The Family (4 page)

By
poor
they mean not the thousands of literal poor living in Washington’s ghettos, but rather the poor
in spirit
: the senators, generals, and prime ministers who coast to the end of Twenty-fourth Street in Arlington in black limousines and town cars and hulking SUVs to meet one another, to meet Jesus, to pay homage to the god of the Cedars. There they forge relationships beyond the “din of the vox populi” and “throwaway religion” in favor of the truths of the Family. Declaring God’s covenant with the Jews broken, the group’s core members call themselves
the new chosen.
¹⁹

The brothers of Ivanwald were the Family’s next generation, its high priests in training. Sometimes the brothers would ask me why I was there. They knew that I was “half Jewish,” that I was a writer, and that I was from New York City, which most of them considered to be only slightly less wicked than Baghdad or Paris. I didn’t lie to them. I told my brothers that I was there to meet Jesus, and I was: the Jesus of the Family, whose ways are secret. The brothers were certain that He had sent me to them for a reason, and perhaps they were right. What follows is my personal testimony, to the enduring power of this strange American god.

A
T
I
VANWALD, MEN
learn to be leaders by loving their leaders. “They’re so busy loving us,” a brother once explained to me, “but who’s loving them?” We were. The brothers each paid four hundred dollars per month for room and board, but we were also the caretakers of the Cedars, cleaning its gutters, mowing its lawns, whacking weeds, blowing leaves, and sanding. And we were called to serve on Tuesday mornings, when the Cedars hosted a regular prayer breakfast typically presided over by Ed Meese. Meese is best remembered for his oddly prurient antiporn crusade as Ronald Reagan’s ethically challenged attorney general; less-often recalled is his 1988 resignation following a special prosecutor’s investigation of his intervention on behalf of an oil pipeline for Saddam Hussein. He remains a powerful Washington presence, a quick-witted man who presents himself as an old gumshoe, carrying messages back and forth between social and fiscal conservatives. In 2005 and 2006, he shepherded Supreme Court justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito through their nomination processes; in 2007, he gave the religious Right’s stamp of approval to Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
²⁰
Each week at the Cedars, his breakfast brought together a rotating group of ambassadors, businessmen, and American politicians. Three of Ivanwald’s brothers also attended.

The morning I was invited, Charlene, the cook, scrambled up eggs with blue tortillas, Italian sausage, peppers, and papaya. Three women from Potomac Point, an “Ivanwald for young women” across the road from the Cedars, came to serve. They wore red lipstick and long skirts (makeup and “feminine” attire were required on duty) and had, after several months of cleaning and serving in the Cedars while the brothers worked outside, grown unimpressed by the high-powered clientele. “Girls don’t sit in on the breakfasts,” one of them told me, though she said that none of them minded because it was “just politics,” and the Bible generally reserves such doings for men.
²¹

The breakfast began with a prayer and a sprinkle of scripture from Meese, who sat at the head of a long, dark oak table. Matthew 11:27: “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” That morning’s chosen introduced themselves. They were businessmen from Dallas and Oregon, a Chinese Christian dissident leader, and two ambassadors, from Benin and Rwanda, who sat side by side. Rwanda’s representative, Dr. Richard Sezibera, was an intense man who refused to eat his eggs and melon. He drank cup after cup of coffee, and his eyes were bloodshot. A man I didn’t recognize, whom Charlene identified as a former senator, suggested that negotiators from Rwanda and Congo, trapped in a war that had killed more than 2 million, should stop worrying about who will get the diamonds and the oil and instead focus on who will get Jesus. “Power sharing is not going to work unless we change their hearts,” he said.

Sezibera stared, incredulous. Meese chuckled and opened his mouth to speak, but Sezibera interrupted him. “It is not so simple,” the Rwandan said, his voice flat and low. Meese smiled. Everyone in the Family loves rebukes, and here was Rwanda rebuking them. The former senator nodded. Meese murmured, “Yes,” stroking his maroon leather Bible, and the words “Thank you, Jesus” rippled in whispers around the table as I poured Sezibera another cup of coffee.

