Are you worried about Muslim fundamentalism? Read about this. This has been around for a long time and until now very few Americans knew about this secretive group that admires the methods used by Hitler, Lenin, and the Mafia:
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“Un-American theocrats can only fool patriotic American democrats when there aren’t critics like Jeff Sharlet around -- careful scholars and soulful writers who understand both the majesty of faith and the evil of its abuses. A remarkable accomplishment in the annals of writing about religion.”--Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
"Just when we thought the Christian right was crumbling, Jeff Sharlet delivers a rude shock: One of its most powerful and cult-like core groups, the Family, has been thriving. Sharlet's book is one of the most compelling and brilliantly researched exposes you'll ever read -- just don't read it alone at night!" --Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch, and Dancing in the Streets
"Forget what you think you know about the Christian Right; Jeff Sharlet has uncovered a frightening strain of hidden fundamentalism that forces us to revise our understanding of religion and politics in modern America. A brilliant marriage of investigative journalism and history, an unsettling story of how this small but powerful group shaped the faith of the nation in the 20th century and drives the politics of empire in the 21st. Anyone interested in circles of power will love this book."--Debby Applegate, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for biography for The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
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.
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.
1. Your exposé on The Fellowship, aka “The Family,” appeared five years ago. Has your understanding of the group changed?
When I was working on that story, I remember debating how much Hitler we should put in the piece. That is, we wondered how fair it was to dwell on The Family’s invocations of Hitler as a model of “total commitment.” As it turns out, it was quite fair. After I left Ivanwald, a team of researchers and I spent years combing through hundreds of thousands of documents in archives around the country. We discovered that as far back as the 1940s, when The Family began organizing congressmen, the group’s founder, Abraham Vereide, was praising Hitler’s “youth work” as a model to be adopted by Americans. He denounced Hitler himself, but he admired fascism’s cultivation of elites, crucial to what he saw as a God-ordained coming “age of minority control.”
The Family has put that concept, which they call “Jesus plus nothing,” into action for decades, from their early successes fighting the New Deal in the 1930s and 40s to their recruitment of war criminals such as Herman J. Abs, known as “Hitler’s banker,” into postwar European leadership, to their facilitation of U.S. support for dictators ranging from Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti to Suharto of Indonesia to Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, now their “key man” for Africa. The fetish for strongman leadership has continued with Vereide’s successor, Doug Coe, who leads the group today. Throughout his letters in the Billy Graham Center Archive at Wheaton College, I found references to the leadership model of Hitler. In one sermon, variations of which he’s given many times, Coe says: “Jesus said ‘You got to put Him before mother-father-brother-sister.’ Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that’s what they taught the kids. Mao even had the kids killing their own mother and father. But it wasn’t murder. It was for building the new nation. The new kingdom.”
2. Given the unbelievable amount of influence brokered by the Fellowship Foundation, and by Doug Coe, why have so few national media outlets have picked up on the story?
The problem is that we just don’t have a press that really wants to challenge power on issues they consider “personal.” Speaking at the 1985 Prayer Breakfast, Ronald Reagan said, “I wish I could say more about it, but it’s working precisely because it’s private.” That should have been an invitation for investigative reporting. Instead, the media, then and now, tends to acquiesce to elite secretiveness, not out of any conspiracy, but due to a culture of reverence for established power, liberal or conservative. Most journalists believe in meritocracy—not merely that it’s a good idea, but that it actually exists. They know some politicians game the system, but they’re committed to the idea that the system basically works. And it does, but not in favor of democracy.
3. It seems like the National Prayer Breakfast, which The Family administers, is a big part of why the press doesn’t pick up on the story. It seems inconceivable that a group that attracts so many powerful public figures from around the world to its annual event could be up to anything untoward.
It’s the Family’s only public event, but the few hours that the press is allowed to attend are the dullest thing imaginable, the blandest kind of ecumenical civil religion, with the main address presented by some figure distinct from the Christian Right—Joe Lieberman, or the Saudi Prince Bandar, or even Bono. How threatening is that? But internal documents tell a different story. “Anything could happen,” reads one, “the Koran could even be read, but JESUS is there. He is infiltrating the world.”
13 comments:
I can't WAIT to read this book. I heard an expose on CNN yesterday about them and wanted to know more so thanks for tipping me off to this book. I've always thought that much of Neo-Conservatism mirrors fascism.
Classical fascism as defined by Mussolini. And anyone who admires Hitler in any capacity scares the pants right off me. It makes me wonder what other religious cults, political cults and secret societies are out there right now that we don't know of.
