Notes

Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (William B. Eerdmans, 1991), a pithy sum-
mation from a scholar sympathetic to evangelicalism. It su ces so long as we
remember that anger takes many forms, and that the “something” a fundamen-
ta list is opposed to is not, in his or her mind at least , nec essarily modernity, but
sin, whether de ned as sex outside of marriage or the d isobedience to God
many fundamentalists believe is implicit in managed economies.


1. IVANWALD

1. In this chapter, I use the full names of men who held leadership positions
at Ivanwald. Such men are activists, and some, such as Gannon Sims, built on
their Ivanwald experiences to develop careers in government. (Gannon be-
came a spokesman for the Depar tment of State’s O ce to Monitor and Com-
bat Human Tra cking.) Men who were not in leadership or government
positions I identify only by their rst names. “Zeke” is a pseudonym for a man
who I fear m ight face repercussions for h is role in introducing me to the Fam-
ily. In the years since then, several former members have contacted me with
accounts of ostracization and even retaliation for various actions, and while
I’ve no way of con rming these stories, there’s no need to unduly expose
Zeke to the possibility of similar responses.
2. A note on notes: In this chapter and throughout The Family, I use endnotes
to identify archival sources and to provide sources for h istorical events that
may not be well known. Chapters 4–9, which depend largely on historical
research, are extensively endnoted, but where I rely on personal experience
(chapters 1, 9, 14) or directly reference interviews (chapters 10–14), or on
publicly available sources identi ed within the text (chapters 12–14), I gener-
ally refrain from notes. As for this account of Ivanwald: like several of the
brothers, I openly kept a journa l. When writing about a conversation that had
occurred earlier, I often asked individual brothers for their recollections. This
was not “undercover.” Although I had no inkling of a book about the Family or
fundamentalism at the time, I told the brothers I was a writer, the publications
I’d written for, and that I was working on a book about unusual religious com-
munities (Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, with Peter Manseau [Free Press,
2004]). A few documentary notes in chapters 4–10 identif y the only general
collection in which the relevant documents can be found. I made my rst,
brief archival research tr ip in late 2002, after I had decided to write about
Ivanwald but before I had even imagined this book. Since magazine fact checkers


NO TES| 395
are more interested in actual evidence than my assu ra nces that memo x can be
found in folder y in an archive, I made Xerox copies instead of notes for future
researchers. When I returned to the main archive of the Family at the Billy
Graham Center at Wheaton College with a book in mind, I made note of ap-
propriate ling numbers. In total I or my research assistants reviewed well
over 60,00 0 pages of primary-sou rce docu ments, a nd ma de copies of around
5,000 pages; I lack folder numbers for a very few pages, and those I have cop-
ies of.
3. Senator Brownback, Senator Pryor, and Representative Wolf told me of
their involvement in interviews. I met Senator Ensign wh ile he was living in
the C Street House, a former convent maintained as a group home for con-
gressmen by a Family- a liated organization, and Senators Grassley and Nel-
son and Representative Pitts are well represented in the Family’s archives.
Senator Cobur n told the reporter Tom Hess of his residence in C Street House
and his participation in a Family cell for a feature in James Dobson’s Citizen
magazine, “ ‘There’s No One I’m Afraid to Challenge,’ ” accessed at http://
www .family .org/ cforum/ citizenmag/ coverstory/ a0012717 .cfm on October
10, 2004. Senator Thune cited the Family’s leader, Doug Coe, and a house the
Family maintains on Capitol Hill in a Christianity Today interview with Collin
Hansen ( http:// www .christianitytoday .com/ ct/ 2005/ februaryweb-only/ 42
.0a.html, accessed Januar y 7, 2007). Most of the rest of these men were spo-
ken of as members by Ivanwalders and se nior men in the Family—for in-
stance, Steve South, former se nior counsel for Senator Don Nickles, told me
of Senator Domenici’s involvement, con rmed in the Family’s archives ( le
15, box 354, collection 459, Papers of the Fellowship Foundation, Billy Gra-
ham Center Archives [hereafter cited as BGCA]). I’ve no reason to doubt
these claims; members of the Family are scrupulous about distinguishing be-
tween members, those who have joined a prayer cell or made some other com-
mitment to the work, and friends, those with whom they’re comfortable
working. Representative Eric Cantor, for instance, a Jewish Republican f rom
Virginia, is just a friend. Representative McI ntyre, who joined Representative
Wolf ’s prayer cell, is a member. This is only a partial list. The Fam ily believes
in a concentr ic model of holiness, with a few key men close to Ch rist at the
center (Representative Pitts, for instance), another circle of active supporters
farther out (Senator Grassley), followed by one of casual allies (such as Senator
Pryor) who are mostly unaware of the group’s inner workings.
Thurmond: I nterview, Cliford B. Gosney, former Family member. Thur- 4
mond’s association was among the Family’s most long- standing, stretching


396 | N O T E S
across the decades. On October 30, 1987, Family leader Doug Coe sent to
Representative Tony Hall, a Democrat from Ohio who moved rightward un-
der the Family’s guidance, a sermon preached by Thur mond to a meeting of
the weekly Senate Prayer Break fast. The subject was “integrity” and “the un-
raveling of the fabric of our society,” to which Thurmond—a segregationist
who refused to publicly acknowledge his African-American daughter—
responded with four suggestions on becoming “men and women of integrity.”
Folder 3, box 166, collection 459, BGCA. Talmadge and Robertson: Annual Re-
port of the Fellowship Foundation, 1962, folder 2, box 563, collection 459,
BGCA. Ford: Paul Wilkes, “Prayer: The Search for a Spiritual Life in Washing-
ton and Elsewhere: A Country on Its Knees?” New York Times, December 22,
1974. Besides Laird and Ford, the other two members of the cell were Repub -
lican congressmen John Rhodes, a Bar ry Goldwater protégé from Arizona,
and Al Quie of Minnesota, an early opponent of a rmative action. The four
had been organized into a Family prayer group during the late 1960s. Rehn-
quist: Doug Coe to Panayiotis Touzmazis, Apr il 24, 1974, folder 11, box 200,
collection 459, BGCA. And then there are the jocks: Bu alo Bills legend and
vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp; Seattle Seahawks NFL Hall of Famer
Steve Largent, one of the ercest ideologues of the Republican Revolution
of 1994; and Oklahoma Sooners Orange Bowl champ J. C. Watts, the
highest-ranking black Republican in congressional histor y. According to Bob
Jones I V, Watts prefer red Campus Crusade’s related e ort, Ch ristian Em-
bassy (“The Church Inside the State,” World, October 12, 1996), but when I
interviewed him in 2003, he told me he prayed with “the Prayer Breakfast
people” as well.
5. NCCL News Letter, April 1948. Christian Leadership News, October 1950.
Collection 459, BGCA.
6. On July 15, 1965, the Family’s founder, Abraham Vereide, boasted in an
address to a prayer meeting that in Generalissimo Franco’s Spain, initially
hostile to the Protestant Family, “there are secret cells, such as the American
embassy, the Standard Oil o ce, allowing [our men] to move practically any-
where.” No box number, collection 459, BGCA. 350: D. Michael Lindsay, “Is
the National Prayer Breakfast Surrounded by a ‘Christian Ma a’? Religious
Publicity and Secrecy Within the Corridors of Power,” Journal of the American
Academy of Religion 74, no. 2 (June 2006): 390– 419.
7. Quoted in Stephen Scott, “Jesus’ Name Has Drawing Power for Prayer
Breakfast,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, April 14, 2001.
8. The Fellowship Foundation’s 2005 990 tax form showed o cial income of


NO TES| 397
nearly $17 million and program expenses of nearly $14 million. Among the
expenses, $900,000 went to the National Prayer Breakfast, a Fellowship-
produced event that appears to the world to be an o cial function of the fed-
eral government. (When I attended in 2003, I got my press credentials through
the White House.) I n 2005, the Fellowship actually turned a pro t on the
Breakfast, taking in $47,000 more than it cost. In “Showing Faith in Discre-
tion,” Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2002, the journalist Lisa Getter noted
that the Family has paid for overseas congressional junkets and even loaned
congressmen money.
9. Ba kke’s deal is docu mented in Deepak Gopinath, “The Divine Power of
Pro t,” Institutional Investor, March 1, 2001. Bakke isn’t conservative in the
conventional sense—he’s a major Democratic donor—but he has made a ca-
reer out of deregulation and anti-union management, and he’s used his wealth
to create the Harvey Fellows Program, which aims to train an “expanding
beachhead of evangelicals in the Amer ican elite” and “the corr idors of power”
through funds for graduate students who agree to sign a statement of faith. D.
Michael Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American
Elite (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 80.
10. Getter, “Showing Faith in Discretion.”
11. Lindsay, “Is the National Prayer Breakfast Surrounded by a ‘Christian Ma-
a’?” Lindsay, a fellow at Princeton University’s Department of Sociology du r-
ing the period of this study a nd now on the faculty at Rice Un iversity, enjoyed
tremendous ac cess to what he refers t o as the “bac kstage” of Family leadership of
his study of the “Christian Ma a,” in which he a sserts that the Family is not se-
cret but private. Secrecy, he notes, “often protects the interests of the power-
ful.” Of course, so may privacy when maintained by elites who use it to shield
networks of in uence from public transparency. The di erence between secrecy
and privacy, Lindsay argues, is that those who are not in on secrets—especially
secrets about power—resent them, whereas those excluded from a private as-
sociation of elites don’t mind, since such “privacy” appeals to trad itions of defer-
ence to the elite. Thus, the “privacy” used by the Fa mily to protect the privilege
of its members, Lindsay argues, is “legitimated” by the public status of the Fa m-
ily’s members. Such are the ju sti cations for power by the ivory tower so often
derided as too leftist by conservative pundits.
12. Monday Associates Meeting, January 23, 1995, Burnett Thompson pre-
siding.
13. David Kuo, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction (Free
Press, 2006), pp. 21–24.


