The Family (8 page)

“Yes,” Coe told us, “it’s good to have friends. Do you know what a difference a friend can make? A friend you can agree with?” He smiled. “Two or three agree, and they pray? They can do anything.
Agree. Agreement
. What’s that mean?” Doug looked at me. “You’re a writer. What does that mean?”

I remembered Paul’s letter to the Philippians, which we had begun to memorize.
Fulfill ye my joy, that ye be likeminded.

“Unity,” I said. “
Agreement
means unity.”

Doug Coe didn’t smile. “Yes,” he said. “
Total
unity. Two, or three, become one. Do you know,” he asked, “that there’s another word for that?”

No one spoke.

“It’s called a
covenant
. Two, or three, agree? They can do anything. A covenant is…powerful. Can you think of anyone who made a covenant with his friends?”

We all knew the answer to this, having heard his name invoked numerous times in this context. Andrew from Australia, sitting beside Coe, cleared his throat: “Hitler.”

“Yes,” Doug Coe said. “Yes, Hitler made a covenant. The Mafia makes a covenant. It is such a very powerful thing. Two, or three, agree.” He took another bite from his plate, planted his fork on its tines. “Well, guys,” he said, “I gotta go.”

As Doug Coe left, my brothers’ hearts were beating hard: for the poor, for a covenant. “Awesome,” Bengt said. We stood to clear our dishes.

O
N ONE OF
my last nights at Ivanwald, the neighborhood boys asked my brothers and me to play flashlight tag. There were six boys, ranging in age from maybe seven to eleven, all junior members of the Family. It was balmy, and the streetlight glittered against the blacktop, and hiding places beckoned from behind trees and in bushes. One of the boys began counting. My brothers, big and small, scattered. I lay flat on a hillside. From there I could track movement in the shadows and smell the mint leaves planted in the garden. A figure approached. I sprang up and ran, down the sidewalk and up through the garden, over a wall that my pursuer, a small boy, could hardly climb. But once he was over, he kept charging. Just as I was about to vanish into the trees, his flashlight caught me. “Jeff-I-see-you, you’re It!” the boy cried. I stopped and turned. He kept the beam on me. I heard the slap of his sneakers as he ran across the driveway. “Okay, dude,” he whispered. He clicked off the flashlight. Now I could see him. Little Stevie, whose drawing of a machine gun we’d posted in our bunk room. He handed the flashlight to me, spun around, started to run. Then he stopped and looked over his shoulder. “You’re It now,” he whispered and disappeared into the dark.

…the election will obtain, and the rest will be blinded.

—
JONATHAN EDWARDS, “SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD”

L
ITTLE
S
TEVIE WAS RIGHT:
As soon as I left Ivanwald, I became It. That is, I’ve been chasing the story I first encountered there ever since, trying to fit the religious practice I found in that Arlington cul-de-sac onto a spectrum of belief where it seems to have no place. It was at once as ordinary as a game of golf and stranger than anything I’d seen in years of reporting from the margins of faith. Maybe it was nothing but country club fundamentalism, worth little more attention than Rotary or the Freemasons. But experienced from within, the Family was as perfectly absurd and—granted its own logic—as perfectly rational as the Catholic dirt eaters of Chimayo, New Mexico, who consider the dusty soil in one small spot in the mountains capable of curing any ailment; or Shinji Shumeikai, an international sect of religious aesthetes who believe that by building modernist architectural masterpieces in remote places they’re restoring the planet’s balance, literally. But such convictions are self-contained, interested mostly in internal purity. Indeed, the more eccentric the religion, the more sharply its followers tend to define themselves against the rest of society.

And yet, despite the Family’s theological oddities—its concentric rings of secrecy, its fascination with megalomaniacs from Mao to Hitler, its conviction that being one of God’s chosen provides divine diplomatic immunity—it is anything but separate from the world. It so neatly harmonizes with the political shape of worldly things, in fact, that it’s nearly indistinguishable from secular conceptions of social order. It’s “invisible” not because it’s hiding, but because it’s not. Dismissed as “civil religion” by observers who know it only by the National Prayer Breakfast’s annual broadcast on C-Span, the Family’s long-term project of a worldwide government under God is more ambitious than Al Qaeda’s dream of a Sunni empire. Had I not stumbled into its heart, I would never have seen it. Since I had, I began to ask basic questions. Was the Family’s vision simply a pious veneer on business as usual? Do its networks actually influence the world the rest of us live in? Is it an aberration in American religion, or the result of a long evolution?

This last is a very different question from the one usually asked about radical religion: “What do the believers want?” An understandable concern, but one that obscures the true shape of fundamentalism. Those of us not engaged in “spiritual war” attempt to contain fundamentalism by reducing its ambitions to a program, an agenda: the abolition of abortion, homosexuality, or maybe sex in general. If the fundamentalists ever won, we tell ourselves, we would all be forced to live like Puritans, or worse—the Taliban. Fundamentalism, we conclude, is therefore un-American and doomed to wither on our democratic soil.

