1. Ivanwald
Not long after September 11, 2001, a man I’ll call Zeke1
came to New York to survey the ruins of secularism. “To bear
Not long after September 11, 2001, a man I’ll call Zeke1
witness,” he said. He believed Christ had called him.
He wandered the city, sparking up conversations with people he
took to be Muslims—“Islam ics,” he called them—knocking on the
doors of mosques by day and sliding past velvet ropes into sweaty
clubs by night. He prayed with an imam (to Jesus) and may or may
not have gone home with several women. He got as close as possible
to Ground Zero, visited it often, talked to street preachers. His
throat tingled with dust and ashes. When he slept, his nose bled. He
woke one morning on a red pillow.
He went to bars where he sat and listened to the anger of men
and women who did not understand, as he did, why they had been
stricken. He stared at photographs and painti ngs of the Towers. The
great steel arches on which they’d stood reminded him of Roman
temples, and this made him sad. The city was fallen, not just literally
but spiritually, as decadent and doomed as an ancient civilization.
And yet Zeke wanted and believed he needed to know why New
York was what it was, this city so hated by fundamentalists abroad
and, he admitted after some wine, by fundamentalists—“Believers,”
he called them, and himself—at home.
At the time Zeke was living at Ivanwald. His brothers-in-Christ,
the youngest eighteen, the oldest in their early thirties, were much
like him: educated, athletic, born to a uence, successful or soon to
14 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
be. Zeke and his brothers were fundamentalists, but not at all the
kind I was familiar with. “We’re not even Christian,” he said. “We
just follow Jesus.”
I’d known Zeke on and o for twelve years. He’s the older
brother of a woman I dated in college. Zeke had studied philosophy
and history and literature in the United States and in Europe, but he
had long wanted to nd something . . . better. His life had been a
pilgrim’s progress, and the path he’d taken a circuitous version of the
route every fundamentalist travels: from confusion to clarity, from
questions to answers, from a mysterious divine to a Jesus who’s so
familiar that he’s like your best friend. A really good guy about whom
Zeke could ask, What would Jesus do? and genuinely nd the an-
swer.
His whole l ife Zeke had been searching for a friend like that,
someone whose words meant what they meant and nothing less or
more. Zeke himself looks like such a man, tall, lean, and muscular,
with a square jaw and wavy, dark blond hair. One of his grandfathers
had served i n the Eisen hower adm inistration, the other in Kenne-
dy’s. His father, the family legend went, had once been considered a
possible Republican contender for Congress. But instead of seeking
o ce, his father had retreated to the Rocky Mou ntains, and Zeke,
instead of attaining the social heights his pedigree seemed to predict,
had spent his early twenties withdrawing into theological conun-
drums, until he peered out at a world of temptations like a wounded
thing in a cave. He drank too much, fought men and raged at women,
disappeared from time to time and came back from wherever he had
gone quieter, angrier, sadder.
Then he met Jesus. He had long been a committed Christian, but
this encounter was di erent. This Jesus did not demand orthodoxy.
This Jesus gave him permission to stop struggling. So he did, and his
pallor left him. He took a job in nance and he met a woman as
bright as he was and much happier, and soon he was making money,
in love, engaged. But the questions of his youth still bothered him.
Again he drank too much, his eye wandered, his temper kindled. So,
one day, at the suggestion of an older mentor, he ditched his job, put
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 15
his ancée on hold, and moved to Ivanwald, where, he was told, he’d
meet yet another Jesus, the true one.
When he came up to New York, his sister asked if I would take him
out to dinner. What, she wanted to know, was Zeke caught up in?
We met at a little Moroccan place in the East Village. Zeke ar-
rived i n bright white tennis shorts, spotless white sneakers, and
white tube socks pulled taut on his calves. His concession to Manhat-
tan style, he said, was his polo shirt, tucked i n tight; it was black. He
irted with the waitress and she giggled, he talked to the people at
the next table. Women across the room glanced his way; he gave
them easy smiles. I’d never seen Zeke so charming. In my mind, I
began to prepare a report for his sister: Good news! Jesus has nally
turned Zeke around.
He said as much himself. He even apologized for arguments we’d
had in the past. He acknowledged that he’d once enjoyed getting a rise
out of me by talking about “Jewish bankers.” (I was raised a Jew by my
father, a Christian by my mother.) That was behind him now, he said.
Religion was behi nd him. Ivanwald had cured him of the God problem.
I’d love the place, he said. “We take Jesus out of his rel igious wrap-
ping. We look at Him, at each other, without assumptions. We ask
questions, and we answer them together. We become brothers.”
I asked if he and his brothers prayed a great deal. No, he said, not
much. Did they spend a lot of time in church? None—most churches
were too crowded with rules and rituals. Did they study the Bible in
great depth? Just a few minutes in the morning. What they did, he
said, was work and play games. During the day they raked leaves and
cleaned toilets, and during the late afternoon they played sports, all
of which prepared them to serve Jesus. The work taught humility, he
said, and the sports taught will; both were needed in Jesus’ army.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “ Back up. What leaves? Whose toilets? ”
“Politicians,” he said. “Congressmen.”
“You go to thei r houses? ”
“Sometimes,” Zeke answered. “But mostly they come to us.”
I was trying to picture it—Trent Lott pulling up in a black Lin-
coln, a toilet badly in need of a scrub protruding from the trunk. But
16 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
what Zeke meant was that he and his brothers raked and polished for
politicians at a retreat called the Cedars, designed for their spiritual
succor.
“Really?” I said. “Like who?”
“I can’t really say,” Zeke answered.
“Who runs it?”
“Nobody.”
“Who pays? ”
“People just give money.” Then Zeke smiled. Enough questions.
“You’re better o seeing it for yourself.”
“Is there an organization?” I asked.
“No,” he said, chuckling at my incomprehension. “Just Jesus.”
“So how do you join?”
“You don’t,” he said. He smiled again, such a broad grin. His
teeth were as white as his sneakers. “You’re recom mended.”
Zeke recommended me to Ivanwald, and because I was curious and
had recently quit a job to write a book about American religious
com munities, I decided to join for a while. I had no thought of inves-
tigative reporting; rather, my interest was personal. By the time I got
there, I’d lived for short spells with “Cowboy Christians” in Texas,
and with “Baba lovers,” America’s most benign cultists, in South
Carolina, and in Kansas with hundreds of naked pagans. I thought
Ivanwald would simply be one more bead on my agnostic rosary. I
thought of the transformation Ivanwald had worked on Zeke, and I
imagined it as a sort of spiritual spa where angry young men smoothed
out their anxieties with new-agey masculine bonding. I thought it
would be silly but relaxi ng. I didn’t imagine that what I’d nd there
would lead me into the heart of American fundamentalism, that a
spell among Zeke’s Believers would propel me into dusty archives
and the halls of power for the next several years. I had never thought
of myself as a religious seeker, but at Ivanwald I became one. Since
then, I’ve been searching, not for salvation, but for the meaning be-
hind the words, the hints of power, that I found there.
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 17
Zeke was gone by the time I arrived. He had returned to nance,
a path the brothers approved of, and to his ancée, whom they did
not—she was a graduate student and a free- spirited Scandinavian
who loved to party. Je Connally, one of the Ivanwald house leaders
who picked me up at Union Station in Washington one April eve-
ning, told me he thought Zeke might have made the wrong choice.
Zeke’s ancée did not obey God. She was, he said, a “Jezebel.” Je
was a small, sharply handsome man with cloudy blue eyes above high
cheekbones. When he said “Jezebel,” he smiled.
Je had come with two other brothers: Gannon Sims, the Baylor
grad, and Bengt Carlson, the other house leader, a twenty-four-year-
old North Caroli nian with spiky brown eyebrows. In the car, after a
long silence, he said, “Well, I think you’re probably the most m isun-
derstood Ivanwalder ever.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“I didn’t real ly know how to explain you to the guys,” Bengt
went on. “ So I just told hi m we got a new dude, he’s from New York,
he’s a writer, he’s Jewish, but he wants to know Jesus. And you know
what they said? ”
“No,” I answered, my ngers curling around the door handle.
“Bring him on! ” My three new brothers laughed, and Gannon’s
Volvo eased down tree-lined streets, each smaller and sleepier than
the last, until we arrived at the gray colonial that was to be my new
home. Bengt showed me my bunk and two drawers in a bureau and a
cubbyhole in the bathroom for my toiletries. One by one, a dozen
men drifted by in various states of undress, slapping me on the back
or the ass or hugging me, call ing me “ brother.” Someone was playing
the soundtrack to Hair. One man c rooned the words to “Fel latio,” but
then he said he was just kidding, and another switched out Hair for
Neil Young’s “Keep On Rockin’ in the Free World.” Pavel the Czech
winked.
Ready for bed, the men introduced themselves. From Japan there
was Yusuke, a management consultant studying Ivanwald in order to
replicate it in Tokyo; from Ecuador, a former college soccer star
named Raf, a Catholic who was open about his desire for business
18 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
connections. From Atlanta there was thick-necked Beau and bespec-
tacled Josh, best friends who’d put o their postcollege careers; from
Oklahoma, Dave, a tall, redheaded young man with a wide, da y
smile on a head of uncommon proportions. “Our pumpkin on a bean-
pole,” one of the brothers called him, a “gift” to our brotherhood
from former representative Steve Largent, who Dave said had ar-
ranged with Dave’s father for Dave to be sent to Ivanwald to cure him
of a mild case of college liberalism.
Before the lights went out after midnight, they came together to
pray for me, Je Con nally’s voice just above a whisper, asking God to
“ break” me. Dave, already broken, mumbled an amen.2
Ivanwald, w hich sits at the end of Twenty-fourth Street North in
Arlington, was known only to its residents and to the members and
friends of the Family. The Family is in its own words an “invisible”
association, though it has always been organized around public men.
