What mattered was the
model, the seven or the twelve, circles of access to a power de ned
by a personality at the center: Jesus. Contrasting American funda-
mentalism to secularism at a Fellowship meeting in 1962, Bill Bright,
the Fellowship fel low traveler who founded Campus Crusade, one of
the biggest popular fu ndamentalist groups in the world, put it suc-
cinctly: “We worship a person, they worship ideas.” 23 That was
American fundamentalism’s Christ: a person, purged of the ideas
that de ned hi m, as i f what mattered most about Jesus was the color
of his eyes and the shape of his beard.
Coe understood the cult of personality better than Clif Robinson
and Dick Halverson. He may even have understood it better than
Abram, who, after all, was moved rst and foremost by “the Idea.”
Not Coe. For Coe, it was Jesus plus nothing—a formula into which
he could plug any values. It was a theology of total malleability, per-
fect for American expansion.


218 | JEFF SHARLET
From the start of Coe’s tenure, the Fellowship began turning away
from its old Europe an allies. The German Gus Gedat found Coe im-
petuous; Wallace Haines, Abram’s longtime man in Paris, despaired of
pleasing him. “I have retreated step by step before your desires,” he
wrote the new leader. Not my desires, Coe corrected him; God’s.
Haines accused Coe of tearing down the neat organization of Europe an
aristocrats and merchant-princes Abram had spent years building.
“Wallace,” Coe replied. “I am not against structure. I am for
structure. I just think it needs to be underground.”
Other men “caught” Coe’s vision of a decentralized web that
would reach not just between Europe and the United States but around
the world. “I regard the program . . . as being the most e ective for
promoting the basic ideology for which the United States stands,” an-
nounced an enthusiastic supporter of Coe’s new emphasis on nations
Abram had ignored. He didn’t de ne that ideology, but its broad out-
lines were known to all in the Fellowship. First and foremost, there
was “free enterprise,” unrestrained capitalism, property—the foun-
dation, fundamentalists believed, of all other freedoms. Those free-
doms were more unde ned. T he American ideology was as amorphous
as its empire, de ned not by borders but by in uence, invisible threads,
transcendent alliances. It was, to Coe, an empire of spirit, and Coe
took Worldwide Spiritual O ensive to mean more than conferences in
The Hague and prayer meeti ngs in Bavarian castles; Jesus must rule
every nation through the vessel of American power.
Robinson and Halverson also saw the importance of smaller
countries, but it was Coe who dispensed with any concern at all for
politics in the Fellowship’s expansion; he would pray with anyone,
and he would bless anyone, so long as they had the strength to subm it
their nation to God. That was his greatest virtue in Abram’s eyes: he
never complained, never insisted on honors, never questioned whether
Jesus really cared most for men with power.


What was it they wanted? What drove Coe and his spiritual broth-
ers to con ate the Gospel with the needs of a nation expanding into


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 219
empire? Over “ lamb chops and hash- browned potatoes and fried ap-
ples and fried tomatoes,” reported the Washington Post i n 1966, Billy
Graham followed LBJ to the podium of the National Prayer Breakfast
to preach the fury of Christ down on America’s enemies in Vietnam.
“I am come to send re on the earth!” he quoted Christ. “ Think not
that I am come to send peace but a sword!” “There are those,” Gra-
ham continued, “who have tried to reduce Christ to a genial and in-
nocuous appeaser; but Jesus said, ‘You are wrong—I have come as a
resetter and a
sword-wielder.’ ”24
A resetter—were they revolutionaries after all? Or did they
fantasize a new Holy Roman Empire, recast in the terms of the twen-
tieth century as an empire of in uence, not territory? Maybe it was
more trivial, pious posturing as cover for petty cri mes.
Sometimes, at least, it was just that. In attendance for Graham’s
thundering warcry were two generals who devoted their free time to
Fellowship work, crisscrossing the nation to lecture prayer cells and
prayer breakfasts on the need for revival. One of them, General Har-
old K. Johnson, chief of sta of the army, ordered the other, General
Carl Turner, to work with Coe, “quietly, and I repeat quietly,” to give
the army’s “substantial” assistance to the production of the Prayer
Breakfast. That in itself may have been a violation of the First Amend-
ment’s establishment clause, but it paled beside General Turner’s real
sideline: reselling mothballed army weapons to Third World gangs, a
crime for which he was sentenced to prison in 1971 after General
Johnson’s attempt to help failed.
Is that all it was? A spiritual alibi for get-rich-quick schemes? A
Fellowship tract titled Studies for Public Men, 10,00 0 of which were
printed up by a Chevron Oil executive, claimed that such abuses are
inevitable, but not attributable to the piety with which such men
cloaked their misdeeds. When pious men committed crimes, went
the thinking, godlessness was to blame—“secularism in its worst
form!” In a section titled “Accountability,” the tract explained why the
Fellowship should not be held accountable for the actions of its indi-
vidual members, the American generals, General Turner and General
Johnson, the overseas divines on Coe and Carlson’s government gravy


