This Is Not the End
She was as pretty as any nineteen-year-old girl thin ned down to near
nothing. Hair smooth and blonde, eyes big and blue, and her lips,
pale red on white ski n, were quivering. She stood between me and
the door to the bar in which she’d just struck out at begging change
from the last round of drinkers. She carried a piece of cardboard, the
sum of her life to date scrawled with black marker i n a hand too
shaky to read. So she put it to a sort of song, a practiced routine she
chanted with arti cial sadness while something real inside actually
broke down. “Mister, I just got to Portland, I got nowhere to go.
They won’t give me my TB card and, you know, so . . . I need
money for a shelter, I slept under a bridge. Mister, I just got to Port-
land, I’m scared, I need somewhere to go.”
I scrounged in my pocket and came up with a thin wad of twen-
ties and small bills; I peeled o two singles and gave them to her.
“Thank you, Mister,” she said.
I said, “Good luck.” She began weeping. “Good luck,” I said again.
“Thank you.”
“I have to go,” I said.
“Thank you.” She turned and went out the door; as it swung shut
behi nd her, she doubled over, sobbing.
I gave her a minute to gain some ground, and then I left, too. She
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 371
was hal fway up the block. I went to my rental car and took my bags
out of the trun k. I was staying in a room above the bar, in Portland
searching out the Family’s early days in archives and at addresses long
since given over to purposes other than Abram Vereide’s or Doug
Coe’s. I hadn’t found a trace. I was killing time.
The girl spotted me rolli ng my suitcase across the parking lot.
She approached as if I might hit her. The yel low streetlight made her
face look as if it had color; she was even prettier than she’d been in-
side. “Mister,” she said, “I just got to Portland, I got nowhere to
go . . .” Word for word the same song.
I stared at her. “I’m sorry. I just helped you inside.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, too.”
“I wish I could help more.”
“Uh- huh.”
“What’s a TB card? ”
“For a test,” she said. “They got no reason not to give it to me.”
She began crying agai n, her tears leavi ng trails of streetlight
glimmer on her cheeks.
“Good luck,” I said.
If I was a believer, I would have said, “God bless you.” If I wasn’t a
believer, I should have said, “God bless you.” Either way, it would
have cost me nothing and would have been so much less hopeless than
wishing “good luck” to a woman who was not likely to have any. Such
is the dilemma of the American city upon a hill with which I began
this book, and the problem of fundamentalism’s myths versus those
of liberalism with which I closed the last chapter. Both are systems of
knowing, of believing, of absorbing citizens into what Doug Coe
calls the “social order.” They are not means of “changing the world”
but of reconciling us—the believers and the unbelievers—to its or-
dinary su ering.
If I was a believer, I might thi nk my blessing would matter; if I
wasn’t, I’d know it would sound good and that it would not matter.
372 | JEFF SHARLET
But I said, “Good luck,” and the woman bent over crying again, and I
left her like that, weeping on the street, and I went up to my room
thinking of Christians and of “followers of Christ,” of the Fam ily’s
“ heart for the poor.” I was thinking, too, that I should go back and
o er t he woman a place to stay; of giving her a bed to sleep in, and
how I wouldn’t put any moves on her, and she would appreciate that,
and she’d make me some ki nd of o er, and I’d decline, and I’d be a
real hero. I was thinking, too, of tuberculosis, and of the cramped,
airless rooms above the bar, and the germs swirling arou nd me as I
drifted o , her microscopic gratitude servi ng as a di erent kind of
communion.
And I thought of the morning, of waking up with no money.
How would she get it? She couldn’t sneak away without waking
me. Maybe she had a knife. I imagined bringing her to the room and
her big eyes turning mean and her lips and teeth snarling like she was
a raccoon in a corner, her bone- and-skin hand swipi ng my money and
her backing away with her knife ready for my gut should I make a
wrong gesture.
That wouldn’t have happened. There would have been no knife,
and, for that matter, I’m guessing here, she would have said no if I’d
o ered to share my room with her. She needed something, but it
wasn’t a bed. I don’t know what it was, whether it came in a pill or a
pipe or a needle.
I asked mysel f, What would a believer do?