Senator Sam Brownback (R., Kansas), chair of a weekly, o -the-record
meeting of rel igious right groups called the Values Action Team
(VAT), is an active member, as is Representative Joe Pitts (R., Penn-
sylvania), an avuncular would-be theocrat who chairs the House ver-
sion of the VAT. Others referred to as members include senators Jim
DeMint of South Carolina, chairman of the Senate Steering Com-
mittee (the powerful conservative caucus cofounded back in 1974 by
another Family associate, the late senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska);
Pete Domenici of New Mexico (a Catholic and relatively moderate
Republican; it’s Domenici’s status as one of the Senate’s old lions that
the Family covets, not his doctrinal purity); Chuck Grassley ( R.,
Iowa); James Inhofe (R., Oklahoma); Tom Coburn (R., Oklahoma);
John Thune (R., South Dakota); Mike Enzi (R., Wyoming); and
John Ensign, the conservative casino heir elected to the Senate from
Nevada, a brightly tanned, hapless gure who uses his Family con-
nections to graft holi ness to his gambling-fortune name. “Faith- based
Democrats” Bill Nelson of Florida and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, sin-
cere believers drawn rightward by their understanding of Christ’s
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 19
teachings, are members, and Fam ily stalwarts in the House include
Representatives Frank Wolf ( R., Virginia), Zach Wamp (R., Tennes-
see), and Mike McIntyre, a North Carolina Democrat who believes
that the Ten Com mandments are “the fundamental legal code for the
laws of the United States” and thus ought to be on display in schools
and courthouses.3
The Family’s historic roll call is even more striking: the late sena-
tor Strom Thurmond (R., South Carolina), who produced “con -
dential” reports on legi slation for the Fami ly’s leadership, presided
for a time ov er the Fami ly’s w eekly Se nate meeting , and the Di xie-
crat senators Herman Talmadge of Georgia and Absalom Willis
Robertson of Virgi nia—Pat Robertson’s father—served on the
behi nd-the- scenes board of the organization. In 1974, a Family prayer
group of Republican congressmen and former secretary of defense
Melvin Laird helped convince President Gerald Ford that Richard
Nixon deserved not just Christian forgiveness but also a legal pardon.
That same year, Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist led the
Family’s rst weekly Bible study for federal judges.4
“I wish I could say more about it,” Ronald Reagan publicly de-
murred back in 1985, “ but it’s working precisely because it is pri-
vate.”
“We desire to see a leadership led by God,” reads a con dential
mission statement. “Leaders of all levels of society who direct proj-
ects as they are led by the spirit.” Another principle expanded upon
is stealthiness; members are instructed to pursue political jujitsu by
making use of secular leaders “in the work of advancing His king-
dom,” and to avoid whenever possible the label Christian itself, lest
they alert enemies to that advance. Regular prayer groups, or “cells”
as they’re often called, have met in the Pentagon and at the Depart-
ment of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties
with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries.
The Family’s use of the term “cell ” long predates the word’s cur-
rent association with terrorism. Its roots are in the Cold War, when
leaders of the Fam ily deliberately emulated the organizing techniques
of com munism. In 1948, a group of Senate sta ers met to discuss
20 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
ways that the Family’s “cell and leadership groups” could recruit
elites u nwilling to participate in the “mass meeting approach” of
populist fundamentalism. Two years later, the Family declared that
with democracy inadequate to the ght against godlessness, such
cells should function to produce political “atomic energy”; that is,
deals and alliances that could not be achieved through the clumsy
machinations of legislative debate would instead radiate quietly out
of political cells. More recently, Senator Sam Brownback told me
that the privacy of Family cells makes them safe spaces for men of
power—an appropriation of another term borrowed from an enemy,
feminism.5 “In this closer relationship,” a document for members
reads, “God will give you more insight into your own geographical
area and your sphere of in uence.” One’s cell should become “an in-
visible ‘believi ng group’ ” out of which “agreements reached in faith
and in prayer around the person of Jesus Christ” lead to action that
will appear to the world to be unrelated to any centralized organiza-
tion.
In 1979, the former Nixon aide and Watergate felon Charles W.
Colson—born again through the guidance of the Fam ily and the
ministry of a CEO of arms manufacturer Raytheon—estimated the
Family’s strength at 20,000, although the number of dedicated “as-
sociates” around the globe is much smaller (around 350 as of 20 06).
The Family maintains a closely guarded database of associates, mem-
bers, and “ key men,” but it issues no cards, collects no o cial dues.
Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities.6
“The Movement,” a member of the Family’s inner circle once
wrote to the group’s chief South African operative, “is simply inex-
plicable to people who are not intimately acquainted with it.” The
Fam ily’s “po litical” initiatives, he continues, “have always been m isun-
derstood by ‘outsiders.’ As a result of very bitter experiences, there-
fore, we have learned never to commit to paper any discussions or
negotiations that are taking place. There is no such thing as a ‘con -
dential’ memorandum, and leakage always seems to occur. Thus, I
would urge you not to put on paper anything relating to any of the
work that you are doing . . . [unless] you know the recipient well
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 21
enough to put at the top of the page ‘PLEASE DEST ROY AFTER READ-
ING.’ ” *
“If I told you who has participated and who participates until this
day, you would not believe it,” the Family’s longtime leader, Doug
Coe, said in a rare interview in 2001. “You’d say, ‘You mean that
scoundrel? That despot?’ ” 7
A friendly, plainspoken Oregonian with dark, curly hair, a lazy
smile, and the broad, thrown- back shoulders of a man who recognizes
few superiors, Coe has worked for the Family si nce 1959 and been
“First Brother” since founder Abraham Vereide was “promoted” to
heaven in 1969. (Recently, a successor named Dick Foth, a longtime
friend to John Ashcroft, assumed some of Coe’s duties, but Coe re-
mains the preeminent gure.) Coe denies possessing any authority, but
Family members speak of him with a mixture of intimacy and awe.
Doug Coe, they say—most people refer to him by his rst and last
name—is closer to Jesus than perhaps any other man alive, and thus
privy to information the rest of us are too spiritually “immature” to
understand. For instance, the necessity of secrecy. Doug Coe says it
allows the scoundrels and the despots to turn their talents toward the
service of Jesus—who, Doug Coe says, prefers power to piety—by
shielding their work on His behalf from a hardhearted publ ic, unwill-
ing to believe in their good intentions. In a sermon posted online by
a fundamental ist website, Coe compares this method to the mob’s.
“His Body” —the Body of Christ, that is, by which he means
Christendom—“functions invisibly l ike the ma a. . . . They keep
their organization invisible. Everything visible is transitory. Every-
thing invisible is permanent and lasts forever. The more you can make
your organization invisible, the more in uence it will have.”
For that very reason, the Family has operated under many guises,
some active, some defunct: National Committee for Christian Lead-
ership, International Christian Leadership, National Leadership
*In a t of pique or stunni ng stupidity, the recipient immediately responded to in form the Family
that he accepted the rebuke and had made multiple copies of it for the other South African opera-
tives as well, one of wh ich sur vives. James F. Bell to Ross Main , May 19, 1975. Folder 25, Box
254, Box 459, Billy Gr aham Center Archives. Mai n to Doug Coe, June 19, 19 75. Ibid.
22 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Council, the Fellowship Foundation, the International Foundation.
The Fellowship Foundation alone has an annual bud get of nearly $14
mill ion. The bulk of it, $12 million, goes to “mentori ng, counseling,
and partnering with friends around the world,” but that represents
only a fraction of the network’s nances. The Family does not pay big
salaries; one man receives $121,000, while Doug Coe seems to live
on almost nothing (his income uctuates wildly according to the
o -the- books support of “ friends”), and none of the fourteen men on
the board of directors (among them an oil executive, a defense con-
tractor, and government o cials past and present) receives a penny.
But within the organization money moves in peculiar ways, “man-to-
man” nancial support that’s o the books, a constant proliferation of
new nonpro ts big and small that submit to the Family’s spiritual
authority, money owing up and down the quiet hierarchy. “I give
or loan money to hundreds of people, or have my friends do so,”
says Coe.8
Each group connected to the Family raises funds independently.
Ivanwald, for example, was nanced in part by an entity called the
Wilberforce Foundation. Major evangelical organizations such as
Young Life and the Navigators have undertaken the support of Family
operatives, and the Fam ily has in turn helped launch Christian con-
servative power houses such as Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship, a
worldwide m inistry that has declared “civil war” on secularism, and
projects such as Community Bible Study, through which a failing
Texas oilman named George W. Bush discovered faith i n 1985.
The Family’s only publicized gathering is the National Prayer
Breakfast, which it established in 1953 and which, with congressio-
nal sponsorship, it continues to organize every February at the Wash-
ington, D.C., Hilton. Some 3,00 0 dignitaries, representing scores of
nations and corporate interests, pay $425 each to attend. For most,
the breakfast is just that, mu ns and prayer, but some stay on for
days of seminars organized around Christ’s messages for particular
industries. In years past, the Family organized such events for execu-
tives in oil, defense, insurance, and banking. The 2007 event drew,
among others, a contingent of aid-hungry defense ministers from
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 23
Eastern Europe, Pakistan’s famously corrupt Benazir Bhutto, and a
Sudanese general linked to genocide in Darfur.
Here’s how it can work: Dennis Bakke, former CEO of AES, the
largest independent power producer in the world, and a Fam ily in-
sider, took the occasion of the 1997 Prayer Breakfast to invite Ugan-
dan president Yoweri Museveni, the Family’s “ key man” in Africa, to
a private dinner at a mansion, just up the block from the Fam ily’s
Arlington headquarters. Bakke, the author of a popular business book
titled Joy at Work, has long preached an ethic of social responsibility
inspired by his evangelical faith and his free-market convictions: “ I
am trying to sell a way of life,” he has said. “I am a cultural imperial-
ist.” That’s a phrase he uses to be provocative; he believes that his
Jesus is so universal that everyone wants Him. And, apparently, His
business opportunities: Bakke was one of the pioneer thinkers of en-
ergy deregulation, the laissez-faire fever dream that culminated in
the meltdown of Enron. But there was other, less-noticed fallout,
such as the no- bid deal Bakke made with Museveni at the 1997 Prayer
Breakfast for a $500-million dam close to the source of the White
Nile—in waters considered sacred by Uganda’s 2.5-million–strong
Busoga minority. AES announced that the Busoga had agreed to “re-
locate” the spirits of their dead. They weren’t the only ones opposed;
rst environmentalists (Museveni had one American arrested and
deported) and then even other foreign investors revolted against a
project that seemed like it might actually increase the price of power
for the poor. Bakke didn’t worry. “ We don’t go away,” he declared.