398 | N O T E S
14. Doug Coe and General Vessey : Minutes of a luncheon held at the Cedars, the
Family’s Arlington, Virginia headquarters, October 19, 1983, collection 459,
BGCA; no box number. The luncheon was organized by Aquilino E. Boyd,
the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega’s ambassador to the United States.
Also in attendance was an inner-circle member of the F amily na med Herb El-
lingwood, a longtime Reagan aide who had been responsible for “psychologi-
cal warfare” against student protestors in California. In 1970, Ellingwood was
one of the small circle of men who laid hands on Reagan and heard a voice,
allegedly God’s, prom ising Reagan the White House. Paul Kengor, God and
Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (Regan Books, 2004), pp. 135–36. When Rea -
gan ascended t o 1600 Pen nsylvan ia Avenue, he t ook Ellingwood with him as a
deputy counsel. Ellingwood’s advice? “Economic salvation and spiritual salva-
tion go side by side.” John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right
Nation: Conservative Power in America (Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 331–32. Lugar
et al.: Telegram to General Manual Antonio Noriega, January 25, 1984, col-
lection 459, BGCA. Casanova and Martinez: Getter, “Showing Faith in Discre-
tion.” Military aid to Honduras: Elaine Sciolino, “U.S. Said to Link Latin Aid to
Support for Contras,” New York Times, May 18, 1987.
15. Quoted in Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power, p. 36.
16 Ibid., p. 35.
17. Paul N. Temple to James F. Bell, October 7, 1976, collection 459, BGCA;
no box number. Phillips gave $30,000 toward the cost of the Cedars; Stone, a
self-help author of get-rich-quick books who was also fa mous for having given
$2 million to Nixon’s 1968 and 1972 campaigns, donated $100,000. Temple,
a for mer Standard Oil executive, gave $150,000, while the oilman Harold
McClure gave $100,000. Other nancing for the Cedars came from: William
Lo in, $150,000; James Millen, $150,000; Mike Myers (not the actor),
$150,000; Otto Zerbe, $100,000; the PGA pro Jim Hiskey, $100,000; and
Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital, $83,000. The president of a local bank
who was also a member of a Fam ily prayer group ar ranged for a loan up to
$400,000 (Temple to Bell, January. 6, 1977).
18. Thomas: Kuo, Tem pting F aith, p. 92; Durenberger: Edward Walsh, “Sena-
tor Goes Public with Pr ivate Life,” Washington Post, March 2, 1986, and Tony
Bouza, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire: Corruption, Decadence, and the
American Dream (Da Capo, 1996), p. 102; Watt: Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of
Power, “Is the National Prayer Break fast Surrounded by a ‘Christian Ma a’?”
19. New chosen and throwaway religion are ordinary phrases in the daily ver-
nacular of the Family, no more than variations on contemporar y evangelical


NO TES| 399
rhetoric, but the din of the vox populi—the voice of the people— I found as far
back as an account of the rst National Prayer Breakfast (then known as the
Presidential Prayer Breakfast) held shortly after Eisenhower’s inauguration in
1953, by the then-Senate chaplain Dr. Frederick Brown Harris. Dr. Harris is
quoted at length in a hagiography of the Family’s founder by the Family evan-
gelist Norman Gr ubb: Modern Viking: The Story of Abraham Vereide, Pioneer in
Christian Leadership (Zondervan, 1961), p. 131. The existence of a published
biography may seem like a paradox for a group so bent on invisibility, but the
early Fam ily leaders assumed a lack of public scrutiny as the due of their elite
status. It wasn’t until the antiestablishment revolt of the late 1960s that Ver-
eide’s successor, Coe, led the group “underground.”
20. Lynette Clemetson, “Meese’s I n uence Looms Large in Today’s Judicial
Wa rs,” New York Times, August 17, 2005. Meese is credited with moving into
the mainstream the idea of a jurisprudence of original intention—the basis for a
conservative judicial philosophy that rejects worker protections, the right to
privacy, women’s reproductive rights, and queer rights.
21. Ben Daniel, a minister in the Presbyteria n Church (U.S.A.) and a former
member of the Family, interviewed former residents of Potomac Point for a
study of what he views as the Fam ily’s “spiritual abuse”: “A former resident of
Potomac Point told me about her nine months there. Having been encouraged
to share her every thought and to expose her secrets and sins, she found her
confessions and con dences used against her when she would ask questions or
resist Fellowship authority. As the Fellowship exerted control over every as-
pect of her life she became angry and bitter. Something broke inside her.
‘When I came to Potomac Point I struggled with self-esteem issues,’ she told
me. ‘While I was there my low self-esteem moved from a personal to a spiri-
tual level.’ When, at last, she expressed a desire to leave, she was told that,
without the teaching and company of the Fellowship, her well- being would
disintegrate. She became terri ed of life on the outside.” The wife of a Fel-
lowship member describes her role in the Family: “I’m always third. The Fel-
lowship comes rst in my husband’s life. Then our ch ildren. Then me.”
“Dysfu nction in the Fellowship F amily,” http:// bend aniel .org/?p= 110 ac-
cessed November 27, 2007.
22. Congressmen who have lived there include former representatives Steve
Largent (R., Oklahoma), Ed Bryant (R., Tennessee), and John Elias Baldacci
(D., Maine). The house’s eight congressman-tenants each paid $600 per
month in rent for use of a town house that includes nine bathrooms and ve
living rooms. Lara Jakes Jordan, “Religious Group Helps Lawmakers With


400 | N O T E S
Rent,” Associated Press, April 20, 2003. When the Los Angeles Times asked
then-resident Representative Bart Stupak, a pro-life Democrat from Michi-
gan, about the proper ty, he replied, “We sor t of don’t talk to the press about
the house.” Getter, “Showing Faith in Discretion.”
23. On October 29, 2007, a reporter for the Norwegian da ily Dagbladet, Tore
Gjerstad, who was following up on Norwegian con servatives’ connections to
the Family, managed to confront Coe with some of the language about Hitler
I’ve quoted. Coe, Gjerstad told me, responded, “No one who really knows me
would think I admire Lenin, Hitler, Stalin. They were evil men. But they were
successful when it came to power . . . All power is with Jesus. You can choose
to go aga inst him, but you can never have more power than what he gives you.”
24. Carter’s contacts with Doug Coe, whom he told the sociologist D. Mi-
chael Lindsay (“Is the National Prayer Breakfast Surrounded by a ‘Christian
Ma a’?”) had been a “very importa nt person” in his life, predated his presi-
dency. In a 1972 brie ng to the Family’s leadership, Coe wrote that Carter was
involved with the Family’s mission to Brazil’s dictatorial government. Folder 1,
box 362, collection 459, BGCA. That same year, the Fam ily’s chief Central
American associate, a Costa Rica n lawyer named Jua n Edgar Picado, hosted
Carter in Costa Rica; in 1976, Picado boasted to his Centra l American allies
that Carter wou ld increase aid to the region, which he did. It was Ca rter, not
Rona ld Reagan, who began the United States’ support for El Salvador’s brutal
regime. (Howa rd Siner, “Attorney Knows Carter as Smart, K ind Friend,” San
Jose News, Ma rch 4, 197 7.) Nixon kept his personal dista nce from the Family
until after his presidency, when, according to Lindsay, he “min istered ” Rea-
gan’s national security adviser, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, into a Family prayer
cell in the wake of McFa rlane’s d isgrace as an Ira n-Contra conspirator.
25. Folder 1, box 166, collection 459, BGCA.


2. EXPERIMENTAL RELIGION

1. Doug Coe, “The Person of Chr ist, Pt. 4,” videotape of an address given to
a conference of presidents of evangelical organizations, Navigators Great Hall
Productions, January 15, 1989.
2. There are ma ny great biographies of Edwards, but my method of research
for this account of his life was to rely primarily on original sources, which I tried
to read through the lter of my own half- secula r m ind and as I imagine a Fa mily
man might, attuned to power and relationships. I depended on the two-volume


NO TES| 401
Works of Jonathan Edwards, with a Memoir by Sereno E. Dwight, ed. Edward Hickman
(F. Westley and A. H. Davis, Stationers Court, 1834); Works of Jonathan Edwards,
particularly vol. 2, Religious A ections, ed. John E. Smith (Yale University
Press, 1959); vol. 7, The Life of David Brainerd, ed. Norman Pettit (ibid., 1985);
and vol. 16, Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn (ibid., 1998);
Samuel Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards,
rst published in 1765 and collected— along with a useful portrait by Peter
Gay, “Jonathan Edwa rds: An American Tragedy,” and two ne poems about
Edwards by Robert Lowell—in David Levin, ed., Jonathan Edwards: A Pro le
(Hill and Wang, 1969). For a full accou nt by a sympathetic biographer, I rec-
ommend George Marsden’s authoritative Jonathan Edwards (Yale University
Press, 2003). I also found useful portions of Philip J. Gura’s brief biography,
Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical (Hill and Wa ng, 20 05); Perry Miller’s
classic portrait of the Puritan mood, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth
Century (Macmillan, 1939); Jon Butler’s investigation of the eccentricities of
American religion, Awash In A Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People
(Harvard University Press, 1990); Ann Taves’s history of religious enthusi-
asm, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from
We sley to Ja mes (Princeton University Press, 1999); Nancy Carlisle, “Pursuing
Re nement in Rural New England, 1750 –1850: An Exhibition Review,” Win-
terthur Portfolio 3 4, no. 4 (19 99): 239 –49; Ava Chamberlain, “Bad Books and
Bad Boys: The Transformation of Gender in Eighteenth-Century Northa mp -
ton, Massachu setts,” New England Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2002): 179–203; Cham-
berlain, “The Immaculate Ovum: Jonathan Edwards and the Con struction of
the Female Body,” William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 2 (200 0): 289 –322; Sa n-
dra Gustafson, “Jonathan Edwards and the Reconstruction of ‘Feminine’
Speech,” American Literary History 6, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 185–212; and
“Jonathan Edwa rds in 2003,” a special issue of Theology Matters, “A Publication
of Presbyterians for Faith, Family, a nd Min istry” published in November/
December of 2003 and edited by, among others, Richard Lovelace, a mentor
of sorts to Doug Coe’s son Jonathan, and the inspiration for Jonathan House,
an Ivanwald-like residence for young men on Capitol Hill in Washington.


3. THE REVIVAL MACHINE

1. Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on
the Eve of the Civil War (Harper and Row, 1965), p. 79.


402 | N O T E S
2. Charles G., Finney, The Original Memoirs of Charles G. Finney, ed. Garth M.
Rosell and Richard A. G. Dupuis (Zondervan, 1989), p. 66. The rst edition
of Finney’s memoirs was published in 1876; the edition I rely on most is pub-
lished by one of the biggest evangelical publishers of today but is a scholarly
work in the sense that it re ects the text as Finney intended it, not as his
nineteenth-century publishers presented it. Finney, who in his old age dic-
tated these memoirs to a former student, is one of the great underappreciated
memoirists of American letters. His memoirs are not high art, but they are
storytelling in a distinct American vein, and I make extensive use of them in
this chapter. Biographical details are taken from the memoirs unless other-
wise indicated.
3. Ibid., jacket blurb.
4. William C. Cochran, “Charles Grandison Finney Memorial Address” (J.
B. Lippincott, 1908).
5. Richard Hofstadter, Anti- Intellectualism in American Life (Alf red A. Knopf,
1963), p. 92.
6. Marianne Perciaccante, Calling Down Fire: Charles Grandison Finney and
Revivalism in Je erson County, New York, 1800–1840 (State University of New
York Press, 2003), p. 38.
7. I don’t mea n to suggest that the arguments of Finney scholars such a s Wil-
liam G. McLoughlin, Keith J. Hardman, Allen C. Guelzo, John L. Hammond,
and others miss the point. Indeed, from their close readings of
nineteenth-century theological disputes they derive great insights into the
evolution of Amer ican religion and politics. (Of particular interest in the lat-
ter regard are Paul E. Johnson’s A Shop keeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in
Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 [Hill and Wang, 1978], and “God and Mam-
mon,” chapter 7 of Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America,
1815–1846 [Oxford University Press, 1991], both of which are among the rare
works of academic specialization that are also splendid reading.) Rather, I
mean to simply single out the strand of Finney’s life that I believe is most rel-
evant to the genealogy of American fundamentalism as it has appeared in re-
cent times.
8. For a discussion of the “machiner y” of revival and its critics, see “The
Businessmen’s Revival,” chapter 1 of John Corr igan’s Business of the Heart: Reli-
gion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press,
2002). Mark A. Noll provides a succinct description of Finney’s “new mea-
sures” in A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (William B.
Eerdmans, 1992; reprint edition, 2003), pp. 176–77.


NO TES| 403
9. Charles Chauncey, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in
N e w - E n g l a n d (Rogers and Fowle, 1743), p. 218, cited in Eric Leigh Schmidt,
Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2000), p. 71.
10. Finney, “Human Government,” in Finney’s Systematic Theology (Bethany
House, 1994).


