Journalist Explores Washington's Fundamentalist Fraternity
by Jana Riess, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 5/21/2008
It sounds like the stuff of a potboiler beach read: an affluent religious network based in Washington, D.C., engineers political appointments and grooms its members to scale the heights of government and industry. But according to journalist Jeff Sharlet (co-author of Killing the Buddha), it's not the stuff of fiction. In The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (reviewed in this issue and on Publishersweekly.com), published yesterday by HarperCollins, Sharlet exposes the most prominent fundamentalist organization you've never heard of.
Called the Family (not to be confused with the "flirty fishing" cult known as The Family), this organization controls tens of millions of dollars and promotes the careers of men who espouse its economic and political ideology. President George W. Bush and Watergate alumnus Charles Colson both became Christians through Family small groups. John Ashcroft and Sam Brownback have been supporters. Although it's known for establishing and sponsoring some highly visible initiatives like the National Prayer Breakfast, for the most part the Family labors behind the scenes, leaving media theatrics to others.
Despite its air of mystery, Sharlet insists the group is "not a conspiracy or a cult." He places the Family, which was founded in the 1930s, within the context of a much larger history of Christian fundamentalism in America. "This isn't the old school of fundamentalist rhetoric of separatism," he explains, saying that the theology of the group is post-millennialist (emphasizing that Christ will return only after Christians have built the kingdom of God on Earth) rather than the more fashionable pre-millennialist (which teaches that Christ will return without warning, a la Left Behind).
Sharlet, who is an expert at NYU's Center for Religion and Media, says that the Family is able to fly under the radar partly because some members of the press have preconceived—and often wrong—notions of what a "fundamentalist" looks like. "The press doesn't get that there's this whole other group that is seeking to exert political control precisely because they don't think the world is about to end," he said. Sharlet also said the organization is "an open secret" that doesn't try very hard to conceal itself. When he lived among some of its young men at a Virginia quasi-commune called Ivanwald , he did so under his own name, and was open about the fact that he was a writer. "If this is a conspiracy, it's the saddest attempt at conspiracy in history," he said. "If you push even a little, you can get information."