220 | JEFF SHARLET
train, Papa Doc and Emperor Selassie, General Park in Korea, Gen-
eral Suharto in Indonesia, General Medici in Brazil: “Persisting in the
accusation of collective guilt nal ly immobilizes a society,” advised the
tract. Perhaps, but the Fellowship denied individual guilt as well, de-
nied the very concept of guilt for the powerful. T hat was a legalistic
notion, an encroachment on God’s sovereignty as expressed in Ro-
mans 13: “The powers that be are ordained of God.” Who was Coe to
question them?
Romans, declared a Fellowship study guide for bankers, is “the Bi-
ble in miniature in a layman’s words.” The layman is Paul, formerly
Saul, who on the road to Damascus saw the light and abandoned the
law, for better and worse. “With the Jew in mind,” declared the study
guide, “not to mention the memory of his own experience, Paul shows
that the purpose of the law was not to save but to reveal sin.”25 Elite
fundamentalists, unl ike the moral istic masses of popular crusades, did
not care much about sin; they cared about salvation, a concept they
understood in terms of nations, not souls, embodied by the rulers to
whom God had given power, whether through ballots or bullets.
Senator Carlson, writing to President José Joaquín Trejos Fernán-
dez of Costa Rica in 1967, made that explicit. As a spiritual guide for
the Catholic nation’s National Prayer Breakfast, he wrote, the Fel-
lowship was sending Representative Wil liam Jennings Bryan Dorn, a
South Caroli na Dixiecrat who advocated extendi ng the Monroe
Doctrine, by which the United States dominated Latin America, to
the entire world. Romans 13, Carlson rem inded the Latin American
leader, lest he bal k: “For there is no authority except from God, and
those that exist have been instituted by God.”26
In the decade that followed, Costa Rica, the region’s most stable
government, became increasingly a base for Fellowship operations
and increasingly submissive to God’s instituted authority. “The pro-
gram to expand the activities of the Movement have been ful lled
according to schedule,” the Fel lowship’s Costa Rican key man, a
well-connected lawyer named Juan Edgar Picado, wrote Coe in 1976,
assuring him that the leaders of both the nation’s minority and major-
ity parties had been absorbed into prayer cells. “We have achieved the


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 221
objectives as programmed.” Coe never sent Picado anything but prayer
suggestions, but one of his assistants forwarded Henry Kissinger’s
plan for the protection of U.S. investments in the region, which Pic-
ado promptly made a matter for consideration in his men’s prayers.
Po litical brokers li ke P icado work in a loop of power. The more he did
for the Fellowship, the more the Fellowship did for him, and the more
powerful he became. “Through [a] private world Christian organiza-
tion,” reported a Costa Rican paper, “Picado [has] had the opportu-
nity to meet in Washington with . . . Dwight Eisenhower, John
Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.”27
“Why does God look for one man who will listen to Him? ” asked
the Fellowship’s Studies for Public Men. “What e ect can one man have
in a group, community, city, nation, and world? ” Good question.
What e ect, for instance, did General Suharto hope for when he
turned his army loose on his own people, a half mill ion civil ians
murdered as “com munists” in a year? What e ect did Coe hope for
when in 1971, he helped Suharto organize his rst Indonesian Na-
tional Prayer Breakfast to celebrate the fth anniversary of the March
11, 1966, decree by which he seized power and commenced slaugh-
tering hundreds of thousands of his own people?
The simple answer would be that it was nothing but cynicism,
war by other means, Cold War conquests for the American way. It
was that, but it was also more. The prize was never Indonesia or
Haiti or Costa Rica. The prize was the Promised Land. Not Israel—
like Abram, Coe didn’t seem to care about Zionism one way or the
other. The Fellowship’s Promised Land was as it had been for Jona-
than Edwards: the New World. Edwards could hardly have been a
nationalist before the American nation existed, but Coe was no na-
tionalist, either. The Promised Land was America. Not a destination
but a concept to be perfected and spread around the world. His Jeru-
salem, the New Jerusalem, was an idea, not a place. “My Jerusalem,”
one of Coe’s men wrote to him from a businessmen’s revival he’d
sparked in Billings, Montana.28 By that he meant the Kingdom of
Heaven at home: rst-century Christianity reconstructed, restored,
resurrected on whatever ground you claimed as your own. To raise


222 | JEFF SHARLET
that ancient real ity from the mythological depths—to seize hold of
Christianity’s platonic shadow—Coe’s Fellowship adopted the strat-
egy with which Edwards ended his days, the strategy with which,
centuries later, a decade after Coe reinvented it, the new Christian
Right would claim power in the public sphere. It was simple: Con-
vert the weak. Encircle the strong.
Edwards dreamed of doing so by leading Native Americans to
Christ, thus shaming the colonials into the piety even “savages” could
attain. One day, hoped Edwards, Boston and New York and the
Northampton that had driven him from his pulpit would wake up to
discover a frontier of saintly natives. In the late 1970s, the Christian
Right wedged its way into Washington not by massive national cam-
paigns but through local elections, PTAs, town councils, precinct
captains. One day the Republican Party woke up to discover its base
was Christian, fundamentally inclined, Edwards’s America achieved
at last. The Fellowship’s strategy was—is—sim ilar, but on a global
scale. To work, though, it must be a surprise. Secularism must be
confronted with overwhelming numbers, a host of believers i n every
direction. Unexpected, unimagi nable in this modern age.
Coe used the power of the American ag to win subm ission (if
not delity) to the fundamentalist God of key men in little nations
nobody cared about and big nations nobody understood. There was
Somalia’s Siad Barre, a sel f- styled “Koranic Marxist” for whose alle-
giance in the 1980s Coe won access to Reagan and a military aid bud-
get nearly doubled in size. There was Jonas Savimbi, the brutal rebel
of Angola cultivated by other key men from the United States and
apartheid South Africa.29 There was Brazil’s General Costa e Silva,
the Catholic dictator who acquiesced to a secret cell of Brazilian leg-
islators organized by Coe and subsequently won the good graces of a far
more powerful group of American congressmen, who helped pour a
billion dollars in aid i nto Brazil’s long dictatorship of the generals.30
“I never invite them,” Coe said in 20 07 of his dictator friends. “They
come to me. And I do what Jesus did: I don’t turn my back to any
one. You know, the Bible is full of mass murderers.”31
Coe has always claimed he’s not a nationalist, and it’s true—unl ike