4. UNIT NUMBER ONE

1. My account of Abram’s early life is shaped by his own reminiscences in
letters and notes for a biography, stored in collection 459 of the Billy Graham
Center Archives, but the major details and quotations are for the most part
from the two full-length, English-language biographies (there is a third, by an
evangelical admirer, in Norwegian) written about Abram: Modern Viking: The
Story of Abraham Vereide, Pioneer in Christian Leadership (Zondervan,1961), writ-
ten by a revivalist named Norman Grubb mainly for private distribution to
Abram’s followers; and Abraham, Abraham, by Abram’s son, Warren Vereide,
and Claudia Minden Weisz, a privately published book (I received my copy
from a former member of the Fellowship). The Abram story would be retold
over the years in the literature produced by h is various organizations; where I
rely on such material in future chapters, I’ll provide additional notes.
2. James C. He ey and Edward E. Plowman, Washington: Christians in the
Corridors of Power (Tyndale House, 1975), p. 100.
3. Mauritz A. Hallgren, “Panic in the Steel Towns,” The Nation, March 30,
1932.
4. Richard C. Berner, Seattle in the 20th Century, vol. 2, Seattle, 1921–1940:
From Boom to Bust (Charles Press, 1992). For Seattle history, I rely on Abram’s
memoir, documents from the Washington State archives, and most of all the
incomparable and epic multivolume Seattle in the 20th Century, by R ichard
C. Ber ner, who presents pieces of nearly every signi cant primary source on
the city’s politics and culture during the period he covers. In this chapter and
in chapter 5, I draw especially on volume 2, Seattle, 1921–1940: From Boom to
Bust (Philadelph ia: Charles Press, 1992) and volume 3, Seattle Transformed:
World War II to the Cold War (1999).
5. Except where particular sources are indicated, my account of Abram’s
nightmare nemesis, Harry Bridges, the strike of 1934, and the factors that fed
into it is based on the following: Charles P. Lar rowe, Harry Bridges: The Rise


404 | N O T E S
and Fall of Radical Labor in the United States (Lawrence Hill and Coe, 1972);
David F. Selvin, A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront and General Strikes in San
Francisco (Wayne State University Press, 1996); Mike Quin, The Big Strike
(Olema, 1949); Paul Eliel, The Waterfront and General Strikes, San Francisco, 1934
(Hooper, 1934); Warren Hinckle, The Big Strike: A Pictorial History of the 1934
San Francisco General Strike (Silver Dollar Books, 1985); J. Anthony Lukas, Big
Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets O a Struggle for the Soul of America
(Simon and Schuster, 1997), Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence
in America (Viking, 1934).
6. Tillie Lerner, “The Strike,” Partisan Review, September–October, 1934.
7. Abraham Vereide, notes prepared for Grubb, Modern Viking, from collec-
tion 459 of the BGCA, no box number.
8. Evelyn Seeley, “Our Number One Fascists,” The Nation, April 15, 1936.


5. THE F WORD

1. Kissinger’s graduate work was recently brought to public attention by the
economist Paul Krugman in The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New
Century (W. W. Norton, 2003). Unfortunately, K rugman reads Kissinger too
literally, settling for the either/or dichotomy established at rst glance and
then translating it to the present political situation as us (the secular state)
versus them (the “right-wing movement” as “revolutionary power”). Krugman
falls for this intellectual trap despite the fact that he acknowledges that the
right-wing movement controls much or most of the state (depending on the
electoral moment). The us and the them, status quo and revolutionary power,
are not so di erent after all. As Pogo famously put it, “We have met the en-
emy, and it is us.”
2. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great
Depression (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 83–95.
3. Robert O. Paxton writes on the fascist penchant for colored shirts and its
relationship to the appearance of perfect unity in The Anatomy of Fascism (Al-
fred A. Knopf, 2004).
4. “Cincinattus Drive Is Sped in Seattle,” New York Times, March 1, 1936.
5. Mary McCarthy, “Circus Politics in Washington State,” The Nation, Oc-
tober 17, 1936.
6. Richard L. Neuberger, “State of the Slapstick in Politics,” New York Times,
February 20, 1938.


NO TES| 405
7. “Seattle Deals Radicals a Blow,” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1938.
8. Los Angeles Times, March 9, 1938; New York Times, March 10, 1938.
9. Michael Janson, “A Chr istian Century: Liberal Protestantism, the New
Deal, and the Origins of Post-War American Politics” (dissertation, Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania, 2007), pp. 163–70.
10. Hart’s involvement with ICL; Edward Cabannis to Abram, July 24, 1951.
Folder 6, box 166, collection 459, BGCA. FBI on Hart and Lindbergh, and
Hart on the Jews: Max Wallace, The American Ax is: Henry Ford, Charles Lind-
bergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich (St. Martin’s Press, 2003), p. 252. Robert
H. Jackson on Hart: “Democracy Under Fire,” delivered to a meeting of the
Law Society of Massachusetts, Boston City Club, Boston, Massachusetts,
October 16, 1940.
11. For biograph ical details in this sketch of Buchman, I am indebted to the
popular press of the era, which found Buch man a subject for admiration or a
source of amusement, and especially to Tom Driberg’s The Mystery of Moral
Re- Armament: A Study of Frank Buchman and His Movement (Alfred A. Knopf,
1965). Driberg was the rst British journalist to investigate Buchman in the
late 1920s. By the time he published his book-length study, however, he was a
member of Parliament for Labour, and Buchmanites had long sought to dis-
credit h im as a communist and homosexual. Driberg had, indeed, joined the
British Communist Party as a young man, but as his biographer Francis Wheen
writes in The Soul of Indiscretion: Tom Driberg—Poet, Philanderer, Legislator, and
Outlaw (Fourth Estate, 2002), he had been expelled when it was discovered
that he was reporting to M15. His homosexuality was hardly a secret; he was
famous for it, and in case there was any confusion he outed himself once again
in The Mystery of Moral Re- Armament. He died a British peer, Baron Bradwell, in
1975 and was charged with having been a KGB spy in 1999 by the ex-KGB
archivist Vasili Mitrok hin, who claimed that the Soviets black mailed Driberg
on th reat of exposure of his sexuality. This seems a rather dubious assertion,
given the fact that Driberg was out, and Driberg’s defenders say that their man
had once again played double agent. Such facts are hard to ascertain, but for
certainty’s sake in my reliance on his account of Buchman, I’ve used only in-
formation that Driberg clearly sourced; amboyant in politics and romance,
he was a moderate wr iter who made h is case with care.
12. Peter Howard, Frank Buchman’s Secret (Heinemann, 1961), p. 28. How-
ard’s shor t book is an exercise in distortion. The most egregious of its
misrepresentations is Howard’s celebration of the Moral Re- Armament men
who fought for the Allies in World War I I. While many MRA followers no


406 | N O T E S
doubt did ght, MRA went to such ends in seeking to obtain exemptions for
military service for British and American followers that Colo nel Arthur V.
McDermott, New York City’s draft director, declared that MRA was “reeking
with hypocrisy and bad faith.” Quoted in Driberg, The Mystery of Moral
Re- Armament, p. 75.
13. Frank Buchman, “Guidance or Guns,” speech delivered at Interlaken on
September 6, 1938, in Remaking the World: The Speeches of Frank Buchman (Bland-
ford Press, 1961), p. 63.
14. This fact, and the following description of a typical Buchmanite house
party, are derived from “Soul Surgeon,” a pro le of Buchman by Alva Johnson
in the April 23, 1932, New Yorker, pp. 22–25.
15. Buchman, Remaking the World.
16. Grubb, Modern Vik ing, p. 51.
17. Buchman, “Will God Control America?” broadcast from Ph iladelphia,
June 19, 1936, in Remaking the World, p. 33.
18. Buchman, “How to Listen,” speech delivered in Birmingham, England,
July 26, 1936, in Remaking the World, p. 35.
19. William A. H. Birnie, “Hitler or Any Fascist Leader Controlled By God
Could Cure All I lls of World, Buchman Believes,” N e w Y o r k W o r l d - T e l e g r a m ,
August 26, 1936. Buchman’s high opinion of Hitler so addled his senses,
writes Dr iberg in The Mystery of Moral Re- Armament (pp. 66– 67), that before a
tr ip to Germany he had one of his followers, a U.S. assistant attorney general,
request a meeting with FDR for Buchman on the grounds that “Herr Hitler”
had himself requested a meeting with Buchman, and Buchman would be em-
barrassed to report to Hitler that his own president would not receive him.
It’s not k nown whether or not Buch man did, in fact, meet Hitler, but if so,
he must have been red-faced; Roosevelt wanted no truck with Moral
Re- Arma ment’s gnome.
20. Buchman, “Miracles in the North,” speech delivered in New York City,
November 20, 1935, in Remaking the World, pp. 19, 23.
21. Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (Doubleday, Doran, 1935), p. 21.
22. Richard M. Fried, The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of
Modern America (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), p. 97.
23. American magazine, June 1930, p. 202, quoted in Barton in Blunderland, a
1937 campaign pamphlet for the American Labor Party.
24. “Dollar’s Eagle I s a Sparrow, Bar ton Finds,” Washington Post, June 10,
1934.
25. Bruce Barton, “Hard Times,” Wall Street Journal, March 30, 1926.


NO TES| 407
26. Finding the Better Way, periodicals, collection 459, Records of the Fel-
lowship Foundation, BGCA.
27. Grubb, Modern Viking, p. 66. Poling’s relationship to the Philadelphia
machine is discussed in “Ring Job Ordered,” Time, August 6, 1951.
28. Richard C. Berner, Seattle in the 20th Century, volume 3, Seattle Trans-
formed: World War II to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Charles Press, 1999), p. 52.
29. Ibid., p. 54.
30. “Barton Breaks a Lance,” Wall Street Journal, October 26, 1937.
31. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced
Industrial Society, 2nd edition (Beacon Press, 1991), p. 1.


6. THE MINISTRY OF PROPER ENLIGHTENMENT

1. “Nazi Envoy Silent on Agency Ouster,” New York Times, January 17, 1941.
2. Quoted in “D.C. Trial Bares German Secrets,” Washington Post, July 24,
1941.
3. “It is of paramount . . .”: Hans Thomsen to Zapp, August 30, 1938, repro-
duced in full in “Excerpts f rom Wh ite Paper on Nazi Activities Here Re-
leased,” New York Times, November 22, 1940. “My task here . . .”: Zapp to Rudolf
Leitner, then the German ambassador to South Africa, November 25, 1938,
in ibid.
4. “You can easily recognize Manfred Zapp, the Nazi agent, his madcap girl-
friend, and . . . John Edgar Hoover,” Walter Winchell wrote in a blurb for
High Stakes (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942), a thinly ctionalized account of the
FBI’s investigation of Zapp by the journalist Cur t Riess, a German ém igré
considered an authority on Naz i espionage. For Zapp in Havana, see Willard
Edwards, “Find 200 Agents in Havana Push Cause of Hitler,” Chicago Tribune,
July 27, 1940.
5. Zapp’s antagonism toward Ryan was all the more remarkable for the fact
that Ryan occasionally struck a friendly note for fascism, as in his 1937 de-
fense of Generalissimo Franco’s fascist rebellion in Spain. Wilson D. Mis-
ca mble, “T he Limits of American Catholic Anti-Fascism: The Case of John A.
Ryan,” Church History, 59, no. 4 (December 1990): 523–38. Zapp’s rebuttal:
Winifred Mallon, “Asks Public to Rise on Neutrality Act,” New York Times,
July 14, 1939.
6. “Roo sevelt’s Attack Comes as G-Men Order Probe of Nazi Press Ser-
vice,” Washington Post, October 25, 1940.