He dispatched a young man named Christian Wright, the son of one
of the Prayer Breakfast’s organizers, to be AES’s in-country liaison to
Museveni; Wright was later accused of authorizing at least $4 00,000
in bribes. He claimed his signature had been forged.9
“I’m sure a lot of people use the Fellowship as a way to network,
a way to gain entrée to all sorts of people,” says Michael Cromartie,
an evangelical Washington think tanker who’s critical of the Fam ily’s
lack of transparency. “And entrée they do get.”10
The president usually arrives an hour early, meets perhaps ten
heads of state—usually from small nations, such as Albania, or
24 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Ecuador, or Benin, that the United States uses as proxies in the
United Nations—without publicity, and perhaps a dozen other use-
ful guests chosen by the Fam ily. “It totally circumvents the State
Department and the usual vetting within the administration that
such a meeting would require,” an anonymous government infor-
mant told a sympathetic sociologist. “ If Doug Coe can get you some
face ti me with the President of the United States, then you will take
his call and seek his friendship. That’s power.”11
The president always speaks last, usually to do no more than
spread a dull glaze of civil religion over the proceedings. For years,
the main address came from Billy Graham, but now it’s often deliv-
ered by an outsider to Christian conservatism, such as Saudia Arabia’s
longtime ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, or Senator
Joe Lieberman, or, as in 2006, Bono. “This is really weird,” said the
rock star.
“Anything can happen,” according to an internal planning docu-
ment, “the Koran could even be read, but JESUS is there! He is i n l-
trating the world.”12 Too bland most years to merit much press, the
breakfast is regarded by the Family as merely a tool in a larger pur-
pose: to recruit the powerful attendees into smaller, more frequent
prayer meetings, where they can “meet Jesus man to man.”
In the pro cess of introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family
has managed to e ect a number of behind-the- scenes acts of diplo-
macy. In 1978 it helped the Carter administration organize a world-
wide call to prayer with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. At the
1994 National Prayer Breakfast, Fam ily leaders persuaded their South
African client, the Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, to stand down
from the possibility of civil war with Nelson Mandela. But such be-
nign acts appear to be the exception to the rule. During the 1960s,
the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and
some of the most oppressive regimes i n the world, arranging prayer
networks in the U.S. Congress for the likes of General Costa e Silva,
dictator of Brazil; General Suharto, dictator of Indonesia; and Gen-
eral Park Chung Hee, dictator of South Korea. “The Fellowship’s
reach into governments around the world,” observes David Kuo, a
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 25
former special assistant to the president i n Bush’s rst term, “ is al-
most impossible to overstate or even grasp.”13
In 1983, Doug Coe and General John W. Vessey, chairman of the
Joi nt Chiefs of Sta , informed the civilian ambassadors of the Cen-
tral American nations that the Prayer Breakfast would be used to
arrange “private sessions” for their generals with “responsible lead-
ers” in the United States; the i nvitations would be sent from Republi-
can senators Richard Lugar and Mark Hat eld, and Dixiec rat John
Stennis, the Mississippi segregationist after whom an aircraft carrier
is now named. The Family went on to build friendships between the
Reagan adm inistration and the Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios
Vides Casanova, found liable in 2002 by a Florida jury for the torture
of thousands, and the Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez,
who before his assassination was li nked to both the CIA and death
squads. El Salvador became one of the bloodiest battlegrounds of the
Cold War; U.S. military aid to Honduras jumpe d from $4 million per
year to $79 million.14 In Africa, the Family greased the switch of U.S.
patronage from one client state, Ethiopia, to another that they felt
was more promising: Somalia. “We work with power where we can,”
Doug Coe explai ns, “build new power where we can’t.” Former sec-
retary of state James Baker, a longtime participant in a prayer cell
facilitated by Coe, recalls that when he visited Albania after the col-
lapse of Eastern Europe an communism, the Balkan nation’s foreign
minister met him on the tarmac with the words, “I greet you in the
name of Doug Coe.”15
Coe’s status within Washi ngton has been quantitatively calcu-
lated by D. Michael Lindsay, a Rice University sociologist who traded
on his past work with evangelicals as a pollster—and his sympathetic
perspective—to wi n interviews with 360 evangelical elites. “One in
three mentioned Coe or the Fellowship as an important in uence,”
he reports. “Indeed, there is no other or ganization l ike the Fellow-
ship, especially among religious groups, in terms of its access or
clout among the country’s leadership.”16 At the 1990 National Prayer
Breakfast, President George H. W. Bush praised Doug Coe for what
he described as “quiet diplomacy, I wouldn’t say secret diplomacy.”
26 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Bush was apparently ignorant of one of the nation’s oldest laws, the
Logan Act, which forbids private citizens to do just that lest foreign
policy slip out of democratic control. Sometimes Coe’s role is for mal;
in 200 0, he met with Pakistan’s top economic o cials as a “special
envoy” of Representative Joe Pitts, a key power broker for the region,
and when he and Bush Senior hosted an o -the-record luncheon with
Iraq’s ambassador to the United States in the mid-1980s, he may also
have been acting in some o cial capacity. Mostly, however, he trav-
els around the world as a private citizen. He has prayed with dicta-
tors, golfed with presidents, and wrestled with an island king in the
Paci c. He has visited nearly every world capital, often with con-
gressmen at his side, “making friends” and inviting them back to the
Cedars, the Family’s headquarters, bought i n 1978 with $1.5 m illion
donated by (among others) Tom Phillips, then the CEO of arms
manufacturer Raytheon, several oil executives, and Clement Stone,
the man who nanced the campaign to i nsert “under God,” into the
Pledge of Allegiance.17
Coe, who while I was at Ivanwald lived with his wife in an ele-
gantly appointed carriage house on the mansion’s grounds, considers
the mansion a refuge for the persecuted and the a icted: Supreme
Court Justice Clarence Thomas retreated there when Anita Hill ac-
cused him of sexual harassment; Senator David Durenberger, a conser-
vative Catholic, boarded there to escape marital problems that began
with rumors of an a air and ended with Durenberger’s pleading guilty
to misuse of public funds; James Watt, Reagan’s anti-environmental sec-
retary of the interior, weathered the controversy surrounding his
appoi ntment in one of the Cedars’ bedrooms.18 A waterfall has been
carved into the mansion’s broad lawn, from which a bronze bald ea-
gle watches over a forested hillside sloping down to the Potomac
River. The mansion is white and pillared and surrounded by magno-
lias, and by red trees that do not so much tower above it as whis-
per. The Cedars is named for these trees, but Family members
speak of it as a person. “The Cedars has a heart for the poor,” they like
to say.
By poor they mean not the thousands of literal poor living in
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 27
Washington’s ghettos, but rather the poor in spirit: the senators, gen-
erals, and prime m inisters who coast to the end of Twenty-fourth
Street in Arlington in black limousines and town cars and hulking
SUVs to meet one another, to meet Jesus, to pay homage to the god
of the Cedars. There they forge relationships beyond the “ di n of the
vox populi ” and “throwaway religion” in favor of the truths of the
Family. Declaring God’s covenant with the Jews broken, the group’s
core members call themselves the new chosen.
19
The brothers of Ivanwald were the Family’s next generation, its
high priests in training. Sometimes the brothers would ask me why I
was there. They knew that I was “half Jewish,” that I was a writer,
and that I was from New York City, which most of them considered
to be only slightly less wicked than Baghdad or Paris. I didn’t lie to
them. I told my brothers that I was there to meet Jesus, and I was:
the Jesus of the Fam ily, whose ways are secret. The brothers were
certain that He had sent me to them for a reason, and perhaps they
were right. What follows is my personal testimony, to the enduring
power of this strange American god.
At Ivanwald, men learn to be leaders by loving their leaders.
“They’re so busy loving us,” a brother once explained to me, “but
who’s loving them?” We were. The brothers each paid four hundred
dollars per month for room and board, but we were also the caretak-
ers of the Cedars, cleaning its gutters, mowing its lawns, whacking
weeds, blowing leaves, and sanding. And we were called to serve on
Tuesday morni ngs, when the Cedars hosted a regular prayer break-
fast typically presided over by Ed Meese. Meese is best remembered
for his oddly prurient antiporn crusade as Ronald Reagan’s ethically
challenged attorney general; less-often recalled is his 1988 resigna-
tion following a special prosecutor’s investigation of his intervention
on behalf of an oil pipel ine for Saddam Hussein. He remains a power-
ful Washington presence, a quick-witted man who presents himself
as an old gumshoe, carrying messages back and forth between social
and scal conservatives. In 20 05 and 20 06, he shepherded Supreme
28 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Court justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito through their nom ina-
tion pro cesses; in 2007, he gave the religious Right’s stamp of ap-
proval to Attorney General Michael Mukasey.20 Each week at the
Cedars, his breakfast brought together a rotating group of ambassadors,
businessmen, and American politicians. Three of Ivanwald’s brothers
also attended.
The morning I was invited, Charlene, the cook, scrambled up
eggs with blue tortillas, Ital ian sausage, peppers, and papaya. Three
women from Potomac Point, an “Ivanwald for young women” across
the road from the Cedars, came to serve. They wore red lipstick and
long skirts (makeup and “ feminine” attire were required on duty)
and had, after several months of cleaning and serving in the Cedars
while the brothers worked outside, grown unimpressed by the high-
powered clientele. “Girls don’t sit i n on the breakfasts,” one of them
told me, though she said that none of them minded because it was
“ just politics,” and the Bible generally reserves such doings for
men.
21
The breakfast began with a prayer and a spri nkle of scripture
from Meese, who sat at the head of a long, dark oak table. Matthew
11:27: “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows
the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to re-
veal hi m.” That morning’s chosen introduced themselves. They were
businessmen from Dallas and Oregon, a Chinese Christian dissident
leader, and two ambassadors, from Benin and Rwanda, who sat side
by side. Rwanda’s representative, Dr. Richard Sezibera, was an i n-
tense man who refused to eat his eggs and melon. He drank cup after
cup of co ee, and his eyes were bloodshot. A man I didn’t recognize,
whom Charlene identi ed as a former senator, suggested that nego-
tiators from Rwanda and Congo, trapped in a war that had killed
more than 2 million, should stop worryi ng about who will get the
diamonds and the oil and i nstead focus on who wi ll get Jesus. “Power
sharing is not goi ng to work unless we change their hearts,” he said.
