- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 1
- 2
-
Sparkle (0)
In politics, as with most things, there are two ways of understanding power. An organization chart can tell you who's officially in charge, but there's also what one writer years ago called the "true organization of power" - the way things really get done -- alliances built on personal relationships between people with shared interests. For most of the last decade, Jeff Sharlet has been decoding one of the most influential power centers in domestic and international politics -- and he's alarmed by much of what he's found.
Sharlet's 2009 book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, introduces readers to a decades-old organization whose members include have included heads of state on nearly every continent, members of the US Congress, titans of industry, and mega-church pastors. According to Sharlet and others, the Family has played a critical - and mostly secret - role in shaping domestic and international politics and policy. The list of US public figures associated with the group in recent years includes Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, Rep. Bart Stupak (D- MI), and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS).
I've been reading Jeff Sharlet's work for several years, and I once wote and article about how the gay rights debate might affect the black Christian vote in the 2004 election. I've been especially thinking about Sharlet and the Family since last Tuesday, when I moderated a discussion on my campus featuring Sharlet and popular Christian author Eric Metaxas about the role of evangelical Christianity in US politics. Mataxas' work highlights Christian champions of human rights such as 19th-century anti-slavery movement leader William Wilberforce and would-be Hitler assassin Dietrich Bonhoeffer. During the discussion, Mataxas argued that the positive role that committed Christians have played in many important movements for social justice has often been underplayed, and Christians today find themselves unfairly demonized and caricatured. However, Mataxas agreed with Sharlet that the excesses described in Sharlet's book are indefensible. For his part, Sharlet called upon Mataxas to join him in condemning efforts by some Family members to push the United States toward theocracy.
Sharlet got interested in the Family in 2002, when he took up a friend's invitation to spend a month at one of its properties, known as Ivanwald. A version of Sharlet's essay about that experience, which first appeared in a 2003 Harper's magazine article, opens the book. In that article, he described the family's paterfamilias, Doug Coe:
"At the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast, George H.W. Bush praised Doug Coe for what he described as “quiet diplomacy, I wouldn't say secret diplomacy,” as an “ambassador of faith.” Coe has visited nearly every world capital, often with congressmen at his side, “making friends” and inviting them back to the Family's unofficial headquarters, a mansion (just down the road from Ivanwald) that the Family bought in 1978 with $1.5 million donated by, among others, Tom Phillips, then the C.E.O. of arms manufacturer Raytheon, and Ken Olsen, the founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation."
Sharlet traces evidence of the Family's hand in charges that some US military leaders are pushing an extreme Christian theology on troops, violating the military's own rules. He says The Family helped former Pres. Jimmy Carter jump-start the talks that led the Camp David Accords, but its members also threw their weight behind murderous dictators in Indonesia, Somalia and Haiti, among other places. A Family associate is behind the repugnant Ugandan legislative proposal targeting homosexuals for execution, and prison for people who fail to turn in gay people they might know - although the organization has condemned the measure.
A report by Christian Broadcasting Network said that the organization's secrecy leads people to read sinister motives into what its defenders describe as a benign organization dedicated to ministering to those in power:
Last summer, Sharlet talked about The Family in this interview with Democracy Now! Sharlet traced the group's origins back to its founders' anti-labor convictions during the 1930s:
"They believe that organized labor is ungodly, to put it mildly, perhaps Satanic. It began with this vision in 1935 that the New Deal and organized labor were literally a Satanic conspiracy they had
