The Family (51 page)

18.
Thomas
: Kuo,
Tempting Faith
, p. 92;
Durenberger
: Edward Walsh, “Senator Goes Public with Private Life,”
Washington Post
, March 2, 1986, and Tony Bouza,
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire: Corruption, Decadence, and the American Dream
(Da Capo, 1996), p. 102;
Watt:
Lindsay,
Faith in the Halls of Power,
“Is the National Prayer Breakfast Surrounded by a ‘Christian Mafia’?”

19.
New chosen
and
throwaway religion
are ordinary phrases in the daily vernacular of the Family, no more than variations on contemporary evangelical rhetoric, but the
din of the vox populi
—the voice of the people—I found as far back as an account of the first National Prayer Breakfast (then known as the Presidential Prayer Breakfast) held shortly after Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953, by the then-Senate chaplain Dr. Frederick Brown Harris. Dr. Harris is quoted at length in a hagiography of the Family’s founder by the Family evangelist Norman Grubb:
Modern Viking: The Story of Abraham Vereide, Pioneer in Christian Leadership
(Zondervan, 1961), p. 131. The existence of a published biography may seem like a paradox for a group so bent on invisibility, but the early Family leaders assumed a lack of public scrutiny as the due of their elite status. It wasn’t until the antiestablishment revolt of the late 1960s that Vereide’s successor, Coe, led the group “underground.”

20.
Lynette Clemetson, “Meese’s Influence Looms Large in Today’s Judicial Wars,”
New York Times,
August 17, 2005. Meese is credited with moving into the mainstream the idea of a
jurisprudence of original intention
—the basis for a conservative judicial philosophy that rejects worker protections, the right to privacy, women’s reproductive rights, and queer rights.

21.
Ben Daniel, a minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and a former member of the Family, interviewed former residents of Potomac Point for a study of what he views as the Family’s “spiritual abuse”: “A former resident of Potomac Point told me about her nine months there. Having been encouraged to share her every thought and to expose her secrets and sins, she found her confessions and confidences used against her when she would ask questions or resist Fellowship authority. As the Fellowship exerted control over every aspect of her life she became angry and bitter. Something broke inside her. ‘When I came to Potomac Point I struggled with self-esteem issues,’ she told me. ‘While I was there my low self-esteem moved from a personal to a spiritual level.’ When, at last, she expressed a desire to leave, she was told that, without the teaching and company of the Fellowship, her well-being would disintegrate. She became terrified of life on the outside.” The wife of a Fellowship member describes her role in the Family: “I’m always third. The Fellowship comes first in my husband’s life. Then our children. Then me.” “Dysfunction in the Fellowship Family,” http://bendaniel.org/?p=110 accessed November 27, 2007.

22.
Congressmen who have lived there include former representatives Steve Largent (R., Oklahoma), Ed Bryant (R., Tennessee), and John Elias Baldacci (D., Maine). The house’s eight congressman-tenants each paid $600 per month in rent for use of a town house that includes nine bathrooms and five living rooms. Lara Jakes Jordan, “Religious Group Helps Lawmakers With Rent,” Associated Press, April 20, 2003. When the
Los Angeles Times
asked then-resident Representative Bart Stupak, a pro-life Democrat from Michigan, about the property, he replied, “We sort of don’t talk to the press about the house.” Getter, “Showing Faith in Discretion.”

23.
On October 29, 2007, a reporter for the Norwegian daily
Dagbladet
, Tore Gjerstad, who was following up on Norwegian conservatives’ connections to the Family, managed to confront Coe with some of the language about Hitler I’ve quoted. Coe, Gjerstad told me, responded, “No one who really knows me would think I admire Lenin, Hitler, Stalin. They were evil men. But they were successful when it came to power…All power is with Jesus. You can choose to go against him, but you can never have more power than what he gives you.”

24.
Carter’s contacts with Doug Coe, whom he told the sociologist D. Michael Lindsay (“Is the National Prayer Breakfast Surrounded by a ‘Christian Mafia’?”) had been a “very important person” in his life, predated his presidency. In a 1972 briefing to the Family’s leadership, Coe wrote that Carter was involved with the Family’s mission to Brazil’s dictatorial government. Folder 1, box 362, collection 459, BGCA. That same year, the Family’s chief Central American associate, a Costa Rican lawyer named Juan Edgar Picado, hosted Carter in Costa Rica; in 1976, Picado boasted to his Central American allies that Carter would increase aid to the region, which he did. It was Carter, not Ronald Reagan, who began the United States’ support for El Salvador’s brutal regime. (Howard Siner, “Attorney Knows Carter as Smart, Kind Friend,”
San Jose News
, March 4, 1977.) Nixon kept his personal distance from the Family until after his presidency, when, according to Lindsay, he “ministered” Reagan’s national security adviser, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, into a Family prayer cell in the wake of McFarlane’s disgrace as an Iran-Contra conspirator.

25.
Folder 1, box 166, collection 459, BGCA.

2.
EXPERIMENTAL RELIGION

1.
Doug Coe, “The Person of Christ, Pt. 4,” videotape of an address given to a conference of presidents of evangelical organizations, Navigators Great Hall Productions, January 15, 1989.