Sezibera stared, incredulous. Meese chuckled and opened his
mouth to speak, but Sezibera interrupted him. “It is not so simple,”
the Rwandan said, his voice at and low. Meese smiled. Everyone in
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 29
the Family loves rebukes, and here was Rwanda rebuking them. The
former senator nodded. Meese murmured, “Yes,” stroking his ma-
roon leather Bible, and the words “Thank you, Jesus” rippled in whis-
pers around the table as I poured Sezibera another cup of co ee.
The brothers also on occasion sat i n quietly on meetings at the
Family’s four- story, redbrick Washington townhouse, a former con-
vent at 133 C Street SE, run by a Family a liate called the C Street
Foundation. Eight congressmen lived there, paying below-market
rents.22 The C Street House is registered as a church, which allows it
to avoid taxes. There’s a house mother and a TV the size of a small
movie screen, usually tuned to sports, and a prayer calendar in the
kitchen that tells residents which “demonic strongholds,” such as
Buddhism or Hinduism, they are to wage spiritual warfare against
each day. Eight Christian college women do most of the serving, but
we brothers were on occasion called to stand in for them, the better
to nd spiritual mentors.
The day I worked at C Street, half a dozen congressmen were
trading stories over lunch about the power of prayer to “ break
through” just about anything: political opposition, personal pride, a
dull policy brie ng. They spoke of their devotions as if they were
running backs moving the ball, chuckling over how prayer um-
moxed the “other team.” They didn’t mean Democrats —a few were
Democrats —but the godless “enemy,” broadly de ned. All credit to
the coach, said one congressman, who was dabbing his lips with a red
napkin that read “Let Me Call You SWEETHEART . . . I Can’t Re-
member Your Name.” Later that day, I ran into Doug Coe himself,
who was tutori ng Todd Tiahrt, a Republican representative from
Kansas. Tiahrt is a short shot glass of a man, two parts awless hair
and one part teeth. He wanted to know the best way “ for the Chris-
tian to win the race with the Muslim.” The Muslim, he said, has too
many babies, while Americans kill too many of theirs.
Coe agreed that too many Muslim babies could be a problem. But
he was more concerned that Tiahrt’s focus on labels like Muslim and
Christian might get in the way of the congressman’s prayers. “Religion”
distracts people from Jesus, Coe said, and allows them to isolate
30 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Christ’s will from their work in the world. God’s law and our laws
should be identical “ People separate it out,” he warned Tiahrt. “ ‘Oh,
okay, I got religion, that’s private.’ As if Jesus doesn’t know anything
about building highways or Social Security. We gotta take Jesus out
of the religious wrapping.”
“All right, how do we do that?” Tiahrt asked.
“A covenant,” Doug Coe answered. The congressman half smiled,
as if caught between confessing his ignorance and pretending he
knew what Doug Coe was talking about. “Like the Ma a,” Coe
clari ed. “Look at the strength of their bonds.” He made a st and
held it before Tiahrt’s face. Tiahrt nodded, squi nting. “See, for them
it’s honor,” Coe said. “For us, it’s Jesus.”
Doug Coe listed other men who had changed the world through
the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers”:
“Look at Hitler,” he said. “Leni n, Ho Chi Minh, bin Laden.” The
Fam ily possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the “total Jesus” of a
brotherhood in Christ.
“That’s what you get with a covenant,” said Doug Coe. “Je sus plus
nothing.”23
The regimen at Ivanwald was so precise it was relaxing: no swear-
ing, no dri nking, no sex, no self. Watch out for magazines and don’t
waste time on newspapers and never watch TV. Eat meat, study the
Gospels, play basketball; God loves a man who can sink a three-pointer.
Pray to be broken. “O Heavenly Father. Dear Jesus. Help me be hum-
ble. Let me do Your will.” Every morni ng began with a prayer, some
days with outsiders—a former Ivanwald brother, now a busi ness-
man, or another executive who used tales of high nance to illumi-
nate our lessons from scripture, which he supplemented with xeroxed
midrash from Fortune—and Fridays with the women of Potomac
Point. But most days it was just us boys, bleary-eyed, gulping co ee
and sugared cereal as Bengt and Je C. laid out lines of Holy Word
across the table like strategy.
The dining room had once been a deck, but the boys had walled
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 31
it in and roofed it over and unrolled a red Persian carpet, transform-
ing the space into a sort of monastic meeting hall, with two long ta-
bles end to end, ringed by a dozen chairs and two benches. The rst
day I visited Ivanwald, Bengt cleared a space for me at the head of the
table and sat to my right. Beside him, Wayne slumped in his chair, his
eyes hidden by a cowboy hat. Across from him sat Beau, an Atlantan
with the build and athletic intensity of a wrestler, still wearing the
boxers and T-shirt he’d slept in. Bengt alone looked sharp, his hair
combed, golf shirt tucked tightly into pleated chi nos.
Bengt asked Gannon to read our text for that morning, Psalm
139: “O Lord, you have searched me and you know me.” The very
rst line made Bengt smile; this was, in his view, an awesome thing
for God to have done.
Bengt’s manners and naive charm preceded him in every encoun-
ter. He was kind to his brothers and excellent with small children,
tall and strong and competent with any tool, deadly whenever he got
hold of the ball—any ball; all sports seemed to Bengt just a step
more chal lenging than breathing. His eyes were deep and kind of
sad, but he liked to laugh, and when he did he sounded like a friendly
donkey, an Eyore for whom things were suddenly not so bad. When
you told him a story, he’d respond, “Goll- y!” just to be nice. When
genuinely surprised, he’d exclaim, “Good ni- ight! ” Sometimes it was
hard to remember that he was a self-professed revolutionary. He
asked Gannon to keep readi ng, and then leaned back and listened.
“Where can I go from your Spi rit? Where can I ee from your
presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in
the depths, you are there.”
Bengt raised a hand. “ That’s great, dude. Let’s talk about that.”
The room fell silent as Bengt stared into his Bible, running his nger
up and down the gilded edge of the page. “Guys,” he said. “What—
how does that make you feel? ”
“Known,” said Gannon, almost in a whisper.
Bengt nodded. He was looking for something else, but he didn’t
know where it was. “What does it make you think of? ”
“Jesus? ” said Beau.
32 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Bengt stroked his chin. “Yeah . . . Let me read you a little more.”
He read in a monotone, accelerating as he went, as if he could per-
suade us through a sheer heap of words. “For you created my inmost
being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb,” he concluded.
His lips curled into a half smile. “Man! I mean, that’s intense, right?
‘In my mother’s womb’—God’s right in there with you.” He grinned.
“It’s like,” he said, “it’s li ke, you can’t run. Doesn’t matter where you
turn, ’cause Jesus is gonna be there, just waiting for you.”
Beau’s eyes cleared, and Gannon nodded. “Yeah, brother,” Bengt
said, an eyebrow arched. “Jesus is smart. He’s gonna get you.”
Gannon shook his head. “Oh, he’s already got me.”
“Me, too,” Beau chimed. Then each man clasped his hands into
one st and pressed it against his forehead or his chin and prayed,
eyes closed and Jesus all over his ski n.
The sweetest words of devotion I heard at Ivanwald came from the
one man there who thought Jesus had a message more complicated
than “Obey.” Riley was the son of a Republican busi nessman from
Wisconsi n, but he sounded like a Spaniard who’d learned his English
in Sweden. He’d “spent time overseas,” he explained, and the accent
had just rubbed o . Nobody believed him—he was clearly the most
pretentious follower of Jesus since Saul changed his name to Paul and
declared hi mself a Christian—but nobody scorned him for his airs.
Riley wore his dirty brown hair long and tied in a braided ponytail,
and if it was cool outside he favored a Guatemalan- style poncho. He
didn’t share the views of the other brothers; in fact, he stayed only
long enough to attend a demonstration in Washington against Plan
Colombia, a nearly $5- bill ion military aid package for that cou ntry’s
right-wing regime and U.S. defense contractors that began in 1999.
The Saturday of the demonstration, Riley slipped out before
dawn, and I woke up early to attend a three-hour prayer meeti ng at
the Cedars with some elder brethren: a Republican political couple
from Oregon, an old stalwart of the movement who had for many
years presided over a Family retreat in Bermuda called Willowbank,
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 33
and John Nakamura, a businessman who that year was volunteering
as host of the Cedars. We met in a room appointed with statues of
bald ea gles and photos of friends of the Family: there was Richard
Nixon, scowling over the sofa, and there was Jimmy Carter, the rst
openly evangel ical chief executive, ashing his toothy smile in a
frame on the co ee table.24 We got on our knees and held hands, and
together we prayed, some of us rocking, some of us approaching the
gi ft of tongues, Jesus-Jesus-Jesus, praying with Nakamura’s guidance
for Dick Cheney’s ailing heart and for Bush, “who has said he knows
the Lord.” Roy Cook, one of Doug Coe’s oldest friends, prayed for
Jesus to “turn the evil” in the hearts of journalists, who “tell stories
that go against the work Jesus is doing at the Cedars.” Then we began
praying about the demonstration Riley was attending. We prayed
that the “stratagems of evil and wickedness” —that’d be Riley—
would be washed from the streets by God’s rain.
That night the brothers had their weekly house meeting. There
was serious business. While I’d been praying at the Cedars, Riley had
been arrested at the demonstration. Released after several hours, he
hunkered down on Ivanwald’s oor cross-legged and unraveled a tale
of crowds and cops, handcu s, and what he believed to be gentle
heroism. He’d ridden in a police van with an old man, impossibly
frail, soaked from the rain. “ I asked him if he knew Jesus,” Riley said,
“and this old man smiled. So I asked him why he had done this thing,
let himself be put into jail, and do you know what he said? ” The
brothers did not. “He said, ‘For me it is a form of prayer.’ ” After the
police let Riley go, he took the metro to Arlington and walked to
Ivanwald in a drivi ng rain. “At rst I was not happy. But then I
thought about what that old man said, and the rain began to change,
or maybe I did. As I walked home to you brothers, the rain felt like a
baptism.”
The brothers were quiet. Finally, Je C. spoke up from across
the room. “Thank you, brother.” Murmurs rippled around the circle.
Nervous laughter followed. Beau said, “Riley, can we pray for you?”
and Riley said yes. Beau then asked Riley if he would lead us in this
prayer. He would. So we closed our eyes and prayed with Riley for
34 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
the old man soaked to the bone and then for the police and for an end
to Plan Colombia, at which point the men’s prayers sputtered into
confusion; wasn’t military aid between one God-led government and
another a good thi ng? The brothers were relieved when Riley an-
nounced he was going back to Wisconsi n. He walked into the pour-
ing rain with his backpack and his sleeping bag. It was a mile and a
half to the station. Nobody o ered him a ride.