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 223
immigrant Abram, who cared most for America, Coe, Oregon- born,
cares most for the American Christ, His power spread throughout the
world even as the homeland is denied Him in the secular fol ly of
church/state separation. One day, Coe believes—not yet—America
(and Old Europe, too, the Germans and French and Ital ians who
drifted from Christ once their prosperity was assured) will wake up
and nd itself surrounded by a hundred tiny God-led governments:
Fiji, a “model for the nations” under a theocratic regime after 2001, a
Fam ily organiz er boasted to me; and Uganda, made over as an experi-
ment in faith- based initiatives by the Family’s favorite African brother,
the dictator Yoweri Museveni; and Mongolia, where Coe traveled in
the late 1980s to plant the seeds for that country’s postcommunist
laissez- faire regime.
Nobody notices; nobody cares what happens in small places. This is
what George H. W. Bush praised in 1992 as Coe’s “quiet diplomacy.”
In 1966, with the Christian Right just starting to emerge as a vis-
ible front for fundamentalism, Coe decided to go in the opposite di-
rection. “The time has come,” he instructed the Core, “to submerge.”
Thereafter, the Fellowship would avoid at all turns any appearance of
an organization, even as Coe crafted ever more complex hierarchies
behi nd-the- scenes. Business would be conducted on the letterhead of
public men, who would testi fy that Fellowship initiatives were their
own. Finances would be more “man-to-man,” which is to say, o the
books. The Fellowship was going underground.32
The decision was not so much conspiratorial, as it seemed to
those among Abram’s old-timers who responded with confusion, as
ascetic, a humbling of powers. Or, rather, of power’s visible expres-
sion. The Fellowship had long been protected from scrutiny by the
fact of its membership’s elite positions; not since the days of the
muckrakers had the press re al ly pressured the country’s “top men” of
a airs. The same principle that forbade photographers to picture
FDR’s shriveled legs prevented reporters from asking for details
about the private devotions of public men. But such protections were
withering. Assassination, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam
War demanded tougher questions, and it wasn’t just the press that


224 | JEFF SHARLET
was asking them; ordinary citizens called for answers, marched for
them, fought for them. Power—political, cultural—appeared to be
democratizi ng beyond the scope of God’s anointed leaders, just as it
had duri ng the 1930s, when Abram rst conceived of his backroom
brotherhood. The decision to “submerge,” to make the Fellowship
“i nvisible,” was, then, merely a rea rmation of Abram’s founding
principles, recast in response to a new populism, deepened, even, to
suit the needs of Coe’s new internationalism.


Coe announced the decision in a series of letters to the old guard of
Abram’s Europe an leadership: Pierre Harmel, the foreign minister of
Belgium; Edmond Michelet, a former hero of the French resis tance
who’d gradually sul lied his reputation for integrity through a series of
cabinet positions in General de Gaulle’s government; and, in Europe’s
sphere if not its territory, Charles Malik, a Lebanese Christian. To
anyone who is familiar with the United Nations’ Universal Declara-
tion of Human Rights, which Malik helped write, his name may be
the most surprising of all those to emerge from the Fellowship’s ar-
chives. Yet Malik had been party to Abram’s schemes for almost two
decades. In 1949, Abram and a retired U.S. admiral, C. S. Freeman,
waged a secret diplomatic o ensive against Israel. Christian Zionism
as a feature of American fundamentalism was still decades away;
Abram and Freeman—and their strongest ally in the United Nations,
Mal ik—saw the Jewish state as an obstacle to the “gradual readjust-
ment of pol itical and economic control in the Near East in line with
the divine plan as declared in the Bible,” a plan they bel ieved best
served by U.S. power in Lebanon.33 In Israel’s place they proposed an
ostensibly neutral international zone. Of course, to Abram, neutrality
would only lead to Jesus, the “universal inevitable,” as he called his
God. The plan was a total failure but for one detail: Abram’s acquisi-
tion of Malik’s name for his letterhead, an impressive declaration of
elite fundamentalism’s international connections.
The connection seemed to seduce Malik. By the time Coe joined
the Fellowship i n 1959 and began pushing for the evangelization of


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 225
African, Asian, and Latin American leaders, Malik, then the presi-
dent of the thirteenth session of the United Nations’ General Assem-
bly, had veered from his own sense of “universal human rights” to the
Fellowship’s, declaring that Christians had a responsibility to eradi-
cate “tribal and national deities” in Africa and Asia.34 As Coe’s in u-
ence in the Fellowship grew, so did Mali k’s intolerance. Christians,
he declared, “worship a person,” while “they”—everyone else—
“worship an idea”—words that Campus Crusade’s Bill Bright would
convert into mainstream American fundamentalism. Christians, Ma-
lik went on, worshipped Christ’s “strength,” and in the end, Mali k
worshipped strength, indeed, becom ing one of the founders of the
Lebanese Front, the right-wing alliance of Christian militias in Leb-
anon’s long and awful civil war. Mali k’s old internationalist friends
may have been surprised, but it’s hard to imagine that Coe was.
Through Malik’s involvement with the group, his name became pop-
ular with mainstream American fundamentalists like Bright, happy
to add Mal ik’s intellectual credentials to their case.
In 1963, Coe collected a group of other people’s speeches he la-
beled “T houghts on Prayer,” as close to a statement of his beliefs as one
were well represented,
can nd from his early years.35 Malik’s ideas
just one clue that Coe’s ideas about what prayer was for were interna-
tional in scope, despite his own personal mysticism. “T houghts on
Prayer” began with Senator Strom Thurmond railing against the 1962
Supreme Court decision Engle v. Vitale, which outlawed o cial school
prayer. Following Thurmond came the once moderate John Mackay,
president of the Princeton Theological Semi nary, declaring that the
nations of the world could now be divided into three categories: the
secular (increasingly, Western Europe), the “demonic” (the Commu-
nist bloc), and the “covenantal,” an echo of the old “City upon a hill”
thinking that understood the United States not so much as a country
as a holy m ission. But pride of place in “Thoughts on Prayer” belonged
to a speech by Bill Bright, based on Malik’s ideas and delivered to a
1962 Fel lowship prayer breakfast for the governor of Arizona.
Bright, a candy maker before he launched Campus Crusade, was
not a charismatic man. He wore a pencil-thin black mustache that


