The Family (56 page)

7.
Coe to Korry, October 10, 1970, folder 36, box 194, collection 459, BGCA.
Korry and the October 1970 Plot
: Gregory Palast, “A Marxist Threat to Cola Sales? Pepsi Demands a U.S. Coup. Goodbye Allende. Hello Pinochet,”
Observer
(UK), November 8, 1998. Korry, to his very minor credit, opposed a military coup because he did not think it would work. The CIA-backed murder of Allende’s defense minister that month seemed to bear out his point. The Chilean people rallied round Allende. But in 1973, Kissinger and General Pinochet, to Chile’s lasting sorrow, proved him wrong. I could find no record of Fellowship contact with Pinochet. They had long been allied with a right-wing civilian faction called the “Officialists,” headed by Hector Valenzuela Valderrama, a conservative Catholic politician whom Coe and Korry shopped around in Washington in 1969 as an Allende alternative. “The Majority Leader of the Congress, with whom you visited, called me the other day,” Coe wrote Valderrama. “He again expressed an interest in the ideas that you and he discussed. I think in the months to come such ideas can be pursued in private discussions and someday perhaps come to pass.” Correspondence, Coe, Korry, and Valderrama, February–June 1969, folder 35, box 194, collection 459, BGCA. “The sun is just now beginning to shine again”: Valderrama to Coe, December 21, 1973, box 194, BGCA.

8.
Tape 109, January 4, 1971, titled “Family Night at Fellowship House during which “Sam Cram,” Douglas Coe, and Clif Robinson gave reports on their recent trip to Japan, South Korea, South Vietnam, India, Hong Kong, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Turkey, and the Soviet Union to visit leaders in those countries,” collection 459, BGCA.

9.
B. Everett Jordan to members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives involved with the Presidential and Congressional Prayer Breakfasts, October 1970. “Mr. Howard Hardesty, Executive Vice President of Continental Oil company, recently traveled to Indonesia where he met for a day with men in the leadership groups there. He also had dinner with President Suharto and Members of the Indonesian Cabinet. The sense of spiritual relationship which was formed caused Mr. Hardesty to comment, ‘This is one of the greatest days of my life.’” Folder 8, box 548, collection 459, BGCA.

10.
McClure:
Jordan to members of Congress involved with the Prayer Breakfasts, 1970, folder 2, box 362, collection 459, BGCA.
“Confidential” prayer:
Jordan to members of Congress, undated, in reference to 1970 National Prayer Breakfast, folder 5, box 584, collection 459, BGCA.

11.
Elgin Groseclose to Clifton J. Robinson, November 28, 1972, folder 6, box 383, collection 459, BGCA.

12.
Clifton J. Robinson to Elgin Groseclose, December 1, 1972, ibid.

13.
From a 2005 interview with the Reverend Rob Schenck, president of Faith and Action, a small, Coe-style ministry with headquarters across from the U.S. Supreme Court.

14.
Locke’s remarks are found on p. 19 of “Trip to the [illegible] and Sermon by Doug Coe,” circa 1988, National Prayer Breakfast, no box number, collection 459, BGCA.

10.
INTERESTING BLOOD

1.
Max Blumenthal, “God’s Country,”
Washington Monthly
, October 2003. Eyal Press’s
Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America
(Henry Holt, 2006) is the definitive account of the Buffalo abortion wars and the murder of Barnett Slepian.

2.
Hillary Clinton,
Living History
(Simon and Schuster, 2003), p. 168.

3.
Interview with Tony Hall, August 30, 2006, by Meera Subramnian. Hall recently published a book (coauthored by Tom Price) with the evangelical publisher Thomas Nelson titled
Changing the Face of Hunger: One Man’s Story of How Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, and People of Faith are Joining Forces to Help the Hungry, the Poor, the Oppressed
(2006). In it, Hall repeatedly refers to a figure who connects him with Republican members of the Family as “our mutual friend.” Hall puts the connections to good effect, genuinely pursuing a foreign policy more oriented toward the problem of hunger. But his emphasis on religious freedom—and his disinterest in systemic economic critiques—persistently guides him toward worthy but sentimental projects of limited effect, or worse, actively depoliticizing local organizations.