After Riley left, the brothers stood up and started movi ng furni-
ture. “Okay,” Je C. said, clapping his hands. “You ready, brothers?”
I looked around. My brothers were blank-faced or smirking, clearing
a space on the oor. “Je ,” Je C. said to me, “Andrew” —the other
new man, a balding Australian who said he’d come to Ivanwald at the
recommendation of a conservative Australian politician named Bruce
Baird—“you guys are going to arm wrestle. Think of it,” he said,
putting a nger on his chin and mocki ng a pose of thoughtfulness, “as
a test of your manhood.”
He instructed us to lie down on our bellies. We lay like snakes
facing each other and rose up on torsos, gripping hands, awaiting the
signal.
“Fumble!” someone shouted. “Fumble! Fumble!”
I twisted around to nd out what they meant, but not in time—all
I saw was a blur of T-shirts and legs ying at me, and then the rst
man hit, slapping me back to the oor and attening my lungs into
empty airbags. Then the second man landed, and the third, and some-
one shouted, “Get his arms!” Did they think I was a stratagem of wick-
edness? Had they decided that the evil in my journal ist’s heart could
not be overcome even by Jesus? I swung my one free st and felt it col-
lide with a stomach that remained unmoved because it was being
pressed down by the weight of two, three more men, each of them
ailing away at my ribs. I felt my face redden and my ears ll with a
roar, and if I’d had any breath left, I would have screamed. But then I
heard the brothers laughing, and in between blows I felt hands slap-
ping my ass and ru ing my hair, and I understood what was happen-
ing. This was scripture in action, the verses we all memorized together
(failure to do so meant sleeping in the cold basement): Ecclesiastes
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 35
4:9, “ Two are better than one”; Philippians 2:2, “ ful ll ye my joy that
ye be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one
mind.” The brothers were of one mind and thirteen bodies, crushing
Christ into me, and there was nothing I could do but to give in to
their love. T hey wanted to welcome me. To brotherhood, to Jesus, to
the Family. I gasped. A man near the bottom of the pile on top of me
squeaked. “ I can’t breathe,” someone above me whispered. One
more man fell on top of us, jumping from the couch onto the tower.
The Australian, who’d somehow escaped full fumble, gave it a push.
It tumbled, I was free, and Je C. o ered me his hand. Ecclesiastes
4:10: “If one falls down, his friend can help him up.”
“Congratulations, brother,” he said. “You’re one of us.”
A few weeks into my stay, David Coe, Doug’s son, dropped by Ivan-
wald. My brothers and I assembled in the living room, where David
had draped his tall frame over a burgundy leather recliner like a frat
boy, one leg hangi ng over a padded arm.
“You guys,” David said, “are here to learn how to rule the world.”
He was in his late forties, with dark, gray- ecked hair, an olive com-
plexion, teeth li ke a slab of white marble, dark eyes so big they didn’t
need to move to take in the room. We sat around him in a rough
circle, on couches and chairs, as the afternoon light slanted through
the wooden blinds onto a wall adorned with a giant tapestry of the
Last Supper. Rafael, a wealthy Ecua doran, had a hard time with En-
glish, and he didn’t understand what David had said. He stared, lips
parted in puzzlement. David seemed to like that. He stared back,
holding Raf ’s gaze like it was a pretty thing he’d found on the ground.
“You have very intense eyes,” David said.
“Thank you,” Raf mumbled.
“Hey,” David said, “let’s talk about the Old Testament.” His voice
was like a river that’s smooth on the surface but swirling beneath.
“Who”—he paused—“would you say are its good guys? ”
“Noah,” suggested Ruggi, a shaggy-haired guy from Kentucky
with a silver loop on the upper ridge of his right ear.
36 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
“Moses,” o ered Josh, a lean man from Atlanta more interested
in serving Jesus than his father’s small empire of shower door manu-
facturing.
“David,” Beau volunteered.
“King David,” David Coe said. “That’s a good one. David. Hey.
What would you say made King David a good guy?” He giggled, not
from nervousness but from barely containable delight.
“Faith?” Beau said. “His faith was so strong?”
“Yeah.” David nodded as i f he hadn’t heard that before. “Hey, you
know what’s interesting about King David?” From the blank stares of
the others, I could see that they did not. Many didn’t even carry a full
Bible, preferring a slim volume of New Testament Gospels and Epis-
tles and Old Testament Psalms, respected but seldom read. Others
had the whole book, but the gold gilt on the pages of the rst two-
thirds remained undisturbed. “King David,” David Coe went on,
“liked to do really, really bad things.” He chuckled. “Here’s this guy
who slept with another man’s wife—Bathsheba, right?—and then
basically murdered her husband. And this guy is one of our heroes.”
David shook his head. “I mean, Jiminy Christmas, God li kes this guy!
What,” he said, “is that all about?”
“Is it because he tried?” asked Bengt. “He wanted to do the right
thing? ” Bengt knew the Bible, Old Testament and New, better than
any of the others, but he o ered his answer with a question mark on
the end. Bengt was dutiful in checking his worst sin, his erce pride,
and he frequently turned his certai nties into questions.
“That’s nice, Bengt,” David said. “But it isn’t the answer. Anyone
else?”
“Because he was chosen,” I said. For the rst time David looked
my way.
“Yes,” he said, smiling. “Chosen. Interesting set of rules, isn’t it?”
He turned to Beau. “Beau, let’s say I hear you raped three little girls.
And now here you are at Ivanwald. What would I think of you, Beau?”
Beau, given to bellowing Ivanwald’s daily call to sports li ke a bull
elephant, shrank i nto the cushions. “Probably that I’m pretty bad?”
“No, Beau.” David’s voice was kind. “I wouldn’t.” He drew Beau
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 37
back into the circle with a stare that seemed to have its own gravita-
tional pull. Beau nodded, brow furrowed, as if in the presence of
something profound. “Because,” David continued, “I’m not here to
judge you. That’s not my job. I’m here for only one thing. Do you
know what that is?”
Understanding blossomed in Beau’s eyes. “Jesus?” he said. David
smiled and winked. “Hey,” he said. “Did you guys see Toy Story?” Half
the room had. “Remember how there was a toy cowboy, Woody?
And then the boy who owns Woody gets a new toy, a spaceman?
Only the toy spaceman thinks he’s real. Thinks he’s a real spaceman,
and he’s got to gure out what he’s doing on this strange planet. So
what does Woody say to him? He says, ‘You’re just a toy.’ ” David sat
quietly, waiting for us to absorb this. “Just a toy. We’re not really
spacemen. We’re just toys. Created for God. For His pleasure, noth-
ing else. Just a toy. Period.”
He walked to the National Geographic map of the world mounted
on the wall. “You guys know about Genghis Khan? ” he asked. “Geng-
his was a man with a vision. He conquered” —David stood on the
couch under the map, tracing, with his hand, half the northern
hem isphere—“nearly everythi ng. He devastated nearly everything.
His enemies? He beheaded them.” David swiped a nger across his
throat. “Dop, dop, dop, dop.”
Genghis Khan’s genius, David went on, lay i n his understanding
that there could be only one king. When Genghis entered a defeated
city, he would call in the local headman. Conversion to the Khan’s
cause was not an option, as Genghis was uninterested in halfhearted
deputies. Instead, said David, Genghis would have the man stu ed
into a crate, and over the crate’s surface would be spread a tablecloth,
on which a wonderful meal would be arrayed.
“And then, while the man su ocated, Genghis ate, and he didn’t
even hear the man’s scream s.” David stood on the couch, a nger in
the air. “Do you know what that means?”
To their credit, my brothers did not. Perhaps on account of my
earlier insight, David turned to me. “I thi nk so,” I said. “Out with the
old, i n with the new.”
38 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Yes, he nodded. “Christ’s parable of the wineskins. You can’t
pour new into old.” One day, he continued, some monks from Eu-
rope show up in Genghis Khan’s court. Genghis welcomes them in
the name of God. Says that i n truth, they worship the same great
Lord. Then why, the monks ask, must he conquer the world? “I don’t
ask,” says Genghis. “I submit.”
David returned to his chair. “We elect our leaders,” he said. “Je-
sus elects his.”
He reached over and squeezed the arm of Pavel. “Isn’t that great? ”
David said. “That’s the way everything in life happens. If you’re a per-
son known to be around Jesus, you can go and do anything. And that’s
who you guys are. When you leave here, you’re not only going to
know the value of Jesus, you’re going to know the people who rule the
world. It’s about vision. Get your vision straight, then relate. Talk to
the people who rule the world, and help them obey. Obey Him. If I
obey Him myself, I help others do the same. You know why? Because
I become a warning. We become a warning. We warn everybody that
the future king is coming. Not just of this country or that but of the
world.” T hen he pointed at the map, toward the Khan’s vast, reclaim-
able empire.
Th at nigh t, I sl ipped out of the house at close to eleven, padded
around the pool of light cast by the streetlamp, and began making my
way up the grassy hill of the park across the road. I had my cell phone
with me, and behind the big oak tree at the top I hoped I could call a
friend undetected. David Coe’s lesson had been more than I could
take without a dose of ordinary conversation, the kind that doesn’t
involve “warnings” and decapitations. But halfway up the slope a
voice shot through the dark and hit me like a hardball: “ Halt! Who
goes there?”
Ten yards to my right stood Je C., lit by a pale yellow full
moon.
“Secret orders, man,” I said. “Going to have to kill you.” The joke
was as lame as Je C.’s, and neither of us laughed. I walked slowly in
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 39
his direction, debating whether I should tel l him I was out there for
meditation or for exercise. Phone calls—contact with the outside
world—was allowed but discouraged for new brothers. A late-night
run, I decided. Endurance was something the brothers respected, en-
durance and strength and coordination, honing your body with exer-
cise just as you hone your soul with prayer. Cardiovascular health was
especially important if you wanted to have a heart for spiritual war.
But that night, Je C. had a heart for contemplation. “Look at the
old fort,” he said, gesturing down the hill at Ivanwald. “Guys come
here and get changed. I think of all the guys that have gone through
here over the years, and I wonder, How many of ’em come back?
How many of ’em end up staying at the mansion?”