226 | JEFF SHARLET
made him look like a cartoon, and he was so sti that next to him Pat
Boone, his musical apostle, seemed like a genuine rocker. Bright’s ge-
nius was organi zational discipline. To the world, Campus Crusade was
as simple as Bright’s “Four Spiritual Laws,” a dumbing-down of the
gospel that made even his allies uneasy. Internally, Crusade organizers
were required to adhere to a book-length set of rules for fundamental-
ists that ranged from evangelism techniques to what kind of socks to
wear (argyle was forbidden) to the proper way to pick up girls.
Bright took the same approach to politics. He publicly declared
that Campus Crusade had none, and since Crusade didn’t donate
money to candidates or lobby for speci c legislation, the press ac-
cepted Bright’s contention. Among friends, he told a di erent story.
“The house is on re,” he raged to the Arizona governor’s prayer
breakfast, “and there is no time to x the pictures.” The “house” was
America; the “pictures” were niceties of the Bill of Rights, such as
the First Amendment’s establ ishment clause separati ng church and
state. Citing Malik, Bright declared that only Christians could save
American government from communism. The time had come for
America to embrace 2 Chronicles 6.
What did this mean? That was a question the businessmen and poli-
ticians assembled that spring day in Arizona must have asked, too, for in
the collection of Bible verses bandied about by fundamentalists—as
if scripture was Bartlett’s Quotations—2 Chronicles 6 had little standing.
It was Old Testament, and unlike the prophecies of Isaiah, it could
not, by any stretch of the imagination, be said to foretell Christ. In-
stead, it promised a new political order. It’s the story of Solomon’s
construction of a temple to be the heart of an Israelite nation, to
house the mythic ark of the covenant, “the ark of your might,” as
Solomon called it, that would make his kingdom undefeatable in
battle.
The Jewish temple was destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago, in 70
CE. The ark is now nothi ng but a story. Within Judaism, 2 Chroni-
cles 6 is both history and mystery, scripture to be studied and pon-
dered and parsed for ancient meanings. To Bright, though, guided by
Malik, 2 Chronicles 6 was a bluepri nt for a new God-led nation.


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 227
Bright wanted to rebuild the temple, but in Washington, not Jerusa-
lem. The prayer arm ies he dreamed would be unstoppable were
those of American fundamental ism. To the world, Bright’s Campus
Crusade preached Bible studies for college kids, ice cream socials,
and even Christian dance parties. To the movement, he preached
spiritual war. Like Coe, he anticipated the coming Jesus wave, and
recognized that for the movement to be successful, it would need
men to work the deeper currents. Bright organized the masses; Coe
cultivated the elite. And Coe’s most successful protégé, Charles W.
“Chuck ” Colson, would soon do both, combi ning Bright’s populist
style with Coe’s political sophistication.


At the 1970 National Prayer Breakfast, a Washington lawyer named
James Bell led a seminar for college men who’d been selected by
were told only that they’d
their institutions’ presidents.36 The men
be having breakfast with Richard Nixon, but in Washington, Fellow-
ship brothers handed them from one instructor to the next, alternat-
ing fundamentalist theology with “private” lectures from politicians
and businessmen. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird explained that
Christ had a special message for elites. The former student body
president of Stanford, just back from Vietnam, spoke of the dedica-
tion of the Viet Min h as a model for evangelizing Washington. Paul
Temple, a Standard Oil executive, explained how the Fellowship had
won him access to key men in General Francisco Franco’s govern-
ment in Spain. “Public events” had two purposes, said Bell: (1) to
declare to the world “the relevancy of God in the Establishment’s
life”; (2) to recruit “the up and outer.” The real work of the Fellow-
ship that the college men had been chosen for took place in small
groups, where, away from publicity, men “attack the basic social
problems of America.” Bell didn’t list those problems, but he gave a
hint of his meaning: “All of us cry over our martinis about law and
order, but very few of us do a blooming thi ng about it.”37
The Fellowship did. How? Not through proposing laws or cam-
paigning. Its politics were cultural, in the broadest sense; its method


228 | JEFF SHARLET
the capture of leaders’ souls, the eradication of their egos, the replace-
ment of their will with Christ’s. Their goals were not the rollback of
the 1963 school prayer decision, or antiporn laws, or the “Christian
Amendment,” a perennial proposal to formally dedicate the nation to
Christ. It was bigger, deliberately vague, and so long-term—think
generations—that the Fellowship would never have to answer for its
successes and failures. Coe made the strategy of deferral into Fellow-
ship doctrine. T he distant goal was “a leadership led by God,” said Bell.
“Period.” Few men in the Fellowship expected to see it in their life-
times. But the college boys could get in on it if they felt so called—by
conscience or career. “If you want some doors opened . . . there are
men in government, there are senators who literally nd it their plea-
sure to give any kind of advice, assistance, or counsel.”38
Three years later, Chuck Colson, destined to become one of the
leadi ng theorists of American fundamentalism, would discover as
much as he faced the prospect of prison. Colson was no ordinary
criminal. He was one of Richard Nixon’s closest aides, the smartest,
toughest man on his sta , Nixon’s “hatchet man”: responsible for
Nixon’s “enemies list,” said to be the brai ns behind schemes to re-
bomb the Brookings Institution and hire Teamsters to beat up anti-
war protesters. He was, the court would soon rule, a Watergate
felon, the most powerful of the Nixon “dirty tricksters” to be sent to
prison.
He wouldn’t go alone, though; accompanying him would be the
Jesus of the Fellowship, whom he’d discovered was a good friend,
indeed. The Fellowship, he’d write in his 1976 memoir, Born Again,
comprised a “veritable underground of Christ’s men all through gov-
ernment.” 39 Colson would later claim that it was news to him, but he
was a man who understood the power of friends and the politics of
religion.
A former marine from Massachusetts, a scholarship student at
Brown, and a Harvard lawyer by dint of brain power and no silver
spoons, Colson was (and is) a beefy, square-headed man with thick
black square- shaped glasses. He’s always had the jowls of a bulldog
and a natural sneer like that of late- stage Elvis—the same bloated