I was thinking about some believers whom I’d met earlier in the
eve ning, a house church of a half dozen young families and a few
single men and women who met every Sunday night in the living
room of a couple named Adam and Christie Parent. I’d joined them
because a false lead had suggested that theirs was a church that func-
tions as a feeder to Ivanwald—I’d come across several around the
country—but the connection turned out to be no deeper than one
you ng man nobody knew well. Still, I stuck around, because what
the Parents were doing—church in their living room, “small groups,”
discussions of “accountability” that denied personal responsibility—
seemed to merge the methods of elite fundamentalism with the
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 373
passions of the populists. I told them I was writing a book about reli-
gion in America; they welcomed me, I think, because they know
they’re its future.
Adam and Christie have three kids, two little boys and a girl, and
they live i n a handsome old box of a house with a real yard, in east
Portland, just o the campus of Multnomah Bible College. Adam is
starting his fourth year there. He is twenty- seven, tall, wide, and
square in the shoulders. He grew up in San Diego and as a teenager
wandered up to rural Washington, where he worked as a youth pas-
tor until he decided to go back to school. He wears a small brown soul
patch just beneath his lip and dresses like the frat boy he never was —
loose plaid shirt, matchi ng light blue ball cap—and he talks like a
former surfer who has left the waves behind. He cracks smiles like
they were ip tops on a six-pack, but he has developed a habit com-
mon to preachers and salesmen, of holding your eyes with his and
transmitti ng sincerity. That it is real makes it no less disconcerting.
His wife, Christie, is short and strawberry blonde, all buttery
cheeks and bouncy energy. But at twenty-nine she’s one of the oldest
in the group, and she talks with the authority be tting a young mother
with more kids than any other couple i n the “home community” has
managed. When it came time to take all the children upstairs, Chris-
tie summoned a helper and herded them past Adam’s golf clubs and
his acoustic guitar, leaving the rest of us sitting on couches and
cross-legged on the oor, in a big circle, waiting for Adam to tell us
what we’ll be discussing. First, a prayer: studded with ju sts: “ I just
want to thank You”; “I just, just really love You”; “I just pray and hope
You show up tonight.”
When I rst heard the many justs of prayer at Ivanwald, I thought
it was a southern thing. But here was a room of northwesterners and
transplanted midwesterners and one Cali fornian, and when I peeked
during the prayer, I saw their heads nodding on the jus t l ike they
were counting rhythm. Shi rley Mullen, a religious historian and pro-
vost at Westmont College when I spoke with her in 20 04, told me
she had noticed the rise of just in evangelical prayer over the last
twenty years. “ It is a claim to innocence,” she said. “A disquali er.”
374 | JEFF SHARLET
Ju st is, in its ubiquity, a word central to the self-e acing desire for
in uence that has driven those evangelicals who stud their prayers
with it out of their churches and into “the culture,” a word they use
to refer to something that is to be wrestled with and defeated. It’s a
word that hides its own hunger.
“Just use us, Lord, just use us, please,” Adam concluded his
prayer. They’d been brought together by a shared belief in the awe-
some power of God, “awesome” the way a skater might say it, “power”
as an absolute, a total ity. They wanted and bel ieved they were called
to be in the presence of that power, but to approach it in pride would
be meaningless, and they were very keen on meaning. So they pref-
aced speculation about God and the nature of His power with just,
as if by claim ing their needs were simple they could slip beneath the
radar God used to detect unseemly want. All they wanted, after all,
was just to be used.
At Adam’s direction, the group broke up into smaller groups
of three and four and proceeded to work t hrough a series of ques-
tions devised by Adam and the leaders of eleven other like-minded
home churches, all part of something called the Imago Dei Commu-
nity. Imago Dei is an odd mix of progressive evangelicalism and fun-
damentalism, a church that rejects the idea of “church”; its “vision”
promises, instead, community and Jesus, stripped not so much of cul-
tural accretion as of everything boring and less-than-intense about
traditional church services. They do hold a Sunday morning service,
but at the pulpit an artist, who paints or draws or sculpts the Gospel
as directed by God, accompanies the preacher. They believe God is
present, as in here, now. “ Interventionist,” as some theologians would
describe their conception of the deity, is too wonky a word for the
Jesus they believe is simultaneously sitting right next to them and pos-
sessing them, guiding every breath, every thought, every icker of
their eyes. They believe in sin but don’t much care; they prefer love
and discuss it often. Love is the word they use most frequently to evoke
how completely in the control of Jesus they nd themselves. Adam’s
home church group had instituted a col lective prayer journal, a black
hardcover notebook in which each member was to write, on one side
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 375
of the page, his or her prayer requests; and, on the other, the date and
time Jesus answered them. “We forget what God does in our lives,”
Adam explained. “We need to remind each other.”
