The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power | 
 enlarge | Author: Jeff Sharlet
Publisher: Harper
Category: Book
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Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 8175
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9 x 5.9 x 1.5
ISBN: 0060559799
Dewey Decimal Number: 277.3082
EAN: 9780060559793
ASIN: 0060559799
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
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Product Description
A journalist's penetrating look at the untold story of christian fundamentalism's most elite organization, a self-described invisible network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful They are the Family—fundamentalism's avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the new chosen—congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential cells, to pray and plan for a "leadership led by God," to be won not by force but through "quiet diplomacy." Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside its walls. The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power—not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the far right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a "family" that thrives to this day. In public, they host Prayer Breakfasts; in private, they preach a gospel of "biblical capitalism," military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao as leadership models, the Family's current leader, Doug Coe, declares, "We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't." Sharlet's discoveries dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the cold war, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not "What do fundamentalists want?" but "What have they already done?" Part history, part investigative journalism, The Family is a compelling account of how fundamentalism came to be interwoven with American power, a story that stretches from the religious revivals that have shaken this nation from its beginning to fundamentalism's new frontiers. No other book about the right has exposed the Family or revealed its far-reaching impact on democracy, and no future reckoning of American fundamentalism will be able to ignore it.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 Some confusion August 15, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Mr. Sharlet deals with a good number of facts about a group which has influence in politics. That is good. But there is intertwined some failed terminology and off-topic material that I find disturbing.
Off-topic: Why deal at all with Campus Crusade ("Christian Embassy")?
Inconsistent terminology: Is this group really "fundamentalist" or even representative of fundamentalism? Two stories emerge -- they are and tehy are not.
Does he understand?: The statement that they are merely followers of Jesus reflects some postmodern thinking. I don't know that Mr. Sharlet caught that very clearly. Apparently this was also unclear to some other reviewers.
The history section is thorough but will bog down many readers. It is scholarly to do this, but further peer review would have been helpful. In that light, the research and energy are good but the taint of such inconsistency damages an otherwise useful work. My suggestion to Mr. Sharlet would be to have a *critic* peer-review his work in order to gain additional clarity.
 Emperial ambitions August 13, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is an excellent book for understanding both the public face of evangelical Christianism in the US and, perhaps more importantly, at least one very powerful and influential largely secret group: The Family.
Central to the Family's ideology is what Sharlet calls "American fundamentalism, a movement that recasts theology in the language of empire" (p. 3). The US, it believes, has the divine right to rule the world, either directly or indirectly. Any nation or individual who stands in the way of the American empire is, from this standpoint, thwarting the will of God and hence, evil. Reagan's language of the "Evil Empire" and Bush's of the "Axis of Evil" take on new meaning in this light.
Embedded in the notion of American empire are the ideas of "biblical capitalism," anti-labor unionism, free trade, and economic inequality. The poor will always be with us. Just as any opposition to American political dominance goes against God's plan, so too is any effort to organize labor, limit free trade, or abolish poverty.
The fact that there are individuals who believe that an American empire, free-market capitalism, and economic inequality are God's will is mildly troubling. The fact that many of these individuals are high-ranking government officials, heads of large and powerful corporations, and military leaders is a matter of great concern. (Also, the fact that this organization has received very limited attention by the mass media is also a cause for concern.)
Sharlet makes it clear that he is no conspiracy theorist. Family, he says, is "not a conspiracy. Rather, it's a seventy-year-old movement of elite fundamentalism, bent not on salvation for all but on the cultivation of the powerful, "key men" chosen by God to direct the affairs of the nation [and the world]" (p. 7). He repeats this claim later in regard to the founder of the Family, when he says "Abram's upper-crust faith was not a conspiracy, but it was not meant for the masses either" (p. 92).
The legal definition of a conspiracy is "an agreement by two or more persons to commit a crime, fraud, or other wrongful act." So long as no two members of the Family, over the past seventy years, have discussed or plotted any illegal activities, then there is no conspiracy. But the very existence of a highly secret organization made up of influential individuals who believe in world dominance and who have an elitist outlook naturally raises the suspicion of conspiracy. One of the underlying principles of any democratic nation is that the public's business should be discussed in public.
