The Family (35 page)

Once, he said, he was a bad man, just any other politician, in it for himself. And then came cancer, like a message from heaven. Only at first it brought not certainty but doubt. Brownback found himself wondering, What does anything mean?

For a short spell in his youth, Brownback was a radio broadcaster. It’s easy to imagine his voice on the radio dial, deep in the darkness on a Kansas highway, not preaching so much as whispering to itself across the airwaves, creating a cocoon around the listener. The Senate dining room faded into silence. I saw Hillary Clinton, but I couldn’t hear her. I saw John McCain slapping backs, but he seemed very far away. The powerful and the ugly swam past us like fish in the ocean, and Brownback kept talking, completely lost in the strangely serene recollection of his former fear. The doctors scooped out a piece of his flesh, a minor procedure, but in his mind, he had lost hold of everything. He asked himself, “What have I done with my life?” The answer seemed to be nothing.

“I went in search of things,” he said. “I went in search of things that are eternal,” he murmured.

One night, he got up while his family was sleeping. “I remember going over my résumé.” Sitting in his silent house, in the middle of the night, a scar beneath his ribs where death had, for the time being, been carved out of his body, he looked down at that piece of paper and thought, “This must be who I am.” And then he thought, “What is this paper?” And then, “It’s not going to last.”

Brownback turned, held my gaze. “So,” he said, “I burned it.”

He paused. He was waiting to see if I understood. He had cleansed himself with fire. He had made himself pure.

“I’m a child of the living God,” he said.

I nodded.

“You are, too,” he said.

He pursed his lips as he searched the other tables. “Look.” He pointed to a man across the room, a Democratic senator from Minnesota. “He’s a liberal.” But you know what else he is? “A beautiful child of the living God.” He continued. Ted Kennedy? “A beautiful child of the living God.” Hillary? Yes. Even Hillary. Especially Hillary.

Once, Brownback said, he hated Hillary Clinton. Hated her so much it hurt him. But he reached in and scooped that hate out like a cancer. Now, he loved her. She, too, is a beautiful child of the living God.

H
ILLARY

Hillary may well be God’s beautiful child, but she’s not a member of Coe’s Family. Rather, I’d been told at Ivanwald, she’s a “friend,” less elect then a member, but more chosen than the rest of us. A fellow traveler but not a sister. Her goals are not their goals; but when on occasion they coincide, Hillary and the Family can work together. Such collaborations, as much as the endeavors of true believers such as Brownback, are a measure of the mainstreaming of American fundamentalism. The theology of Jesus plus nothing is totalitarian in scope, but diplomatic in practice. It doesn’t conquer; it “infects,” as Abram used to preach. Within the body politic, it doesn’t confront ideas, it coexists with them, its cells multiplying by absorbing enemies rather than destroying them. It’s not cancerous, it’s loving. In place of conflict, love. In place of debate, love. In place of tolerance, love. In place of democracy, loudmouthed, simmering mad and crazy hopeful democracy—love, all-encompassing.

In her memoir
Living History
, Hillary describes her first encounter with the Family. It was at a lunch organized on her behalf in February 1993 at the Cedars, “an estate on the Potomac that serves as the headquarters for the National Prayer Breakfast and the prayer groups it has spawned around the world. Doug Coe, the longtime National Prayer Breakfast organizer, is a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God.”
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Or with the kind of politically useful friends one might not make otherwise. For the eight years she lived in the White House, Clinton met regularly with a gathering of political ladies who lunch: wives of powerful men from both parties, women who put aside political differences to seek—for themselves, for their husbands’ careers—an even greater power. Among Clinton’s prayer partners were Susan Baker, the wife of Bush consigliere James and a board member of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family; Joanne Kemp, the wife of conservative icon Jack, responsible for introducing the political theology of fundamentalist guru Francis Schaeffer to Washington; Eileen Bakke, an activist for charter schools based on “character” and the wife of Dennis Bakke, then the CEO of AES, one of the world’s largest power companies; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat. The women sent her daily scripture verses to study, and Baker, the wife of one of the Republican Party’s most cutthroat strategists, provided Hillary with spiritual counsel during “political storms.”

