Over the past three weeks, Rachel Maddow has repeatedly had Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family as a guest on her show to discuss the unfolding revelations surrounding the secretive elite fundamentalist organization and it's Washington safe house on C Street. In doing so, Maddow has repeatedly hammered away at the point that what's involved here is far more than just standard-issue rightwing hypocrisy about sex. It's about the very essence of conservative belief in an unelected elite that is destined to rule without any accountability to those it would rule over.
This is the very antithesis of what America is supposed to be all about. And yet these people are part of a wider movement that is tirelessly trying to rewrite American history to make us believe that America was founded by people like them, to be a nation ruled by people like them, when nothing could be further from the truth. This false teaching of theirs is very much an example of mythos over logos, a system of meaning that is impervious to fact or logic.
On Thursday, July 9, Maddow and Sharlet discussed just how radically outside the mainstream The Family is-not just the mainstream of American political thought, but outside the mainstream of Christianity as well-fundamentally opposed to it, in fact:
SHARLET: What makes it a little bit different than other Christian conservative organizations-two things. You said that it's secretive. Indeed, the leader of the group describes it, he says, "The more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have."
And the other thing is the nature of the influence they want to have. I got to sit in on a spiritual counseling session between the leader of the family and Congressman Todd Tiahrt on the C Street house. I actually, met Senator Ensign there.
As the leader of the family was counseling Congressman Tiahrt, who had this very standard issue, bill of issues related to the Christian right, and he said, you've got to have a bigger vision of what we're talking about here. He described-he called it "Jesus plus nothing." And he said it's sort of a totalitarian idea of Christianity and he gave his examples of men who he believed, understood the way power should wielded. He actually gave his examples, Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden and Lenin.
Sure! What God-fearing Christian doesn't look up to Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden and Lenin?
So it was suggested by historian Perry Miller in The New England Mind, a 1939 book on Puritanism, as quoted in Jeff Sharlet's spotlight on the faith of America's powerful. And The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, explores both the mood of this elite fundamentalism and its implications.
He first learned about the Family when he was invited to stay at Ivanwald, a home for young men that the sect grooms for power. Consider Bengt Carlson, one of Ivanwald's house leaders, whose own mood in the following passage seemed an easy metaphor for the consequences these power brokers have brought to the world:
One sweltering afternoon, he gave up writing [his graduate school application essay] and decided to chop down two magnolia trees in the front yord. All of Ivanwald's neighbors agreed that they were a shady, symmetrical adornment of what, without them, would look like a parking lot, but Bengt couldn't be stopped: the trees had to go. They had to die, and they had to be killed by his hand. With a long-blade Stihl chewing up magnolia, green leather muffs protecting his ears, his eyes hidden by goggles, Bengt relaxed for the first time in days. It took just a few hours to reduce the trees to a stack of five-foot lengths of branch. He put a booted foot on the pile and pressed, listening to the wood crack, and he smiled. "I just love getting a job done," he said.
Bengt's elders and predecessors in the Family, like the sex-obsessed Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), climate-fantasist Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), fascist sympathizer Henry Ford, Gen. Suharto of Indonesia, as well as past and present business leaders from all over, have this, as I've gathered from the book, as their mood: all is well, rejoice, for the kingdom of God is manifest on Earth already, his chosen are those invested with power or those willing to wield it to maintain order.
Having a curious faith that gladly embraces unrepentant bribe-takers, bribe-makers, thieves of high finance and mass murderers, the only sin that concerns the Family is the poisonous sin of envy that the discontented masses sometimes harbor against their betters. Their sympathies, they reserve for the "poor in spirit", the victims of uncharitable, retributive, disorderly manifestations of envy. They view dissent against their rule, dissent against the orderly transactions of commerce-as-we-know-it, as literally the same as rebellion against God and His kingdom.
The Family's leadership, Doug Coe and his son David, regularly invoke the model of developing power among the intimate relationships of small groups, cells, as practiced by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Castro. David Coe held out Genghis Khan as a good leadership model for the young men of Ivanwald.
Jesus loves the powerful, and the orderly; so says the Family. Join us on the flip for a chat with Jeff Sharlet, who's kindly agreed to answer as many questions as he can between 3-5pm today ...
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