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 229
cockiness but without any sex appeal. His job for Ni xon was not to
look pretty but to cut deals with constituencies Republicans had ei-
ther ignored or taken for granted. He brought i n the working-class
vote by playing to poor men’s fears of hippies, feminists, black power,
and, as always, the red tide. And he brought in the religious vote in a
way no American pol itician had attempted to do until then: he ar-
ranged for Nixon to hold church services directly in the White
House, “quasi- spiritual, quasi-political,” he’d call them. Colson rec-
ognized the political power of religion years before he was born again,
before he joined the Fellowship. He brought in a di erent religious
leader every Sunday, a photo op every week that put Nixon’s mug in
the pastor’s o ces of the nation’s most powerful churches. St. Dick
of the Second Chance, the most enduring man on the American po-
litical scene. Billy Graham’s best political buddy; a friendship, Colson
understood, worth more in a changing America than the waning
power of the old city machi nes that had stolen the White House from
Nixon in 1960. The machines were rusting; their troops were mov-
ing to the suburbs; and the suburbs were getting religion. And Col-
son got them, because he understood what they wanted, visible
access. Proof that they mattered. Image was everything, and they
wanted pictures of themselves in the White House, a new visual nar-
rative about the distribution of power in America.
There was something almost democratic about it. Only, Colson
didn’t let the multitudes in; he simply made room for the bosses, the
men who ran the old machines and the new and improved ones. The
unions, grinding into irrelevance, and the Jesus-engi nes, revving,
revving, ready to bring the war home, indeed, and ght it with the
discipline of the Viet Minh, the stealthiness of the Vietcong, and the
revolutionary fervor of rock and roll. What Colson recognized was
that in America the time for sermons was past. A new politics, raw
and emotional, was being born (again), and Colson did what he could
to make it work for the most overcooked, overcalculated president in
history.
So, did this political xer really not know about Abram and Coe
and the dozens of congressmen networked i n prayer cells before he


230 | JEFF SHARLET
faced prison time? Was he unaware of the White House cell that met
weekly under Nixon’s Federal Reserve chief, Arthur Burns, a Jew for
Jesus before anyone had heard of such a notion? Did he not know that
Gerald Ford, the House Republican leader, his soul saved by a
preacher named Billy Zeoli, had for years been in a prayer cell with
Melvin Laird, now Nixon’s secretary of defense?
Well, he says so. White House correspondent Dan Rather found
shy Colson’s sudden discovery of prayer for himself as well as the
rubes. At a 1973 press conference, Rather demanded to know why,
after Colson had left the White House in disgrace, he continued to
pop in on a regular basis. For prayer meetings, answered an embar-
rassed press secretary. Come on, Rather replied, we all know what
goes on when pol iticians get together to talk about their souls. The
press secretary shrugged, Rather gave up, and Colson continued on
his amazing spiritual journey. Later that year, a syndicated columnist
discouraged further i nquiries into Colson’s “u nderground prayer
movement,” lest the press undermine its ability to humbly arrange
for the redemption of “ big” men: “they meet in each other’s homes,
they meet at prayer breakfasts, they converse on the phone. . . .
They genuinely avoid publicity. In fact, they shun it.” 40
Colson wasn’t the only Watergate conspirator to nd solace in
the Fellowship as the indictments began. James W. McCord, the ex-
CIA man who served as “security director” of the Committee to Re-
Elect the President, CREEP (sentenced to two and a hal f to eight
years), received “spiritual undergi rding” from Halverson; Egil “Bud”
Krogh, the chief of the “plumbers” (sentenced to six months), who
tried to silence Daniel Ellsberg, prayed with a Fellowship prayer cell
right before heading o to prison; and Jeb Magruder (sentenced to
four months to ten years), who blamed his participation in the plot
on the liberal ethics he’d been taught at Williams College by the Rev-
erend Will iam Sloane Co n, joined a Fellowship cell just as he was
pleading guilty, albeit only to get “the best possible deal.” But Colson
was the one who actually made something real of his new faith—
indeed, he transformed it.41
Colson’s rst contact with the Fellowship came through Tom


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 231
Phillips, the CEO of the m issile manufacturer Raytheon. Back in
private practice after leaving the White House under a black cloud,
waiting to go to trial, Colson was pumping his Republ ican network
hard for new clients. One such was the International Brotherhood of
Teamsters under Frank “Fitz” Fitzsimmons, the ma a-friendly suc-
cessor to Jimmy Ho a and one of Nixon’s staunchest allies. Nixon
was no friend to worki ng people, but with Colson’s help, he managed
to seduce right-wing union bosses by turning a blind eye toward
their looting of their own treasuries (Nixon ordered the Justice De-
partment to drop its investigations of the Teamsters after Fitz took
over in 1971) in exchange for their muscle at the ballot box and in the
streets, as when Colson asked the Teamsters to crack skulls at an
antiwar rally. (From the Nixon tapes: “Haldeman: Colson’s gonna . . .
do it with the Team sters. Nixon: They’ve got guys who’ll go in and
knock their heads o . Haldeman: Sure. Murderers . . . They’re
gonna beat the [expletive deleted] out of some of these people. And,
uh, and hope they really hurt ’em.”)
Fitz would remain a Colson client well into Colson’s “born again”
phase; the dissonance between his newfound piety and “friends” l ike
Fitz angered liberal Christians, but it wasn’t a problem for the Fel-
lowship. When Phillips raised the subject of Jesus with Colson at
Phillips’s Massachusetts home one summer night in 1973, he didn’t
speak of accountabi lity or Christian ethics; instead, he read Psalms
to Colson and told hi m that Jesus, alone, could make the frightened
dirty trickster feel whole again. Colson wept all the way home, lled
with repentance for his godlessness but not for his crimes. He denies
them to this day, despite having pled guilty. “Had I fought [the
charges] I would have won,” he boasts to fellow fundamentalists.
“But, no, God had a plan for my life.”42
Soon after Colson’s t of weeping, Coe paid him a visit in Wash-
ington. Colson had no idea who he was. Coe simply walked into Col-
son’s law o ce, threw o his raincoat, draped himself sideways over a
leather chair, and informed Colson that Phillips had been sharing his
private, confessional letters about his growing religiosity with Coe. “I
hope you don’t mind,” Coe said. Colson did mind, but “there was such