The brothers also on occasion sat in quietly on meetings at the Family’s four-story, redbrick Washington townhouse, a former convent at 133 C Street SE, run by a Family affiliate called the C Street Foundation. Eight congressmen lived there, paying below-market rents.
²²
The C Street House is registered as a church, which allows it to avoid taxes. There’s a house mother and a TV the size of a small movie screen, usually tuned to sports, and a prayer calendar in the kitchen that tells residents which “demonic strongholds,” such as Buddhism or Hinduism, they are to wage spiritual warfare against each day. Eight Christian college women do most of the serving, but we brothers were on occasion called to stand in for them, the better to find spiritual mentors.

The day I worked at C Street, half a dozen congressmen were trading stories over lunch about the power of prayer to “break through” just about anything: political opposition, personal pride, a dull policy briefing. They spoke of their devotions as if they were running backs moving the ball, chuckling over how prayer flummoxed the “other team.” They didn’t mean Democrats—a few
were
Democrats—but the godless “enemy,” broadly defined. All credit to the coach, said one congressman, who was dabbing his lips with a red napkin that read “Let Me Call You SWEETHEART…I Can’t Remember Your Name.” Later that day, I ran into Doug Coe himself, who was tutoring Todd Tiahrt, a Republican representative from Kansas. Tiahrt is a short shot glass of a man, two parts flawless hair and one part teeth. He wanted to know the best way “for the Christian to win the race with the Muslim.” The Muslim, he said, has too many babies, while Americans kill too many of theirs.

Coe agreed that too many Muslim babies could be a problem. But he was more concerned that Tiahrt’s focus on labels like
Muslim
and
Christian
might get in the way of the congressman’s prayers. “Religion” distracts people from Jesus, Coe said, and allows them to isolate Christ’s will from their work in the world. God’s law and our laws should be identical “People separate it out,” he warned Tiahrt. “‘Oh, okay, I got religion, that’s private.’ As if Jesus doesn’t know anything about building highways or Social Security. We gotta take Jesus out of the religious wrapping.”

“All right, how do we do that?” Tiahrt asked.

“A covenant,” Doug Coe answered. The congressman half smiled, as if caught between confessing his ignorance and pretending he knew what Doug Coe was talking about. “Like the Mafia,” Coe clarified. “Look at the strength of their bonds.” He made a fist and held it before Tiahrt’s face. Tiahrt nodded, squinting. “See, for them it’s honor,” Coe said. “For us, it’s Jesus.”

Doug Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers”: “Look at Hitler,” he said. “Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, bin Laden.” The Family possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the “total Jesus” of a brotherhood in Christ.

“
That
’s what you get with a covenant,” said Doug Coe. “Jesus plus nothing.”
²³

T
HE REGIMEN AT
Ivanwald was so precise it was relaxing: no swearing, no drinking, no sex, no self. Watch out for magazines and don’t waste time on newspapers and never watch TV. Eat meat, study the Gospels, play basketball; God loves a man who can sink a three-pointer.
Pray to be broken.
“O Heavenly Father. Dear Jesus. Help me be humble. Let me do Your will.” Every morning began with a prayer, some days with outsiders—a former Ivanwald brother, now a businessman, or another executive who used tales of high finance to illuminate our lessons from scripture, which he supplemented with xeroxed midrash from
Fortune
—and Fridays with the women of Potomac Point. But most days it was just us boys, bleary-eyed, gulping coffee and sugared cereal as Bengt and Jeff C. laid out lines of Holy Word across the table like strategy.

The dining room had once been a deck, but the boys had walled it in and roofed it over and unrolled a red Persian carpet, transforming the space into a sort of monastic meeting hall, with two long tables end to end, ringed by a dozen chairs and two benches. The first day I visited Ivanwald, Bengt cleared a space for me at the head of the table and sat to my right. Beside him, Wayne slumped in his chair, his eyes hidden by a cowboy hat. Across from him sat Beau, an Atlantan with the build and athletic intensity of a wrestler, still wearing the boxers and T-shirt he’d slept in. Bengt alone looked sharp, his hair combed, golf shirt tucked tightly into pleated chinos.

