The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power Book

This book was given to me by my father-in-law, a retired Church of England minister who had numerous clashes in his career with narrow-minded Christians in and out of the Church hierarchy. He has understandable concerns about what he reads about the "Religious Right" in the US, and given the book's uniformly excellent reviews in Australia, he gave me Sharlet's THE FAMILY.

I was riveted from the first chapter: Sharlet was welcomed into the core of an organisation devoted to extending the influence of evangelical Christianity throughout the United States and the world, and he lived at their headquarters, which has the sinister name "Ivanwald". Sharlet's reporting talent is apparent from the opening sentences with their vivid depiction of typical American suburban and ex-urban communities and their earnest, basketball-playing, but possibly unconsciously intolerant residents. His thesis is that Doug Coe, the leader of a shadowy and pervasive organisation called "The Family" gives pep talks comparing his methods to those of Stalin and Hitler.

It is all deeply disturbing, esp. since Coe's supporters include many prominent Republican and some Democratic politicians. So I settled in for a good read on a vital current issue, ready to start writing cheques to the Anti-Defamation League and any other organisations I could identify, once I had finished the book, that might be on the front lines of stopping this scourge in American political life.

But starting with Page 56, Sharlet called his own credibility seriously into question. He begins a long discussion of Jonathan Edwards, the great eighteenth century New England minister to whom Sharlet traces the phenomenon of The Family. And Sharlet's discussion of Jonathan Edwards is unrecognisable. Puzzled, I went to the footnotes, where Sharlet writes that despite the "great many biographies of Edwards, my method of research for this account of his life was to rely primarily on original sources, which I tried to filter through my own half-secular mind and as I imagine a Family man might".

On the evidence of his interpretation of Edwards, Sharlet is one sick puppy. I actually took down from the shelf my copy of the most recent biography of Edwards, by the Notre Dame (hardly a centre of the Religious Right) scholar George M. Marsden, as well as my copy of Patricia J. Tracy's JONATHAN EDWARDS, PASTOR: RELIGION AND SOCIETY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NORTHAMPTON. Sharlet's grotesque description of Edwards is really shocking, and I wanted to confirm that my understanding of Edwards was founded on something other than my failing memory of these books.

It was with relief that I can report that Sharlet is basically free-associating in his discussion of Edwards, and that the lurid and disturbing claims he makes about Edwards in THE FAMILY come from the part of his psyche responsible for what Sharlet "imagines", rather than what he reads.

I returned to reading THE FAMILY with new scepticism, and then I came across Sharlet's discussion of Richard Halverson, who apparently was once in line to lead The Family before its current leader Doug Coe was appointed.


Given the late Halverson's private and public record, Sharlet has to struggle to criticize him, but his patronizing innuendoes about Halverson offer a good example of his entire method in THE FAMILY: "Halverson would help to build one of the world's largest relief agencies, World Vision, a Christian outfit that supplies food for the starving and medicine for the wounded and gospel tracts only to those who ask. Although it has been plagued by accusations of serving as a CIA front, World Vision's verifiable record is admirable . . . Halverson, in other words, was an imperialist of the old school, bringing light to the natives and clearing the way for other men to extract a dollar . . . "

The text offers plenty of clues to the alert reader about the presence of some agenda in Sharlet's book. But in the case of Halverson, as in the case of Edwards, I have my own independent information.

When I was a child, my family attended Fourth Presbyterian Church in the DC area, where Halverson was the minister, and he was a family friend. I saw him last in 1991 when he was Senate chaplain. Halverson recounted at that meeting how he and his colleague, the rabbi working with him in a pastoral capacity to the US Senate, had become very close, and that when the rabbi expressed astonishment some years before that their religious outlooks were so similar, Halverson responded "I've never heard you say anything I didn't completely agree with!" This is the man whom Sharlet paints as a sinister senior leader of a totalitarian, anti-Semitic organization plotting to take over America. I know that allegation to be false.

In fact, THE FAMILY itself is an irresponsibly written book, one of those books whose good qualities--its reporting of ordinary day to day facts that create the appearance of a vivid atmosphere, Sharlet's fluent prose, his catchy chapter titles, and so on--all serve a negative purpose, creating unfounded fear and exacerbating the already-excessive divisions in American social and political life today.

The number of works written out of either ignorance (a phenomenon not uncommon in evangelical publications) or out of bad faith and a willingness to fit the facts to one's personal agenda (what Sharlet has accomplished in THE FAMILY) is one of the chief obstacles in today's world to achieving world peace and understanding. In the aftermath of 9/11 I had long talks with an Australian woman who is a Shiite Lebanese by origin. Married at 12 and giving birth to her first child at 13, she never had the chance to pursue an education. She is highly intelligent, however. Our talks convinced me of how dangerous books such as THE FAMILY can be in this confused and hate-filled world of ours. She relied for much of her information on the Arabic-language press and radio, and a portion of that media was devoted to insane, hate-filled conspiracy theories and outright lies about the Israelis, Americans, and Jews in general. She had no way of filtering that information except through her discussions with me, and that was when I realized that her intelligence, fueled with disinformation, was very dangerous.

The 20th Century was soaked in blood, we know understand, because highly intelligent intellectuals sincerely believed that their knowledge gave them the ability, and the right, to govern others, even when their decisions contradicted age-old ethics and morality. At their core, that is where Communism and National Socialism are essentially the same. What we need to understand in the 21st century is how dangerous intelligent people with false information can be. And we need to take a stand against those who recklessly spread falsehoods masquerading as the truth. We need to speak and write the truth as we know it, so that others at least have the chance to consider both sides of an issue.

Sharlet claims to have uncovered an old form of danger to world peace and understanding: the all powerful conspiracy. In fact, he himself represents a new and powerful challenge to global understanding: those who use their positions to pollute the ocean of truth. How can my Australian father-in-law have any idea if what Sharlet writes about events in the Washington DC area are true or not? Sharlet has broken faith with readers like my father-in-law, and millions like him around the world. Alice Kaplan does an excellent job of discussing the issues surrounding reckless intellectuals who abuse their rhetorical abilities and media access in her book THE COLLABORATOR: THE TRIAL AND EXCECUTION OF ROBERT BRASILLACH.

At the end of the day, THE FAMILY isn't even good value for those who remain truly worried that people like the late Richard Halverson will one day rule America: Sharlet mainly repeats the same allegations made by David Cantor in the 1994 Anti-Defamation League study "The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance & Pluralism in America".

Cantor made the phrase "The Religious Right" famous with this 193 page study. Midge Decter reviewed the study at the time in the magazine COMMENTARY, which has been one of the great ornaments of American intellectual life for two generations, and not coincidently one of the great outlets for American Jewish writing on a variety of cultural, literary, social, political and religious issues. Decter wrote that the Cantor's study "is intended to warn the country of the growth, in the words of Cantor's introduction, of an 'exclusionist religious movement' seeking to 'unite its version of Christianity with state power.'

Decter summarises the playbook Cantor attributes to the Religious Right, which Sharlet claims to have uncovered 14 years later:

"Somewhere around 1990, the study notes, the decision was taken by the movement's leaders to engage in serious organizing and political activity at the grass roots, and by 1994 this decision has menacingly borne fruit:

(CONT'D BELOW IN THE COMMENT SECTION)