408 | N O T E S
7. Drew Pearson, “Merry-Go-Round,” Washington Post, October 25, 1946.
8. “Huge Area Shaken, But City Escapes,” New York Times, September 13,
194 0.
9. “West Point Sails With Axis Agents Ousted from the U.S.,” New York
Times, July 16, 1941.
10. “German Newsmen Tour Army Bases,” Information Bulletin, September
1951 (U.S. High Com missioner’s O ce), p. 72. University of Wisconsin
Digital Collections, http:// digital .library .wisc .edu/ 1711 .dl/ History .
11. Correspondence between Donald C. Stone and Ho man, “Re attached
report by Donald C. Stone: I mplications of Mutual Security Act and Requ ire-
ments for Action, October 4, 1951,” correspondence, 1951, Economic Coop-
eration Administration File, Paul G. Ho man Papers, Truman Presidential
Museum and Librar y. “My main use . . .”: Stone to Abram, undated, circa 1948,
folder 21, box 474, collection 459, BGCA.
12. National Security Council directive 10/2, quoted in Kenneth Osgood,
Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Univer-
sity of Kansas Press, 2006), p. 39.
13. Letter to Abram, from unknown correspondent, December 25, 1945,
folder 4, box 168, collection 459, BGCA; and Grubb, Modern Viking, pp.
101–2.
14. Timothy George, “Inventing Evangelicalism,” Christianity Today, March
2004.
15. “I believe honestly . . .”: Dianne Kirby, “Harry Truman’s Religious Legacy:
The Holy Alliance, Containment and the Cold War,” in Religion and the Cold
Wa r, ed. Diane Kirby (Palgrave, 2003), p. 86. Truman and MR A.: Dr iberg, The
Mystery of Moral Re- Armament, p. 92. Tr uma n’s mee tin g with Rober tson : Donald C.
Stone to John R. Steelman, the rst man to hold the o ce later known as
White House chief of sta , January 23, 1948, folder 21, box 474, collection
459, BGCA.
16. “Imperial interests”: Gregor Dallas, 1945: The War That Never Ended (Yale
University Press, 2005), p. 581. Carlson: The phrase had popped up in Fellow-
ship correspondence the year previous, but it seems that Carlson debuted it
publicly and may well have coined it. In an undated memo he wrote in appar-
ent preparation for the conference, he declares Worldwide Spiritual O ensive
as the “theme” that unites church and state into a force strong enough to con-
front the “Red Hordes.” Worldwide Spiritual O ensive in his view was dis-
tinctly American, since only the “new race” of Americans, “conscious of its
dependence on divine providence,” could confront the “alien way of life” prac-


NO TES| 409
ticed by leftists and foreigners (memo and speech). Folder 1, box 505, collec-
tion 459, BGCA. Broger: “Moral Doctrine for Free World Global Planning”
was a presentation Broger made to a Fellowship group on June 14, 1954. No
box number, collection 459, BGCA. The doctrine consisted of a study of
communism and Broger’s plan for reforming society after a “global war” using
Fellowship- style networking, using “indoctrinated personnel who will form
nucleus groups” to implement “the highest concepts of f reedom, whether so-
cially acceptable or not.”
17. Th is brief account of the NAE is derived from (and with apologies to)
Joel A. Carpenter’s more sympathetic but ver y insightf ul account in “An
Evangelical United Front,” chapter 8 of his excellent Revive Us Again: The Re-
awakening of American Fundamentalism (Oxford University Press, 1997).
18. Har riet French, “To Make Christians Leaders, and Leaders Christians,”
in unidenti ed newspaper, box 411, folder 4, collection 459, BGCA.
19. An undated brochure produced by the Fellowship shows on its f ront
page just such a conversation between two men walk ing down the stone
steps of the mansion. The man on the right, dressed in light gray and a dark
tie, seems to be trying to persuade his companion, an older fellow with gray
hair and black brows and an impatient air. The persuader, we learn in the
caption, is Commissioner Sigurd Anderson of the Federal Trade Commis-
sion; the skeptic, Howard Blanchard of Union Paci c Railroad—two men
with more than Christ in common. “The Bible,” declares the brochure,
“contains inexhaustible resources for the businessman ghting the economic
battle in a two- sted business world,” like a vein of coal or a pool of oil
“deposited” by God, awaiting re nement into a spiritual o ensive against
“materialism.”
20. FDR has long been a problematic gure for American fundamentalism,
and not just because of his impossible-to-ignore leadership in World War II.
On one hand, the New Deal bene ted too many in both the populist rank and
le of fundamentalism and at the elite level of Dixiecrat politicians for the
movement to condemn FDR altogether. On the other hand, the avant- garde
of fundamentalism was born in 1935 in response to FDR’s perceived godless
socialism. What is to be done with this historical paradox? William J. Fe-
derer, an accountant-turned- historian who has become a best- selling funda-
mentalist historian, attempts to resolve the dilemma with The Faith of F.D.R.
(Amerisearch, 2006), a compilation of every banal piety Roo sevelt ever
uttered. Federer hopes the book will cement FDR, war- president, into the
fundamentalist pantheon.


410 | N O T E S
21. Grubb, Modern Viking, p. 105. “Nominal membership”: Otto Fricke, J. W.
E. Som mer, Georg Reichel, Professor Landon Bender, Paul Orlamunder,
Friedreich Wunderlich, to Abram, August 26, 1946, folder 4, box 218, col-
lection 459, BGCA.
22. J. F. Byrnes, “Restatement of Policy on Germany, Stuttgart,” September
6, 1946. http:// usa .usembassy .de/ etexts/ ga4–460906 .htm accessed August
20, 2006.
23. “You are God’s man”: Abram to Fr icke, August 29, 1947, folder 4, box
218, collection 459, BGCA.
24. Michael H. Kater, Di erent Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany
(Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 49.
25. Hans Spier, From the Ashes of Disgrace: A Journal from Germany, 1945–1955
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), pp. 31–32.
26. Hans Kempe to Abram, February 5, 1948, folder 5, box 218, collection
459, BGCA.
27. Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain
(Houghton Mi in, 2000), pp. 2–6.
28. “Meeting Agenda,” in folders 46–50, box 585, collection 459, BGCA.
29. Most of this money came in individual donations raised by Abram’s
prayer cells (see Gedat to Abram, January 14, 1951; Abram to Gedat, April
18, 1951, folder 7, box 218, collection 459, BGCA), but some apparently came
from the Mellon Foundation, as well. Gedat to Abram, March 26, 1950,
folder 5, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
30. In The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Ca mbr idge
University Press, 2003), the historian Richard Steigmann-Gall delivers con-
clusive evidence that settles the debate over whether or not Nazism conceived
of itself as anti-Ch ristian: not at all. In fact, much of the top leadersh ip,
Steigmann-Gall documents, considered the cross and the swastika two di er-
ent symbols for one great idea.
31. “Directive to Commander-in- Chief of United States Forces of Occupa-
tion Regarding the Military Government of Germany,” April 1945 (JCS
1067). Available online from the U.S. Embassy to Germany at http://usa .
u s e m b a s s y . d e / e t e x t s / g a 3 – 4 5 0 4 2 6 . p d f .
32. “Asiatic nihilism”: Dr. H. O. Ahrens to Abram, November 10, 1949,
folder 5, box 218, collection 459, BGCA. Ahrens was a vocal and e ective
lobbyist for German industrialists determined to avoid the dismantling of
factories used for military production. At the time of this letter, he was taking


NO TES| 411
one of Abram’s American operatives, William Frary von Bromberg (who
claimed the title of baron, perhaps falsely) on a tour of such properties.
33. Abram to Fricke, September 21, 1949; Fricke to Abram, October 17,
1949; Abram to Fricke, November 2, 1949; folder 4, box 218, collection 459,
BGCA. Gedat quoted in Inge Deutschkron, Mein Leben nach dem Überleben
(Dtv, 2000), p. 130.
34. The involvement of Abs, Schmelz, Rohrbach, and Speidel is reported in
“The Highlights of the ICL Conference at Castle Mainau, Germany, June
14–17, 1951,” an account by the ICL employee Wallace Haines, and an un-
dated, untitled report on the same conference by a German ICL employee,
Margarete Gärtner (herself a former prewar propagandist for German expa n-
sion), folders 10 and 11, respectively, of box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
35. Han s von Eicken, a leader with Gedat and Fricke of the German division
of the Fellowship, wrote to Abram on July 11, 1951, to tell Abram that the
German Fellowship’s advocacy on behalf of Pohl and another war criminal,
Otto Ohlendorf—an in uential economist who’d boasted at his trial of hav-
ing overseen the murder of 90,000 Jews and other non- Aryans— had helped
soothe the concer ns of those in “important circles” who felt that the German
Fellowsh ip was the “cleverly engineered product of an American power
group.” Folder 7, box 218, collection 459, BGCA. On October 12, 1951, von
Neurath’s daughter had written Abram a letter begging for help with the case
of her father. He’d been treated well by his American guards, she wrote, but
persecuted by the Soviets who ran the prison in tandem with the United
States. She was outraged that her father, one of the seven “Major War Crimi-
nals,” su ered from bad dentistry. “It was di cult for him to talk,” during her
last visit to him in prison, “as his arti cial set of teeth—put in about a year ago
at Spandau—was tting very badly.” Abram opened a le on the case. “Can
we do anything about this?” he wrote in a note to one of his aides. “Maybe
[Congressman O. K.] Armstrong should see th is.” Von Neurath won his re-
lease as a medical parolee in 1953 (Arieh J. Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied
War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment [University of North Carolina
Press, 1998], p. 245), but besides th is letter, the le Abram opened is lost,
leaving us uncertain whether Abram’s intervention played a part in von Neur-
ath ’s good fortune. Winifred von Mackensen (née von Neurath) to Abram,
folder 1, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
36. “Church Group Votes, Elects 17 from Congress,” Washington Post, January
14, 17, 1945. “Panty- waist diplomacy”: Grose, Operation Rollback, p. 6.


412 | N O T E S
37. Lance Morrow, The Best Year of their Lives: Kennedy, Nixon, and Johnson in
1948: Learning the Secret s of Power (Basic Books, 2005), p. 128. Jack Powers,
South Bend Tribune, February 24, 1991.
38. Address to the United States Senate, February 5, 1946. One can nd
extensive excerpts from the speech on a number of Holocaust revisionist Web
sites, including, as of 2006, http:// www .sweetliberty .org/ issues/ wars/ wit
ness2history/ 21 .htm l .
39. Spier, From the Ashes of Disgrace, p. 27.
40. Lecture to the Frankfurt chapter of I nternational Christian Leadership,
August 9, 1950, folder 11, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
41. Von Gienanth to Wallace Haines, ICL “Field Director for Europe,”
March 29, 1952, folder 1, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
42. Abram to Ropp, October 6, 1953, folder 3, box 218, collection 459,
BGCA. Ropp was himself an admirer of Merwin K. Hart, the anti-Semitic
American fascist whom Abram had welcomed into the Fellowship’s inner cir-
cle. Ropp to Wallace Haines, August 12, 1952, folder 1, box 218, collection
459, BGCA.
43. Frances Hepp, April 23, 1947, folder 4, box 218, collection 459,
BGCA.
44. Haines to Abram, June 23, 1951, folder 8, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
45. This account of the meeting at Mainau is drawn from K. C. Liddel,
“Notes on Mainau Conference,” June 28, 1951, folder 8, box 218, collection
459, BGCA; Wallace Haines, “The Highlights of ICL Conference at Castle
Mainau, Germany,” folder 10, box 218, collection 459; Christian Leadership
News, September 1951, collection 459; Margarete Gär tner, “Newsletter,” July
30, 1951, folder 10, box 218, collection 459; undated reports for Abram by
Margarete Gärtner in folders 10 and 11, box 218, collection 459. Gärtner’s
past as a propagandist is referred to in John Hiden and Thomas Lane, eds., The
Baltic and the Outbreak of the Second World War (Cambridge University Press,
1992), p. 126. The U-boat commander was Reinhard Hardegen. The fascist
editor was Benno Mascher. Bishop Wurm’s anti-Semitic remarks can be found
in Wolfgang Erlich, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the
Persecution of the Jews (University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p. 201.
46. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin Press, 2005), p. 61.
47. Dallas, 1945, p. 615.
48. Zapp to Abram, September 16, 1950, folder 6, box 218, collection 459,
BGCA.
49. Carpenter, Revive Us Again, p. 149.


