Replies to post #79574 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

Coburn claims privilege on Ensign advice


Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota
Sen. John Ensign, R-NV, addresses the delegates on the last day of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 4, 2008.
(UPI Photo/Roger L. Wollenberg)


Citizens Against Government Waste
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) (L) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) speaks at a Citizens Against Government Waste news conference to release the 2006 Congressional Pig Book, a complete database of state-by-state breakdown of per-capita government over site, in Washington on April 5, 2006. (UPI Photo/Kevin Dietsch)

Published: July 9, 2009 at 7:42 PM

WASHINGTON, July 9 (UPI) -- Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said Thursday he would invoke privilege if asked about advice he gave to Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., on handling an extramarital affair.

Coburn said he was talking to Ensign about his tryst with a former staffer in his capacities as a doctor and a man of the cloth, Roll Call reported.

"I was counseling him as a physician and as an ordained deacon," Coburn said. "That is privileged communication that I will never reveal to anybody. Not to the (Senate) Ethics Committee, not to a court of law, not to anybody."

Doug Hampton, whose wife had engaged in an affair with Ensign, has claimed Coburn urged Ensign to pay the Hamptons millions of dollars after Hampton confronted Ensign about the affair.

"I categorically deny everything he said," Coburn said.

Coburn said he has acted as a counselor to other lawmakers in the past.

"Ya'll don't know about all the people I've counseled," he told Roll Call when asked why Ensign sought his help.

Ensign said Thursday his parents gave $96,000 to his mistress and her family out of concern for the well-being of family friends. In a statement read by his lawyer, Ensign said, "None of the gifts came from campaign or official funds, nor were they related to any campaign or official duties," USA Today reported.

"Sen. Ensign has complied with all applicable laws and Senate ethics rules," the statement said.

Ensign, 51, told the Las Vegas Sun he had no plans to resign.

"I said before, I always planned on serving and working hard -- working harder than I ever worked -- and I'm going to continue to do that," he said.

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Next Story: Ensign admits family paid $96K to lover
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/07/09/Ensign-admits-family-paid-96K-to-lover/UPI-36341247122461/

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© 2009 United Press International, Inc.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/07/09/Coburn-claims-privilege-on-Ensign-advice/UPI-20581247181187/ [with comments]

[F6]

Why tide against Sanford ebbed


Gov. Mark Sanford.
- C. Aluka Berry

Governor’s wife, political realities helped put calls for resignation to rest

By JOHN O’CONNOR
Sunday, Jul. 12, 2009

The shock had subsided.

Then Gov. Mark Sanford set the scandal ablaze again, saying he considered his Argentine lover his “soul mate” and saw her more often than he originally had said.

A wave of lawmakers and others jumped off the fence, calling on Sanford to “do the right thing” — resign. Attorney General Henry McMaster asked for an inquiry to determine whether Sanford used any public money to visit the woman.

Behind the scenes, political camps tried to influence, in the direction of their own interests, the decisions of Sanford and others. Meanwhile, polls showed more than 60 percent of those asked thought Sanford should resign.

It seemed as if Sanford was hanging on by a thread. Still, Sanford would not resign, telling one top Republican that he would have to be kicked out of office.

Three factors combined to allow Sanford to cling to his office:

• His wife, Jenny, stepped to his defense for the first time.

• State law enforcement officials found Sanford broke no laws. Absent that, state law makes it difficult to remove a governor.

• South Carolina’s Republican leadership refused to ask Sanford. Meanwhile, lawmakers — in part because of wrangling over the 2010 governor’s race — could not coordinate a push to force Sanford to resign.

And, observers say, unless something new emerges — either in the media or through a legislative investigation — Sanford will survive.

THE JENNY FACTOR

Jenny Sanford helped ignite the story about her husband’s disappearance with her nonchalant attitude about his well-being. Later, after Sanford admitted the affair, his wife said “his career is not a concern of mine.”

But observers say Jenny Sanford rescued her husband’s political career when he needed her most.

“I am willing to forgive Mark for his actions,” Jenny Sanford wrote July 2 [below] in the last of a handful of statements issued as the scandal unfolded. “We have been deeply disappointed in and even angry at Mark. The Bible says, ‘In your anger do not sin.’ (Psalm 4:4)

“In that spirit of forgiveness, it is up to the people and elected officials of South Carolina to decide whether they will give Mark another chance as well.”

Jenny Sanford’s public words — and private calls to key officials, three sources say — appealed to the faith of many South Carolinians.

“The key player in all of this is Jenny,” said Richard Quinn of Columbia, a political consultant to many of the state’s leading Republicans. “If she wanted him to resign, he would have.”

