The Family of Sharlet

Jeff Sharlet is a smart guy and a talented long-form journalist who has made his bones looking into some of the odder corners of the American religious landscape. He's a man of the left who has dedicated himself to reminding his ideological fellows that (yes, Virginia) religion really exists in America and, not only that, it can make a big difference in how Americans do their respective things. And so it was, that having been tipped off about a curious religious group operating in Washington called the Family, he set out to investigate. He pretended to be interested in joining up, spent some time living at the group's headquarters, and came away with a notable story for Harper's. Here was a distinctive organization of national leaders and up-and-coming wannabes that was devoted to Jesus, maybe not so committed to the democratic processes that had brought some of them to power, and eager to keep their light under a bushel--except when it came to ushering selected newcomers into their ranks. The Family is their story--and then some.

The big payoff came because, besides hanging out with the members and taking their spiritual and ideological pulses, Sharlet learned that the group had dumped cartons and cartons of its records into the Billy Graham archive at Wheaton College. So off went our investigator to bury among what turned out to be documents on the Family's doings going back to its origins in the 1930s. And by far the most valuable part of his book has to do with what he learned there--all the more valuable because, it seems, the Family is now keeping the stuff away from prying eyes.

Sharlet uses the archives to tell the story of Abram Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant who got the group going as the result of a deep-seated Christian pietism and his distress at the social disruption created by the Depression. Vereide's Big Idea was to sell Jesus to whatever powerful people he could get to, in the expectation that getting them together would be a way to maintain the socio-economic status quo. He made his way to Washington, hooked up with a sufficient number of the powerful, and created prayer cells and a network that eventually reached around the world. The pitch didn't involve a particular church or even exactly Christianity: It was Jesus alone, via Bible-reading and praying together. Forty years ago, leadership of the group passed to Doug Coe, a rather more secretive character than Vereide, who managed to achieve a kind of cult status among a portion of the Washington elite. Altogether, over the course of 70 years, the powerful attracted to the Family have included a few Democrats along with the Republicans, and some unsavory foreign leaders. Being part of the Family network did not hurt their careers.

It is unfortunate, especially in light of the closing of the archives, that Sharlet did not provide a more systematic account of the Family's activities. That would have made the book more academic, but more useful. As it is, it is not easy to determine to what extent the Family's activities have actually made a difference. In any group that seeks to have an impact, insiders tend to exaggerate their importance: We had a terrific meeting with X, Y told us what a difference we're making in country G, the speech was greeted with vast enthusiasm, etc. While Sharlet allows as how the Family experienced failure from time to time--e.g. in Germany after the war--his claims about its importance in advancing the causes of, for example, Suharto in Indonesia and Siad Barre in Somalia, require a far more comprehensive account than he provides. The problem, simply, is that whatever the Family network may done to advance this or that individual, this or that issue, it was not (necessarily) alone in doing the advancing.

That's important in assessing the Family's influence in Washington generally. Arguably, the organization was at its most influential during the early years of the Cold War, when its establishmentarian style of bringing like-minded leaders together across party lines was most in tune with the national inclination. But Sharlet portrays Vereide as the key figure in giving America's conduct of the Cold War its religious spin. There's no mention of John Foster Dulles or Henry Luce, of the role of the Catholic Church, of the way "Judeo-Christian" language was fashioned to provide a religious umbrella for including Americans of (as it then seemed) all faiths in the common cause of fighting Communism. Sharlet does make brief reference to Reinhold Niebuhr (though he gets the dating of his intellectual evolution wrong)--but the point is, the Family was simply swimming in a much larger tide. There is a hermetic, conspiracy-hunting quality to the book that leads Sharlet to miss the forest for his tree.

Nor is it just the forest of Cold War religiosity. Sharlet's father was a Sovietologist who advised the CIA, and he himself might best be described as a Fundamentologist, one who teases out the inside story of American religious evil behind the scrim of public utterances and appearances. For The Family offers up what amounts to a secret history of religion in America, as seen through what Sharlet calls "fundamentalism" (or sometimes "American fundamentalism"). This is not fundamentalism as historians of American religion know it--that is, the fundamentalism of the particular theological propositions advanced in the pamphlet series, The Fundamentals. Sharlet is not unaware of that fundamentalism, which he once or twice refers to as "theological fundamentalism." No, his fundamentalism is a different animal--or rather, two different animals: elite and populist. The Family represents elite fundamentalism; a species of politically engaged conservative evangelicalism (including mainstream religious right organizations) represent the populist wing.

There is something Humpty-Dumptyish about this usage, as in Through the Looking Glass:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."