NO TES| 413

7. THE BLOB

1. Inter view with Kate Phillips in Tom Weaver, Science Fiction Con dential:
Interviews With Monster Stars and Filmmakers (McFarland, 2002), pp. 234–46.
2. Joshua Muravch ik, “Losing the Peace,” Commentary, July 1992.
3. Quoted in Richard Hofstadter’s 1955 essay “The Pseudo- Conservative Re-
volt,” in The Radical Right ed., Daniel Bell (Anchor Books, 1964), p. 76.
4. A revealing statistic overlooked by conventional historians of the Cold
War: between 1935, the year Abram and his fundamentalist elite came in
from the cold of domestic exile, and 1980, the commencement of the Reagan
era, the average number of American evangelical m issionaries overseas grew
from 5,000, many of them engaged in small projects close to home, to 32,000
spread all over the globe. Carpenter, Revive Us Again, p. 184. The anthropolo-
gist David Stoll explores the interconnections— ideological and actual—
between the U.S. covert operations and the network of evangelical
missionaries connected to what was then the largest missionar y organization
in the world in Fishers of Men or Found ers of Empire?: The Wycli e Bible Translators
in America (Zed Press, 1982). Stoll takes pains to explain that such intercon-
nections did not constitute a conspiracy, but rather, an overlapping worldview
in which spiritual and imperial interests were not easily distinguished. As re-
cently as 2006, when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez expelled a group of
evangelical missionaries he claimed were U.S. spies, Christianity Today felt
compelled to condemn “The CIA Myth,” apparently persuasive enough to se-
duce even some of the magazine’s conservative evangelical readers. Deann
Alford, January 2006.
5. Quoted in Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Po-
litical Power in the United States (Guilford Press, 1995), p. 101.
6. “Our press,” reads a memo in Abram’s les on Cuba and the American
media’s ambivalence toward Castro, “is infested with crypto-Com munists
[and] intellectual prostitutes in their hire.” Whether the Fellowship would
extend that charge to even the evangelical press is unclear, but there can be no
doubt on their position with regard to détente with Castro.
7. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Annual Message to Congress on the State of the
Union,” 1958. Eisenhower accused the Soviets of waging “total cold war,” to
which, he said, the United States must respond with “total peace” in which
“ever y asset of our personal and national lives,” par ticularly religion, would be
dedicated to the ght. Ike also believed in “progress” as de ned by the Atlas,
Titan, Thor, Jupiter, and Polaris missile programs. The fact that such literally


414 | N O T E S
totalitarian ambitions were considered calming is an indicator of the fear and
loathing that infused the ostensibly bland 1950s.
8. Ken neth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at
Home and Abroad (Kansas State University Press, 2006), pp. 270–75.
9. Reverend John Collins, chairman of Christian Action, to Abram, Sep-
tember 8, 1950, folder 2, box 202, collection 459, BGCA.
10. Osgood, Total Cold War, p. 40.
11. “Government Curbs Scored,” New York Times, May 11, 1949.
12. Grubb to Abram, August 21, 1953, folder 2, box 202, collection 459,
BGCA.
13. Perhaps they carr ied with them repr ints of a Look magazine article
Abram had had made, his chief piece of literature that year. The lead story
was by Nor man Vincent Peale, Abram’s colleague in the Twelve. Why was
Amer ica experiencing a spiritual revival? Simple, said Peale: “for the rst
time in the country’s history, we are lled with fear.” Peale’s solution: “It is
now widely recognized that prayer is a skill, that it is an actual power.” The
demand of the hour, wrote Peale, was organizing such power into action, a
“vital spiritual force.” His inspiration? “The Vereide Organization,” which
inculcated “the country’s lawmakers” in “the importance of divine guid-
ance.” Abram’s reprint of Peale’s May 22, 1951, Look article, “The Place of
Prayer in America,” was titled “These Scandalous Years in Washington,” a
reference to widespread suspicion th at the Tr uman administration was rid-
dled with red agents. Folder 51, box 585, collection 459, BGCA. “Direct re-
lationship . . .”: Associated Press, “Wiley Trip Declared in U.S. Interest,”
Washington Post, May 21, 1952. Particularly controversial was Wiley’s deci-
sion to bring his much younger new bride for a vacation, a practice that un-
der Eisenhower would become uno cial policy, the chumminess of power
couples meeting their peers used to cement “relationships” with foreign na-
tions, as David F. Sch mitz writes in Thank God They’re On Our Side: The United
States & Right-Wing Dictatorships (University of North Carolina Press, 1999),
p. 183.
14. Wil helmina was at that point technically “princess,” hav ing passed
her throne to her daughter, Juliana, but she was still referred to as queen,
and both women were strong supporters of the Fellowship, though
whether out of religious sentiment or other motives—the royal family
was responsible for the interests of Royal Dutch-Shell Oil—is unclear in
Abram’s papers.


NO TES| 415
15. Robert C. Albright, “Ike Can’t Find Titles for All His Talented Help,”
Washington Post, June 22, 1952.
16. “The June Brides,” Time, June 23, 1952.
17. In Phyllis Schla y and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton
University Press, 2005), the historian Donald T. Crichtlow argues that this
sense of betrayal led to the formation of the New Right that would propel
Barry Goldwater to the GOP nom ination twelve years later. See pp. 46– 47.
18. Drew Pearson, “Merry-Go-Round: Taft Talks Way Back to the Top,”
Washington Post, December 22, 1952.
19. Two of the Democratic candidates for the nom ination, Senator Estes
Kefauver of Tennessee and Senator Robert Kerr of Ok lahoma, were Breakfast
Groupers. The eventual nom inee, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, was de-
cidedly not, but his hawk ish liberalism would lead h im into even more mili-
tant expressions of faith. The “one supreme di erence” between the United
States and the USSR, Stevenson told a “Washington Pilgrimage” of Christian
nationalists, “is that America and its leaders believe in God; the rulers of Rus-
sia have turned their back on God and deny His very existence.” “Presidential
Candidates Speak Out For Religion,” Washington Post, May 3, 1952. Steven-
son’s surprising piety may be understood a s a sign of the times; the 1952 elec-
tion was, according to the Washington Post, the rst time all presidential
candidates had publicly paid tribute to America’s ostensible religious—read,
“Chr istian”—heritage.
20. Graham’s account of h is role can be found in “The General Who Be-
came President,” chapter 12 of h is autobiography, Just As I Am (HarperSan-
Franciso/Zondervan, 1997), in which he says he met Abram during his
Northwest Crusades. He does not mention the fact that Abram had been re-
cr uited by his own former Seattle cell—doubling as the sponsoring commit-
tee for the Graham Crusade’s visit—to seek federal funds for a cover for the
city’s Memorial Stadium to ensure the Crusade’s success. “Graham wants
this,” wrote Abram’s Seattle lieutenant, a wealthy lawyer named Warren
Dew ar. “Langlie and Devin”—the governor and the mayor of Seattle, both
men whose careers had been made by Breakfast Group connections—“want it
too.” Dewar suggests that $18,000, possibly federal funds, had already been
directed toward Graham’s appearance. Dewar to Abram, May 16, 1951, folder
7, box 168, collection 459, BGCA. Reference to Oiltown U.S.A. may be found
in the BGEA’s collection 214, the records of World Wide Pictures, Graham’s
lm production compa ny.


416 | N O T E S
21. Dr. Frederick Brown Harris, quoted in Gr ubb, Modern Viking, pp.
130 –32.
22. Nick Thimmesch, “Politicians and the Underground Prayer Movement,”
Los Angeles Times, January 13, 1974. Thimmesch, who adm ired the Fellow-
ship, described it thusly: “They are secretive and guarded in discussing their
experiences or activities . . . They genuinely avoid publicity. In fact, they
shun it.”
23. Ferguson: Ferguson was a longtime inner circle member who regularly
appeared in the Fellowship’s brochures for new prospects. Bennett: Bennett’s
membership in ICL was repor ted in the July 1959 issue of Moody Monthly, the
magazine of the fundamentalist Moody Institute in Ch icago, in “Christians in
Your Congress,” by Donald H. Gill. Other members cited included Strom
Thur mond, James B. Utt—the Orange County congressman who believed
that the United Nations was training Africans to conquer the United States—
and Representative Bruce Alger, the Dallas Republican who would lead a
“min k coat mob ” ma de up of his wealthy female supporters in a spitting attack
on Ladybird Johnson. Bennett, a signer of the infamous Southern Manifesto,
remained close to the Fellowship for decades. “I ask too much of you already,”
he wrote Doug Coe on January 27, 1987, “and therefore am not pressing for a
particular appointment, but anytime that suits you I would cer tainly like to
see you.” Folder 4, box 166, collection 459, BGCA.
24. He ey and Plowman, Washington: Christians in the Corridors of Power,
pp. 120–21.
25. Associated Press, “Eisenhower Joins in a Brea kfast Prayer Meeting,” New
York Tim es, February 5, 1954. Eisenhower didn’t speak at the second breakfast,
but Vice President Nixon did, initiating a tradition Nixon maintained for the
rest of the decade. Personally indi erent to Abram’s piety, he recognized the
value of the Prayer Breakfast’s pulpit and made it his own. Guatemala: Van
Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left
(Verso, 1993), pp. 26–29.
26. Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion,
Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Duke University Press, 2005),
pp. 60–62. “Wiley Would End Attack on Dulles,” New York Times, July 25,
1954.
27. “McCarthy to be Asked to Aid I ke,” Washington Post, September 18, 1952.
Ferdinand Kuh n, “McCarthy’s Charges in Speech Stir Angry Denials, Pro-
tests,” Washington Post, October 29, 1952.