In the small groups, they planned to spend that eve ning rem ind-
ing each other of what Truth is. The Truth they were talking about
was the ki nd that comes with a capital T, and it was essential, Adam
had written on the top of the worksheet, to “set us free from the de-
structive nature of life and the world.”
Then followed the chief question: What is Truth?
I joined a group of three sitting on the carpet beside the stairs:
Matt, a reedy Multnomah Bible philosophy student with presence
greater than his age, who acted as group leader; Sara, a long-legged,
long- armed, long-necked woman, given to elaborate stretching, who
worked in standardized testing; and Ben, a resident at a nearby hos-
pital. Ben lay down i n front of the screen door. Across the street be-
hind him an orange and blue sign grew in the garden of each yard,
declaring: one man / one woman. vote YES on Prop 36 —a
state initiative to ban even the possibility of proposing gay marriage.
“What is Truth?” Matt asked.
Sara jumped right in. “A lot of people say there is no Truth, but
my problem with that is that it’s an absolute itself.”
“Right,” said Ben. “It’s self-contradictory.”
“But we’re here,” Sara continued. “So there has to be some
Tr ut h.”
Matt volunteered that one of his Multnomah Bible professors had
brought in a woman who didn’t believe in Truth. The class had chal-
lenged her by demanding that she admit that the attacks of Septem-
ber 11 had been wrong. But she wouldn’t give. Right and wrong, she
said, weren’t categories she fou nd useful; she was more interested in
learning about what she, we, anyone could do better. It was as con-
cise a de nition of liberalism’s strengths—and central weaknesses —as
she could have given them.
Sara put a hand over her right eye, holding her head and shaking it
at the same time. “I wonder how her opinion would change if some-
one near to her was martyred. Or raped!”
376 | JEFF SHARLET
Matt said he had heard such people believe in what they call
“pragmatism,” which means, he explained, that you bel ieve whatever
happens to be useful at the moment.
“But some things never change!” Sara said.
“I know,” Matt agreed. “But they deny that.” He had learned
about pragmatism, he added, in an education class; pragmatism, he’d
been told, was infecting public schools. Matt hadn’t heard of John
Dewey, the early twentieth-century reformer who’d introduced the
philosophical school of pragmatism into American education in the
form of an emphasis on critical thinking rather than memorization.
But the ideas of Tim LaHaye, who writes that Dewey was part of a
prideful conspiracy to undermine Truth, had infused his lessons at
Multnomah Bible College.
Sara wove her ngers together and twisted her hands backward
and stretched them out in front of her, then arched her back and
leaned forward, her shirt riding up her spine; Ben and Matt, red-faced,
averted their eyes. “ What Truth does,” Sara said, “is: Truth names
things.” She rose up out of her stretch and pointed between Matt and
Ben. “Truth puts a value on things. The culture tries to portray a
Truth, like with women.” She didn’t like the pressure put on women to
be thin and beautiful, she explained. Either you are or you aren’t, she
felt, and the culture shouldn’t tell you di erently. “That’s the culture
trying to name us,” she said. “We want God to name us.”
“Yeah,” agreed Ben. “Science”—it seemed to be his word for
what Sara called “the culture”—“gives you at best fragmentary truth.
It doesn’t try to unify things.”
They concluded the small group with a scripture study, looking
for evidence of Truth, and then everyone reassembled in the living
room, where Adam asked each group to announce their results. He
reminded everyone to stay centered on Jesus and scripture. “Don’t
get too caught up in the huge concepts.”
Truth did a lot of things, the groups had discovered: sets you
free, protects you from l ies, exposes deception, gives you a sol id
fou ndation. Truth’s solidity was key to Adam’s closing sermon. He
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 377
sat in a chair in the corner and punctuated his remarks with both
hands curled like commas and slicing downward.