This is why I started voting again in 2004 after going 28 years without voting...
Its also why I blog; I want to do my part to ensure what is left of our democracy is not lost to those who claim to be neo conservatives...
Which if you really think about it means nothing more than they could care less about anything other than America's military might and domination...
Never heard a neo conservative ever discuss social or economic policy have you?
Go around to the blogs and notice the folks who proudly parade their military service on their blog and notice that they are all neo conservatives...
I've seen many of the military types, Tao, and they have been conservatives, but not neo-conservatives.
And from Shaw's post, the small number of people who are neo-conservatives are not related to the "Family" thing.
And it makes me think of the Moonies, best known now for their newsletter, which is called The Washington Times. I wonder if this group is tied in.
Then, Handsome, you should be frightened of the New Dealers of the 1930 and those today who admire them. Pretty much all of the New Deal brain trust admired both Mussolini and Hitler, as well as Stalin.
Gordon,
Could you give us a link to something that backs up your claim that New Dealers "admired" Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin? We do know that in the beginning, Mussolini's and Hitler's own people did admire and support them, and we know that there were groups of Americans of German descent here in America that admired Hitler in the beginning of his dictatorship:
"Between 1931 and 1940, 114,000 Germans moved to the United States, many of whom—including Nobel prize winner Albert Einstein—were Jewish Germans or anti-Nazis fleeing government oppression.[38] About 25,000 people became paying members of the pro-Nazi German American Bund during the years before the war."
As for your claim that New Dealers "admired" Mussolin, Hitler, and Lenin, I found this in Google:
"With our knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II, we find it almost impossible to consider such claims [that FDR admired those three despots] dispassionately. But in the 1930s, when everyone agreed that capitalism had failed, it wasn’t hard to find common themes and mutual admiration in Washington, Berlin, and Rome, not to mention Moscow. (Three New Deals does not focus as much on the latter.) Nor is that a mere historical curiosity, of no great importance in the era following democracy’s triumph over fascism, National Socialism, and communism. Schivelbusch concludes his essay with the liberal journalist John T. Flynn’s warning, in 1944, that state power feeds on crises and enemies. [See the GWB presidency. SK} Since then we have been warned about many crises and many enemies, and we have come to accept a more powerful and more intrusive state than existed before the ’30s.
Schivelbusch finds parallels in the ideas, style, and programs of the disparate regimes —even their architecture. “Neoclassical monumentalism,” he writes, is “the architectural style in which the state visually manifests power and authority.” In Berlin, Moscow, and Rome, “the enemy that was to be eradicated was the laissez-faire architectural legacy of nineteenth-century liberalism, an unplanned jumble of styles and structures.” Washington erected plenty of neoclassical monuments in the ’30s, though with less destruction than in the European capitals. Think of the “Man Controlling Trade” sculptures in front of the Federal Trade Commission, with a muscular man restraining an enormous horse. They would have been right at home in Il Duce’s Italy.
“To compare,” Schivelbusch stresses, “is not the same as to equate. America during Roosevelt’s New Deal did not become a one-party state; it had no secret police; the Constitution remained in force, and there were no concentration camps; the New Deal preserved the institutions of the liberal-democratic system that National Socialism abolished.” But throughout the ’30s, intellectuals and journalists noted “areas of convergence among the New Deal, Fascism, and National Socialism.” All three were seen as transcending “classic Anglo-French liberalism”—individualism, free markets, decentralized power.
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Great irony. They poked fun at Hillary when she brought up the "vast right wing conspiracy." But now more than ever, it appears she, and I (Right wing cabal) are correct in our assesment.
I think the Illuminati have some competition now.
Now that I have wasted 20 minutes of my valuable time ...all I can say about these absurd comments is...
Thank’s for the interesting information..
Wordsmith-
You need to work a little faster. Twenty minutes seems kind of pokey. Remember, time is money!
But speaking of fans of the Reich. Let's not forget one Prescott Bush.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
Wordsmith,
How much do you get paid to be part of that little group of 75 malcontents?
If they pay well enough I am up for sale!
I just started reading "The Family" and I can't put it down. I've been looking for blogs that are talking about it because it is so informative. It's un-F'in- believable! I bet it didn't get much media because the media bosses are part of it. Maybe even the publisher since the book is rather cheap (<$10) on Amazon, so the author can't get rich.
Buy it, then talk about it. It is unbelievable. Thanks Jeff for writing it and opening our eyes.
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