232 | JEFF SHARLET
kindness in his eyes my resis tance began to melt.” Coe reached across
Colson’s desk, held his hand, and asked him to pray. Thereafter, Col-
son was his brother, a member of the underground, eligible for advice,
assistance, and counsel from all its members, not just Republicans but
Democrats as well—especially a popular l iberal senator from Iowa
named Harold Hughes, well known for his opposition to the Vietnam
War in general and Nixon very much in particular.
Hughes was a perfect frontman for Coe, su ciently liberal that
Coe could claim to have transcended politics, but also so kooky that
his actions were easily manipulated. He was a former truck driver
and a recovered alcoholic who turned to Jesus after spiritualism and
ESP failed him. He was said to have the demeanor of an evangelist
and the eyes of a mystic. In unpublished portions of his memoir,
Hughes wrote that his encounters with UFOs were the source of his
d eep sen se o f p ersp ect ive. Th at “per sp ec t ive,” c omb ined wit h Hu gh es’s
faith—and, perhaps, the diminution of his career after a failed 1972
presidential bid—led Hughes to view Colson, under investigation for
Watergate, as an underdog who needed his help. Hughes vowed to do
all that he could to see that Colson got o lightly; a bout of
on-their-knees prayer the two had u ndertaken had su ciently re-
deemed Colson in Hughes’s eyes. Hughes lobbied hard for his new
“ brother,” as he called Colson, and even broke ranks with Democrats
to keep Watergate pardons in the pipel ine under Ford. Once Colson
was in prison, Coe and Hughes worked hard for his early release. It
worked; Colson ended up serving less than seven months of his one-
to three-year sentence for his role i n Watergate. It wasn’t hard time.
“If you think what you’ve done was done for the right reasons,” he
boasted shortly before he began his sentence, “then the consequences
are easy to live with.” 43
In prison, Colson claims, he gave up politics for God. But in a
June 11, 1974, letter defending his conversion to his parole board,
Colson wrote, “That which I found I could not change or a ect in a
political or managerial way, I found could be changed by the force of a
personal relationship that men develop in a common bond to Christ.”44
Doug Coe, in a letter to the board dated one day later, wrote that


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 233
Colson’s freedom was necessary so that a group of Christian men
could put him to work on a program for “reaching youth” in juvenile
del inquent homes. Upon his release, the two men collaborated on
what would become the model and inspiration for what may well be a
generation or more of “faith- based” governmental activism.
The story of Prison Fellowship—the largest m inistry for prison-
ers in the world, with 50,0 00 employees and volunteers dedicated to
helping convicts become law abiders —has been recounted in short,
inspirational bursts many times since Colson founded it with Coe’s
help and the Fellowship’s money shortly after his own release from
prison i n 1975. So many times, in fact, that it’s not a story anymore
but a myth, a legend of how a brilliant but bad man got God in prison
and came out a babe in Christ; of how the liberals and the cynics
didn’t believe Colson at rst but soon saw the l ight. Say what you will
about Prison Fellowship’s fundamentalist Jesus, the story goes, but
Colson’s Christ works. He saves souls. And, more important, he trans-
forms rapists, murderers, and thieves into docile “followers of Jesus.”
Even nonbelievers would rather ex-cons thump Bibles than their fel-
low se nior citizens.
And yet Prison Fellowship—indeed, compassionate conservatism
writ large—is implicitly political. Colson sees it as a bulwark against
“moral decadence,” he told me, and even as an almost governmental
institution. “Government, theologically, has two major roles: to pre-
serve order—we can only have freedom out of order—and to do jus-
tice, to restrain evil.” The evil that most concerned Colson at the
beginning of his Prison Fellowship days was black radicalism; today it’s
“Islamofascism,” a word that in Colson’s usage functions as a warning
against secularism. “To the extent that we become a decadent society,”
he explained to me, “we feed Islamofascism.” What disturbs Colson
most, though, isn’t “Islamofascism” or black power or any particular
dissident faction; it’s simply the concept of authority being challenged,
Romans 13—a key text for Colson that only begins to outline the
scope of theological and political power, he told me—disobeyed. Dis-
cipline and obedience, Colson writes in Against the Night: Living in the
New Dark Ages, were the foundations of the Roman Empire, just as


234 | JEFF SHARLET
“ biblical obedience” should be—must be—the cornerstone of “the
West’s” stand against the “new barbarians,” whether they come in the
form of Musl ims or secular schoolteachers.
Colson’s message breaks with the classic Christian concept of
redemption through humility, argues Paul Apostolidis, a political
scholar who has studied Colson’s extensive archive of radio broad-
casts. In its place, Colson o ers a “ fundamentalist logic according to
which salvation is dispensed according to obedience—and, if neces-
sary, outright humiliation—before authority.” Colson fragments and
then co-opts that which could otherwise be a potentially anarchic
class of the disenfranchised. In keeping with the principles of evan-
gelicalism, the same as those of compassionate conservatism, Prison
Fellowship works on a one- by-one model, transforming adherents of
“radical Islam” and other threats to the Republic—black power ac-
tivists, white power supremacists, plain old thugs, prisoners who get
an education—into an atomized class of isolated individuals, praying
to be “ broken” by God, to be “used” by His Son, to be “nothing” be-
fore the Holy Ghost.45
If this strikes men who’ve already been broken by the state as just
one more humiliation, Colson reminds them that he o ers the same
counsel to CEOs and congressmen. Prisoners and senators, he tells
convicts, are equal in God’s eyes—a nice sentiment that neatly sepa-
rates those who accept it from the realities of a world in which the
power is in somebody else’s hands. Had Colson directed his new pious
energies at any other segment of society—had he tried to convert
union members, for instance, or joined Bill Bright at Campus
Crusade—he real ly might have been cruci ed. But Colson chose the
lowest of the low, men and a few women on whom it has long been
acceptable to experiment. Colson experimented, bludgeoning his way
through bureaucracy with his political skills and his new Fel lowship
political allies to set up fundamentalist ministries in prisons around
the country. A great story, according to conventional thinking. Col-
son must mean it; what could he have to gain from prisoners?
Colson knew the answer to that one. First there was a best-
selling book, and then another one, and now there are literally doz-