“The postmodern c ulture, they lay aside Truth. It can be hard
to i nteract with them. They say, ‘I don’t care about the Bible; it’s
just a book of words.’ ” Adam shook his head. “But I don’t want a
shifty fou ndation. God gave us His Word! I am so than kful I have
that, because it’s easy to get sucked i n by the cu ltu re. We want a
solid foundation. Christ is a solid foundation. I was looking at my
Bible today. Christ says seventy-eight times, ‘I tell you the Truth.’
That is a lot of times. The culture then was similar to ours now;
they were questioning the Truth.” Adam didn’t mean good question-
ing. “So Christ told them ‘I tell you t he Trut h.’ That’s awesome.
He did that for them so they’d know he wasn’t just some guy. No
way. He said, ‘I tell you the truth.’ I was gett ing stoked looking at
that because I have a solid foundation. I’m protected. Unbelievers
think there is no absolute Truth. They trust feelings and experi-
ence. The power of Truth is lost to them. But we don’t have to
change our conception of Truth for the c ulture, because it’s abso-
lute. Its power is absolute.”
I thought of a book by Art Lindsley, a fundamental ist writer who
would stop in at Ivanwald from time to time to teach the young men
about “character” and politics. A slim volume called Tr ue Tru th: De-
fending Absolute Truth in a Relativistic World was Lindsley’s most popular
work among the brothers, who took its tautological butchery of lan-
guage for a closed circuit of power and wisdom. This ultrarigid intel-
lectualization of “Truth” is the doctri ne that merges elite and populist
fundamentalism. The elite fundamentalism of the Family preaches
its unbending concept of “ Truth” as a defense of privilege; populist
fundamentalism embraces these philosophical underpinnings as a
response to su ering. Many of the men and women in the Parents’
living room, in fact, were employed as social workers or nurses; sev-
eral were former activists, some of them even once radical leftists.
They were good-hearted folk. They wanted to help the poor, the sick,
the weak, and on small, everyday levels, they did so more than most
378 | JEFF SHARLET
do; and yet nothing seemed to get better. Their commitment to this
stern Truth enabled them to let go of the feelings of powerlessness
that often a ict those whose hearts are largest. Indeed, many of
them had so let go of power that they’d lost their politics, too. For-
mer liberals had stopped voting; conservatives trusted giant evan-
gelical organizations to make the best use of their small donations, a
form of “ big government” by another name. Their Truth had proven
itsel f relative, emboldening the powerful and tranqui lizi ng the pow-
erless.
Adam continued. They all knew, he said, that a couple of weeks
ago the mentor of Imago Dei’s pastor had been shot. The details
didn’t matter; he had been shot. “Well, if you don’t believe in absolute
Truth, what do you do with that? What’s your foundation? ” True
Truth makes such losses bearable. It absolves you of the need to ask
more questions. True Truth is God’s will, Coe’s “social order.” It’s
the power and solace of submission.
We bowed our heads in prayer. We prayed for friends and rela-
tives with cancer, just that they m ight know God, and that if God
wanted to heal them that he would, but just, please God, let them
know you. And we prayed for me, for my book, that it just be a good
book, a True book, one by which I’d come to know what I had been
created for.
And—just—amen.
Later that night, I thought about Truth and the junkie, what she
wanted and what she needed, and what a believer might have done. I
couldn’t come up with answers, and I knew it wouldn’t help to ask
Adam. Because even if there is a Truth, what we would have done in a
given situation is always subjective. But I’m pretty sure Adam would
have prayed for her salvation, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he
had taken her by the arm and guided her to a shelter. Nor would I
have been shocked if he had given her a blessi ng and a sad, half-mouthed
smile and sent her packing. In either case, what would be the Truth
of the matter?
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 379
I checked into my room, a tiny box with a window looking out
on an air shaft and a skyl ight above the bed reveali ng the dark purple
night. The room was stu y, so I turned on its rotating table fan and lay
on top of the covers. “Everything is connected,” Ben the doctor had
told me at the house church. “ Everything is Jesus. It’s like a web, and
He’s at the center”—where otherwise you’d nd a spider.