The Family should be required reading for people who write about national and international events and for students of American government. It should also be required reading for students of religion and for liberal Christians--Christians who believe that they are called upon to serve the poor, the sick, and the homeless (not the rich and powerful) and for those who do not equate the Kingdom of Heaven with an American empire. For Christians who place their loyalty to God above their loyalty to free-market capitalism or the US, this book might serve as an object lesson of the dangers associated with conflating God and Caesar.
For a very different take on the relationship between Christian faith and national government, I would recommend The American Empire and the Commonwealth of God: A Political, Economic and Religious Statement, by David Griffin. This book argues, among other things, that religion is, or should be, the best bulwark against excessive nationalism, economism and imperialism.
 Pimping Jesus? August 6, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The author of The Family, Jeff Sharlet, has written a lengthy expose of The Fellowship, a clandestine 501(c)(3) "ministry organization" housed inside the beltway of Washington D.C. that is perhaps best known for its sponsorship and production of the National Prayer Breakfast as well as affiliated prayer breakfasts around the world. For clarification purposes of this review, Sharlet refers to The Fellowship as "the Family." Sharlet unwittingly infiltrated The Fellowship several years ago and wrote about it in Harpers. This book represents a lengthened treatise on the same.
The subtitle of the book, however, is misleading in terms of historical word usage. To call The Fellowship a fundamentalist organization is a far, far reach in terms of the past and present theological understanding of the word in relationship to this organization. Protestant fundamentalists are those who possess high convictions concerning the preeminence of the Bible; in Christendom they are the defenders of the faith.
In Sharlet's own words, associations and definitions of The Fellowship, he himself defines the group's members to be anything but the subtitle he chose to give them.The astute reader will become suspicious as to why Sharlet or the publisher defined them as such: was it for purpose of book sales? To have subtitled The Family as The Secret Cult Group at the Heart of American Power would lack relevance to secular concern over the Religious Right movement in America. The subtitle is a clumsy attempt to tie them in, as though they are a covert arm of the movement. His attempt to do so is recorded on page 3: "[The Fellowship] were members of a very peculiar group of believers, not representative of the majority of Christians but of an avant-garde of the social movement I call American Fundamentalism." But he quickly admits, as soon as page 43, "The more I learned about the Family, the more difficulty I had in classifying its theology..."
To illustrate the point, notice the following definitions and associations used by Sharlet in his book:
A non-biblical group, page 61:
"In 1935...When the family began as a businessman's antilabor alliance in Seattle ... [their] origins lie not in the New Testament, which is ultimately little more than a fabric from which the Family constructs contemporary realities..."
A non-Christian group, page 14 & 15:
"We're not even Christian," he said (Sharlet is quoting a man named Zeke at The Fellowship's training center, Ivanwald). "We just follow Jesus." Sharlet responds, "this Jesus did not demand orthodoxy." Sharlet goes on to state that when Zeke quit his job and moved to The Fellowship's training center, he was told, "he'd meet another Jesus..."
A Buddhist group, pages 51-60:
"Not for aesthetics alone, I realized, did Bengt and the Family reject the label Christian. Their faith and their practice seemed closer to a perverted sort of Buddhism, their Christ everywhere and nowhere at once, His commands phrased as questions, His will as palpable as one's own desires" (p. 51) "I've been...trying to fit the religious practice I found in that Arlington cul-de-sac (The Fellowship's Training Center) onto a spectrum of belief where it seems to have no place" (p. 56). "I went to the Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College, where the Family had deposited more than 600 boxes of documents, and I sifted through these seventy years of history in search of explicit theology, an explanation of what I had encountered...but most of all there was a mood...men would come from around the world to spend time with Doug Coe, or his predecessor, Abraham Vereide, to catch the spirit of the work...one did not learn anything; one found it in one's own heart" (p. 60).
A mystical religion for the elite, pages 89, 91, 98:
Speaking about his research on Vereide, Sharlet states, "In April of 1935 [Veriede] received not instructions for the day before him but a vision for the decades; God's hand moving His people in an entirely new direction. The revelation God gave him was simple: To the big man went strength, to the little man went need. Only the big man was capable of mending the world" (cf. p. 92; 159). "Abraham would become an exponent of a religion for the elite....for men who believed in their own goodness and proved it to themselves and each other by commending Christ and the next fellow's fine effort at following His example."
