The Family (36 page)

But a thing and its shadow are not the same. Even as American power fueled nightmares in Vietnam, in Indonesia, in Haiti, in dozens of other nations whose histories disappeared into the blob of the Cold War, real freedom has endured and even prospered within the borders of the United States. It’s the relatively bright prospects of domestic democracy—even at its most endangered moments—that have blinded us to the shadow it casts. “Freedom,” more than one general has declared from the pulpit of the National Prayer Breakfast, comes at a cost. Liberals scoff at such an apparent oxymoron, but the lesson of elite fundamentalism is that it’s true; for that matter, the last seventy years of history prove even the Christian doctrine of blood atonement. Only, the blood is not Christ’s, and despite the very notable exception of tens of thousands of American soldiers killed overseas, it’s not ours, either. It’s the rest of the world that pays for American fundamentalism’s sins, and for the failure of American liberalism to even recognize the fundamentalist faith with which it has all too often—in Vietnam, in Indonesia, in Haiti—made common cause.

We might quibble that point. We might ask, Which came first, American fundamentalism or the Cold War? Is American fundamentalism the essence of the economic policies by which we unraveled the New Deal, or is it simply a coincidental phenomenon of the Reagan Revolution and then “globalization”? Don’t the good intentions with which America gives billions in foreign aid for food for the starving and medicine for the sick and, yes, weapons for governments that actually use them in defense mitigate—outweigh, even—the trillions spent on weapons for governments that put them to other ends, and the uncountable sums reaped by corporations dependent on the American global order? Then again, how different are such questions from that of Greg Unumb, the Family oilman who thought Doug Coe’s culpability in the crimes of the killers for whom he served as a matchmaker depended entirely on whether they killed
before
or
during
their fellowship with Coe? Such a strange concern. As if one might be excused for giving a gun to a mass murderer because his first victims were already buried; as if Christ’s injunction to forgive demanded also that we forget. That is, in fact, exactly what the Family believes, the complexities of “reconciliation” reduced to a gross equivalence of sins. The center slouches rightward, and the faithful forget that anyone ever dreamed otherwise.

Dick Halverson preached as much once during his tenure as Senate chaplain. He framed it as a story relayed to him by Coe and Senator Harold Hughes after a visit to the Philippines, during which he, in turn, heard the story from the Philippines’ Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin.
⁴
Archbishop Sin was a moderate with a mixed record in relation to the Marcos regime; at its end, he helped lead the “People Power” revolution, but for years before that he preached obedience to dictatorship. “He told Harold and Doug this true story,” Halverson sermonized. One of Sin’s nuns said to him that Jesus was coming to her bed at night. Sin decided to test the apparition. “Ask Him”—Halverson, the old actor, pretended to be the Filipino clergyman—“What sins did the archbishop commit before he became an archbishop?” The nun did so and reported back to Sin. Christ’s answer? “I can’t remember.”

Did this suggest to Sin or Halverson that the nun had simply been dreaming? Just the opposite. Their Christ did not just forgive the sins of Archbishop Sin; he couldn’t remember them. That, Halverson thought, was as it should be, Christ’s mercy not a balance to justice but a gift for the powerful. The church loves the down and out, but who loves the up and out? Jesus of the Family, the Christ of Coe’s “social order.”

“Love,” preached Halverson, “forgets. That’s what God does with your sin and mine when it’s under the Blood. He forgets all about it.”