Hillary’s Godtalk is more sincere than it sounds, grounded in the influence of a Methodist minister named Don Jones whom she met when he was a twenty-eight-year-old youth pastor in Park Ridge, Illinois. Jones continues to counsel Hillary to this day. He calls the theological worldview behind her politics a third way, a reaction against both old-fashioned separatist fundamentalism and the New Deal’s labor-based liberalism. He describes the theology he taught as in the tradition of “Burkean conservatism,” after the eighteenth-century reactionary philosopher’s belief that change should be slow and come without the sort of “social leveling” that offends class hierarchy. Elites rule because they rule; tradition is its own justification, a tautology of power neither left nor right but circular.

Under Jones’s mentorship, Clinton learned about theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Liberals may consider Niebuhr their own, but the Niebuhr whom Hillary Rodham studied with Jones and later at Wellesley College was a Cold Warrior, dismissive of the progressive politics of his earlier writing. “He’d thought that once we were unionized, the kingdom of God would be ushered in,” Jones says, explaining Niebuhr as he and Hillary came to see him. “But the effect of those two world wars and the violence that they produced shook [his] faith in liberal theology.” The late Niebuhr replaced his devotion to messianic unionism with a darker view of humanity and replaced his emphasis on domestic social justice with a global realpolitik, easily hijacked by liberal hawks in rhetorical need of a justification for aggressive American power.

Tillich also enjoys a following among conservative Christian intellectuals for arguments on behalf of revising the once-radical Social Gospel to favor individual redemption, the heart of conservative evangelicalism. Hillary once said she regretted that her denomination, the Methodists, had focused too much on Social Gospel concerns—that is, the rights of the poor—“to the exclusion of personal faith and growth.” Abram, once a Methodist himself, had made the very same observation a half century before. The spirit, conservative Christians believe, matters more than the flesh, and the salvation of the former should be a higher priority than that of the latter. In worldly terms, religious freedom trumps political freedom, moral values matter more than food on the table, and if might doesn’t make right, it sure makes right, or wrong, easier. Taken together, Niebuhr and Tillich as Hillary encountered them represent the most reactionary elements of her “worldview”: a militantly aggressive approach to foreign affairs and a domestic policy of narrow horizons. Under the spiritual tutelage of the Family, Hillary moved further rightward, drifting from traditional liberalism toward the kind of privatized social welfare the Family has favored ever since Abram reacted in horror to the New Deal.

The Reverend Rob Schenck’s favorite example? Clinton’s collaboration with Brownback on anti–sex trafficking legislation condemned by the very activists it should have helped. Brownback and Chuck Colson, one of the leading thinkers behind the law, were more interested in extracting pledges of purity than in helping the already fallen. That resulted in the de-funding of longtime federal partners that, for instance, provide health care for prostitutes, and increased funding for faith-based groups that simply preach Christ and abstinence to foreign sex slaves. And it’s not just those who are trapped in involuntary sex work who are ill served by the switch; epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, notoriously resistant to sermonizing, ripple out into the general population. It’s bad law for everyone. But Clinton was willing to lend her name, and her fundamentalist friends noticed. “I welcome that,” says Colson.

Hillary fights side-by-side with Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it. Practically speaking, such work appeased evangelical elites without drawing the notice of liberals who thought Hillary stood for separation, but such tunnels genuinely undermine the foundations.

For instance, a law she backed to ensure “religious freedom” in the workplace that so distorts the meaning of the words that it makes even Republicans such as Senator Arlen Specter uneasy about its encroachments on First Amendment freedoms. It’s a sort of Bartleby option for those “who prefer not to”: pharmacists who refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions, nurses who refuse to treat gay or lesbian patients, police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics. And then there was the passage, during Bill’s presidency, of the International Religious Freedom Act, a move supported by Hillary. Like the workplace bill, it seemed sensible. Who’s opposed to religious freedom? But in reality it shifted the monitoring of religion in other countries from the State Department to an independent, evangelical-dominated agency that drew much of its leadership from the Christian Legal Society, creating a platform for U.S. evangelicals to use religious freedom ratings as leverage for a sort of shadow foreign policy. Hillary’s stance toward Iran, more hawkish than that of many Republicans, is just one example of a position long held by elite fundamentalists mainstreamed through the work of an ostensibly liberal ally.

