The Family's Values: America's Most Influential (and Secretive) Religious Organization

Jeff Sharlet's The Family is a hair-raising account that will leave you stunned by the religious motivations behind seemingly every political decision in the last 70 years. As the title suggests, Sharlet's book focuses on the Family, a highly secretive, elite fundamentalist organization that wields political power behind the scenes. The Family, also known as the Fellowship, believes in God-driven government whose precepts are spread by top level, "key men" throughout the world. This is creepy religious imperialism at its most harrowing, which Sharlet delivers through fascinating historical accounts blended with personal anecdotes of the year he spent living with the Family in its picturesque estate along the Potomac River, Ivanwald.

Having covered all manner of religious sects for Rolling Stone and Harper's, Sharlet's intentions for living at Ivanwald were innocuous at first. What he encountered was so disturbing, however, that he felt compelled to investigate the Family's shadowy role in shaping elite American fundamentalism into a highly effective political tool. The Family is much more than its National Prayer Breakfasts, which have been presided over by every President for the last 50 years since Eisenhower helped launch them in 1953. As Sharlet writes, "the Family's long-term project of a worldwide government under God is more ambitious than Al Qaeda's dream of a Sunni empire."

Sharlet masterfully weaves through the underpinnings of elite fundamentalism, as he discusses Jonathan Edwards's Great Awakening and Charles Grandison Finney's populist evangelicalism. In doing so, he hits upon a love of power that is both "divine and worldly," which simultaneously explicates the Family's core principles and America's soft empire.

Since the Family is only as powerful as its leaders, it comes as no surprise that Sharlet devotes the majority of the book to the influence of Family founder Abraham "Abram" Vereide and his successor (the Family's current head) Doug Coe. It was Abram who thought up "the Idea" of trickle-down faith spread by "key men" to the elite leaders around the world -- the Family's prevailing ethos being "every Christian a leader, every leader a Christian." And it was Abram who decided that organized labor had no place in an elite fundamentalist worldview that catered to CEOs and dictatorial leaders. Of course, polite Christians couldn't very well attack or destroy labor unions, but they could force them into "cooperation."

It was also Abram who epitomized the Family's fascination with fascism. Early on, you get a sense that perhaps the Family's authoritarian interests derive from their warped desire to emulate such power structures within their own organization, sans bloodshed or genocide. "Doug Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their 'brothers,'" writes Sharlets. "'Look at Hitler,' he said. 'Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, bin Laden.' The Family possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the 'total Jesus' of a brotherhood in Christ."

When Sharlet explores Abram's past, however, you come to grim realization that the Family's fascist leanings are literal as well as metaphorical. Abram didn't merely form bonds with vicious anti-Semites like Henry Ford, Merwin Hart, Charles Lindbergh, or Frank Buchman, who once said, "I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler." He also cavorted with Nazis in postwar Germany, ostensibly in an attempt to orchestrate the country's "moral rehabilitation."

Sharlet suggests that no one is beyond the Family's reach. First you have your usual suspects: Ed Meese, Reagan's anti-porn attorney general who once helped secure an oil pipeline for Saddam Hussein; Chuck Colson, the Watergate criminal who was "born again" and started his powerful faith-based Prison Fellowship initiative; and Rep. Joe Pitts and Sen. Sam Brownback, who united over their hatred of reproductive rights but also to push lucrative energy trade deals in Central Asian nations with awful human rights records (in part to stop the spread of Islam). Then you have your drop-in visitors like Clarence Thomas, who retreated to Ivanwald during the Anita Hill scandal, or President Ford, who prayed with his small prayer group (or "cell") before pardoning Nixon. Even both Bushes, who are technically not members of the Family themselves, are considered Family "relations" because they have surrounded themselves with Family members such as James Baker, Jack Kemp, Dan Quayle, and John Ashcroft.