Along with Bengt, Je C. was a house leader, but if you asked
him what he did for a l iving, he would cock his head, half sm ile,
crinkle his sapphire- blue eyes like a natural- born southern lawyer—
which is what his father was—and say, “Well, I work for the revolu-
tion.” He’d studied rhetoric at Chapel Hill, and he loved making
declarations that begged a conversation mainly because he’d laced
them with subtle, nagging aggression.
“Maybe you’ll come back to the Cedars one day,” he said. He
squeezed my shoulder. “C’mon, brother,” he said, his ngers digging
in and guidi ng me down the hill. “You can make your calls tomor-
row.”
The next morning, Je C. and I were up early, lacing our sneak-
ers for a run down by the river. Sitting on the porch, he asked me
why my Bible was a King James. I said I liked the passion of the lan-
guage. “Yeah,” Je C. said—he always agreed with everything, at
rst. Then he looked up from his sneakers as if something had just
occurred to him. “You know, I’m not sure it’s about passion.”
“No?” I said.
“No, I think it’s about Jesus.”
“Not the Old Testament,” I said.
“Well,” said Je C., “you take Psalms, for example, every one of
them, the way to read it is like it’s just another piece of Jesus.” He
stared at me, half smiling, head cocked.
40 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
“Which part,” I asked, “would you say is in Psalm 137? ” Je C.’s
lip twitched, his eyes shifted. “You know,” I said, “ ‘O Daughter of
Babylon’?” He arched his left eyebrow. “ ‘O Daughter of Babylon,’ ” I
recited, “ ‘who art to be destroyed, happy shal l he be that rewardeth
thee as thou hast served us, happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth
thy little ones against the stones.’ Which part of Jesus is that?”
Je C. smiled fully and nodded. “ Brother,” he said, clapping a
hand on my knee. “I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure He’ll let you
know when it’s time.” Then he stood up and ran, waving over his
shoulder as he went. He knew he was too fast for me.
We wer e at Ivanwald, a Family associate named Terry instructed,
to study “the fu ndamentals, as opposed to the fancy plays,” by which
he meant “ discipline,” as opposed to “sissy stu ,” an authoritarian
faith, not a questioning one. Terry—golf- shirted and twitchy, drum-
ming his ngers on our dining room table—was one of the many
middle- aged men in the c ul-de- sac who seemed to have no other job
than to dispense wisdom. We should pray to be “nothing.” We were
there to “soften our hearts to authority.” Democracy, we were told,
was “rebelliousness.” We instituted a rule that every man must wipe
the toilet bowl after he pisses, not for cleanliness but to crush his “in-
ner rebel.”
Je C. crushed his by abstaining from “shady” R-rated movies,
lest they provoke lusty dreams. He was a beautiful man, but he was
indi erent to the e ect he had on the opposite sex. The Potomac
Point girls brought him cookies; the wives of the Family’s older men
asked him to visit. One night, when the guys went on a swing-
dancing date with the Potomac Pointers, more worldly women
ocked to Je C., begging to be dipped and twirled. The feeling was
not mutual. “I just don’t like girls as much as guys,” he told me one
day while we painted a new coat of “Gettysburg Gray” onto Ivan-
wald. He was speaking not of sex or of romance but of brotherhood.
“I li ke”—he paused, his brush suspended m idstroke—“competence.”
He wasn’t gay. He wasn’t, technically, anything. He was twenty-
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 41
ve, but he was a virgin. He had kissed a girl once, and the experi-
ence had not moved his heart li ke Jesus did every day. He asked me
once what sex with a woman was like, “emotionally,” but before I
could even think of how to answer, he silenced me. Sex for him was
pure and nonexis tent in the natural order of things, a myth, elusive
and sweet. Je C. didn’t need to sully it with details for it to be
true.
He ran nearly every day, often alone, down by the Potomac. On
the basketbal l court anger sometimes overcame him: “Shoot the ball!”
he would snap at Rogelio, a shy eighteen-year-old from Paraguay, one
of several internationals and the youngest brother. But later Je C.
would turn his lapse into a lesson, citing scripture, a verse we were
to memorize or else be banished, by Je C. himself, to a night in the
basement. Ephesians, chapter 4, verses 26–27: “In your anger do not
sin: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not
give the devil a foothold.”
Je C.’s pride surfaced in unexpected ways. Once, together in
the kitchen after lunch, I mentioned that I’d seen the Reverend Al
Green perform, up in Massachusetts, no less. This bothered Je C.
He was a southerner and I was not, and he did not like this news of
Yankee privilege. Also, he was certain I considered him racist, be-
cause that’s what he believed al l New Yorkers thought about all
North Caroli nians. He wanted me to know that as a southern white
man, he was blacker than me. “ I got an Alabama blacksnake in my
pants,” he said. He was not just black, he was a black man. “Brother,
you’re nothing but a white boy.”
“Agreed,” I said, hopi ng to calm him down.
But he could not be soothed. He left the room and returned with
a box and put in a CD and cranked up Al Green. He started to
groove. His hands balled into sts, his blue eyes wide. He began sing-
ing, a honey falsetto. “Here I a-a-m . . .” He grabbed his crotch and
shook his head li ke a rag, wrenched his shirt up and ran his hand over
his hard stomach, going deeper and deeper into Green. Then he
froze, dropped back to his ordinary voice as if he was narrati ng. “ In
college, I used to work in this pizza parlor,” he said. “It was a buncha,
42 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
I dunno, junkies. Heroin.” He grinned. “But, man, they loved Al Green.
We had a poster of him. He was, he was—man! Shirtless, leather
pants. Low leather pants.” Je C. tugged his waistband down. “Hips
cocked.” He slid across the oor and grabbed my waist so tight I
could feel his pulse beating. Then he moonwalked away and snapped
his knees together with his feet spread wide, hands in the air, testify-
ing, baring his smooth, at torso.
The spiritual bonds among Family members were, Doug Coe re-
minded us, expressions of love, though he used the term not merely
to connote a ection. Love in the Family was the love that “conquers,”
the love that “consumes.” It was the love of competition, the love that
“ breaks a man down”; the love without which one was “a nothing,” “a
minus,” “a zero.” But with it one was a “plus,” a “warrior,” a man. The
love, a Family elder once explained to me, that Jesus himself pro-
claimed when he said, “I came not to bring peace but a sword. For I
am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter
against her mother.” The se nior brother who quoted Christ’s sword at
me did not mean anything so blunt as an actual blade but rather the
divisiveness of a faith that scorns earthly a ections that come be-
tween Jesus and his soldiers. The word heart was similarly unmoored
in the Family’s vocabulary, made weirdly functional, an expression of
a quality or skill. A leader, for instance, was said to have a “ heart for
the Lord”; a man lower down in rank m ight have a “ heart for His
Word,” a “ heart for laborers” (not the working class but missionar-
ies), or, like my brothers and me, the men-in-training, a “ heart for
spiritual war.”
Spiritual war was a struggle to be fought everywhere, at all
times. Through witnessing and activism and proselytizing and the
passage of laws—or, rather, the “discovery” of laws already written
for us by God—and, most of al l, through prayer. The brothers prayed
after sports and before every meal, over Froot Loops in the morning
and steaks at night. At the beginning of each workday, or before we
went out on a “ date” —chastely accompanying a group of Potomac
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 43
Point sisters to a suitable movie, or an evening of swing dancing—we
prayed. Our prayers were contradictions: We prayed because God
was “awesome,” because we were “nothing,” and because the only
thing we were good for was His praise. But we also prayed because
we wanted things, like, say, a BMW, or divine guidance for our lead-
ers, or a sunny day on which to paint the house. “Prayer,” Andrew
the Australian told me, “ is everything you need.” A gentle sentiment,
at rst blush, seemingly uncontroversial. But consider what Andrew
did not think one needed: “rights,” a word I put in quote marks be-
cause he did. “ Rights,” the Family taught, are the product of an ar-
rogant mind—an infringement on God’s sovereignty.
The more I learned about the Family, the more di culty I had in
classifying its theology. It is Protestant, to be sure, though there are
Catholic members. Its leadership regards with disdain not only the
mainline denominations, but also evangelicals they consider “ luke-
warm.” And yet they distance themselves from the bullying of tel-
evangelists and moral scolds as well, in part because of theological
di erences (Jesus, they believe, instructs them to cultivate the pow-
erful regardless of their doctrinal purity) and in part based on style
(the Family believes in a subtler evangelism). “ They take the same
approach to religion that Ronald Reagan took to economics,” says a
Senate sta er named Neil MacBride, a political liberal with conser-
vative evangelical convictions that put him at odds with the Family’s
unorthodox fundamentalism. “ Reach the elite, and the blessings will
trickle down to the underlings.”
Based on the almost-ecumenical face it presents at the National
Prayer Breakfast—that of a Jesus to whom the Family welcomes non-
Christians to pray—the Family might be considered neo-evangelical.
Neo-evangelicals distance themselves from populist fundamentalism,
which they consider a “ fol k”—read: white trash—rel igion, given to
unseemly displays of emotion and tied too closely to cultural tradi-
tions. Whereas populist fundamentalists are strident and hectoring,
neo-evangelicals pride themselves on exibility. Unlike many pre-
millennialists w ho, a wa iting Ch r ist’s imminent r etur n, mer ely do th eir
best to stay out of trouble and to keep their eyes shut in prayer,
44 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
neo-evangelicals are willing to engage the world in the hope that
they can neaten things up in time for His arrival. They hew to Cal-
vi n’s belief that worldly power can help shape a holy community, but
they resist any ki nd of ethics or man-made morality, which they dis-
miss as legalism and consider almost a sin in itself.
But at Ivanwald, or in a prayer cell at the Cedars, or in conversa-
tions with world leaders, the Family’s beliefs appear closer to a more
margi nal set of theologies sometimes gathered under the umbrella
term of dominionism, characterized for me by William Martin, a reli-
gious historian at Rice University and Billy Graham’s o cial biogra-
pher, as the “ intellectual heart of the Christian Right.” Dominionist
theologies hold the Bible to be a guide to every decision, high and
low, from whom God wants you to marry to whether God thinks
you should buy a new lawn mower. Unlike neo-evangelicals, who
concern themselves chie y with getting good with Jesus, dominion-
ists want to reconstruct early Christian society, which they believe
was ruled by God alone. They view themselves as the new chosen
and claim a Christian doctrine of covenantalism, meaning covenants
not only between God and humanity but at every level of society,
replacing the rule of law and its secular contracts. Since these cove-
nants are signed, as it were, in the Blood of the Lamb, they are writ-
ten in ink invisible to nonbelievers.