Liberals, says Clinton’s prayer partner Grace Nelson, are welcome in the Family as long as they submit to “the person of Jesus.” Jesus, not ideology, “is what gives us power.” But the Jesus preached by the Family is ideology personified. For all of the Family’s talk of Jesus as a person, he remains oddly abstract in the teachings they derive from him, a mix of “free market” economics, aggressive American internationalism, and “leadership” as a fetishized term for power, a good in itself regardless of its ends. By eschewing the politics of the moment—party loyalties and culture wars—Family cells cultivate an ethos of elite unity that allows long-term political transformation, whereby political rivals aren’t flipped but won over gradually through fellowship with former enemies, as in the case of former Representative Tony Hall.

Hall, one of the few Democrats appointed by Bush in his first term (he was made ambassador to the UN for hunger issues, a position he used to push the Monsanto corporation’s genetically modified crops onto African nations) was brought into the Family in the 1980s by Jerry Regier, an ultra-right Reagan administration official in the Department of Health and Human Services who went on to work with James Dobson. Upon his conversion, Hall abandoned his liberal social views and became a vocal opponent of abortion and, eventually, same-sex marriage. He also championed a bill establishing a National Day of Prayer with an event at the White House organized by Dobson’s wife, Shirley. But he didn’t switch parties, and the Family would never ask him to. Hall isn’t a Republican; he’s a Democrat who called on his fellow party members to follow President Bush’s example by injecting more religion into their rhetoric. Hillary did just that in 2007, boasting of the “prayer warriors” who carried her through Bill’s infidelities, a bit of spiritual warfare jargon instantly recognizable to evangelicals who worried about her feminism.
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The Family wants to “transcend” left and right with a faith that consumes politics, replacing fundamental differences with the unity to be found in submission to religious authority. Conservatives sit pretty in prayer and wait for liberals looking for “common ground” to come to them in search of compromise. Hillary, Rob Schenck noted, became a regular visitor to the Family’s C Street House in 2005. “She needs that nucleus of energy that the Coe camp produces.” That summer, she appeared as part of a threesome that shocked old school fundamentalists: Bill, Hillary, and Billy, live in New York for Graham’s last crusade. Before tens of thousands, the patriarch of Christian conservatism said Bill “ought to let his wife run the country.” Bonhomie and cheap blessing, maybe, but it was the kind of endorsement that Bill never won, despite Graham’s custom of speaking sweet nothings to power.

A T
HING AND
I
TS
S
HADOW

How much power can a movement have if it’s sufficiently vague in its principles to encompass both Sam Brownback and Hillary Clinton? If measured only according to the advocates of domestic “moral values” who choose fights in part for the clarity of their “sides”—abortion, yes or no? homosexuality, yes or no?—it would seem like the Family doesn’t have much influence at all. Neither abortion nor sex will be legislated away soon. But the fact that fundamentalism, a faith that by definition aims to address the totality of human experience, is measured according to a handful of issues decided by a yea or a nay is, itself, evidence of the broad success of Abram’s Idea.

Following the Scopes trial of 1925, American fundamentalism split in two. One branch busied itself with the creation of new institutions, Bible colleges, and “parachurch” ministries, the foundation for a populist faith that could stand on its own in the face of secular ridicule—often enough, a real problem—and fight for control of the public sphere. The second, elite branch concerned itself with what believers saw as threats to the nation itself. That was a move that conflated the nation with the faith. This new civil religion was what enabled Cold Warriors, liberal as well as conservative, to project the shadow of American freedom around the globe.