But faith, radical or tepid, gentle or authoritarian, is always more complicated and enduring than a caricature. The Family has grown and taken root directly at the center of American democracy, intertwining with the world as it is. “Business as usual” is the Family’s business. The elite fundamentalism of the Family doesn’t lead us back to Plymouth Rock, much less to the Taliban’s Kabul. The Family’s faith is not that of a walled-off community but of an empire; not one to come but one that already stretches around the globe, the soft empire of American dollars and, more subtly, American gods. If we want to understand this fundamentalism, we must ask not what it wants to do but what it has done: how it has run parallel to and at times flowed into the main currents of history. We must solve the equation presented by Doug Coe: Jesus plus nothing.
J
+
0
=
X
. To solve for
X
, the role of elite fundamentalism, we’ll need to consider our variables:
American Jesuses,
plural, and
nothing
.
Nothing
, in this equation, stands for a great deal. All that fundamentalism has abandoned, the story it does not tell: the history of where it came from and how it came to live so close to the center of American power.

T
HE PLAINEST EXPRESSION
of the relationship between the theology of Jesus plus nothing and the mundane world of secular democracy may be found in the words of George W. Bush. Bush is not a member of the Family, although his faith was shaped in a Bible study in Midland, Texas, organized by a group the Family started in the late 1970s for the very purpose of bringing influential men into personal relationships with each other and with a particular concept of Jesus. In 1989, Doug Coe, addressing a private gathering of evangelical leaders in Colorado Springs, assured them that Bush Senior—a secular sort whom they’d backed with reservations—was a Family relation, if perhaps a distant one. Moreover, he’d surrounded himself with godly men such as James Baker and Jack Kemp and, yes, even Dan Quayle, all associates of the Family. Most promising of all, said Coe, was Bush Junior, a good influence on his father.
¹
Twelve years later the younger Bush ran for president. At a 1999 debate in Des Moines, Iowa, the moderator asked the then-candidate to identify his favorite philosopher. His opponents had already named John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, but Bush said Jesus, because Jesus had changed his heart. A murmur of surprise rippled through the crowd. The moderator asked Bush to say more, implicit in his question the problem of how
heart
reconciles with the traditional province of philosophy,
mind
. Bush answered as if the audience was not in the room. “Well, if they don’t know, it’s going to be hard to explain.”

Pundits scoffed, but Bush’s response proved brilliant, a flare in the night for fundamentalist America—the equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s flirty 1980 remark to a convention of the National Religious Broadcasters, “You can’t endorse me, but I can endorse you.” And Bush’s words meant more than those of Reagan, who seemed merely to promise political favors. Bush avowed a strength of belief that must be felt to be fully understood, a faith outside the tidy terminology of liberal religion. You must be in the Word to get this powerful feeling.
Well, if they don’t know, it’s going to be hard to explain
. It’s beyond rational definitions. It’s an idea that denies ideas, a fixed intellectual position that rejects the primacy of intellect and the significance of “positions.” Jesus plus nothing.

As a statement of philosophy, Bush’s first answer—
because He changed my heart
—insists on timelessness (Jesus in the present tense), spacelessness (Jesus in Texas, in Des Moines, in Bush’s body), and selflessness, though this last not in the sense of a modesty of spirit that might lead one to help others, but rather in that of an inward gaze that is simultaneously narcissistic and blind to the particulars of the self it sees there, able only to perceive a heart remade by God. There’s a word for this wide-eyed stare:
piety
. We are all familiar with the figures of the pious church lady and the sanctimonious school marm, and yet such characters fail to embody the meaning of
piety
as it has existed for hundreds of years in Christianity and took root in America, first through the Puritans and then, in the fashion in which it lives on today, in the 1730s, in Northampton, Massachusetts, summoned from the hearts of men, women, and children by the words of Jonathan Edwards, the author of the Great Awakening.

Edwards’s legacy lies not in the Republic built on the Enlightenment ideas of Locke and Jeffersonian skepticism, but in the fact that more than two centuries later, that nation remains one of the most religious on Earth, much of it devoted to a vision of Christendom that originated with him. That this vision was at its inception theocratic is barely worth mentioning; among the elites of Edwards’s day, theocracy was simply the “Calvinist scheme” which their forebears had come to the New World to pursue. That the United States is, as much as ever, a Christian nation, is a more controversial claim. “Historians of the United States,” notes George Marsden, Edwards’s most perceptive biographer, “have been prone to give much more attention to Benjamin Franklin than to Edwards as a progenitor of modern America.” That oversight explains why most of American history cannot account for the country’s ongoing religious fervor. Although American fundamentalism has lately attempted to claim Franklin as a forebear—a collection titled
American Destiny: God’s Role in America
trumpets three apparently pious utterances of Franklin’s out of context and without mentioning his equal enthusiasm for the sensual life and a Christless deism—the legacy of Franklin’s ideas remains staunchly secular. But the nation does not. Christ thrives in America not so much as an idea or a deity as a mood: a feeling, a conviction, a sentimental commitment to manifest destiny on a personal level, with national implications.