2. Salvation
In 2007, as this book neared completion, I met with a former special
assistant to President Bush the younger named David Kuo, in a quiet
o ce he’d rented outside of Washington to write his memoirs. He’d
published a book called Tempting Faith: The Inside Story of a Political
Seduction, in which he recounts his own journey from liberalism to
fundamentalism and, after a fashion, back again. Kuo is a tall, big-
boned man with spiky black hair and a pleasantly padded face given
to loose smiles. His demeanor is naive, but by his own account he can
be calculating; yet he doesn’t seem to want to deceive.
As a student at Tufts University in the 1980s, Kuo found the
Fam ily. Or rather, they found him. He was bright, pol itical, and
moving rightward, from a girlfriend’s abortion to antiabortion activ-
ism. A man named Kevin, who “worked with” student Christians on
elite campuses, fed him books by conservative Christian writers and
took him to go hear Chuck Colson speak. “I was dazzled,” writes Kuo.
“If I followed Jesus, helped others follow Jesus, and did it all publicly,
I’d be ghting back against the secularizing forces that were sweep-
ing God into the corner.” Kuo has always been a service-m inded soul.
He wanted to help—as a young man, he didn’t think too much about
what he wanted to help—and he wanted to do so on a grand scale.
Before he graduated, Kevi n gave him a “political gift”: an invita-
tion to the National Prayer Breakfast, where he’d be one of “150
student leaders” initiated into “the mysterious—some thought
secretive—group behi nd the prayer breakfast.” It was, he’d learn,
“the most powerful group in Washington that nobody knows.” At a
380 | JEFF SHARLET
session with Doug Coe after the o cial event, he learned that “Jesus
the man” is more important than politics, that faith must be individ-
ual, that Jesus chose certai n individuals to whom to reveal greater
secrets. “The three within the twelve,” Coe called them—Peter,
James, and John, the three disciples who, according to Coe’s teach-
ing, Jesus took aside for “gli mpses of his power” and “special instruc-
tion.” That was a “model,” Coe taught, “of intimate relationships”
fol lowed by only a few very clever leaders. “[Coe] pointed to Hitler,
to Stalin, to Mao, to Castro.” Evil men, said Coe, but wise. “Do you
want to prove your worth? ” Coe asked Kuo and the other students
selected for special instruction. “ Then pursue Jesus, pursue real rela-
tionships. Forget about power.”
It was like the note Abram wrote to him sel f i n 1935, his scrib-
bled list of delegated authority for his new movement: To this man
went responsibility for organization, to that one nances. And beside
his own name, he’d written “power”—and then crossed himself out,
erasing the evidence of his desire.
Kuo began to rise in politics. An intern for Ted Kennedy in col-
lege, he became a Republican, working in the orbit of Fam ily men
such as Jack Kemp and John Ashcroft. He tried to strike out on his
own—and failed. Coe took him up as a project. “Without my real-
izing it, the Fellowship”—as he prefers to call the Family—“ began
subverting my ideas of power, and, more speci cally, of Christian
power.” Coe took Kuo shing in Montana, with Supreme Court Jus-
tice Sandra Day O’Connor. He introduced him to Billy Graham and
Bil l Bright of Campus Crusade, to Democrats and Republicans.
Through the Family, he met former vice president Dan Quayle. In
1996, Quayle arranged for his conservative backers to support a non-
pro t Kuo had created to evaluate groups doing “e ective” poverty
work and channel more money their way—an experience Kuo would
draw on when the grand experiment in “ faith- based initiatives” to
which he’d been contributing went federal in 20 01.
In the rst months of the new Bush administration, John DiIulio,
the Democrat Bush had tapped to sell his faith- based program, called
to invite Kuo to move into the West Wing. “Karen Hughes is on
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 381
board, Karl Rove is on board,” he told Kuo. “When can you start?”
