Was Doug Coe a Born Again Christian

The Family: The Underground Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Ability
Past Jeff Sharlet
Hardcover, 464 pages
Harper
List Price: $25.95

Chapter Ane

The Family, or the Fellowship, 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, off -the-tape coming together of religious right groups called the Values Action Team (VAT), is an active member, every bit is Representative Joe Pitts (R., Pennsylvania), an avuncular would-be theocrat who chairs the Firm version of the VAT. Others referred to as members include senators Jim DeMint of S Carolina, chairman of the Senate Steering Committee (the powerful conservative caucus co-founded back in 1974 by another Family acquaintance, the late senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska); 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 effigy who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling-fortune name. Some Democrats are involved: representatives Bart Stupak and Mike Doyle, leading anti-abortion Democrats, are longtime residents of the Family unit's C Street House, a old convent registered as a church and used to provide Family-subsidized housing for politicians supported by the Family. A centrist occasionally stumbles into the fold, simply the Family is more often than not conservative. Family unit stalwarts in the House include Representatives Frank Wolf (R., Virginia), Zach Wamp (R., Tennessee), and Mike McIntyre, a hard right North Carolina Democrat who believes that the 10 Commandments are "the cardinal legal code for the laws of the U.s.a." and thus ought to be on display in schools and court houses.

The Family's historic roll call is even more striking: the late senator Strom Thurmond (R., South Carolina), who produced "confidential" reports on legislation for the Family's leadership, presided for a time over the Family's weekly Senate meeting, and the Dixie-crat senators Herman Talmadge of Georgia and Absalom Willis Robertson of Virginia — Pat Robertson's begetter — served on the backside-the-scenes board of the organization. In 1974, a Family prayer group of Republican congressmen and onetime 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 unit'southward commencement weekly Bible study for federal judges.

"I wish I could say more than nearly it," Ronald Reagan publicly demurred back in 1985, "but it's working precisely because it is private."

"We want to see a leadership led by God," reads a confidential mission argument. "Leaders of all levels of society who direct projects every bit 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 kingdom," and to avert whenever possible the label Christian itself, lest they alert enemies to that advance. Regular prayer groups, or "cells" as they're ofttimes called, have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defence, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries.

The Family unit's use of the term "cell" long predates the word'due south electric current association with terrorism. Its roots are in the Cold War, when leaders of the Family deliberately emulated the organizing techniques of communism. In 1948, a grouping of Senate staffers met to discuss means that the Family'southward "cell and leadership groups" could recruit elites unwilling to participate in the "mass meeting approach" of populist fundamentalism. Two years later, the Family declared that with republic inadequate to the fight confronting godlessness, such cells should function to produce political "atomic energy"; that is, deals and alliances that could not be accomplished through the clumsy machinations of legislative fence would instead radiate quietly out of political cells. More than recently, Senator Sam Brownback told me that the privacy of Family unit cells makes them safe spaces for men of power — an appropriation of another term borrowed from an enemy, feminism. "In this closer relationship," a document for members reads, "God will give you more insight into your own geographical area and your sphere of influence." One's cell should get "an invisible 'assertive grouping'" out of which "agreements reached in faith and in prayer effectually the person of Jesus Christ" lead to action that will appear to the world to be unrelated to whatsoever centralized organization.

In 1979, the former Nixon aide and Watergate felon Charles W. Colson — born again through the guidance of the Family and the ministry of a CEO of arms manufacturer Raytheon — estimated the Family's strength at twenty,000, although the number of dedicated "associates" around the globe is much smaller (effectually 350 every bit of 2006). The Family maintains a closely guarded database of associates, members, and "key men," only it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak nearly the group or its activities.

"The Movement," a fellow member of the Family's inner circle once wrote to the grouping's chief South African operative, "is simply inexplicable to people who are non intimately acquainted with information technology." The Family's "political" initiatives, he continues, "have ever been misunderstood by 'outsiders.' Equally a issue of very biting experiences, therefore, we have learned never to commit to paper any discussions or negotiations that are taking place. There is no such thing every bit a 'confidential' memorandum, and leakage ever seems to occur. Thus, I would urge you lot not to put on paper anything relating to whatever of the piece of work that you are doing ... [unless] yous know the recipient well enough to put at the top of the page 'PLEASE DESTROY AFTER READING.'"

"If I told you who has participated and who participates until this day, yous 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?'"

A friendly, plainspoken Oregonian with dark, curly hair, a lazy grinning, and the broad, thrown-back shoulders of a man who recognizes few superiors, Coe has worked for the Family since 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, causeless some of Coe's duties, but Coe remains the preeminent figure.) Coe denies possessing any authority, but Family members speak of him with a mixture of intimacy and awe. Doug Coe, they say — about people refer to him by his showtime and last proper noun — is closer to Jesus than perchance whatsoever other human being alive, and thus privy to information the balance of u.s. are too spiritually "immature" to empathise. 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 — past shielding their work on His behalf from a hardhearted public, unwilling to believe in their skilful intentions. In a sermon posted online by a fundamentalist website, Coe compares this method to the mob'due south. "His Body" — the Body of Christ, that is, by which he means Christendom — "functions invisibly like the mafia. ... They keep their organization invisible. Everything visible is transitory. Everything invisible is permanent and lasts forever. The more you can make your organization invisible, the more influence information technology volition have."