When I left Ivanwald, one of the senior men, a former chief counsel to Republican senator Don Nickles, told me I was making a terrible mistake. “You may not be able to come back,” he said. He left it unclear whether that would be my choice or the Family’s, but I think I know now what he meant. If I left, prematurely in his eyes, I would literally no longer be within the mood. The ideas I’d encountered there might travel with me (as they have, in a manner the Family didn’t anticipate), but the mood could not. After I left, I went to the Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College, where the Family had deposited more than 600 boxes of documents, and I sifted through these seventy years of its history in search of explicit theology, an explanation for what I’d encountered. There were snatches of argument, passages of theory, references and allusions which I have since spent several years pursuing. But most of all there was the mood. Oftentimes, in letters to one another, Family men wrote of it as a “spirit” that spread like a disease, a “contagion,” they called it. Men would come from around the world to spend time with Doug Coe, or his predecessor, Abraham Vereide, to “catch the spirit of the work.” Sometimes they’d talk politics; sometimes they’d make business deals. But more often they simply basked together in the glory of “the work.” One did not “learn” anything; one found it in one’s own heart.

There is little taste for history among Family members, and the disarray of the 600 boxes it shipped off to the Billy Graham Center suggests that nobody has ever been interested in looking backward. Not to 1935, when the Family began as a businessmen’s antilabor alliance in Seattle, and certainly not farther back, to the roots of “the work.” Those origins lie not in the New Testament, which is ultimately little more than a fabric from which the Family constructs contemporary realities, but in the dream of a Christian nation, “awakened,” as it was by Jonathan Edwards in 1735, by a piety infused with enthusiasm and—an element overlooked by most historians of the Great Awakening—an adoration of power, divine and worldly, the intangible foundation of American empire. The love of power—world-changing power, messianic power—is not an American invention; but our civil religion, the belief that such a love can coexist peacefully with both God and democracy, is.

Biographers of Edwards note the unlikely marriage within his thought of the rigors of John Calvin—who argued that God cares so little for good deeds or bad that he saves whom he will and damns the rest of us—with the revelations of the Enlightenment, Locke’s political ideas and the scientific discoveries of Isaac Newton. But Edwards was no mere synthesizer. His preaching and writing helped spark a fire of religiosity that swept the colonies and leaped back across the ocean to the heart of the British Empire. Edwards rationalized religion; set it on a course of wildfire evangelism; and built a web of ideas in which the radicalism of the American Revolution would be entangled with a spiritual authoritarianism, an idea of God that did not so much emphasize
might
rather than
love
as equate the two. Edwards’s Jesus was personal, intimate, dedicated, like the Family, to the slow breaking of souls.

Of all insects, no one is more wonderful than the spider, especially with respect to their sagacity and admirable way of working.

—
JONATHAN EDWARDS, “OF INSECTS,” IN HIS PRIVATE JOURNAL
, 1716
²

E
DWARDS’S GENIUS WAS
to describe his God not through declaration but through observation. He wrote like a naturalist, of flowers and insects and cloud formations, all of creation bursting with revelation. “And scarce any thing,” he confessed, “among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning.” Edwards “felt God” at the first appearance of a thunderstorm: “I would fix myself in order to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic and awful voice of God’s thunders.”

He was tall and slender, his face long and his features delicate, his skin pale. He spoke in a soft, lovely voice, and he liked to sing aloud during storms, his lyrics the raw form of the prose he would later commit to writing. He began every day at four, because Christ rose early, too, just three days after his crucifixion. Then he prayed, secret prayers. Later, his wife, Sarah, would join him in his study, and they would pray together in that light that rises before the sun, the same blue light one finds at the heart of a flame.

He ate very little. He often studied for a dozen hours or more, time passed “not in perusing or treasuring up the thoughts of others,” wrote his nephew, but in wrestling with data from his own congregation, tested against ideas transmitted directly from God. “New Light,” the believers at the time called the religion of Jonathan Edwards. As a young man, he studied the
Opticks
of Newton, wrote papers about rainbows and twinkling stars, and took delight in science’s discovery that the color of things in this world is not inherent but merely a matter of perception. He loved to look at flowers; he thought often of how they would soon die. Fruit trees proved yet more revealing. “That of so vast and innumerable a multitude of blossoms that appear on a tree, so few come to ripe fruit.” So was it, he concluded, with “the mass of mankind.”