One night I asked Josh Drexler, a brother from Atlanta who was
hoping to do mission work overseas, if I could look at some materi-
als the Family had given hi m. “Man, I’d love to share them with
you,” he said, and retrieved from his bureau drawer two folders full
of documents. While my brothers slept, I sat at the end of Ivanwald’s
long, oak d ining table and copied passages from them into my note-
book.
In a document titled “Our Common Agreement as a Core Group,”
members of the Family are instructed to form a core group, or a cell,
which is de ned as “a publicly invisible but privately identi able group
of companions.” The cell has “veto rights” over each member’s life,
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 45
and everyone pledges to monitor the others for deviations from
Christ’s will. A document called “Thoughts on a Core Group” ex-
plains that “Communists use cells as their basic structure. The ma a
operates like this, and the basic unit of the Marine Corps is the four
man squad. Hitler, Lenin, and many others u nderstood the power of
a small core of people.”
Jesus, continues the document, does not relate to all souls equally.
“He had levels of relationships much like concentric rings.” The
masses were the outermost fringe; next were the hundreds who saw
Jesus after he rose from the dead, and then came a ring of seventy,
and so on until one reached the “inner circle.” “ It’s quite obvious,”
the document concludes, “that he revealed more of himself to these.”
Later, I’d learn that the Family had drawn up blueprints for an under-
ground chapel-cum-bunker beneath the Cedars, its altar designed on
this concentric model of access to Christ’s love. At its heart would
stand Doug Coe, said by the brothers to be as close to Jesus as the
disciple John. That’s why Coe could walk into any politician’s o ce,
went thei r thin king; Jesus held the doors to power open.
Another document sets forth self-examination questions:
“4. Do I give only verbal assent to the policies of the Family or
am I a partner in seeking the mind of the Lord? ” The Family is aware
that politicians and busi nessmen use it for strictly worldly ends, but it
constantly pushes even its most cynical members toward sincerity.
The Fam ily does not ask them to stop seeking power or raking in
pro ts; rather, it wants them to believe that they do so not for their
own gain but for God’s.
“7. Do I agree with and practice the nancial precepts of the
Family? ” These precepts do not require one to tithe to good works.
Rather, the Family’s two major nancial principles concern appear-
ances. To practice the precepts of the Family, one must declare one’s
own fortune—great or small—wholly a gift from Jesus. It’s not yours,
even if it is; you’re not really rich, even if you are. This allows Family
members to be li ke Jesus himself by giving freely to other Family
members without regard for formality—a pro cess that has the added
advantage of being o the books.
46 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
“13. Am I willing to work without human recognition?” The
Family’s com mitment to secrecy—they cal l it privacy—demands a
sort of political ascetism that they think of as humility. It is nothing
of the sort; the Family renounces public accountability, not power.
Long-term goals are best summarized in a document called
“Youth Corps Vision.” Another Fam ily project, Youth Corps distrib-
utes pleasant brochures featuring endorsements from political
leaders —among them Tsutomu Hata, a former prime m inister of
Japan, former secretary of state James Baker, and Yoweri Museveni,
president of Uganda—and full of enthusiastic rhetoric about helping
you ng people to learn the principles of leadership. The name Jesus is
never mentioned.
But “Youth Corps Vision,” which is intended only for members of
the Family (“ it’s kinda secret,” Josh cautioned me), is more direct.
The Vision is to mobilize thousands of young people worldwide—
com mitted to the principles, precepts, and person of Jesus
Christ . . .
A group of highly dedicated individuals who are united together
having a total com mitment to use their lives to daily seek to
mature into people who talk like Jesus, act li ke Jesus, thin k
like Jesus. This group will have the responsibility to:
—see that the commitment and action is maintained to
the overall vision;
—see that the nest and best invisible organization is
developed and maintained at all levels of the work;
—even though the structure is hidden, see that the Fam-
ily atmosphere is maintained, so that all people can feel a part
of the Fam ily.
Youth Corps, whose programs are often centered around
Ivanwald- style houses, prepares the best of its recruits for positions
of power in business and government abroad. Its programs are in
operation in Rus sia, Ukrai ne, Romania, India, Pakistan, Uganda,
Nepal, Bhutan, Ecuador, Honduras, Peru, and other countries. The
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 47
goal: “Two hundred national and international world leaders bound
together relationally by a mutual love for God and the family.”
From time to time, Bengt would walk down to the Cedars or next
door to the house of Lee Rooker, a Department of Education o cial,
or hop onto his bike or into his Volkswagen and drive over to—the
brothers didn’t know where he went, just that he was missing. No
one worried. They all knew Bengt was having leadership lessons.
Bengt had been tapped to become a future father of the Family.
Sometimes, though, he seemed skeptical about his patrimony.
One day not long after I’d arrived, Bengt and I drove into Wash-
ington to pick up a new brother at the bus station. I’d spent the day
chipping and sanding green paint, and because there’d been no mask
most of the time, I was still coughing up paint dust. “You’ll get used
to it,” Bengt said.
“It’s ne,” I said. “ This is what I’m here for.”
Bengt laughed. “Paint in your nose?”
“The work,” I said. “It’s a kind of prayer, right?”
Bengt glanced over at me. “Can be,” he said.
I pressed the point. “ You do the work every day until it’s like
praying. Isn’t that the idea?”
“It is,” Bengt said. “But you have to be careful. Even work can
distract you.” We stopped at a red light. “Sometimes,” Bengt said.
“Lately. Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’ve been losi ng the vision.
Work is just work. Not because I don’t like it. Because I like it so
much. I l ike what I’ve learned to do. I can let my head ll up with this
whole world of details until there’s no room for God. I know He’s in
there, but I’m not paying Him the attention He’s due.”
“What do you do then? Do you pray?”
“I’ve had my more nihilistic moments.” He paused, and we drove
in silence, cruising through downtown D.C.’s deserted nighttime
streets. Bengt turned right onto Rhode Island Avenue. “Yeah,” he
said. “I pray. But sometimes it’s like putting pieces together. Trying
to get this thing to work like it’s supposed to.”
48 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
“Which is . . . ?”
“I have enjoyed,” Bengt said, “in the past anyway, the complete
absence of doubt.”
We pulled up to the bus depot, a squat, pale brick of a building
tucked behind Union Station. We were a few mi nutes early, and we
talked. Bus station hustlers drifted toward the car but kept their dis-
tance; addicts who couldn’t even stand watched us through cloudy
eyes.
“That’s what prayer is? ” I asked. “Absence? ”
Bengt paused. “Yeah, I think it is.”
Bengt stared at a fat woman in a red halter top; she was slapping
a skinny drunk on the shoulder. When his Redskins cap fell o , he
looked as i f he might cry.
“You go in,” Bengt said. “ I’ll wait here.”
Most of the brothers didn’t know it, but Bengt was thinking of
going to graduate school. He had chosen a university close enough to
com mute to from Ivanwald, and a course of study in the classics that
would complement his understanding of Jesus and provide him with
an advanced degree that could prove useful on a political résumé.
Two weeks into my stay, he began working on his application. After
dinner every night, he’d disappear into the little o ce beside his up-
stairs bunk room to write his essay on the house’s one computer. At
breakfast Je C. would ask him how it was goi ng, and he’d plow his
ngers through his hair and sigh. Handing out work assignments for
the day, he’d repeat himself needlessly.
One swelteri ng afternoon, he gave up writing and decided to
chop down two magnol ia trees in the front yard. All of Ivanwald’s
neighbors agreed that they were a shady, symmetrical adornment of
what, without them, would look like a parking lot, but Bengt couldn’t
be stopped: the trees had to go. They had to die, and they had to be
killed by his hand. With a long- blade Stihl chewing up magnolia,
green leather mu s protecting his ears, his eyes hidden by goggles,
Bengt relaxed for the rst time i n days. It took just a few hours to
reduce the trees to a stack of ve-foot lengths of branch. He put a
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 49
booted foot on the pile and pressed, listening to the wood crack, and
he smiled. “ I just love getting a job done,” he said.
“Bengt,” I said later that night, “I may be able to help with your
essay.” Bengt looked confused. “Before I came here,” I said, “that sort
of thing was my job.” Bengt smiled, clapped me on the shoulder—
he’d just found the tool he needed.
A few days later, he gave me the essay. After I’d done some edit-
ing, we sat down in the o ce one night after dinner to talk it over.
The room was barely big enough for the two of us; we sat with our
legs c rossed in opposite directions so as not to knock knees. “All
right, dude,” Bengt said. “Lay it on me. I’m ready.” He leaned for-
ward to peek at the pages. When he saw the amount of ink I’d added,
he gu awed, slapped his knee, frowned, crossed his arms over his
chest. “ I can take it, boy,” he said.
And he could; we marched through the text l ine by l ine, dissect-
ing run-ons and shu ing clauses and chain-sawing irrelevant phrases.
When we were done with the line-edit, we began moving whole sec-
tions, crafting from Bengt’s collage of his life a chronological intel-
lectual autobiography. My formal education has been a progression from
confusion and despair to hope, the essay began. Its story hewed to the
familiar fundamentalist arc of lost and found: every man and woman
a si nner, fallen but nonetheless redeemed. And yet Bengt’s sins were
not of the esh but of the mi nd. In college he had abandoned his boy-
hood ambition of becoming a doctor to study phi losophy: Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard, Hegel. Raised i n the faith, he saw his ideas about God
crumble before the disciplined rage of the philos ophers. “ I cut and
ran,” he told me. To Africa, where by day he worked on ships and in
clinics, and by night read Dostoyevsky and the Bible, its darkest and
most seductive passages: Lamentations, Job, the Song of Songs. These
authors were ali ke, his essay observed. They wrote about [su ering] like
a companion.
I looked up. “A double,” I said, remembering Dostoyevsky’s alter
egos.
Bengt nodded. “You know how you can stare at something for a
50 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
long time and not see it the way it really is? That’s what scripture had
been to me.” Through Dostoyevsky he began to see the Old Testa-
ment for what it is: relentless in its horror, its God a re, a whirl-
wind, a plague. Even worse is its Man: a rapist, a murderer, a
wretched thief, a fool.
