Since this is my last day as a guest blogger on “Casting Stones,” I’m going to plug the book which prompted Beliefnet to invite me in the first place: The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, just published this week by HarperCollins.
The Family is a narrative history of a self-described “avant-garde” of American fundamentalism, a network of theological conservatives in government, military, and business that first took shape in the 1930s as a reaction against FDR’s New Deal. In the 1940s, convinced that democracy — which they referred to dismissively as “the din of the vox populi” — was insufficient to the task of building God’s kingdom, they began organizing their members — elites only, congressmen, business executives, generals and admirals — into prayer groups they called “cells,” after Lenin — fiercely anti-Communist, they thought communists were nonetheless brilliant organizers, and they hoped to emulate their methods. Throughout the Cold War, they put the stamp of an American Christ — a divine that’d be unrecognizable to most ordinary Christians — on those whom they saw as God’s anointed, facilitating American aid, much of it military, and a form of free trade some might suspect of cronyism. Their “New Chosen” included dictators such as General Suharto of Indonesia, General Park of South Korea, General Costa e Silva of Brazil, Emperor Selassie of Ethiopia, Siad Barre of Somalia, and Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, who — like Selassie and Siad — thought he actually was God.
The Family is, for the most part, a history, based in large part on an incredible archive of documents housed at the Billy Graham Center Archives in Wheaton, Illinois. But The Family, or “The Fellowship,” as they’re sometimes known (after one of The Fellowship Foundation, one of several non-profits in their sphere) continues to exert influence today. “The Fellowship’s reach into governments around the world, observes David Kuo — a Casting Stones regular and former Bush official who has written favorably about The Family — “is almost impossible to overstate or even grasp.”
That statement becomes especially alarming in light of The Family’s political theology. There are three essential points:

1) God cares more about the “up and out” — the elite — than the down and out. Help the “up and out,” and they’ll take care of the rest of us. I call this trickle-down religion.
2) God loves a strongman. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, preaches The Family’s leader, Doug Coe, understood Christ’s teaching better than almost any other leaders of the 20th century. He’s quick to add that they turned those teachings — in his view, total commitment, authority, and obedience — toward evil. He admires their methods, not their ends. For some of us, the methods were pretty lousy, too. His defenders say Coe uses Hitler only as a metaphor. What, he couldn’t think of a better metaphor for Jesus than Hitler?
3) An effective organization doesn’t seek publicity, like James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, but sticks to the shadows. Here’s Coe preaching on the subject in a sermon posted online by The Navigators. “The Body of Christ functions invisibly like the mafia… They keep their organization invisible. Everything visible is transitory. Everything invisible is permanent and lasts forever. The more you can make your organization invisible, the more influence it will have.”

And The Family does have influence. Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay, deeply sympathetic to mainstream evangelicalism, surveyed more than 300 top evangelical politicians in Washington. One in three said The Family (The Fellowship, in his usage) was one of the most influential Christian groups in the capitol. That was more votes than any other group received. Time magazine, listing Family leader Doug Coe among its 25 most powerful evangelicals, dubbed him “The Stealth Persuader.”
Other reporters sometimes ask me if The Family is a conspiracy. No, it’s not. They’re entitled to pursue their vision of a “God-led government” according to their literalist interpretation of Romans 13:1, “The powers that be are ordained of God.” They’re entitled to use Hitler as a metaphor for Christ. They’re entitled to advocate for dictators around the world. They’re even entitled to claim that they do all this in Christ’s name. But the rest of us are entitled to ask questions, too, and that’s what I hope my book will help us start doing. The Family has been subjected to very little scrutiny — an NBC Nightly News report, an LA Times investigation, my reporting in Harper’s and Rolling Stone, and now this book. I hope it’s just the beginning. Meanwhile, you can check out the beginning of the book here.