NO TES| 417
28. I. F. Stone, “The F irst Welts on Joe McCarthy,” I. F. Stone’s Weekly, March
15, 1954, reproduced in The Best of I. F. Stone, ed. Peter Osnos (Public A airs,
2006).
29. “For God and Country,” Vanguard University Magazine, the alumni journal
of the former Southern California Bible College, Spring 2002.
30. Osgood, Total Cold War, p. 315.
31. Drew Pearson, “The New JCS—and the Old,” Washington Post, August
13, 1953.
32. John Broger, “Moral Doctrine for Free World Global Planning,” a pre-
sentation to Abram’s ICL, June 14, 1954, folder 1, box 505, collection 459,
BGCA.
33. Marquis Ch ilds, “A Strange Film Shown to Soldiers,” Washington Post,
January 27, 1961.
34. “Militant Liberty Outline Plan,” November 5, 1954, Operations Coor-
dinating Board Central Files, box 70, OCB 091, f rom the collection of Ken-
neth Osgood, Florida Atlantic University.
35. Wayne’s USC footba ll teammate Ward Bond joined forces with Broger as
well, but although Bond appeared in some of the best movies Hollywood ever
made, including Gone With the Wind, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Ford’s brilliant
John Wayne vehicle, The Searchers, it wouldn’t be fair to include him in the
same category as those two tremendously talented reactionaries. Of course,
Ford would have disagreed with me. Sort of: “Let’s face it,” he once said of
Bond’s anticommunist snitching, “Ward Bond is a sh it. But he’s our favorite
shit.” Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of
Arts and Letters (New Press, 2000), pp. 284–87.
36. Broger, “Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense,” July 26, 1957,
no box number, collection 459, BGCA.


8. VIETNAMIZATION

1. Clifton J. Robinson to Doug Coe, April 28, 1966, folder 2, box 372, col-
lection 459, BGCA.
2. “Carter Appoints ‘Field Ma rsha ll’ Sullivan Ambassador to Sha h,” MERI P
Report, no. 59, August 1977, pp. 24–25. Sullivan went on to become the last
American ambassador to Iran, an appointment of great controversy. Sullivan
“is well- tted to run secret presidential wars and lie to Congress about


418 | N O T E S
them,” editorialized The Nation, an assessment borne out in more adm iring
terms by a study conducted for the CIA: “The secret war in Laos, author Cha rles
Stevenson has emphasized, was ‘William Sullivan’s war.’ . . . Sullivan im -
posed two conditions upon h is subordinates. First, the th in ction of the
Geneva accords had to be maintained . . . ; military operations, therefore,
had to be carried out in relative secrecy. Second, no regular US ground
troops were to become involved.” Instead, Sullivan resorted to one of the
most destr uctive bombing campaigns of the Vietnam War. William M.
Leary, “CI A Air Operations in Laos, 1955–1974,” Studies in Intelligence (pub -
lished by the CIA), Winter 1999–2000.
3. Abram, “Memorandum to the Board,” circa 1966, folder 2, box 563, col-
lection 459, BGCA.
4. Bold Satanic forces: Ibid. Cyclone: Frank McLaughlin to Abram, December
15, 1966, folder 1, box 168, collection 459, BGCA. “Ten steps . . .”: Coe to Jim
Anderson of Young Life, November 18, 1981, folder 5, box 168, collection
459, BGCA.
5. Robinson had won for the Fellowship’s muscular Christ the ostensibly
Gha ndia n Hindu A. M. Thomas, responsible for India’s armed forces during
some of the worst ghting with Pakistan. Robinson to Ford Mason, Novem-
ber 30, 1964, folder 2, box 232, collection 459, BGCA.
6. Robinson to Halverson, April 13, 1963, ibid.
7. Halverson to Robinson, May 22, 1963, ibid.
8. Cordle, Halverson: Robinson to Mason, November 30, 1964, ibid.
9. V. Raymond Edman, They Found the Secret: Twenty Lives That Reveal A Touch
of Eternity (Zondervan, 1984), pp. 78–87.
10 Halverson’s responsibility to a pluralistic nation did not mellow his reli-
gious convictions. Upon h is death in 1995, Senator Dan Coats (R., Indiana)
would eulogize him by expressing his admiration for a man who would
preach thusly on the Senate oor: “God of our fathers, if we separate moral-
ity from politics, we imperil our Nation and threaten self-destruction. Impe-
rial Rome was not defeated by an enemy from without; it was destroyed by
moral decay from within. Mighty God, over and over again you warned your
people, Israel, that righteousness is essential to national health.” Halverson
also preached in the Senate against investigative reporting. Cal Thomas, “The
Most Powerful Man in Washington Retires,” York Daily Record, November 9,
1994.
11. Robert D. Foster, The Navigator (Challenge Books, 1983), p. 61.


NO TES| 419
12. Doug Coe, “The Person of Christ,” a videotaped address to the Presi-
dent’s Meeting, a gathering of evangelical leaders, January 15, 1989.
13. “Wash ington Welcomes Doug Coe,” in Chr istian Leadership, October
1959, collection 459, BGCA.
14. “a woman so uncomplaining”: Wallace Haines quoted in “A Key Man in
Ever y Country,” July 1973, folder 20, box 383, collection 459, BGCA. Sharp-
nack to Coe, December 28, 1959, folder 10, box 135, collection 459, BGCA.
15. Cal Ludeman to Coe, Apr il 27, 1960, folder 11, box 135, collection
459, BGCA.
16. Kent Hotaling to Coe, January 18, 1960, folder 10, box 135, collection
459, BGCA.
17. One of Coe’s standard closings on letters written in 1960, folder 11, box
135, collection 459, BGCA.
18. Haines is quoted back to himself in a letter from Coe to Haines dated
December 27, 1967, folder 4, box 204, collection 459, BGCA. Coe to par-
ents, November 4, 1959, folder 11, box 368, collection 459, BGCA.
19. Frank Laubach, “A Pentagon of World Friendship,” October 19, 1955,
folder 1, box 505, collection 459, BGCA. Chuck Hull to Coe, January 15,
1960, folder 10, box 135, collection 459, BGCA.
20. Traveling on Fellowship behalf: Christian Leadership, December 1959, collec-
tion 459, BGCA. “Capehart and Carlson Meet Duvalier; U.S. Sen ators Pledge
Assistance to Haiti, New Pittsburgh Courier, December 5, 1959.
21. Doug Barram to Coe, June 12, 1962, folder 5, box 168, collection 459,
BGCA.
22. “Finding the Better Way,” January 15, 1942, pamphlet, collection 459,
BGCA.
23. March 1962 remarks to a prayer breakfast for the governor of Arizona,
led under “Thoughts on Prayer,” le 16, box 449, collection 459, BGCA.
24. “LBJ, Billy Graham Eloquent at Breakfast,” Washington Post, February
18, 1966.
25. March 8, 1962, folder 5, box 361, collection 459, BGCA.
26. Carlson to José Joaquín Trejos Fernández, November 27, 1967, folder
17, box 365, collection 459, BGCA. Dorn wa s of no relation to the rst W. J.
Bryan, for whom he was named not in deference to Bryan’s fundamentalism,
ironically, but in honor of Br yan’s anti-imperialism.
27. Howard Siner, “At torney Knows Carter as Sma rt, Kind F riend,” San Jose
News, March 4, 1977.


420 | N O T E S
28. Bill Green to Coe, August 4, 1960, folder 11, box 135, collection 459,
BGCA.
29. Savimbi, a black African leader who enjoyed support f rom the apartheid
state as well as American Christian conservatives, is harder to pin down than
Barre, who gambled his whole relationsh ip with the United States on the
Family. I nterviews with and cor respondence of Clif Gosney, a former Family
liaison to the South Af rican Zulu ch ief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, reveal that
Savimbi was also with in the Family’s circle, his spiritual well- being tended by
Gosney, a sincere Christian, and Piet Koornhof, a cabinet minister in the
South Af rican government of F. W. de Klerk.
30. There are at least two nearly full boxes of documents at the Billy Graham
Center Archives detailing the Family’s relationship with Brazilian regimes.
Boxes 184–85, collection 459, BGCA.
31. I nterview with Coe by Tore Gjerstad, October 29, 2007.
32. Notes on reorganization folders 1–2, box 563, collection 459, BGCA.
33. Abram to Ad miral C. S. Freeman, November 23, 1949, folder 2, box 3 48,
collection 459, BGCA. Abram never put an explicitly anti-Sem itic word on
record, and while Malik may have been holding out hope for a Christian Pal-
estinian state to the south of Lebanon, he was likely motivated more by his
understanding of scripture, wh ich did not include anti-Semitism. Freeman,
however, the point man on the project, was an old-fashioned Jew hater and a
frequent collaborator with Merwin K. Hart, the American fascist organizer.
34. Quoted in the December 1959/January 1960 issue of Christian Leadership,
a members-only newsletter of the International Christian Leadership—the
Fellowship. Located in the periodicals section of collection 459 at the
BGCA.
35. June 28, 1963, “Thoughts on Prayer,” folder 16, box 449, collection
459, BGCA.
36. Bell made clear to the students that they’d been selected not for their
good standing as Christians—some were not religious—or good grades, but
solely for their status as big men on campus. February 5, 1970, “Young Men’s
Seminar,” tape 107, collection 459, BGCA. “During the seminar, when I
voiced my objection to the assumption that we were all devoted Ch ristians,”
Joe Persico, the student body president of San Francisco State, had complained
to Lyndon Johnson after a similar event in 1965, “we were told by Roger
Staubach . . . from the U.S. Naval Academy, ‘I feel sorry for all of you who
are not Christians, because you have no chance of an after-life.’ General
Silverthorn”—one of Abram’s chief aides, an ancient o cer who’d held a


NO TES| 421
Kurtz-like post in the U.S. occupation of Haiti during the 1920s—“told us
that, ‘of course, Chr ist said a few oddball things, too, like the Sermon on the
Mount.’ ” Andrew Kopkind, “The Power of Prayer,” New Republic, March 6,
1965.
37. February 5, 1970, “Young Men’s Seminar,” tape 107, collection 459,
BGCA.
38. Ibid.
39. For basic biographical details about Colson, I relied on his rst two mem-
oirs, Born Again (Spire, 1977) and Life Sentence (Chosen Books, 1979), and
John Perry’s admiring biography, Charles Colson: A Story of Power, Corruption, and
Redemption (Broadman and Holman, 2003). Colson’s output, augmented by
numerous ghostwriters, is enormous. Texts I found particularly useful to un-
derstanding his thinking include Against the Night: Living in the New Dark Ages
(Serva nt Publications, 1989); How Now Shall We Live? (Tyndale, 1999); and
Kingdoms in Con ict (William Morrow, 1987).
40. Thimmesch, “Politicians and the Underground Prayer Movement,” Los
Angeles Times, January 13, 1974.
41. He ey and Plowman, Washington: Christians in the Corridors of Power, pp.
38–55.
42. Paul Apostolidis, Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio
(Duke University Press, 2000), p. 151.
43. Kandy Stroud, “Chuck Colson: Re ections Before Prison,” Women’s Wear
Daily, July 1, 1974.
44. Collection 275, BGCA.
45. Apostolidis, Stations of the Cross, p. 151.
46. Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power, p. 59.
47. Colson to Coe, November 20, 1980, folder 8, box 368, collection 459,
BGCA.
48. Apostolidis, Stations of the Cross, p. 150.
49. Howard Gillette, Jr., Between Beauty and Justice: Race, Planning and the
Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Johns Hopkins University Press,
1995), p. 153.
50. No signature to Coe, April 1, 1960, folder 10, box 135, collection 459,
BGCA.
51. Julia Rabig, “ ‘Black Bu ers’: Evangelical Entrepreneurship Meets Black
Power on the Streets of Washington, D.C.,” unpublished paper presented at
the 2004 University of Pennsylvania Graduate Humanities Forum.
52. Ibid., p. 19.


422 | N O T E S
53. Interview with John Staggers, “How to Eat an Elepha nt,” HIS, November
1981. HIS was a men’s magazine published by the Inter-Varsity Ch ristian
Leadership.
54. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden
Personality Changes (Stillpoint Press, 2005), p. 32.