Sharlet means to be the master of an American fundamentalism that stretches all the way back to Jonathan Edwards in the 1730s, stretches through the Second Awakening, and remains alive and more powerful than ever today. The key elements of this spiritual ideology are, he claims, "heart religion" à la Edwards (not George Whitefield?) and permanent revival à la the 19^th-century revivalist Charles Grandison Finney--plus a commitment to theocracy, a concomitant distaste for democracy, and a thirst for empire. Theocracy in Sharlet's hands is also a bit Dumptyish, or at least confused. Protestant revivalism--which lies at the core of American evangelicalism--is much better seen as expressing a democratic impulse; that's the theme of Nathan Hatch's celebrated book on the Second Awakening, The Democratization of American Christianity. Certainly there are theocratic moments in American religious history--including Puritan Boston and Brigham Young's Mormon Zion. But Sharlet is not interested in these. One can point to an exaggerated sense of American exceptionalism in Landmarkism--a peculiar Baptist variant that sunk deep roots from Tennessee to Texas--but Sharlet has nothing to say about that. Nor does he mention the Student Volunteer Movement, which sought to win the world for Christ in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The confusion is between theocracy--rule by some species of clergy in God's name--and the desire to exercise the Great Commission and Christianize humankind. The latter has always been a prime aim, the prime aim, of evangelicals. But that does not make them theocrats, notwithstanding Sharlet's reproach for "[o]ur refusal to recognize the theocratic strand running throughout American history."

What's lurking behind Sharlet's view is the old-fashioned American Studies approach to American history represented by Vernon Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought. American history is thereby a left-liberal story of good versus evil, which is to say, the forces of Jeffersonian democracy versus the forces of business capitalism. Parrington saw the 20^th century in gloomy terms, the consequence of Jeffersonian farmers making common cause with greedy businessmen to create a particularly noxious form of capitalist hegemony. So Sharlet sees the 21^st century as witnessing the combined forces of elite and populist fundamentalism, more powerful than either ever was alone. The good guys of American religion barely make an appearance--a bit of William Jennings Bryan here, a bit of Martin Luther King, Jr. there. The fundamentalists, by contrast, have a lot to their credit:

Consider the accomplishments of the movement, its populist and its elite branches combined: foreign policy on a near-constant footing of Manichean urgency for the last hundred years; "free markets" imprinted on the American mind as some sort of natural law; a manic-depressive sexuality that puzzles both prudes and libertines throughout the rest of the world; and a schizophrenic sense of democracy as founded on individual rights and yet indebted to a higher authority that trumps personal liberties."

Whew!

What might a preferable account of the Family and its more public contemporary allies be? Let me hazard a sketch. The organization emerges not out of the broad stream of revivalist evangelicalism but simply from the peculiar businessman's Christianity of the 1920s. (In this, Sharlet is not wrong to call attention to Bruce Bartlett's The Man Nobody Knows.) After World War II, it glommed on to the Eisenhower revival, making a permanent place for itself on the Washington scene via its National Prayer Breakfast. It participated in what Jeremy Gunn calls (in his book Spiritual Weapons) the American National Religion--one that combined governmental theism with a commitment to capitalism and a military second to none. Like other establishmentarian groups, the Family made connections for its friends; unlike them, it had a secret creed accessible only to those in the inner circle. Its effectiveness was based to no small degree on the fact that it was able to attract--indeed, was bent on attracting--fellow travelers who enjoyed the spiritual fellowship and networking but knew nothing of the full Jesus program. Did those people advance that program? Not so much.

In due course, along came a revived American evangelicalism and the familiar religious right. Were they the creation of the Family? Nope. Were some religious rightists drawn into the Family orbit? Of course. But so were the likes of Hillary Clinton, who (Sharlet notes) was a frequent visitor to the now notorious C Street house as late as 2005. "How much power can a movement have if it's sufficiently vague in its principles to encompass both Sam Brownback and Hillary Clinton?" Sharlet reasonably asks. His answer is the consummate anti-establishmentarian's conviction that the entire enterprise of bringing The Key People together to serve the cause of social order is necessarily a bad, anti-democratic thing. No doubt, Hillary is a quintessentially establishmentarian creature, from her Renaissance Weekends to her C Street Reformation. And establishments can mess up badly. But there is something to be said for the establishmentarian project as well. It could be argued, for example, that nothing has more disserved the country than the Reagan-era enterprise of creating an ideologically pure counter-establishment of conservative and neo-conservative think tanks and foundations.

The Family has now been subjected to its own worst nightmare, publicly mocked as a den of creepy Christians scurrying to keep their sins under wraps. Doubtless, some of the insiders see themselves following in His footsteps, wending their way to Calvary as they are pelted by the Maddows and Trudeaus. The fellow travelers keep their silence and wait till the commotion blows over. No doubt, the Prayer Breakfast will take place as usual next February, with all the powerful, up to the president, in attendance. But thanks to Gov. Sanford and Sen. Ensign, and Jeff Sharlet too, the Family will never again bask in the splendor of secret celebrity. It's about time.