2.
There are many great biographies of Edwards, but my method of research for this account of his life was to rely primarily on original sources, which I tried to read through the filter of my own half-secular mind and as I imagine a Family man might, attuned to power and relationships. I depended on the two-volume
Works of Jonathan Edwards
,
with a Memoir by Sereno E. Dwight
, ed. Edward Hickman (F. Westley and A. H. Davis, Stationers Court, 1834);
Works of Jonathan Edwards
, particularly vol. 2,
Religious Affections
, ed. John E. Smith (Yale University Press, 1959); vol. 7,
The Life of David Brainerd
, ed. Norman Pettit (ibid., 1985); and vol. 16,
Letters and Personal Writings
, ed. George S. Claghorn (ibid., 1998); Samuel Hopkins,
The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards
, first published in 1765 and collected—along with a useful portrait by Peter Gay, “Jonathan Edwards: An American Tragedy,” and two fine poems about Edwards by Robert Lowell—in David Levin, ed.,
Jonathan Edwards: A Profile
(Hill and Wang, 1969). For a full account by a sympathetic biographer, I recommend George Marsden’s authoritative
Jonathan Edwards
(Yale University Press, 2003). I also found useful portions of Philip J. Gura’s brief biography,
Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical
(Hill and Wang, 2005); Perry Miller’s classic portrait of the Puritan mood,
The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century
(Macmillan, 1939); Jon Butler’s investigation of the eccentricities of American religion,
Awash In A Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People
(Harvard University Press, 1990); Ann Taves’s history of religious enthusiasm,
Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James
(Princeton University Press, 1999); Nancy Carlisle, “Pursuing Refinement in Rural New England, 1750–1850: An Exhibition Review,”
Winterthur Portfolio
34, no. 4 (1999): 239–49; Ava Chamberlain, “Bad Books and Bad Boys: The Transformation of Gender in Eighteenth-Century Northampton, Massachusetts,”
New England Quarterly
75, no. 2 (2002): 179–203; Chamberlain, “The Immaculate Ovum: Jonathan Edwards and the Construction of the Female Body,”
William and Mary Quarterly
57, no. 2 (2000): 289–322; Sandra Gustafson, “Jonathan Edwards and the Reconstruction of ‘Feminine’ Speech,”
American Literary History
6, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 185–212; and “Jonathan Edwards in 2003,” a special issue of
Theology Matters
, “A Publication of Presbyterians for Faith, Family, and Ministry” published in November/December of 2003 and edited by, among others, Richard Lovelace, a mentor of sorts to Doug Coe’s son Jonathan, and the inspiration for Jonathan House, an Ivanwald-like residence for young men on Capitol Hill in Washington.

3.
THE REVIVAL MACHINE

1.
Timothy L. Smith,
Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War
(Harper and Row, 1965), p. 79.

2.
Charles G., Finney,
The Original Memoirs of Charles G. Finney
, ed. Garth M. Rosell and Richard A. G. Dupuis (Zondervan, 1989), p. 66. The first edition of Finney’s memoirs was published in 1876; the edition I rely on most is published by one of the biggest evangelical publishers of today but is a scholarly work in the sense that it reflects the text as Finney intended it, not as his nineteenth-century publishers presented it. Finney, who in his old age dictated these memoirs to a former student, is one of the great underappreciated memoirists of American letters. His memoirs are not high art, but they are storytelling in a distinct American vein, and I make extensive use of them in this chapter. Biographical details are taken from the memoirs unless otherwise indicated.

3.
Ibid., jacket blurb.

4.
William C. Cochran, “Charles Grandison Finney Memorial Address” (J. B. Lippincott, 1908).

5.
Richard Hofstadter,
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 92.

6.
Marianne Perciaccante,
Calling Down Fire: Charles Grandison Finney and Revivalism in Jefferson County, New York, 1800
–
1840
(State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 38.

7.
I don’t mean to suggest that the arguments of Finney scholars such as William G. McLoughlin, Keith J. Hardman, Allen C. Guelzo, John L. Hammond, and others miss the point. Indeed, from their close readings of nineteenth-century theological disputes they derive great insights into the evolution of American religion and politics. (Of particular interest in the latter regard are Paul E. Johnson’s
A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815
–
1837
[Hill and Wang, 1978], and “God and Mammon,” chapter 7 of Charles Sellers’s
The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815
–
1846
[Oxford University Press, 1991], both of which are among the rare works of academic specialization that are also splendid reading.) Rather, I mean to simply single out the strand of Finney’s life that I believe is most relevant to the genealogy of American fundamentalism as it has appeared in recent times.

8.
For a discussion of the “machinery” of revival and its critics, see “The Businessmen’s Revival,” chapter 1 of John Corrigan’s
Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century
(University of California Press, 2002). Mark A. Noll provides a succinct description of Finney’s “new measures” in
A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada
(William B. Eerdmans, 1992; reprint edition, 2003), pp. 176–77.

9.
Charles Chauncey,
Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England
(Rogers and Fowle, 1743), p. 218, cited in Eric Leigh Schmidt,
Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment
(Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 71.

10.
Finney, “Human Government,” in
Finney’s Systematic Theology
(Bethany House, 1994).

4.
UNIT NUMBER ONE

1.
My account of Abram’s early life is shaped by his own reminiscences in letters and notes for a biography, stored in collection 459 of the Billy Graham Center Archives, but the major details and quotations are for the most part from the two full-length, English-language biographies (there is a third, by an evangelical admirer, in Norwegian) written about Abram:
Modern Viking: The Story of Abraham Vereide, Pioneer in Christian Leadership
(Zondervan, 1961), written by a revivalist named Norman Grubb mainly for private distribution to Abram’s followers; and
Abraham, Abraham
, by Abram’s son, Warren Vereide, and Claudia Minden Weisz, a privately published book (I received my copy from a former member of the Fellowship). The Abram story would be retold over the years in the literature produced by his various organizations; where I rely on such material in future chapters, I’ll provide additional notes.