H
ERE’S ONE LAST
Family story love forgot, from a country so blighted by misfortune and misrule that it’s not really a country anymore. Somalia, lost in the shadow of American fundamentalism’s freedom. Somalia—one of the last cases I found in the Family’s archives before they began closing them—is, in the correspondence I retrieved, nothing more than a web of “facts” that I’m hard-pressed to make sense of. What they add up to is too bleak, too broken. The dead who haunt the name of Siad Barre, the dictator Coe called “brother,” seem uncountable. All I can be sure about is the answer to the question Greg Unumb asked me when I told him about Coe’s support for another dictator guilty of murder:
before
or
during
? Before, during, after. I will relate the facts as briefly as I can.
⁵

Somalia, shaped like an upside-down musical note, wraps around the Horn of Africa, across from the Arabian Peninsula. Granted independence in 1960, it should have been a success story; its people were linguistically unified and, while poor, were heirs to a tradition of pastoral democracy that had survived colonialism roughly intact. Then General Siad Barre seized power in 1969, and the Soviet Union poured money into Siad’s regime to make it a counterweight to Ethiopia, which under Emperor Selassie was the major beneficiary of American military aid in Africa. When a Marxist coup overthrew the Ethiopian emperor, Siad saw a chance to distract his own discontented people by seizing part of Ethiopia in its moment of weakness, using his Soviet-armed military. But the Soviets backed now-communist Ethiopia, deeming its new regime more useful than duplicitous Siad, who announced that he was in the market for a new patron. After the Iranian Revolution overthrew the Shah, the U.S. puppet just across the water from Somalia, the United States put its money on Siad and his ports, which would become essential if Ayatollah Khomeini cut off the oil supply. By late 1980, the United States and the USSR had switched proxies: once-red Somalia had become an American outpost, while Ethiopia had turned into a Soviet satellite.

It would have been absurd if it hadn’t been so bloody. Siad, freed from even his veneer of socialism, devolved from an autocrat into the worst thing that had ever happened to Somalia. His heroes, he declared, were Kim Jong Il and the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. He decided to allow American-style democracy, then killed his opposition as well as those he suspected of opposing him, and those who might grow up to be opponents. His secret police developed techniques to spy even on nomads. He sent his troops to machine-gun their herds. He poisoned their wells. For his urban enemies, he developed torture chambers he considered world-class, and his men concluded that rape proved especially productive of useful information.

To his neighbors, he preached the virtues of the United States, but his creed was “Koranic Marxism,” illustrated by a triptych of portraits hung throughout the nation depicting Marx, Lenin, and Siad as the new Muhammad. His official portrait shows him as a young general in a khaki uniform and a mustache he seems to have copied from Hitler. He bombed more civilians than rebels, reduced an entire city to rubble, and directed his air force to strafe refugees. He turned his country into a garden of land mines that continue to blossom to this day.

Before
Coe found Siad through a West German Bundestag member, Siad waged war on Ethiopia.
After
they met, he waged war on his own nation. For the past seventeen years, there has been no nation, only war. If Coe ever said a word about the killings, it was not recorded in the documents I found. “I don’t wish to embarrass people,” Coe said of his relationships with dictators in 2007. “I don’t take positions. The only thing I do is bring people together.”

In 1981, Family members made contact with Siad on behalf of his then-enemy, Kenyan dictator Daniel arap Moi—a brutal American ally—whom Siad agreed to meet. The Family took this news to General David Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and a Family member), who in thanks invited Siad to the Pentagon, a visit that resulted in a special breakfast in America for the dictator, with General Jones, members of congress, and Department of Defense officials. In 1983, Coe arranged for the dictator his own international prayer cell, which included the Bundestag member, Rudolf Decker; a defense contractor, William K. Brehm; and the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A year later Coe strengthened Siad’s hand by proposing Mogadishu as the site for a “fellowship meeting” with two other anti-Soviet dictators, arap Moi and Gaafar Nimeiry of Sudan.

From America, Coe sent Siad Senator Chuck Grassley, ultraright Iowa Republican (still serving as of 2008). But Coe was distracted; his twenty-seven-year-old son, Jonathan, was fighting lymphoma. He rallied, though—Doug, that is—when he put Christ’s social order before his father, his mother, his brother, his sister, and even his own grief to use what must have been one of the saddest days of his life to reach out to the general: “You are much in my thoughts today,” wrote Coe. “Jonathan my son to whom you were so kind died this morning. You influenced his life for God and he never forgot you.”