Faith- Based and Commun ity Initiatives merged DiIulio’s old-
school urban politics, rooted in Catholic social justice teachings,
with the ideas long championed by the Family. Its chief advocates in
Congress during the late 1990s were two Family members, Senator
Dan Coats of Indiana and Ashcroft, who as a senator from Missouri
inserted the concept of “charitable choice”—allowing religious
groups to win government funding without separating out their reli-
gious agenda—into the 1996 welfare-reform bill. The theory behind
faith- based initiatives grew out of the work of scholars and theolo-
gians schooled in traditions that could hardly be considered funda-
mentalist, or even conservative. But its implementation was in many
senses the logical result of the Family’s decades of m inistry to Wash-
ington’s elite combined with the increasingly established power of
populist fundamentalism: a mix of sophisticated policy maneuvers
and the kind of sentimentalism that blinded many supporters to the
fact that faith- based initiatives, no matter how wel l intended, are
nothing less than “the privatization of welfare,” as the faith- based
theorist Marvin Olasky put it in a 1996 report commissioned by
then-Governor Bush. Such an outcome satis ed elite fundamental-
ism’s long- standing belief in the relationship between laissez-faire
economics and God’s invisible, interventionist hand, and populist
fundamental ism’s desire for publ ic expressions of faith, pre ferably
heartwarming ones. The goal, Senator Coats declared, was the “trans-
fer of resources and authority . . . to those private and religious in-
stitutions that shape, direct, and reclaim individual lives.”1
Coats, a bulb so dim he considers Dan Quayle a mentor, isn’t
much of a thinker on his own, but he couldn’t have summed up
Abram’s original Idea any more succinctly. The Family’s interests
have always tended toward foreign a airs, but faith- based initiatives
embody a core philosophy of governance fundamentalists have long
sought on every front. During the 1980s, Attorney General Ed
Meese and Gary Bauer, Reagan’s domestic policy adviser, corre-
sponded with Coe about creating a federal, faith- based response to
poverty—a broad application of the methods Coe had experimented
382 | JEFF SHARLET
with a decade earlier by backing the Black Bu ers as an alternative
to black power. Meese’s plans never came to fruition, but the out-
lines of compassionate conservatism, as Olasky would desc ribe the
trickle-down approach to helpi ng the poor, began to cohere in t hose
letters.
What is the cause of poverty? they asked themselves. Their an-
swer was simple: “disobedience,” according to a special report com-
missioned by the Fam ily. At the right end of the Family spectrum, this
was interpreted according to the logic of just deserts (Bauer, for in-
stance, seemed to believe AIDS was a punishment from God) or plain
denial (in 1983, Meese said he had a hard time believing there actually
were any hungry children in the United States). But both those posi-
tions eroded as the Family’s international realpolitik asserted itself
domestically: the poor existed, and they had to be helped. Or recon-
ciled, in the Family’s words. The goal was not the eradication of pov-
erty; it was the maintenance of a social order through the salvation of
souls. That’s always been the main agenda of populist fundamental-
ism; now, elite fundamentalism began to embrace it as well.
But t hat’s not what Kuo cared about when he went to work in
the West Wing. Kuo’s religion was as infused with liberal Christi-
anity as it was with the obedience- based theology of t he Family.
For that matter, faith- based initiatives are as liberal as they are
fundament alist, t heir privatization of social services an exercise
of the unstated conviction of classical liberalism that the free market
is absolute and yet requires government subsidy. They are to religion
what Clinton-era “ free trade” deals were to labor: a “ rationalization”
in the name of “e ciency.” Both turn on a contradiction: a belief in
a u niversal principle—faith, free markets—put into practice by de-
nying the importance of universal principles. “ That we hoped every-
one would one day know Jesus was simply a private goal,” writes
Kuo, even as he insists that one’s “worldview” informs one’s every
action.
That’s why suppor ters of faith-based gover nance can’t comprehend
the critics who accuse them of theocratic inclinations. They think
they’re going in just the opposite direction, secularizing salvation,
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 383
reconciling theology into law. Theocracy is a collective endeavor,
they point out; American fundamentalism reveres the individual.
So, too, the mystic liberalism of free markets, more similar to
fundamentalism in function than secularists believe. Classical
liberalism fetishizes the rational actor; fundamentalism savors the
individual soul. Both deny possessing any ideology; both inevitably
become vehicles for the kind of power that possesses and consumes
the best intentions of true believers.