9. JESUS + 0 = X

1. Abram to Frank McLaughlin, February 14, 1968, folder 1, box 168, col-
lection 459, BGCA.
2. Kathy Kadane, “U.S. O cials’ Lists Aided Indonesian Bloodbath in ’60s,”
Washington Post, May 21, 1990.
3. Wilkes, “Prayer,” New York Times, December 22, 1974.
4. Senator B. Everett Jordan, “Personal and Con dential Memo” to members
of Congress on Fa mily assets around the globe, April 1969, folder 2, box 363,
collection 459, BGCA. Marpaung’s contribution to the murderous crackdown
is even celebrated by some evangelicals. “The story of I ndonesian revival is an
illustration of God’s sovereignty,” reads the subheading over an account of
Marpaung’s speech on an evangelical website, http://members.aol.com/the
waycm/revival/asia .html, accessed July 20, 2007.
5. Hat eld to Nixon, November 11, 1969, folder 5, box 584, collection 459,
BGCA.
6. Shortly a fter that meeting, Moorer, convinced that Nixon was soft on com-
munism, began an espionage operation against the president’s civilian advis-
ers, “a hanging o ense,” in the words of the Pentagon investigator who
uncovered the plot. “Don’t tell Laird,” Nixon instr ucted his attorney general
as he considered prosecuting Moorer. James Rosen, “Nixon and the Ch iefs,”
Atlantic, April 2002.
7. Coe to Korry, October 10, 1970, folder 36, box 194, collection 459,
BGCA. Korry and the October 1970 Plot: Gregory Palast, “A Marxist Threat to
Cola Sales? Pepsi Demands a U.S. Coup. Goodbye Allende. Hello Pinochet,”
Observer (UK), November 8, 1998. Korry, to his ver y m inor credit, opposed a
military coup because he did not think it would work. The CI A- backed mur-
der of Allende’s defense m inister that month seemed to bear out his point.
The Chilean people rallied round Allende. But in 1973, K issinger and Gen-
eral Pinochet, to Chile’s lasting sorrow, proved him wrong. I could nd no


THE F AMIL Y | 423
record of Fellowship contact with Pinochet. They had long been allied with a
right-wing civilian faction called the “O cialists,” headed by Hector Valen-
zue la Valderrama, a conservative Catholic politician whom Coe and Korry
shopped around in Washin gt on in 1969 as an Allende a lternative. “The Major -
ity Leader of the Congress, with whom you visited, called me the other day,”
Coe wrote Valderrama. “He again expressed an interest in the ideas that you
and he discussed. I think in the months to come such ideas can be pursued in
private discussions and someday perhaps come to pass.” Correspondence,
Coe, Korr y, and Valderrama, February–June 1969, folder 35, box 194, col-
lection 459, BGCA. “The sun is just now beginning to sh ine again”: Valder-
rama to Coe, December 21, 1973, box 194, BGCA.
8. Tape 109, January 4, 1971, titled “Fa mily Night at Fellowship House during
which “Sam Cram,” Douglas Coe, and Clif Robinson gave reports on their
recent trip to Japan, South Korea, South Vietnam, I ndia, Hong Kong, Philip-
pines, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Turkey, and the Soviet Union to visit
leaders in those countries,” collection 459, BGCA.
9. B. Everett Jordan to members of the U.S. Senate and House of Represen-
tatives involved with the Presidential and Congressional Prayer Break fasts,
October 1970. “Mr. Howard Hardesty, Executive Vice President of Conti-
nental Oil company, recently traveled to Indonesia where he met for a day
with men in the leadership groups there. He also had dinner with President
Suharto and Members of the Indonesian Cabinet. The sense of spiritual rela-
tionship which was formed caused Mr. Hardesty to com ment, ‘Th is is one of
the greatest days of my life.’ ” Folder 8, box 548, collection 459, BGCA.
10. McClure: Jordan to members of Congress involved with the Prayer Break-
fasts, 197 0, folder 2, box 362, collection 459, BGCA. “Con dential” prayer:
Jorda n to members of Congress, undated, in reference to 1970 National
Prayer Breakfast, folder 5, box 584, collection 459, BGCA.
11. Elgin Groseclose to Clifton J. Robinson, November 28, 1972, folder 6,
box 383, collection 459, BGCA.
12. Clifton J. Robinson to Elgin Groseclose, December 1, 1972, ibid.
13. From a 2005 interview with the Reverend Rob Schenck, president of
Faith and Action, a small, Coe-style ministry with headquarters across from
the U.S. Supreme Court.
14. Locke’s rema rks are found on p. 19 of “Trip to the [illegible] and Sermon
by Doug Coe,” circa 1988, National Prayer Breakfast, no box nu mber, collec-
tion 459, BGCA.


424 | N O T E S

10. INTERESTING BLOOD

1. Max Blumenthal, “God’s Country,” Washington Monthly, October 2003.
Eyal Press’s Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Con ict that Divided
America (Henry Holt, 2006) is the de nitive account of the Bu alo abortion
wars and the murder of Barnett Slepian.
2. Hillary Clinton, Living History (Simon and Schuster, 2003), p. 168.
3. Interview with Tony Hall, August 30, 2006, by Meera Subramnian.
Hall recently published a book (coauthored by Tom Price) with the evangeli-
cal publisher Thomas Nelson titled Changing the Face of Hunger: One Man’s Story
of How Liberals, Conservatives, Demo crats, Republicans, and People of Faith are Join-
ing Forces to Help the Hungry, the Poor, the Oppressed (2006). In it, Hall repeat-
edly refers to a gure who connects him with Republican members of the
Family as “our mutual friend.” Hall puts the connections to good e ect,
genuinely pursuing a foreign policy more oriented toward the problem of
hunger. But his emphasis on religious f reedom —and his disinterest in sys-
temic economic critiques—persistently guides him toward worthy but senti-
mental projects of limited e ect, or worse, actively depoliticizing local
organizations.
4. As Marcos “disappeared” his opponents in the mid–1970s, the Family
moved a full-time operative to Manila. In 1975, Marcos hosted his rst Presi-
dential Prayer Breakfast, with Coe and Senator Hughes as guests. The event’s
organizer, Bruce Sundberg, was blunt about his interest in the worst elements
of Filipino politics: “that is where the wealth is,” he wrote to his nancial sup-
porters in America. Sundberg didn’t want it for himself, but he believed in a
tr ickle-down fundamentalism. Win a “top man” for the faith, and the lesser
people—those without money, those without power —will fall into line.
Sundberg, general letter, October 17, 1975. Sundberg’s salary was paid in
part by such a top man, Filipino senator Gil Puyat, one of Marcos’s nanciers,
who put $14,285 in a tr ust for Sundberg, according to a letter to Sundberg
from Coe dated June 10, 1975, ibid. Puyat’s nancial support for the Marcos
regime is documented in John T. Sidel’s Capital, Coercion and Crime: Bossism in
the Philippines (Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 74. Another top man cul-
tivated by Sundberg was Butch Aquino, the son of Benigno Aquino, the op-
position hero murdered by Marcos. The younger Aquino, Sundberg wrote to
Coe on September 25, 1976, was “moving more and more to the ‘left’ ” until
Sundberg gave him a copy of Chuck Colson’s Born Again, which persuaded him


NO TES| 425
not to join the anti-Marcos rebels. All Sundberg correspondence is located in
folder 13, box 475, collection 459, BGCA.
5. The Family’s role in U.S.-Somali relations is documented in extensive
correspondence in folders 18–24, box 254, collection 459, BGCA.


INTERLUDE

1. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the
Twentieth Century (Verso, 1997).


11. WHAT EVERYBODY WANTS

1. The stories of individual believers related in this chapter were gathered
during two reporting trips to New Life Church, the rst in January 2005, and
the second in Apr il 2005. Between these visits I corresponded with some of
the members of the church. Where I draw from sources other than interviews
conducted during this period, I’ll provide additional notes.
2. Pastor Ted Haggard, the former leader of New Life, has since disputed
that the location of the Air Force Academy was a consideration, in contradic-
tion of infor mation provided me by church representatives.
3. Cara Degette, “All the President’s Men,” Colorado Springs In de pen dent, No-
vember 13, 2003.
4. This account of Pastor Ted’s founding of New Life is drawn from per-
sonal interviews and Pastor Ted’s Primary Purpose: Making It Hard for People to Go
to Hell From Your City (Char isma House, 1995). The missionar y in question,
Danny Ost, is the son of Joseph Ost, a longtime collaborator of the Fellow-
ship’s on African work. In 1965, Joseph Ost went to work full-time for the
Fellowship “ behind the scenes” in West Africa. Ost introduced Doug Coe and
Gustav Adolf Gedat, then in the late stages of his West German political
ca reer, to se nior Ivory Coast a nd Liberia government o cials. (Coe to Vittoria
Vaccari, December 1965, folder 1, box 362, collection 459, BGCA. Coe to
Gedat, December 30, 1965, folder 11, box 219, collection 459.) Coe included
short reports of Ost’s involvement—including his meetings with African
heads of state—in November/December 19 65, and April/May 1966 “con -
dential” brie ngs he prepared for congressional members of the Fellowship.


426 | N O T E S
(Folder 2, box 362, and folder 19, box 449, collection 459, BGCA.) This is, of
course, not evidence of any organizational connection between Haggard and
the Family; rather, it is simply an illustration of the small world of American
fundamentalism’s elites.
5. I n Primary Purpose, Haggard writes of confronting men outside a gay bar
he’d discovered with one of h is associate pastors. “Two days later, I had a
meeting scheduled with one of the men in the church. On my way there, I
had to go near the intersection where the bar was located and wondered
how many cars would be in the parking lot of that bar in the middle of the
day.” After observing for a while, Ted spotted a member of h is church. Ted
jumped out of his car. “ ‘Jesus sent me here to rescue you,’ ” he called. His
friend got into Ted’s car and cr ied while Ted ministered to him. See pp.
107– 8.
6. Ibid., p. 26.
7. Ibid., p. 33.
8. Ted Haggard, Dog Training, Fly Fishing, and Sharing Christ in the 21st Century
(Nelson Books, 2002), p. 9.
9. Ibid., p. 48.
10. The rst populist church to successfully adopt the cell str ucture was
not American, but South Korean, the work of Pastor Paul Cho, who built a
congregation of nearly eight hundred thousand, the largest single church in
the world, using a cell- group structure that thrived under that nation’s Cold
War authoritar ianism. Steve Brouwer, Paul Gi ord, and Susan D. Rose,
Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism (Routledge,
199 6), p. 2.
11. Haggard, Primary Purpose, p. 160. Pastor Ted is aware that h is martial
plans alarm some outsiders; in Primary Purpose he also writes that when he
began his campaign for Colorado Springs, “spiritual warfare was not a pop-
ular subject . . . I didn’t speak publicly about my own experiences” (p.
32). Even in his more mainstream position atop the NAE, Ted’s belief in
less than full disclosure persisted. When the evangelical jour nalist Ayelish
McGarvey asked Pastor Ted in 2004 why President Bush, as a Christian,
had not apologized for the false assertions used to justify the Iraq War, or
for the dishonest smears marshaled on h is campaign’s behalf, Ted said: “I
think if you asked the President these questions once he’s out of o ce, he’d
say, ‘You’re right. We shouldn’t have done it.’ But r ight now if he said
something like that, well, the world would spin out of control! . . .