For that very reason, the Family has operated nether many guises, some active, some defunct: National Committee for Christian Leadership, International Christian Leadership, National Leadership Council, the Fellowship Foundation, the International Foundation. The Fellowship Foundation alone has an annual budget of nearly $14 meg. The bulk of information technology, $12 1000000, goes to "mentoring, counseling, and partnering with friends around the world," only that represents only a fraction of the network's finances. The Family unit does not pay big salaries; one human being receives $121,000, while Doug Coe seems to live on near naught (his income fluctuates wildly according to the off-the-books support of "friends"), and none of the fourteen men on the board of directors (amidst them an oil executive, a defense contractor, and government officials past and present) receives a penny. Only within the system money moves in peculiar means, "man-to-human" financial support that'southward off the books, a abiding proliferation of new nonprofits big and small that submit to the Family'south spiritual authority, coin flowing up and down the quiet bureaucracy. "I requite or loan money to hundreds of people, or have my friends do and so," says Coe.

The Family unit's only publicized gathering is the National Prayer Breakfast, which information technology established in 1953 and which, with congressional sponsorship, it continues to organize every February at the Washington, D.C., Hilton. Some iii,000 dignitaries, representing scores of nations and corporate interests, pay $425 each to attend. For most, the breakfast is simply that, muffins and prayer, merely some stay on for days of seminars organized around Christ's messages for particular industries. In years by, the Family organized such events for executives in oil, defense, insurance, and banking. The 2007 upshot drew, among others, a contingent of aid-hungry defense force ministers from Eastern Europe, Pakistan's famously corrupt Benazir Bhutto, and a Sudanese general linked to genocide in Darfur.

Here's how information technology can work: Dennis Bakke, former CEO of AES, the largest independent power producer in the globe, and a Family unit insider, took the occasion of the 1997 Prayer Breakfast to invite Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, the Family's "fundamental human being" in Africa, to a private dinner at a mansion, just up the block from the Family's Arlington headquarters. Bakke, the author of a popular business volume titled Joy at Work, has long preached an ethic of social responsibility inspired past his evangelical organized religion and his complimentary-market convictions: "I am trying to sell a way of life," he has said. "I am a cultural imperialist." That'south a phrase he uses to exist provocative; he believes that his Jesus is and then universal that everyone wants Him. And, apparently, His business opportunities: Bakke was 1 of the pioneer thinkers of energy deregulation, the laissez-faire fever dream that culminated in the meltdown of Enron. But in that location was other, less-noticed fallout, such as a no-bid deal Bakke fabricated with Museveni, the effect of a relationship that began at the 1997 Prayer Breakfast, for a $500-million dam close to the source of the White Nile — in waters considered sacred by Uganda'due south two.5-meg–potent Busoga minority. AES announced that the Busoga had agreed to "relocate" the spirits of their dead. They weren't the merely ones opposed; kickoff environmentalists (Museveni had i American arrested and deported) and then even other foreign investors revolted against a project that seemed similar it might really increase the price of power for the poor. Bakke didn't worry. "Nosotros don't go away," he declared. He dispatched a young man named Christian Wright, the son of 1 of the Prayer Breakfast's organizers, to be AES'south in- country liaison to Museveni; Wright was later defendant of authorizing at least $400,000 in bribes. He claimed his signature had been forged.

"I'thou sure a lot of people use the Fellowship equally a way to network, a way to gain entree to all sorts of people," says Michael Cromartie, an evangelical Washington think tanker who's critical of the Family's lack of transparency. "And entree they practise go."

"Annihilation can happen," co-ordinate to an internal planning certificate, "the Koran could even be read, only JESUS is in that location! He is infiltrating the world." Too bland nearly years to merit much printing, the breakfast is regarded past the Family as merely a tool in a larger purpose: to recruit the powerful attendees into smaller, more than frequent prayer meetings, where they tin can "see Jesus man to man."

In the process of introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family has managed to effect a number of behind-the-scenes acts of affairs. In 1978 information technology helped the Carter assistants organize a worldwide call to prayer with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. At the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast, Family leaders persuaded their South African client, the Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, to stand up down from the possibility of ceremonious war with Nelson Mandela. But such benign acts announced to be the exception to the dominion. During the 1960s, the Family unit forged relationships between the U.Due south. authorities and some of the nearly oppressive regimes in the earth, arranging prayer networks in the U.Due south. Congress for the likes of Full general Costa e Silva, dictator of Brazil; General Suharto, dictator of Republic of indonesia; and Full general Park Chung Hee, dictator of South Korea. "The Fellowship's achieve into governments around the globe," observes David Kuo, a former special assistant to the president in Bush's first term, "is almost impossible to enlarge or even grasp."

From The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Ability past Jeff Sharlet. Copyright 2009 by Jeff Sharlet. Published by Harper. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2009/11/24/120746516/the-secret-political-reach-of-the-family