“But,” said Bengt, “that’s not how it ends.”
Bengt meant Jesus. I thought of the end of The Brothers Karamazov:
the saintly Alyosha, leading a pack of boys away from a funeral to
feast on pancakes, everyone clapping hands and proclaiming eternal
brotherhood. In Africa, Bengt had seen people who were diseased,
starving, trapped by war, but who seemed nonetheless to experience
joy. Bengt recalled listening to a group of starving men play the
drum s. “Doubt,” he said, “ is just a prelude to joy.”
I had heard this before from mainstream Christians, but I sus-
pected Bengt meant it di erently. A line in Dostoyevsky’s The Pos-
sessed reminded me of him: Shatov, a nationalist, asks Stavrogin, the
coldhearted radical whom he had revered, “Wasn’t it you who said
that even if it was proved to you mathematically that the Truth was
outside Christ, you would prefer to remain with Christ outside the
Tr ut h?”
“Exactly,” Bengt said. In Africa he had seen the trappings of
Christianity fall away. All that remained was Christ. “You can’t argue
with absolute power,” Bengt said.
I put the essay down. Bengt nudged it back into my hands. “ I
want to know what you think of my ending.” He had written about a
passage from the Gospel of John in which John, with two travelers,
encounters Jesus on the road. John hints at Christ’s importance, so
the two men travel with him. “Then Jesus turns around and asks the
two men one question,” Bengt had written. “ ‘What do you want?’ he
asks.” The question, Bengt thought, might mean, “Why are you fol-
lowing me? ” or “What is it that you are doing? ” But Bengt had de-
cided that what Christ was asking was “What do you desire? ”
The word was important to him. “ That’s what it’s about,” he said.
“Desire.” The way he said the word made it sound almost angry. He
shifted i n his chair. “Think about it: ‘What do you desire?’ ”
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 51
“God?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the answer? ” I asked.
“He’s the question,” was Bengt’s retort. Downstairs, most of the
men had gone to sleep; from the living room we could hear someone
quietly picking a guitar.
“Bengt,” I said, “I don’t understand.”
“You know,” he said, “I don’t either. That’s what I’ve kind of
come to realize. The thing is, I don’t need to. I can just trust i n the
Lord for my directions. He’ll tell me what I need to know.”
“A voice? ” I said, surprised.
“A prayer,” he answered. The voice he heard was his own, his
prayers, transformed by his inverted theology into revelation. What
he wanted was what God wanted.
“Absence?” I said, realizing that what he’d meant by the absence
of doubt was the absence of self- awareness, the absence of an under-
standing of his thoughts as distinct from God’s and thus always sub-
ject to—doubt. But I did not say this. Instead, I just repeated myself.
“Absence,” I said, without a question mark.
“Totally, brother.”
He half smiled, satis ed with this alchemy of logic by which
doubt became the essence of a dogma. God was just what Bengt de-
sired Him to be, even as Bengt was, in the face of God, “nothing.”
Not for aesthetics alone, I realized, did Bengt and the Family reject
the label Christian. Their faith and their practice seemed closer to a
perverted sort of Buddhism, their Christ everywhere and nowhere at
once, His commands phrased as questions, His will as palpable as
one’s own desires. And what the Fam ily desired, from Abraham Ver-
eide to Doug Coe to Bengt, was power, worldly power, with which
Christ’s kingdom could be built, cell by cell.
Whenever a suf ciently large crop of God’s soldiers was bunked
up at Ivanwald, Doug Coe made a point of stopping by for din ner.
The brothers viewed his visit as far more important than that of any
52 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
senator or prime mi nister. The night he joined us, he wore a crisply
pressed golf shirt and dark slacks, and his skin was well tanned. He
brought a guest with him, an Albanian politician whose pale face and
ill- tti ng gray suit made Doug Coe seem all the more radiant. In his
early seventies, Coe could have passed for fty: His hair was dark, his
cheeks taut. His smile was like a lantern.
“He hates the limelight,” Gannon had warned me. “It’s not about
him, it’s about Jesus, so he doesn’t like people to know who he is.”
But he knows who you are. When I reintroduced mysel f that night,
he cut me short. “I remember you,” he said, and moved on to the
next man.
“Where,” Coe asked Rogelio, “are you from, i n Paraguay?”
“Asunción,” he said.
Doug Coe smiled. “I’ve visited there many times.” He chewed
for a while. “Asunción. A Lati n leader was assassinated there twenty
years ago. A Nicaraguan. Does anybody know who it was?”
I waited for someone to speak, but no one did. “Somoza,” I said.
The dictator overthrown by the Sandinistas.
“Somoza,” Coe said, his eyes sweeping back to me. “An interest-
ing man. I liked to visit him. A very bad man, behind his machine
guns.” He sm iled like he was going to laugh, but instead he moved his
fork to his mouth. “And yet,” he said, a bite poised at the tip of his
tongue, “ he had a heart for the poor.” There was another long si-
lence.
“Do you ever think about prayer? ” he asked, but it wasn’t a ques-
tion. Coe was preparing a parable.
There was a man he knew, he said, who didn’t really believe in
prayer. So Doug Coe made him a bet. If this man would choose
something and pray for it every day for forty- ve days, he wagered
God would make it so. It didn’t matter whether the man believed or
whether he was a Christian. All that mattered was the fact of prayer.
Every day. Forty- ve days. He couldn’t lose, Coe told the man. If
Jesus didn’t answer his prayers, Coe would pay him $500.
“What should I pray for?” the man asked.
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 53
“What do you think God would like you to pray for? ” Doug Coe
asked him.
“I don’t know,” said the man. “ How about Africa? ”
“Good,” said Coe. “Pick a country.”
“Uganda,” the man said, because it was the only one he could
remember.
“Fine,” Coe told him. “Every day, for forty- ve days, pray for
Uganda. ‘God, please help Uganda. God, please help Uganda.’ ”
On the thirty-second day, Coe told us, this man met a woman
from Uganda. She worked with orphans. Come visit, she told the
man, and so he did, that very weekend. And when he came home, he
raised $1 million in donated medicine for the orphans. “ So you see,”
Doug Coe told him, “God answered your prayers. You owe me ve
hundred dollars.”
There was more. After the man had returned to the United
States, the president of Uganda called the man at his home and said,
“I am maki ng a new government. Will you help me make some deci-
sions?”
“So,” Doug Coe told us, “my friend said to the president, ‘Why
don’t you come and pray with me in America? I have a good group of
friends—senators, congressmen—who I like to pray with, and they’d
like to pray with you.’ And that president came to the Cedars, and he
met Jesus. And his name is Yoweri Museveni, and he is now the
president of all the presidents in Africa. And he is a good friend of
the Family.”
“That’s awesome,” Beau said.
Coe had told this story many times before, I’d learn; it now ap-
pears recycled in evangelical sermons around the world, a bit of fun-
damentalist folklore. It’s false. Doug’s friend was not just an ordinary
businessman but a well-connected former Ford adm inistration o cial
named Bob Hunter. He may have made a bet with Coe, but his trip
was hardly as casual as Coe suggested; I later found two memos total-
ing eighteen pages that Hunter had submitted to Coe, “A Trip to East
Africa—Fall 1986,” and “Re: Organizing the Invisible,” detailing his
54 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
meetings with Ugandan and Kenyan government o cials (many of
whom he already knew) and the possibility of recruiting each for the
Fam ily. Central to Hunter’s mission was representing the interests of
American political gures —Republican senator Chuck Grassley and
Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for Africa, Chester A. Crocker,
among them—who might in uence newly independent Uganda away
from Africa’s Left.25 The following year, Museveni met with Ronald
Reagan at the White House; he’s served as an American proxy ever
since. O nce heralded as a democratic reformer, Museveni rules Uganda
to this day, having suspended term limits, intimidated the press, and
installed the kind of corrupt but stable regime Washington prefers in
struggl ing nations.
“Yes,” Coe told us, “ it’s good to have friends. Do you know what
a di erence a friend can make? A friend you can agree with?” He
smiled. “Two or three agree, and they pray? They can do anything.
Agree. Agreem ent. What’s that mean?” Doug looked at me. “You’re a
writer. What does that mean? ”
I remembered Paul’s letter to the Phil ippians, which we had be-
gu n to memorize. Ful ll ye my joy, that ye be likeminded.
“Unity,” I said. “Agreement means unity.”
Doug Coe didn’t smile. “Yes,” he said. “To tal unity. Two, or
three, become one. Do you know,” he asked, “that there’s another
word for that?”
No one spoke.
“It’s called a covenant. Two, or three, agree? They can do any-
thing. A covenant is . . . powerful. Can you thi nk of anyone who
made a covenant with his friends? ”
We all knew the answer to this, having heard his name invoked
numerous times in this context. Andrew from Australia, sitting be-
side Coe, cleared his throat: “Hitler.”
“Yes,” Doug Coe said. “Yes, Hitler made a covenant. The Ma a
makes a covenant. It is such a very powerful thing. Two, or three,
agree.” He took another bite from his plate, planted his fork on its
tines. “Well, guys,” he said, “I gotta go.”
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 55
As Doug Coe left, my brothers’ hearts were beating hard: for the
poor, for a covenant. “Awesome,” Bengt said. We stood to clear our
dishes.
On one of my last nights at Ivanwald, the neighborhood boys asked
my brothers and me to play ashlight tag. There were six boys, rang-
ing in age from maybe seven to eleven, all junior members of the
Fam ily. It was balmy, and the streetl ight glittered against the black-
top, and hiding places beckoned from behind trees and in bushes.
One of the boys began counting. My brothers, big and small, scat-
tered. I lay at on a hillside. From there I could track movement in
the shadows and smell the mint leaves planted in the garden. A gure
approached. I sprang up and ran, down the sidewalk and up through
the garden, over a wall that my pursuer, a small boy, could hardly
climb. But once he was over, he kept charging. Just as I was about to
vanish into the trees, his ashl ight caught me. “Je -I-see-you, you’re
It!” the boy cried. I stopped and turned. He kept the beam on me. I
heard the slap of his sneakers as he ran across the driveway. “Okay,
dude,” he whispered. He clicked o the ashlight. Now I could see
him. Little Stevie, whose drawing of a machine gun we’d posted in
our bunk room. He handed the ashlight to me, spun around, started
to run. Then he stopped and looked over his shoulder. “ You’re It
now,” he whispered and disappeared into the dark.