4.
As Marcos “disappeared” his opponents in the mid–1970s, the Family moved a full-time operative to Manila. In 1975, Marcos hosted his first Presidential Prayer Breakfast, with Coe and Senator Hughes as guests. The event’s organizer, Bruce Sundberg, was blunt about his interest in the worst elements of Filipino politics: “that is where the wealth is,” he wrote to his financial supporters in America. Sundberg didn’t want it for himself, but he believed in a trickle-down fundamentalism. Win a “top man” for the faith, and the lesser people—those without money, those without power—will fall into line. Sundberg, general letter, October 17, 1975. Sundberg’s salary was paid in part by such a top man, Filipino senator Gil Puyat, one of Marcos’s financiers, who put $14,285 in a trust for Sundberg, according to a letter to Sundberg from Coe dated June 10, 1975, ibid. Puyat’s financial support for the Marcos regime is documented in John T. Sidel’s
Capital, Coercion and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines
(Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 74. Another top man cultivated by Sundberg was Butch Aquino, the son of Benigno Aquino, the opposition hero murdered by Marcos. The younger Aquino, Sundberg wrote to Coe on September 25, 1976, was “moving more and more to the ‘left’” until Sundberg gave him a copy of Chuck Colson’s
Born Again
, which persuaded him not to join the anti-Marcos rebels. All Sundberg correspondence is located in folder 13, box 475, collection 459, BGCA.

5.
The Family’s role in U.S.-Somali relations is documented in extensive correspondence in folders 18–24, box 254, collection 459, BGCA.

INTERLUDE

1.
Michael Denning,
The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
(Verso, 1997).

11.
WHAT EVERYBODY WANTS

1.
The stories of individual believers related in this chapter were gathered during two reporting trips to New Life Church, the first in January 2005, and the second in April 2005. Between these visits I corresponded with some of the members of the church. Where I draw from sources other than interviews conducted during this period, I’ll provide additional notes.

2.
Pastor Ted Haggard, the former leader of New Life, has since disputed that the location of the Air Force Academy was a consideration, in contradiction of information provided me by church representatives.

3.
Cara Degette, “All the President’s Men,”
Colorado Springs Independent
, November 13, 2003.

4.
This account of Pastor Ted’s founding of New Life is drawn from personal interviews and Pastor Ted’s
Primary Purpose: Making It Hard for People to Go to Hell From Your City
(Charisma House, 1995). The missionary in question, Danny Ost, is the son of Joseph Ost, a longtime collaborator of the Fellowship’s on African work. In 1965, Joseph Ost went to work full-time for the Fellowship “behind the scenes” in West Africa. Ost introduced Doug Coe and Gustav Adolf Gedat, then in the late stages of his West German political career, to senior Ivory Coast and Liberia government officials. (Coe to Vittoria Vaccari, December 1965, folder 1, box 362, collection 459, BGCA. Coe to Gedat, December 30, 1965, folder 11, box 219, collection 459.) Coe included short reports of Ost’s involvement—including his meetings with African heads of state—in November/December 1965, and April/May 1966 “confidential” briefings he prepared for congressional members of the Fellowship. (Folder 2, box 362, and folder 19, box 449, collection 459, BGCA.) This is, of course, not evidence of any organizational connection between Haggard and the Family; rather, it is simply an illustration of the small world of American fundamentalism’s elites.

5.
In
Primary Purpose
, Haggard writes of confronting men outside a gay bar he’d discovered with one of his associate pastors. “Two days later, I had a meeting scheduled with one of the men in the church. On my way there, I had to go near the intersection where the bar was located and wondered how many cars would be in the parking lot of that bar in the middle of the day.” After observing for a while, Ted spotted a member of his church. Ted jumped out of his car. “‘Jesus sent me here to rescue you,’” he called. His friend got into Ted’s car and cried while Ted ministered to him. See pp. 107–8.