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 235
ens, books spinning out of Prison Fellowship every year. There was a
movie, a comic book, and the secular press, which was not so secular
after all when o ered evidence of genuine jailhouse conversions.
Even as the mainstream media fretted about the risi ng power of the
new Moral Majority and the televangelists so bent on beaming their
message, the mainstream media itself beamed Colson’s message.
What did Colson have to gain from the prisoners? The press didn’t
bother to ask, because it was the press that supplied him with his re-
ward: more power than he’d ever had worki ng for mean old Richard
Nixon. “The kingdom of God will not arrive on Air Force One,” he
has declared, dismissive of his old obsession with party politics.
What he meant by this, he told me, was that he had learned through
fundamentalism to pursue pure power, not partisanship. Now, Colson
boasts of his access to leaders arou nd the world through Prison Fel-
lowship, strongmen who would have looked at him as a diplomatic
challenge in his White House days. Today, according to the elite
evangelicals who responded to a survey by the sociologist D. Michael
Lindsay, Colson has more political in uence than James Dobson or
Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention.46 In a 1980 letter
to Coe, Colson puts it as plainly as possible. He’s describing a Fel-
lowship cell in Bonn with which he had met at Coe’s request. “It is a
fabulous group of men. In fact, I’ve never met any group quite like it.
I think we should arrange to use them as a model for leadership
groups around the world. We’d better do it in a hurry, however, be-
fore they lead the next Nazi takeover out of Germany.”47
And yet the Jesus at the heart of Prison Fellowship is not the com-
monplace Christ of mainstream evangelicalism, but a distinct entity
growing out of Colson’s political past and his subsequent philosophi-
cal passions. Colson’s work is shot through with a cagey regard for
Plato’s “noble lie,” by which the elite must govern masses who don’t
know what’s good for them, and a reverence for “ leadership” as a
semimystical quality bequeathed to a small elect who already possess
the ki nd of con dence others might call arrogance. The idealization of
strength that manifests itself even in Colson’s peculiar sense of humor
is the foundation of Colson’s faith. “We should look at our churches


236 | JEFF SHARLET
exactly the way you look at Marine Corps training for combat because
that’s what it is!” he instructs his followers. “ That is how we are prepar-
ing today for the spiritual combat in which we live, and we should take
it every bit as seriously as soldiers in the Marines preparing to go to
war.”48 His rst literary step as a fol lower of Christ was not the Bible
but some of the mor e overlooked pages of C. S . Lew is, in which L ewis
decries “men without chests.” Colson preaches Lewis’s “manly” Christ
with the moral authority of a man who does, after al l, dedicate his life
to prisoners, and the political savvy of one who has been in the
trenches of the culture wars since before the battle had a name. That
combination allows Colson to escape the scrutiny a orded James
Dobson or the Southern Baptist Convention.
It has also resulted in what might be best understood as a powerful
new religious movement. Faith-based initiatives, compassionate conserva-
tism, and servant-leadership, a term popular with evangelical politicians
who insist that they consolidate power the better to help widows and
orphans, can all be traced back to the model of Colson’s Prison Fel-
lowship, a radical revision of the “Social Gospel” of the early twenti-
eth century. Evangel icals have always been at the forefront of aid
work with the poor and the su ering, but they traditionally came
from the left wing of the movement—the branch that seemed to die
with William Jennings Bryan, the “Great Commoner,” back in 1925. In
the years that followed, evangelicals, and especially fundamentalists—
elite and populist—disdained “good works,” aid to the poor, as ir-
relevant to salvation. The only help the poor needed was Jesus. Colson
thought so, too, but he understood that for people to accept the rule of
Christ, they’d need some prep work. But it wasn’t his idea; it was
Coe’s.
To understand where it came from, we must go back several
years to 1968, the morning of April 4, when an assassin’s bullet
slammed i nto Martin Luther King Jr. while he stood on a motel bal-
cony in Memphis. King was a Christian like Coe. Like Coe, he be-
lieved in the “ beloved community,” the Kingdom of God realized
here on Earth, and like Coe, he was willing to work with those who
didn’t share his beliefs. But that is where the similarities end. Coe


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 237
preaches a personal, private subm ission; King fought and died in
public for collective liberation. Coe believes Jesus has a special mes-
sage for the powerful; K ing believed God has a special message for
everyone. Most important, in 1968, as Coe was constricti ng the al-
ready narrow vision of the Fellowship, King was doing as he had
done his whole life: broadening his dream. K ing died just as he was
raising his voice to speak out not only for racial justice but also for
economic justice. He would pursue it not through private prayer
cells but through public solidarity. And when James Earl Ray mur-
dered him, m illions of Americans expressed their sol idarity with the
dead not through polite mourning but through fury.
Following King’s murder, the Fellowship’s city on a hill, Wash-
ington, D.C., burned. More than 200 res roared throughout the
capital. White suburbanites in Arlington and Alexandria looked
across the river and saw a sunrise at midnight, a terrifying new day
dawning. Many white residents of the District had feared it for years.
White ight from Washington began not with the civil rights move-
ment but in the 1940s; it actually slowed down in the 1960s, but
only because so many white people had already retreated to the sub-
urbs. Even so, between 1960 and 1970, those suburbs grew in popu-
lation by 61 percent, putting their numbers far higher than those of
Washington proper, which remained static at around 80 0,000. In
1967, the city got its rst black mayor since Reconstruction, the aptly
named Walter Washi ngton; but in 1968, twelve dead in the street
after clashes between the people and the police (and then the Na-
tional Guard), whole neighborhoods smolderi ng like they were part
of Hanoi, the city seemed doomed.49
For Coe, this would not do. The Fellowship’s Christian Embassy
remained in the heart of the city. It had to be saved. Perhaps, too,
Coe felt some modicum of guilt; even as he and his underlings
courted the strongmen of Africa, he had paid almost no attention to
African Americans. A letter to Coe during his early days in Washing-
ton suggests that his neglect was a conscious choice: “Are any of your
[converts] Negroes,” wrote a friend from Oregon, “or are you still
discriminatory?”50 Coe did not bother to answer. But i n 1968, faced