When Kuo discovered that Bush’s faith- based rhetoric was for
the most part just that—lost in the shadow of the Iraq War, the pro-
gram never received anywhere near the $8 billion Bush had once
spoken of—he resolved to prove its value to the money men. Tempt-
ing Faith is, most damningly, the story of how he and a few others
transformed the O ce of Faith- Based Initiatives into the very Re-
publican vote-getting machine its critics had accused it of being from
the begin ning. “We laid out a plan whereby we would hold ‘roundtable
events’ for threatened incumbents with faith and community lead-
ers,” he writes. In 2002, those roundtables contributed to nineteen
out of twenty victories in targeted races. In 2004, the O ce of
Faith- Based Initiatives repeated the trick on the presidential scale.
But by that time, Kuo was gone. He had quit. “We were good people
forced to run a sad charade, to provide political cover to a White
House that needed compassion and religion as political tools.”
It was a startlingly honest adm ission. The media celebrated Kuo
as a truth teller and his book as the rst big crack in the Christian
Right’s alliance with the Republican Party. By 2007, the press was
declaring the Christian Right dead and evangelicalism a waning force
in American life, despite the fact that by Kuo’s own confession, the
machine he helped build will likely continue to lurch along after
Bush is gone. Bush never provided it the funds he had promised in
idealistic speeches aimed at evangelical voters, but he did something
more signi cant: through administrative changes made by executive
order, he transformed Clinton’s 1996 welfare reforms i nto a wedge
with which to drive irreparable cracks into the wall of separation
between church and state. Suddenly, there were faith- based o ces
384 | JEFF SHARLET
not just in the Department of Health and Human Services but also in
the Department of Justice, not only in the Department of Education but
also in the Department of Commerce. The Small Business Adminis-
tration gained a faith- based o ce; so, too, did the Agency for Inter-
national Development, through which the United States distributes
its imperial largesse, the diplomacy of foreign aid. None of these of-
ces had much money, but then, they didn’t need to. Their bud gets
didn’t matter so much as the bud gets of the departments and agencies
in which they were housed, huge portions of which could now be
tapped for faith- based ends even if the money didn’t ow directly
through the faith- based o ce. The real achievement of faith- based
initiatives was not to launch ashy programs or even to buy votes for
Republicans; it was to open the door for religious groups to the whole
trea sure house of federal social-services funding, tens of billions of
dollars.
But that, too, was only a means to an end: Abram’s Idea written
into the DNA of the government of a world power, Chuck Colson’s
“worldview” fused with constitutional tradition. The dream, harden-
ing now not into politics but the very structures in which politics
happen, is the sancti cation and privatization of power as one and
the same pro cess, proclaimed as “service” by the powerful and ac-
cepted as God’s will by the powerless.
This is no more nor less than a theological restatement of
globalization—a transfer of wealth and power embraced by most
Democrats as well as Republicans as a natural “ fact,” as if divinely
ordained. The di erence between the two parties, econom ically,
theologically, is one of degrees, not principles. “The United States is
also a one-party state,” Julius Nyerere, the rst president of Tanzania,
once observed in defending his own one-party system. “But with
typical American extravagance, they have two of them.” That was a
truth Abram grasped seven decades ago. The rst law of the Fam ily’s
elite fundamentalism is that power does not require partisanship.
“True Truth,” transcending traditional left and right, is a doctrine of
obedience, not a bill of particulars.
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 385
Bush’s mistake—the misapplication of power that cost him the
loyalty of men such as Kuo and even John Ashcroft, who emerged as
a late critic of the administration—was to bend the “ True Truth” of
American fundamentalism to the needs of the electoral cycle. The
slow convergence of the el ite and populist fundamentalism separated
at the Scopes trial in 1925 doesn’t promise the permanent victory of
a political party but of a social order, served with greater or lesser
devotion by Republicans and Democrats bound together in prayer
cells.
After Kuo and I had been talking for several hours, I mentioned
that I’d written about the Fam ily for Harper’s. Kuo seemed surprised.
“I think I remember your article,” he said. He tapped a couple of his
keys on his computer. Not a Google search; a couple of keys. “This is
how they pray,” he began reading, and then shot me a goofy grin.
Was I supposed to think he’d had the story on his screen before I
arrived? “You should call Doug Coe,” he said, and gave me a number.
