Rachel Maddow: GOP Sex Scandal Exposes Secretive Conservative Religious Group -- 'The Family'

By Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show. Posted July 14, 2009.

When you start looking into this organization and its members' oaths to secrecy and fidelity to one another that "I'm not going to be the one who talks here" theme looms very large.  But last year, when Jeff Sharlet's book about the Family first came out in hardback, the resultant buzz around the secrecy and high level connections of the Family and the C Street spurred NBC's Andrea Mitchell to obtain sermons of the group's long-time leader, Doug Coe, in order to find out more about what this group's agenda might be.

Here's some of what she found.

Video transcript:

Douglas Coe, Leader of "The Family": I've seen pictures of the young men in the Red Guard.  They would bring in this young man's mother.  He would take an ax and cut her head off.  They have to put the purposes of the Red Guard ahead of their father, mother, brother, sister, and their own life.  That was a covenant, a pledge.  That's what Jesus said.

Maddow: That's what Jesus said?

Here's more from the same sermon.

Video transcript:

Coe: Jesus said, you have to put me before other people.  And you have to put me before yourself.  Hitler, that was a demand to be in the Nazi party.  You have to put the Nazi party and its objectives ahead of your own life and ahead of other people.

Maddow: Again, the man speaking here is Doug Coe.  He's the leader of the group the Family, that runs the secretive C Street house that features in the sex scandals of both John Ensign and Mark Sanford.

Doug Coe describing the group's mission here in this next clip through his interpretation of the life and words of Jesus.

Video transcript:

Coe: One of the things he said is "If any man comes to me, and does not hate his father, mother, brother, sister, his own life, he can't be a disciple."  So I don't care what other qualifications you have, if you don't do that, you can't be a disciple of Christ.

Maddow: If you don't hate your father, mother, brother, sister, you can't be a disciple of Christ.

Every American's faith is her or his own business.  It's our constitutional inheritance as Americans.  Now, there is no religious test for public office, there's no official religion in this country, and every American has a right to believe or not believe, to worship or not worship, or as he or she sees fit.  Religion is a private matter in this country.

And religion is the organizing principle of many, many powerful interests in the United States, including this one very connected, sworn to secrecy, ministry only to the powerful, that has had a key role in how two major Republican sex scandals have unspooled this summer, that has a theology of power that is poorly understood, and cites Hitler a lot, and that currently houses at least seven members of Congress in what it calls a church.

Joining us now once again is Jeff Sharlet, who lived among this group as part of the research for his book "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," which is now out in paperback.

Maddow: I realize when we finished our interview last night there were more questions about the connection between this theology and these politics that I really wanted to ask you.  And when I asked you last night how a group like the family could essentially sanction John Ensign putting his mistress's son on the Republican Party payroll -- you said, essentially, that this group would be solely focused on looking out for John Ensign dealing with it internally.

Well, it now seems like a big part of the way Ensign responded to the scandal was by spreading a lot of money around.  So, I wanted to ask you to talk to me a little bit about wealth and financial power and how that fits into the theology of this group.

Sharlet: Well, to understand the Family's approach to wealth, it's a good place to start is their own label for themselves.  They like to call themselves the Christian mafia at times.  And they mean this in the sense of money moving quietly behind the scenes.

As David Coe -- one of the leaders of the group, the son of the man we just saw, and also John Ensign's spiritual counselor we now know -- as David Coe explained it to me a few years ago, if money moves around behind the scenes through what they call the man-to-man financial method, then we are able to sort of maintain this veneer of privacy, and that this is very important, because when you're dealing with members of the Family, these guys have been chosen by God for leadership and what the Family is going to do is in some ways almost play the role of consigliores, as fixers for these guys.

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