6.
Ibid., p. 26.

7.
Ibid., p. 33.

8.
Ted Haggard,
Dog Training, Fly Fishing, and Sharing Christ in the 21st Century
(Nelson Books, 2002), p. 9.

9.
Ibid., p. 48.

10.
The first populist church to successfully adopt the cell structure was not American, but South Korean, the work of Pastor Paul Cho, who built a congregation of nearly eight hundred thousand, the largest single church in the world, using a cell-group structure that thrived under that nation’s Cold War authoritarianism. Steve Brouwer, Paul Gifford, and Susan D. Rose,
Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism
(Routledge, 1996), p. 2.

11.
Haggard,
Primary Purpose
, p. 160. Pastor Ted is aware that his martial plans alarm some outsiders; in
Primary Purpose
he also writes that when he began his campaign for Colorado Springs, “spiritual warfare was not a popular subject…I didn’t speak publicly about my own experiences” (p. 32). Even in his more mainstream position atop the NAE, Ted’s belief in less than full disclosure persisted. When the evangelical journalist Ayelish McGarvey asked Pastor Ted in 2004 why President Bush, as a Christian, had not apologized for the false assertions used to justify the Iraq War, or for the dishonest smears marshaled on his campaign’s behalf, Ted said: “I think if you asked the President these questions once he’s out of office, he’d say, ‘You’re right. We shouldn’t have done it.’ But right now if he said something like that, well, the world would spin out of control!…Listen, I think [we Christian believers] are responsible not to lie, but I don’t think we’re responsible to say everything we know.” (McGarvey, “As God Is His Witness,”
American Prospect
online edition, October 19, 2004, http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8790.

12.
William Sims Bainbridge and Rodney Stark,
A Theory of Religion
(Lang, 1987); Roger Finke and Rodney Stark,
The Churching of America, 1776
–
1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy
(Rutgers University Press, 1992); Rodney Stark and Roger Finke,
Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion
(University of California Press, 2000). Since I wrote this chapter, Stark has published a new book that signals his shift from scholarship into wholesale Christian triumphalism of a variety barely distinguishable from Pastor Ted’s:
The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success
(Random House, 2005).

13.
Stark and Finke, Chapter 8, “A Theoretical Model of Religious Economies,” in
Acts of Faith
.

14.
Haggard,
Dog Training
, p. 12.

15.
Ibid., pp. 35–39.

16.
Ibid., p. 24.

17.
Both organizations have their roots in the dubious late-nineteenth-century science of
boyology,
practiced by mostly Protestant, upper-class men concerned about the degenerative effects of “city rot,” immigrants, and professional female educators on future generations of men. The Boy Scouts was the most militant of many groups that started up, but over the years, it grew soft—or maybe Christian fundamentalists grew harder in spirit. (Clifford Putney,
Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880
–
1920
[Harvard University Press, 2001].) An Assemblies of God preacher named Johnny Barnes founded the Royal Rangers in 1962, blatantly copying the Scouts and adding an extra dose of scripture. It has since prospered on the conservative fringe. New Life’s success with the program, though, has been a big factor in moving it toward the mainstream. The Scouts still offer a “God and Country Program,” but that can’t compare with the Rangers’ emphasis on foreign missions, adventures that appeal to kids and fundamentalist parents alike. http://royalrangers.ag.org/.

18.
Our City, God’s Word
(International Bible Society, 2004). “Who is the ‘Our’ in ‘Our City, God’s Word’ that the International Bible Society refers to?” asked Colorado Springs resident Susan Hindman in a letter published in the November 7, 2004,
Colorado Springs Gazette.
The IBS proceeded to produce editions for two more cities, further confusing the issue.