Robert Christgau on America's Secret Fundamentalists.
Book review of Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism
at the Heart of American Power. The subject is a group of politically
engaged Christians who predate and are more influential than the likes of
Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Christgau writes:
Sharlet establishes that since the end of World War II, The Family,
aka The Fellowship, has exerted its influence in an impressive and
frightening array of mostly dire events. Its first coup was the
wholesale exoneration of minor Nazis and major Nazi collaborators
after the war. The addition of under God to the Pledge of
Allegiance and In God We Trust to U.S. currency were its
initiatives. Its first major government operative was Sen. Frank
Carlson, R-Kan., who persuaded Dwight Eisenhower to run as a
Republican, purged progressive bureaucrats from his chair at the
obscure Civil Service Employees Committee and lobbied for such heads
of state as Haiti's "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Other dictators abetted by
The Family included Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam, Haile Selassie of
Ethiopia, Park Chung Hee of South Korea, Artur da Costa e Silva of
Brazil, Gen. Suharto of Indonesia, Mohamed Siad Barre of Somalia and
Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova of El Salvador, which got its first
infusion of special aid at the behest of Jimmy Carter, who has called
Family leader Doug Coe a "very important person" in his life. Hillary
Clinton has also been a Family "friend," and not just via its major
public manifestation, the relatively anodyne annual National Prayer
Breakfast. The Family was instrumental in the creation of Chuck
Colson's Prison Fellowship, and of the Community Bible Study project
through which George W. Bush found Jesus in 1985.
Who are the people in this Family?
Yet you won't meet the usual cast of hucksters and theocrats --
James Dobson, Tony Perkins, John Hagee, Rick Warren, Tim LaHaye,
whoever. A few politicians pass through, notably Sam Brownback, but
for the most part you've never heard of these rather colorless people,
every one of whom Sharlet engages on a human level. This failure to
flatter stereotype couldn't have helped Sharlet get reviewed and
typifies his insight into American Christianity, which subdivides
endlessly. The most important such grouping, argues
Gallup-pollster-turned-Rice-University-sociologist D. Michael Lindsay
in Faith in the Halls of Power (a well-researched -- and widely
reviewed -- 2007 overview of American evangelicals whose "sympathetic
perspective" Sharlet notes with some asperity), pits populists against
cosmopolitans. The populists have become familiar figures in secular
humanist folklore. The Family -- which is neither an official
organization nor a coherent conspiracy -- enlists only cosmopolitans.