238 | JEFF SHARLET
with what appeared to be revolution—Stokely Carmichael, dressed
like a guerrilla commander to promote his book Black Power: The Poli-
tics of Liberation in America, told Howard University, “I’ve come to
Washington to stay, baby . . . this is our town.”—Coe turned the
Fellowship’s considerable resources toward those closest at hand,
Washington’s African Americans.51
Working with Halverson, a group of wealthy white businessmen,
a black preacher named William Porter, and a former professor of
Carmichael’s, John Staggers, Coe oversaw the recruitment of “street
dudes,” black ex-cons, to become a paramilitary security force called
the Black Bu ers —the Fellowship’s answer to black power. Like the
Panthers, the Bu ers patrolled inner-city streets. They even wore
dashikis, bought in bulk on Coe’s orders. But their African garb and
their two-way radios were paid for by white businessmen, and Coe’s
counselors trained them to preach not black power but black capital-
ism. “They called us a spy group,” remembers Reverend Porter, the
rst supervisor of the program, “ because we’d nd out what was
happeni ng”—in terms of black militance—“and shut it down if it
happened.”52
Drawing funds from the city government and the U.S. Labor
Department (through the intervention of Fellowship brother Con-
gressman Al Q uie, who at the time was spearheading the GOP at-
tack on federal aid for schools), the Bu ers were supposed to be
secular. They weren’t. Everything they did—from running after-
school martial arts classes for boys and “charm school” for girls, to
monitoring street corners for m ilitance, to violently enforci ng disci-
pline within their own ranks—was ltered through the fundamen-
talism of Jesus plus nothing.
“The biggest problem that blacks face in this country today hap-
pens to be the black man himself,” Staggers would say. “Racial con-
icts do exist in our country. Their solutions are not to be found in
the passing of laws and other kinds of legislation, but only when man
accepts God totally in his life.”53
That was the idea the Bu ers began with in 1968, the rst seeds of
what would become compassionate conservatism. The Bu ers were a


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 239
fundamentally right-wing organization—authoritarian, violent, and
dedicated to the maintenance of established power—but they some-
times functioned l ike left-wing radicals, acting as literal bu ers be-
tween black Washingtonians and the nearly all-white police force.
About the police, they harbored no illusions. “If you ever have a con-
frontation with the police,” Reverend Porter counseled the Bu ers,
“make sure there’s ve or six of you. Don’t start nothing but defend
yourself. He might kill one of you, but make sure you get him.”
In the end, Coe got them. Not long after they were up and run-
ning, Coe installed a white sta er from the evangelical group Young
Life in authority over the Bu ers. Revered Porter realized that the
Bu ers were losing local control; the goal, he suspected, was to fold
them into Young Life as a diversity program the almost all-white
or ganization could boast about. He couldn’t be sure; Coe surrounded
his intentions with secrecy. Sec recy, in fact, was o cial policy. Coe
and the white businessmen who nanced the Bu ers wanted tight
control of the group, but they didn’t want credit. Instead, they
wanted to create the impression of spontaneous outbreaks of black
submission (to Christ) instead of black power. They thought it might
catch on. When it didn’t, the nanciers pulled the plug after not
much more than a year, satis ed t hat order had at least been re-
turned to Washington. Compassionate conservatism, beta version, was
complete.
Staggers went to work for the Republican senator Richard Lugar.
Coe began staking out suburban properties for the Fellowship, and in
keeping with his new Ozzy and Harriet white- ight ethos, began
calling it the Family. The Bu ers drifted apart, and some went back
to prison. Porter moved on to a pulpit in Maryland, although he kept
attending Coe’s inner-city prayer breakfasts until he nally grew
tired of what he heard as Coe’s broken-record message of “reconcili-
ation” without substance. Porter was a theologically conservative
Christian. He believed in prayer. But he also bel ieved in power, and
he quit the Fellowship—or the Fam ily—when he realized that the
men who ran it would never really share any with a brother who had
nothing to trade, not even a whispered threat of revolution.


240 | JEFF SHARLET
And Colson? He was just getting started. At the beginning, he
seemed to enjoy boasting of his new Fam ily connections, the smooth-
est political machine he’d ever encountered. But he soon learned the
art of quiet diplomacy, Coe- style. He Vietnamized. In 1977, he ap-
peared on Pat Robertson’s 700 Clu b program with his newest brother
in Christ: Eldridge Cleaver, a founder of the Black Panthers. On the
run in revolutionary Algeria, lost and far from home, Cleaver experi-
enced a vision of Jesus that would have been immediately recogniz-
able to the Family. “ I was looking up at the moon,” he’d later recount,
“and I saw the man in the moon and it was my face.” Then the face
began to morph, becoming rst one of Cleaver’s strongman heroes,
then another. From Cleaver himself to Castro to Mao to the stron-
gest man of all, Jesus Christ, glowering down from the African
night. Cleaver fell to his knees and wept, praying the Twenty-third
Psalm, com mitted to memory as a child, and then the tears dried and
Cleaver was ready at last to repent for black power—to surrender to
American justice and the American Jesus.54
Cleaver, Colson told Pat Robertson, had joined a prayer cel l with
him, former senator Harold Hughes—by then worki ng full time for
the Fam ily—and Tommy Tarrant, a former Klansman in prison for
bombing a Jewish family. Cleaver, declared Colson, was reconciled.
In 1980, Cleaver, Panther no more, endorsed Ronald Reagan.