Bengt asked Gannon to read our text for that morning, Psalm 139: “O Lord, you have searched me and you know me.” The very first line made Bengt smile; this was, in his view, an awesome thing for God to have done.

Bengt’s manners and naive charm preceded him in every encounter. He was kind to his brothers and excellent with small children, tall and strong and competent with any tool, deadly whenever he got hold of the ball—any ball; all sports seemed to Bengt just a step more challenging than breathing. His eyes were deep and kind of sad, but he liked to laugh, and when he did he sounded like a friendly donkey, an Eyore for whom things were suddenly not so bad. When you told him a story, he’d respond, “
Goll-y!
” just to be nice. When genuinely surprised, he’d exclaim, “
Good ni-ight!
” Sometimes it was hard to remember that he was a self-professed revolutionary. He asked Gannon to keep reading, and then leaned back and listened.

“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.”

Bengt raised a hand. “That’s great, dude. Let’s talk about that.” The room fell silent as Bengt stared into his Bible, running his finger up and down the gilded edge of the page. “Guys,” he said. “What—how does that make you feel?”

“Known,” said Gannon, almost in a whisper.

Bengt nodded. He was looking for something else, but he didn’t know where it was. “What does it make you think of?”

“Jesus?” said Beau.

Bengt stroked his chin. “Yeah…Let me read you a little more.” He read in a monotone, accelerating as he went, as if he could persuade us through a sheer heap of words. “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb,” he concluded. His lips curled into a half smile. “Man! I mean, that’s intense, right? ‘In my mother’s womb’—God’s right in there with you.” He grinned. “It’s like,” he said, “it’s like, you
can’t
run. Doesn’t matter where you turn, ’cause Jesus is gonna be there, just waiting for you.”

Beau’s eyes cleared, and Gannon nodded. “Yeah, brother,” Bengt said, an eyebrow arched. “Jesus is
smart
. He’s gonna get you.”

Gannon shook his head. “Oh, he’s already got me.”

“Me, too,” Beau chimed. Then each man clasped his hands into one fist and pressed it against his forehead or his chin and prayed, eyes closed and Jesus all over his skin.

T
HE SWEETEST WORDS
of devotion I heard at Ivanwald came from the one man there who thought Jesus had a message more complicated than “Obey.” Riley was the son of a Republican businessman from Wisconsin, but he sounded like a Spaniard who’d learned his English in Sweden. He’d “spent time overseas,” he explained, and the accent had just rubbed off. Nobody believed him—he was clearly the most pretentious follower of Jesus since Saul changed his name to Paul and declared himself a Christian—but nobody scorned him for his airs. Riley wore his dirty brown hair long and tied in a braided ponytail, and if it was cool outside he favored a Guatemalan-style poncho. He didn’t share the views of the other brothers; in fact, he stayed only long enough to attend a demonstration in Washington against Plan Colombia, a nearly $5-billion military aid package for that country’s right-wing regime and U.S. defense contractors that began in 1999.

The Saturday of the demonstration, Riley slipped out before dawn, and I woke up early to attend a three-hour prayer meeting at the Cedars with some elder brethren: a Republican political couple from Oregon, an old stalwart of the movement who had for many years presided over a Family retreat in Bermuda called Willowbank, and John Nakamura, a businessman who that year was volunteering as host of the Cedars. We met in a room appointed with statues of bald eagles and photos of friends of the Family: there was Richard Nixon, scowling over the sofa, and there was Jimmy Carter, the first openly evangelical chief executive, flashing his toothy smile in a frame on the coffee table.
²⁴
We got on our knees and held hands, and together we prayed, some of us rocking, some of us approaching the gift of tongues, Jesus-Jesus-Jesus, praying with Nakamura’s guidance for Dick Cheney’s ailing heart and for Bush, “who has said he knows the Lord.” Roy Cook, one of Doug Coe’s oldest friends, prayed for Jesus to “turn the evil” in the hearts of journalists, who “tell stories that go against the work Jesus is doing at the Cedars.” Then we began praying about the demonstration Riley was attending. We prayed that the “stratagems of evil and wickedness”—that’d be Riley—would be washed from the streets by God’s rain.