NO TES| 427
Listen, I th ink [we Chr istian believers] are responsible not to lie, but I
don’t think we’re responsible to say ever yth ing we know.” (McGarvey, “As
God Is His Witness,” American Prospect online edition, October 19, 2004,
http:// www .prospect .org/ web/ page .ww ?section= root & name= ViewWeb
& articleId = 8790 .
12. William Sims Bainbridge and Rodney Stark, A Theory of Religion (Lang,
1987); Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990:
Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (Rutgers University Press, 1992);
Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Reli-
gion (University of California Press, 2000). Since I wrote this chapter, Stark
has published a new book that signals his shift from scholarship into wholesale
Christian triumphalism of a variety barely distinguishable from Pastor Ted’s:
The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Suc-
cess (Random House, 2005).
13. Stark and Finke, Chapter 8, “A Theoretical Model of Religious Econo-
mies,” in Acts of Faith.
14. Haggard, Dog Training, p. 12.
15. Ibid., pp. 35–39.
16. Ibid., p. 24.
17. Both organizations have their roots in the dubious late- nineteenth-century
science of boyology, practiced by mostly Protestant, upper-class men con-
cerned about the degenerative e ects of “city rot,” immigrants, and profes-
sional female educators on future generations of men. The Boy Scouts was the
most militant of many groups that started up, but over the years, it grew
soft—or maybe Chr istian fundamentalists grew harder in spirit. (Cli ord
Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sport s in Protestant America, 1880–
1920 [Harvard University Press, 2001].) An Assemblies of God preacher
named Johnny Barnes founded the Royal Rangers in 1962, blatantly copying
the Scouts and adding an extra dose of scripture. It has since prospered on the
conser vative fringe. New Life’s success with the program, though, has been a
big factor in moving it toward the mainstream. The Scouts still o er a “God
and Country Program,” but that can’t compare with the Rangers’ emphasis on
foreign missions, adventures that appeal to kids and fundamentalist parents
alike. http:// royalrangers .ag .org/ .
18. Our City, God’s Word (International Bible Society, 2004). “Who is the
‘Our’ in ‘Our City, God’s Word’ that the International Bible Society refers
to?” asked Colorado Springs resident Susan Hindman in a letter published in


428 | N O T E S
the November 7, 2004, Colorado Springs Gazette. The IBS proceeded to produce
editions for two more cities, further confusing the issue.


12. THE ROMANCE OF AMERICAN FUNDAMENTALISM

1. Anne Constable, Richard Walker, and Tom Carter, “The Sins of Billy
James,” Time, February 16, 1976.


13. UNSCHOOLING

1. The American Republic for Christian Schools, second edition, by Rachel C.
Larson, Pamela B. Creason, and Michael D. Matthews, is published by Bob
Jones University Press (2000). Bob Jones University, perhaps the most tradi-
tional school in Christian higher education, is too elite to be representative of
populist fundamentalism but too separatist and intolerant even within the
faith to be part of elite fundamentalism. And yet its publishing arm, one of the
biggest suppliers of evangelical textbooks, reaches far beyond the university’s
sphere of in uence. I rst learned of the press and its o er ings in 2005 at Mac-
Dowell, an artists’ colony in New Hampshire, as a group of writers and artists
were discussing the texts they’d read as schoolchildren. One, Michelle
Aldredge, had us all beat, with quick recall of an impressive sample of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, from Jonathan Ed-
wards to Walt Whitman. What kind of amazing school had she attended? An
evangelical academy, where she’d studied Dr. Raymond St. John’s two-volume
American Literature for Christian Schools. I ordered Bob Jones University Press’s
2003 teachers’ edition of the text and soon realized that my secular public
school education had failed to provide me an adequate grounding in American
literature. Dr. St. John’s text o ered excerpts from writers I didn’t encounter
until college or behind. On the other hand, students were advised to ponder
how much better the already-great Melville could have been had he not been a
pagan.
2. MacArthur did more than th at, according to the h istor ian Lawrence
S. Wittnew: “Despite the o cial policy of religious freedom and separation of
church and state in occupied Japan . . . General Douglas MacArthur openly
and actively assisted the propagation of the Ch ristian faith . . . Christianity


NO TES| 429
and democracy were closely tied in MacArthur’s opinion, and during the
Cold War period he looked to Christianity as a major weapon against Com-
munism in Japan.” That weapon took the form of a campaign to bring thou-
sands of m issionaries into Japan and distribute 10 million Bibles. Christianity
didn’t take, but it’s possible that it did help blunt the powerf ul postwar appeal
of Japanese leftism. “MacArthur and the Missionaries: God and Man in Oc-
cupied Japan,” Paci c Historical Review 40, no. 1 (1971): 77–98.
3. Douthat’s article, published to mild fanfare in the August/September
2006 issue of First Things, missed the lengthy and admiring obituary published
by the magazine just ve years previous, William Edgar’s August/September
2001 tribute, “The Passing of R. J. Rushdoony,” in which Edgar eulogized
him as “a man of extraordinary brilliance possessing an almost encyclopedic
knowledge of human a airs,” and recalled with fondness his early study of
Rushdoony at Francis Schae er’s L’Abri. Schae er, we are told by the respect-
able Right, took only Rushdoony’s most civilized ideas. Wh ich is to say, he
narrowed Rushdoony’s rage down to abortionists, writing in the early 1970s
of abortion as symbolic of all of secularism and thus the front line in a battle
between good and evil that justi ed breaking laws. Some fans took action,
burning and bombing hundreds of abortion clinics and shooting several doc-
tors. See Press, Absolute Convictions (Henry Holt, 2006).
4. Quoted in John Bolt, A Free Church, A Holy Nation: Abraham Kuyper’s Ameri-
can Public Theology (William B. Eerdmans, 2001), p. 21. Bolt, a fellow with the
fundamentalist Family Research Council, is at the forefront of a broad attempt
to claim Kuyper as a forebear of radical Ch ristian conservatism, part of the
long-term project of constructing an intellectual history for a religious tradi-
tion that has long eschewed intellectualism.
5. The historian James D. Bratt argues for the progressive interpretation of
Kuyper in h is edited Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (William B. Eerd-
mans, 1998). “Kuyper was and was not a Protestant ‘fundamentalist,’ ” writes
Bratt. “He was in a manner: a militant in all things, including his
anti-Modernism . . . He did not try to eradicate history, but grow from it”
(p. 3). I n responding to an early draft of this chapter, Bratt noted that while
Rushdoony and other contemporary fundamentalists—notably Chuck
Colson—may have thought they were Kuyperians, their rejection of Kuyper’s
pluralism and socialist inclinations puts them directly at odds not only with
Kuyper’s writing, which is open to interpretation, but with the historical
evidence, in the Dutch state, of Kuyper’s intentions. Kuyper, he argues,


430 | N O T E S
would have rejected the attened perspective implied by a fundamentalist
biblical worldview.
6. James I. Robertson, Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend
(Macmillan, 1997), p. xiii. This is by far the best of the Stonewall biogra-
phies, of interest even if the reader has no Confederate sympathies. I used it as
veri cation for the claims made by less responsible fundamentalist Stonewal-
liana.
7. Like the Family, Christian Embassy prefers to keep a low pro le, but on
November 2, 2005, I obtained an interview with Christian Embassy’s chief of
sta , Sam McCullough. McCullough’s main business is explaining the Bible’s
position on contemporary concerns to congressmen—Brownback among
them, as well as Family members Senator James Inhofe and Senator John
Thune; and former representative Tom DeLay, “about 80 members of Con-
gress . . . in our rotation,” McCullough told me. Christian Embassy also
believes it has a special calling in the Pentagon, explaining the Bible’s view on
war, for example—it’s “all throughout the Bible,” points outs McCullough—to
a group of for ty se nior o cers.
8. Diamond, Roads to Dominion, 1995, p. 173.
9. It works: An elegant booklet that accompanies the DVD is lled not just
with the testimonies of generals and congressmen, but also with those of for-
eign diplomats declaring Washington a sort of holy city. “The most importa nt
thing since coming to Washington from my communist-dominated society is
that I have discovered God,” writes a “European ambassador,” thanking Chris-
tian Embassy. Fijian ambassador Pita Nacuva, reports the booklet, following
his “years of spiritual training in Washington, D.C.,” recon gured his coun-
try’s schools “on the model of Jesus Christ” using an American Christian cur-
riculum designed for developing nations, currently exported to around forty
countries.
10. After I rst wrote about Christian Embassy in 2006, Mikey Weinstein, a
former air force lawyer and Reagan Wh ite House counsel, reviewed its video
and saw not just bad theology but also a potential violation of militar y regula-
tions regarding separation of church and state. Moreover, with his son—a
recent graduate of the Air Force Academy—headed for I raq, Weinstein wor-
ried that the video functioned as almost made-to-order Al Qaeda propaganda.
After all, how hard would it be to convince a potential Al Qaeda recruit that
the United States is ghting a Chr istian crusade when U.S. generals and De-
par tment of Defense o cials say so in so many words? A similar concern


NO TES| 431
arose around one of the Christian witnesses in the video, Major General Peter
U. Sutton at the O ce of Defense Cooperation in Turkey. When news of his
participation in the video hit the Turk ish press following my article (one Turk-
ish paper characterized Sutton as a member of a “radical fundamentalist sect”),
his Turkish counterpart demanded to know why he had appeared in the video,
undermining their trust in him.
Weinstein’s organization, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation,
pressed the Pentagon for an investigation, and on July 20, 2007, the Depart-
ment of Defense Inspector General issued Repor t. H06L102270308, “Alleged
Misconduct by DOD O cials Concerning Chr istian Embassy,” which found
that seven top o cers had violated military ethics by participating in the video
in uniform, that the Pentagon chaplain had obtained approval by “mischarac-
terizing the purpose and proponent of the video,” and that h is o ce had au-
thorized contractor badge status to Ch ristian Embassy employees, allowing
them access to restricted areas. Most disturbing of all was the defense o ered
by one o cer: Christian Embassy, he believed, was a “quasi-federal entity.”
The full text of the report is available at the Military Religious Freedom Foun-
dation’s website, http:// militaryreligiousfreedom .org .
11. Ted Haggard appropriated King’s words at the August 14, 2005, “Justice
Sunday I I” televised forum organized by the fundamentalist Family Research
Council. Haggard invoked King, alongside famed civil rights champions Tom
DeLay and Phyllis Schla y, as part of a call for the kind of right-wing judges
who’d undo Brown v. Board. And in Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Se-
duction (Free Press, 2007), former Bush faith- based o cial David Kuo tells of
drawing on King as he wrote a pivotal speech for the for mer Christian Coali-
tion leader Ralph Reed, in wh ich Reed claimed that the Christian Right was a
victim of discr imination. “I was ghting my own little civil rights battle,”
writes Kuo (p. 67).
12. There are an increasing number of scholarly sources on the Jesus peo-
ple movement, but far more enter taining and revealing are two memoirs by
par ticipants. Charles Marsh, a historian, contextualizes the Jesus people in
the strife of souther n race relations in The Last Days: A Son’s Story of Sin and
Segregation in the New South (Basic Books, 2001), while the music writer Mark
Curtis Anderson evokes the strange mix of rock and roll and piety that
thrilled him as a ch ild in Jesus Sound Explosion (University of Georgia Press,
2003).


432 | N O T E S

14. THIS IS NOT THE END

1. Quoted in Lew Daly, God and the Welfare State (Boston Review/MIT
Press, 2006), p. 33.
2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press,
2000), p. xiv.