A neoevangelical group, page 43:
"Neoevangelicals distance themselves from populist fundamentalism, which they consider a folk--read: white trash--religion."
A liberal Protestant group, page 139:
"Abram soon joined Peale [Norman Vincent] as one of the twelve, a council ... bent on working behind-the-scenes to rebrand fundamentalism in Peale's feel-good terminology." (Cf. p. 135).
A dominion theology group, pages 44, 45, 111:
"Dominionists want to reconstruct early Christian society, which they believe was ruled by God alone." "This goal will be achieved through The Fellowship's "core group agreement." "These core, or cell, groups have hierarchical structure, at its heart would stand Doug Coe (the president of The Fellowship), said by the brothers to be as close to Jesus as the disciple John!" "Abraham agreed to use the `Bible as blueprint' with which to take back first the city, then the state, and perhaps the nation from the grip of godless organized labor." (Cf. p. 191; 218).
An anti-church group, page 213:
`"Doug [Coe] hates church' one of his followers, a former aide to [Senator Mark] Hatfield told me. (Coe considers church irrelevant to the real Jesus encountered in one's prayer cell." (Sharlet here supports this statement in a footnoted article from Christian Leadership magazine).
The Fellowship, if Sharlet's internal descriptions are correct (and I believe they are from my more than 30 years of interactions with the group), is anything but a Protestant fundamentalist group. Even if his labeling is off, however, his book serves a tremendous purpose in outing a potentially heretical organization that appears to pimp Jesus to politicians throughout the world. In this sense, Sharlet may be right on target.
The Family Has No Values August 1, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Well this is a true horror story. One that may well be true and one that we may not be able to change without a revolution.Power for Power: in the name of God, Big G thank you.Humble also. What we are really looking at--in my view is a country with little or no mental heath care for most AND a poor education system People look for "THE TRUTH."
We are a nation of sales people. Surprise! Someone has something to sell. What worries me is how many buy it. A God based fire sale for unregulated capitalism."The Plan" for the end of representative government.Just check with the top dog that talks with God....or maybe put him on the right meds. It will be a him. The ladies are gracious and submissive in this group--even some big names in the feminist movement.And they like it that way. Sorry no fems allowed.
Jeff Sharlit is a fine writer that does his research and writes in a clear style that holds you page after page. Jeff hope you read this. Please read Neil Postman's " The End Of Education". Postman's plan may be the cure. We need more good small g gods. A Big G God with followers that are tolerant would also help. Or maybe it's time to become intolerant of these treasonous powerfreaks that hide behind God.
American Democracy Endangered July 28, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
"The Family" wants to lead Americans out of Democracy and into a world run by elite, fundamentalist, Christian leaders.
Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, describes the seventy-year history of the Family, or Fellowship, from its beginnings to the present day. This secretive group, now headed by a very private Doug Coe, has invaded the halls of our government, "spiritually" guiding leaders across the globe -- from vicious dictators to corporate CEOs and American politicians -- with a spirituality that claims to be a personal guidance by Jesus, having no accountability to anyone but Jesus. But the Jesus they espouse is neither the Prince of Peace nor the Savior of the poor and down trodden. No, He's a God of Power who forgives and forgets whatever methods the leaders use to control their populations and maintain or gain their power.
The Family does not advocate violence, it merely ignores it. For example, the blood-thirsty Suharto of Indonesia is a member of one of the many Prayer Groups located throughout the world, and is on friendly terms with the Family Leadership. The annual National Prayer Breakfast and the weekly prayer gatherings in the Senate are quietly planned and directed by Doug Coe. What the National Prayer Breakfast does for those seeking power is provide them with contacts with other powerful leaders, including the President.
Though not directly connected to the popular Christian Right, the Family uses its power and feeds its paranoia with highly charged "issues," keeping them in line and supporting their leaders.
I came away from reading this book with an alarmed sense that an insidious cancer has invaded and is undermining our democracy. It's well worth reading.
-- Joan Burds
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