I’m be talking with Natasha Chart and the folks at OpenLeft for a book salon about The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, my new history of the “avant-garde” of American fundamentalism. It’s a story that spans from the early days of the Republic to the political ferment of the 1930s to the Cold War to today. Lots to argue about.
Here’s how Chart describes her view of the book:

Jesus is a mood.
So it was suggested by historian Perry Miller in The New England Mind, a 1939 book on Puritanism, as quoted in Jeff Sharlet’s spotlight on the faith of America’s powerful. And The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, explores both the mood of this elite fundamentalism and its implications.
He first learned about the Family when he was invited to stay at Ivanwald, a home for young men that the sect grooms for power. Consider Bengt Carlson, one of Ivanwald’s house leaders, whose own mood in the following passage seemed an easy metaphor for the consequences these power brokers have brought to the world:
One sweltering afternoon, he gave up writing [his graduate school application essay] and decided to chop down two magnolia trees in the front yord. All of Ivanwald’s neighbors agreed that they were a shady, symmetrical adornment of what, without them, would look like a parking lot, but Bengt couldn’t be stopped: the trees had to go. They had to die, and they had to be killed by his hand. With a long-blade Stihl chewing up magnolia, green leather muffs protecting his ears, his eyes hidden by goggles, Bengt relaxed for the first time in days. It took just a few hours to reduce the trees to a stack of five-foot lengths of branch. He put a booted foot on the pile and pressed, listening to the wood crack, and he smiled. “I just love getting a job done,” he said.
Bengt’s elders and predecessors in the Family, like the sex-obsessed Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), climate-fantasist Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), fascist sympathizer Henry Ford, Gen. Suharto of Indonesia, as well as past and present business leaders from all over, have this, as I’ve gathered from the book, as their mood: all is well, rejoice, for the kingdom of God is manifest on Earth already, his chosen are those invested with power or those willing to wield it to maintain order.
Having a curious faith that gladly embraces unrepentant bribe-takers, bribe-makers, thieves of high finance and mass murderers, the only sin that concerns the Family is the poisonous sin of envy that the discontented masses sometimes harbor against their betters. Their sympathies, they reserve for the “poor in spirit”, the victims of uncharitable, retributive, disorderly manifestations of envy. They view dissent against their rule, dissent against the orderly transactions of commerce-as-we-know-it, as literally the same as rebellion against God and His kingdom.
The Family’s leadership, Doug Coe and his son David, regularly invoke the model of developing power among the intimate relationships of small groups, cells, as practiced by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Castro. David Coe held out Genghis Khan as a good leadership model for the young men of Ivanwald.
Jesus loves the powerful, and the orderly; so says the Family. Join us on the flip for a chat with Jeff Sharlet, who’s kindly agreed to answer as many questions as he can between 3-5pm today …