“I did not have the occasion to meet him,” Siad wrote by way of condolences.

A document titled “Siad Barre’s Somalia and the USA,” prepared for the Family and marked “Very Confidential,” is one of the rare Family documents to move beyond what Elgin Groseclose called “the facade of brotherhood.” It is undated but appears to have been written near the beginning of the relationship. Siad, it begins, is the only head of state to have expelled the Soviets, and the only regional leader to offer “full military, air, and naval bases.” He pledges, too, to provide for a pro-American successor, and to purge his government of all officials linked to Somalia’s former patron, excepting himself, presumably. Then he notes that he has already supplied the Pentagon with a list of armaments he needed to fight the Cubans. Received.

In 1983, Somalia’s minister of defense went to Washington at Coe’s invitation to meet with the new chairman of the joint chiefs, General John J. Vessey. The United States nearly doubled military aid to the regime, pouring guns into a country that before the decade was out would achieve a moment of unity it has not seen since, when nearly everyone—politicians, warlords, children—united in opposition to Siad. He fled in 1991, taking refuge in Kenya with arap Moi. One of his last acts as Somalia’s key man was to scorch as much of his enemy’s land as he could, a biblical punishment for a nation that had resisted God’s appointed authority. Three hundred thousand died in the famine that followed. It’s considered Siad’s legacy. It was also the Family’s gift to Somalia.

O
N ONE OF
my last days at Ivanwald, a group of brothers returned from a trip to the movies. They’d gone to see
Black Hawk Down
, the story of nineteen American soldiers killed in 1993 in a battle with one of the Somali militias that have terrorized the country for most of the seventeen years since Siad’s downfall. The movie had made such an impression on the brothers that Jeff C., one of the house leaders, decided to convene the boys to talk about the responsibilities of followers of Christ. Some of the men took a hard lesson from the film: you can’t help savages. But Jeff C. corrected them. There was an international crew there at the time—men from Ecuador, Paraguay, the Czech Republic, Benin—but this, Jeff C. knew, was an American affair. “We help people,” he said. “That’s what we do. Even if they’re, I don’t know, ‘savages.’ We’ll just keep loving on ’em.”

D
OUG
C
OE DID
not pull any triggers in Somalia, did not poison any wells, and the Family was not one of the warring clans that obliterated what was left of the nation’s infrastructure. For all the Family’s talk of the “man-method,” of “relationships,” its members did not know Somalia very well. They treated it as a piece on a playing board. This Somalia wanted friends in Washington, so the Family became Somalia’s friend. This Somalia wanted guns, so the Family helped it get guns. This Somalia wanted to be called “brother,” so the Family called Siad Barre “brother.” Families, as Coe would be the first to point out, are about love. Not accountability, ultimately, and there does not seem to have been any for Brother Siad.

Jesus plus nothing, remember, does not depend on scripture, its nuances, its hard lessons. Jesus plus nothing does not include, for instance, the ninth verse of the fourth chapter of the Book of Genesis. God asks Cain, who has just murdered Abel, where his brother is. “I do not know,” replies Cain. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” It’s a genuinely difficult question. God never answers it directly, instead responding with what sounds like divine distress: “What have you done?” To Cain’s existentialism, God answers with a demand for history. That’s a more straightforward query, one I’ve attempted to answer with regard to the Family. But Cain’s question, that one’s too hard for me. To one who proclaims fellowship, as do the members of the Family, the answer is simple: “Yes, I am my brother’s keeper.” That was Jeff C.’s answer. But the Family has more often served as an accomplice, not a keeper. Where does that leave the rest of us? The Family works through the men and women we put in power. Sam Brownback. Hillary Clinton. Pick your poison. In the calculus of party politics, these two do occupy distant coordinates, but in the geometry of power politics, the Family knows, they are on the same plane, and the distance between them is shrinking. They mean well, both of them, and I’m more partial to the views of one of them, but I can’t help looking at that narrowing spectrum and thinking, This is an awful tight space into which to fit a democracy.