(I did, as I had before; no response.) Coe, he said, had entered
semiretirement. Stepping up to replace him was a man named Dick
Foth, a longtime adviser to John Ashcroft. I’d listened to a recorded
sermon by Foth; it’d struck me as unremarkable stu , platitudes and
tautologies. Kuo wasn’t o ended. This, he said, is proof that the
Family is not political. Politics are speci c, Kuo said; the Family’s
faith is universal.
In a sense, this was true. The cell structure that de ned Abram’s
movement in 1935 has si nce become the model for populist funda-
mentalism and more, one of the common denominators of evangeli-
calism. Both elite and populist cells look upward, their concept of
faith drawn along the vertical axis. Elected elites look up to their
greatest constituent, God; the people who elect them pray that their
leaders listen to God. Both call this gaze “ love,” and in exchange both
demand “salvation.”
The popular front promises the salvation of individuals, a chance
to buy into “purpose,” “meaning,” a movement: to feel like a part of
the big picture. Elite fundamentalism pursues the literal salvation of
386 | JEFF SHARLET
that big picture: the preservation of power, even as those who serve
it change churches, or parties, or particular political whims. Power
is what remains. The popular front rises and falls in an ebb and tide
of “revivals,” spontaneous and cultivated, each, so far, stronger than
the last, each surging just as secularism says that this time that bad old
religion, the superstitious kind, the political ki nd, the powerful kind,
is a thing of the past. The key men endure. Indeed, they prosper.
3. Deliverance
The numbing authority of American fundamentalism resides in its
language, “love” as an expression of obedience, “ just” as a disclaimer
for desire, “Jesus plus nothing” as a description not of a brilliant di-
vi ne but of blunt authority. Such banalities do not disguise evil, as
Hannah Arendt argued in her famous study of traditional fascism, but
rather subvert what is essentially generous about fundamentalism, its
dream of a community in which every member is free to approach
the divi ne as he or she feels guided, its desire for a city upon a hill in
which hunger and regret are unknown. At their roots, evangelical-
ism and its child, American fundamentalism—both driven by the
democratic feeling of individual belief toward faith in authority—arise
in response to the central dilemma of nearly all religion: su ering,
from that of Abigail Hutchinson to that of lonesome immigrant
Abram to that, even, of Ted Haggard. Fundamentalism wants to ease
the pain, to banish fear, forget loneliness; to erase desi re. Populist
fundamentalism does so by o eri ng certainty, a xed story about the
relationship between this world and the world to come; elite funda-
mentalism, certain in its entitlement, responds in this world with a
politics of noblesse oblige, the missionary impulse married to mili-
tary and economic power. The result is empire. Not the old imperial-
ism of Rome or the Ottomans or the British navy, that of a central
power forcing weaker groups to pay tribute. Rather, the soft empire
of America that across the span of the twentieth century recruited
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 387
fundamentalism to its cause even as it seduced liberalism to its ser-
vice “presents itself,” in the useful formulation of the political theo-
rists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “not as a historical regime
originating in conquest, but rather as an order that e ectively sus-
pends history and thereby xes the existing state of a airs for
eternity.”2
Eternity! There’s a word that the subjects of this book understand
better than Hardt and Negri and the entire establishment of political
theorists, political scientists, policy wonks, and newspaper editorial
boards. Eternity, says fundamentalism, is the only real response to
the basic fact of su ering, the constant of human existence that com-
pels us to seek knowledge, or understanding, or faith, or grace. Fun-
damentalism frames that response as a story with a neat beginning,
middle, and, most of all, an end that can be known. The better story
we—believers and unbelievers alike, all of us who love our neigh-
bors more than we love power or empire or even the solace of
certainty—must tell is not simply a di erent answer, secular myths
opposed to fundamentalism’s, but a question. Maybe it’s about that
city upon a hil l. Maybe it’s about how we get there, and what we
must walk away from. Such a question isn’t to be found i n revelation,
but in exodus, the act of stepping i nto the unknown. I suspect it has
something to do with the di erence between salvation, as i magined
by fundamentalism, and deliverance. Salvation ends in heaven; deliv-
erance begins in the desert. Salvation is the last word of a story; de-
liverance is the rst. Salvation is the certainty of empire; deliverance
is the hope of democracy. It’s not humble, because hope isn’t humble,
it’s i mpertinent. It’s a question, always another question, always leav-
ing Egypt behind.