Jenny Sanford’s statement, Quinn said, “sent a pretty powerful signal that caused a lot of Republicans to be reminded there’s something in the Christian tradition about forgiveness.”

Among those who heeded the first lady’s request were state Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort, and state Rep. Murrill Smith, R-Sumter.

In a written statement, Davis said he had asked Mark Sanford, his friend of 30 years and former boss, to consider resigning. But Sanford and his wife insisted he could govern and mend the family.

“I am not going to second-guess them in that personal matter,” Davis wrote.

Additionally, a half-dozen sources said, Jenny Sanford spoke directly to a handful of influential lawmakers throughout the week of June 28, including U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a family friend and godfather to one of the Sanford’s four boys.

Graham initially had urged the governor to remain in office. But, later, he only would say “no comment” after a personal meeting with Sanford.

(Graham declined to comment for this story.)

“It was a close circle of friends” who received calls from Jenny Sanford, said state Sen. Larry Grooms, R-Berkeley, a Sanford ally who has called for his resignation. “She saw his entire career tumbling. She was the only one who could throw him a lifeline.”

(Efforts to reach Jenny Sanford, Davis and Jon Lerner, Mark Sanford’s Maryland-based political consultant, for this story were unsuccessful.)

NOT A CRIMINAL ACT

Jenny Sanford’s lifeline gave her husband some breathing room. On July 2, the results of a state law enforcement investigation provided more cover.

The State Law Enforcement Division announced a quickly completed review of records showed Sanford had not used any taxpayer money on any of his admitted meetings with Maria Belen Chapur.

The SLED report was enough for many to conclude Sanford likely did not break the law, a key threshold for removing him.

The SLED report, said Smith, meant Sanford’s problems were private —not public — issues.

“It’s still embarrassing for the state of South Carolina,” said Smith, a lawyer who formerly chaired a House criminal law subcommittee. “But it doesn’t render him unfit to be governor.”

Grooms said the SLED report did not inoculate the governor but did relieve some of the calls for his resignation.

“There’s a lot of things that happened that are very, very wrong that were not illegal,” Grooms said.

In addition, state lawmakers knew forcing Sanford from office would be difficult. The S.C. House can impeach an elected official only for “serious crimes or serious misconduct.” The state Constitution also requires that two-thirds of House members vote to impeach, a higher standard than federal impeachment.

There was another potent political reality countering forces who wanted Sanford out of office: Removing him would elevate — or banish — one of the state’s most influential senators, Glenn McConnell, to the ceremonial post of lieutenant governor. McConnell, R-Charleston, has become a Sanford critic and called for his resignation.

Few think McConnell, the Senate’s president pro tem, would give up his powers of appointment to state boards, his control over Senate committees and a 29-year career to wear a purple robe and preside over routine Senate matters.

Lawmakers also were weighing how elevating Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, who is expected to run for the GOP nomination for governor, would impact the 2010 governor’s race.

Those behind-the-scenes considerations were among reasons momentum was slow to build for Sanford’s resignation.

While state Senate Republicans frequently have battled with Sanford for years, for example, it took almost a week after Sanford admitted his affair for a majority to ask him to resign.

Other politicians weighed in for resignation too.

But slowly.

U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett, R-Westminster, for example, called for Sanford’s resignation in the scandal’s second week.

Barrett called for Sanford’s resignation even though many speculated Bauer could have an advantage as a quasi-incumbent if Sanford were to resign.

A Bauer aide seemingly was angling for that advantage. The New York Times reported that Chris LaCivita, whom Bauer has hired as a campaign consultant, was e-mailing national Republicans asking for support to pressure Sanford out of office.

(Bauer said he has not instructed anyone to work on his behalf to force Sanford out.)

Others were angling to keep Sanford in office.

Trey Walker, an aide to Attorney General Henry McMaster, another potential GOP candidate for governor, posted comments on a social networking site urging S.C. Republicans not to call for Sanford’s resignation.

But Columbia political consultant Quinn, who advises McMaster, said he has not coordinated any efforts to keep Sanford in office.

Other would-be governors were openly opposed to Sanford’s departure.

State Rep. Nikki Haley, another GOP candidate for governor, said she worried that elevating Bauer would mean a return to good ol’ boy politics and urged Sanford to stay in office.

The battle for positioning in 2010 meant that, at the end of the day, there were only individual efforts to oust Sanford, not a coordinated effort, said Rep. Smith.

“There did not seem to be any coherent strategy,” Smith said, “at least among Republican members.”

Meanwhile, Democrats, seeing an advantage in keeping Sanford in office, largely stayed out of the fray.

Democratic calls for resignation were “not going to mean a hill of beans to Sanford,” said Phil Bailey, Senate Democratic Caucus spokesman. “It was a Republican problem. The ball was in their court.”

For many, a South Carolina GOP executive committee vote Monday to censure Sanford was — barring any new revelations — the final piece of political cover that Sanford needed to clinch his hold on office.

Republicans largely ended the debate Monday night,

After a tightly organized conference call — which included hours of debate and a handful of votes — a majority of GOP leaders voted to censure Sanford instead of asking him to resign.

Francis Marion University political scientist Neal Thigpen and others say that vote likely wrapped up the debate over Sanford’s resignation.

S.C. GOP chairwoman Karen Floyd agreed.

“Today has brought a large measure of resolution to a sad chapter in our State Party’s history,” Floyd said in a statement Monday. “Republicans came together to speak with a unified voice, and now is the time for healing.”

The state’s political leaders have decided it’s “better to have a wounded, paraplegic Sanford twisting in the wind for 18 months” than other options, said Thigpen.

Reach O’Connor at [phone].

---

The evolving scandal

What has happened since Gov. Mark Sanford returned from Argentina

June 24
6:15 a.m. A reporter for The State finds Sanford at the Atlanta airport, getting off a flight from Buenos Aires. The governor admits he had not, as his staff had reported, been on the Appalachian Trial. Sanford says he has been alone, driving the Argentine coast.
About 11 a.m. The State informs the governor’s office it has e-mails that detail an extramarital relationship between Sanford and a woman from Argentina. Sanford already has called a 2 p.m. news conference.
2:20 p.m. A tearful Sanford admits he has been having an affair. He apologizes to his lover, his wife and the public and says he is resigning his chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association. He later says he will not step down as governor.

June 25
Sanford admits seeing his lover on a state-funded trip to Brazil and Argentina in June 2008. He pledges to pay back the state’s expenses for the Argentine leg of that trip.

June 26
Sanford goes back to work, holding a Cabinet meeting, during which he again apologizes. He again says he will not resign.

June 30
Sanford tells The Associated Press his Argentine lover is his soul mate, describes the affair as a tragic love story and admits he’s seen her more times than previously disclosed. Sanford says he’s trying to fall back in love with his wife and adds he has “crossed the line” with other women. Sanford also repays $3,300 of the more than $8,000 cost of his 2008 trip to South America.

July 1
Calls for Sanford to resign grow to a majority of state Senate Republicans after his additional confessions about his lover and other women. Some friends approach Sanford about stepping down, but the governor emphatically rejects the calls to quit.

July 2
A SLED inquiry clears Sanford of any criminal wrongdoing on his trips to see his lover. First lady Jenny Sanford issues a statement saying she is willing to forgive her husband.

July 3
Sanford leaves for a Florida vacation, joining his wife and children.

Monday
A majority of the S.C. Republican Party’s executive committee votes to censure Sanford. The action condemns his actions but does not call for the governor to resign. Sanford returns to work.

Thursday
A State House rally to urge Sanford to resign draws just 60 people.

This week
Sanford’s office is expected to release records, requested by media outlets, about the governor’s spending, communications and other subjects.

---

Road to impeachment

Barring additional revelations, Gov. Mark Sanford is unlikely to face impeachment. Here is what would have to happen for a South Carolina governor to be forced from office:

• The S.C. House of Representatives must act as the accusatory body, with at least one member requesting the governor be impeached. Two-thirds of representatives must agree the governor either has committed a “serious crime” or “serious misconduct.”

• There is no legal definition for either a “serious crime” or “serious misconduct.” It’s up to lawmakers to interpret.

• The state Senate then weighs in. Two-thirds of senators must agree with the House. If they do, the governor is removed from office.

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The GOP on Sanford

How key Republicans weighed in on the governor’s future

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham
Graham, who served in Congress with Sanford and is the godfather of one of his sons, has been one of Sanford’s chief defenders publicly. Graham spoke face to face with Sanford the day many Republicans were calling for him to step down.

U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint
DeMint, who also served with Sanford in Congress, expressed his disappointment with the governor and encouraged him to “do the right thing.” Even when pressed, DeMint would not define what action he considered “the right thing.” DeMint said he spoke to Sanford about his future but would not divulge details.

U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett
Barrett, who is running for governor, became the highest-ranking elected official to call for Sanford to resign. Barrett took his stand after Sanford’s Associated Press interview in which Sanford disclosed additional trips to see his Argentine lover and admitted “crossing the line” with other women.

S.C. Sen. Tom Davis
The Beaufort senator is a friend of Sanford’s and served as his chief of staff. Davis said Sanford should finish his term, basing his view on a SLED report that said the governor did not spend public money to see his mistress and on first lady Jenny Sanford’s willingness to forgive the governor.

Karen Floyd, S.C. Republican Party chairwoman
Floyd said publicly after Sanford admitted an affair that he should consider stepping down. After the state GOP executive committee voted to censure Sanford and not ask for his resignation, Floyd stood by the vote.

S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell
Harrell, who would have to engineer an impeachment effort, has not called for the governor to resign. Harrell is supporting legislation that would make clear when the governor must transfer power in his absence.

S.C. Senate President Pro-Tem Glenn McConnell
McConnell said Sanford has lost the support of the people needed to govern and should consider stepping down.

Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer
Bauer has said Sanford’s future is his choice. But friends of Bauer have called for the governor to step down.

---

3 reasons why calls for Gov. Mark Sanford to resign ultimately didn’t work

1. JENNY SANFORD: Gov. Mark Sanford’s wife, Jenny, stepped to his defense by publicly saying she was willing to forgive him and privately assuring key lawmakers the Sanfords could get past their problems while the governor finished his term.

2. NO CRIME: When state law enforcement officials found Sanford broke no laws, calls for the governor to resign slowed. Believing there would be no criminal charges and no additional embarrassments, Republican leaders looked anew at Sanford in week two of the scandal. They voted to censure the governor, condemning his actions. They did not call for him to resign.

3. NOT ENOUGH ANGRY REPUBLICANS: Sanford made it clear he planned to complete his term. So long as Republican leaders never spoke in a unified voice demanding Sanford resign, the governor knew he could not be forced out. Impeachment is a difficult process, and lawmakers are convinced Sanford would survive.

---

Copyright 2009 The State

http://www.thestate.com/local/story/861088.html [with comments]


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full Jenny Sanford statement (from http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0709/Jenny_willing_to_forgive_sez_its_up_to_SCians_whether_they_will.html [with comments]):

Columbia, S.C. —July 2, 2009 — The last week has been very painful for me, my family and for the people of South Carolina. However, throughout this terrible ordeal, the incredible outpouring of kindness, support, and prayer I've received from countless friends and folks I have never even met has been truly uplifting. I appreciate that more than I can say. Please know that my sons and I are doing fine, given the circumstances. We are surrounded by friends and family, and we will make it through this. I believe it is how we respond to the challenges we face in life, and what we learn from them, that is most telling about who we truly are.

There is no question that Mark's behavior is inexcusable. Actions have consequences and he will be dealing with those consequences for a long while. Trust has been broken and will need to be rebuilt. Mark will need to earn back that trust, first and foremost with his family, and also with the people of South Carolina.

The real issue now is one of forgiveness. I am willing to forgive Mark for his actions. We have been deeply disappointed in and even angry at Mark. The Bible says, "In your anger do not sin." (Psalm 4:4) In this situation, this speaks to the essence of forgiveness and the critical need to channel one's energy into positive steps that uphold the dignity of marriage and the family, and lead to reconciliation over time. My forgiveness is essential for us both to move on with our lives, with peace, in whatever direction that may take us.

Desmond Tutu said "forgiveness is the grace by which you enable the other person to get up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew." Forgiveness opens the door for Mark to begin to work privately, humbly and respectfully toward reconciliation with me. However, to achieve true reconciliation will take time, involve repentance, and will not be easy.

Mark showed a lack of judgment in his recent actions as governor. However, his far more egregious offenses were committed against God, the institutions of marriage and family, our boys and me. Mark has stated that his intent and determination is to save our marriage, and to make amends to the people of South Carolina. I hope he can make good on those intentions, and for the sake of our boys I leave the door open to it. In that spirit of forgiveness, it is up to the people and elected officials of South Carolina to decide whether they will give Mark another chance as well.


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also:

Sanford's Affair Might Have Jeopardized Top-Secret Clearance

July 11, 2009
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/washington-whispers/2009/07/11/sanfords-affair-might-have-jeopardized-top-secret-clearance.html [with comments]

[F6]

Jesus killed Mohammed:

The crusade for a Christian military

By Jeff Sharlet [ http://www.harpers.org/subjects/JeffSharlet ]
May 2009

When Sergeant Jeffery Humphrey and his squad of nine men, part of the 1/26 Infantry of the 1st Infantry Division, were assigned to a Special Forces compound in Samarra, he thought they had drawn a dream duty. “Guarding Special Forces, it was like Christmas,” he says. In fact, it was spring, 2004; and although Humphrey was a combat veteran of Kosovo and Iraq, the men to whom he was detailed, the 10th Special Forces Group, were not interested in grunts like him. They would not say what they were doing, and they used code names. They called themselves “the Faith element.” But they did not talk religion, which was fine with Humphrey.

An evenhanded Indianan with a precise turn of mind, Humphrey considered himself a no-nonsense soldier. His first duty that Easter Sunday was to make sure the roof watch was in place: a machine gunner, a man in a mortar pit, a soldier with a SAW (an automatic rifle on a bipod), and another with a submachine gun on loan from Special Forces. Together with two Bradley Fighting Vehicles on the ground and snipers on another roof, the watch covered the perimeter of the compound, a former elementary school overlooking the Tigris River.

Early that morning, a unit from the 109th National Guard Infantry dropped off their morning chow. With it came a holiday special—a video of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ [see http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=2790077 and preceding and following, also http://www.bettybowers.com/payback.html (. . .)] and a chaplain to sing the film’s praises, a gory cinematic sermon for an Easter at war. Humphrey ducked into the chow room to check it out. “It was the part where they’re killing Jesus, which is, I guess, pretty much the whole movie. Kind of turned my stomach.” He decided he’d rather burn trash.

He was returning from his first run to the garbage pit when the 109th came barreling back. Their five-ton—a supersized armored pickup—was rolling on rims, its tires flapping and spewing greasy black flames. “Came in on two wheels,” remembers one of Humphrey’s men, a machine gunner. On the ground behind it and in retreat before a furious crowd were more men from the 109th, laying down fire with their M-4s. Humphrey raced toward the five-ton as his roof shooters opened up, their big guns thumping above him. Later, when he climbed into the vehicle, the stink was overwhelming: of iron and gunpowder, blood and bullet casings. He reached down to grab a rifle, and his hand came up wet with brain.

Humphrey had been in Samarra for a month, and until that day his stay had been a quiet respite in one of the world’s oldest cities. Not long before, though, there had been a hint of trouble: a briefing in which his squad was warned that any soldier caught desecrating Islamic sites—Samarra is considered a holy city—would fall under “extreme penalty,” a category that can include a general court-martial and prison time. “I heard some guys were vandalizing mosques,” Humphrey says. “Spray-painting ’em with crosses.”

The rest of that Easter was spent under siege. Insurgents held off Bravo Company, which was called in to rescue the men in the compound. Ammunition ran low. A helicopter tried to drop more but missed. As dusk fell, the men prepared four Bradley Fighting Vehicles for a “run and gun” to draw fire away from the compound. Humphrey headed down from the roof to get a briefing. He found his lieutenant, John D. DeGiulio, with a couple of sergeants. They were snickering like schoolboys. They had commissioned the Special Forces interpreter, an Iraqi from Texas, to paint a legend across their Bradley’s armor, in giant red Arabic script.

“What’s it mean?” asked Humphrey.

“Jesus killed Mohammed,” one of the men told him. The soldiers guffawed. JESUS KILLED MOHAMMED was about to cruise into the Iraqi night.

The Bradley, a tracked “tank killer” armed with a cannon and missiles—to most eyes, indistinguishable from a tank itself—rolled out. The Iraqi interpreter took to the roof, bullhorn in hand. The sun was setting. Humphrey heard the keen of the call to prayer, then the crackle of the bullhorn with the interpreter answering—in Arabic, then in English for the troops, insulting the prophet. Humphrey’s men loved it. “They were young guys, you know?” says Humphrey. “They were scared.” A Special Forces officer stood next to the interpreter—“a big, tall, blond, grinning type,” says Humphrey.

“Jesus kill Mohammed!” chanted the interpreter. “Jesus kill Mohammed!”

A head emerged from a window to answer, somebody fired on the roof, and the Special Forces man directed a response from an MK-19 grenade launcher. “Boom,” remembers Humphrey. The head and the window and the wall around it disappeared.

“Jesus kill Mohammed!” Another head, another shot. Boom. “Jesus kill Mohammed!” Boom. In the distance, Humphrey heard the static of AK fire and the thud of RPGs. He saw a rolling rattle of light that looked like a firefight on wheels. “Each time I go into combat I get closer to God,” DeGiulio would later say. He thought The Passion had been a sign that he would survive. The Bradley seemed to draw fire from every doorway. There couldn’t be that many insurgents in Samarra, Humphrey thought. