"C Street House" Backs Christian Nationalist H. Res. 397

While high-profile mass media journalists such as MSNBC's Rachel Maddow  have recently begun giving Washington's "C Street House" some long overdue scrutiny, another aspect to the story has been almost entirely overlooked. Beyond an apparent lust to be above normal legal and moral constraints, and a proclivity for illicit sex, some C Street members share another simmering, but very different, passion: overwriting and falsifying the historical record in order to justify claims that the United States was originally founded as a Christian nation.

According to a July 20th story from Politico.com, Virginia Congressman James "Randy" Forbes (R-VA) attends Bible study groups at the C Street House. When not piously engaging in C Street's Bible studies along with "family values" advocates such as GOP Senators Tom Coburn (R-OK) and John Ensign (R-NV), who shared knowledge of Ensign's extramarital affair before the news became public, Representative Forbes indulges his lust for foisting a fake, Christian nationalist version of American history upon the nation. Randy Forbes' latest legislative push, H. Res 397, backed by a sizable rump GOP House faction, is literally packed with American history lies.

Washington's 'C Street House' provides cheap rent, is registered as a church, and is run by a shadowy Washington based association known as "The Family" or "The Fellowship." The group and its activities, the subject of a 2008 book by journalist Jeff Sharlet, has over the summer of 2009 become notorious as a string of sex scandals has enveloped three national politicians who have lived at the C Street House or gone to Bible study classes there: South Carolina Republican Governor Mark Sanford, Nevada GOP Senator John Ensign, and former Republican Congressman Charles "Chip" Pickering.

The frequency with which names of C Street House's current and former members are popping up in the news, implicated in sex scandals, lends credibility to media lampooning of the cheap rent church as a Christian frat house, but there's a sinister edge to C Street Culture.

The institution is run by "The Family", whose longtime head Douglas Coe operates in the Washington back-room shadows as if a Christian mafia don; for decades, Coe has been able to grants his supplicants private face time with US presidents. Doug Coe has also publicly evinced admiration for the revolutionary dedication of Bolsheviks, Chinese Red Guard who chopped their own parents' heads off, and Hitler Youth willing to follow their Fuhrer's every command. In a recent op ed, Buzzflash.com editor Mark Karlin observed that accounts of C Street's secretive, cultic subculture suggest the group might cover for  crimes committed by C Street members.

But The Family's crimes against the integrity of the American historical record have been very real and very public. For decades, a fabricated George Washington quote, known as "Washington's Prayer", has been incorporated into the program of the National Prayer Breakfast, an event held by The Family every year since President Dwight D. Eisenhower attended the first National Prayer Breakfast event in 1953. The egregious example fits into a wide pattern of abuse that amounts to a Christian nationalist guerrilla war to remake the historical record. In recent years Randy Forbes has been at the tip of the spear in that war.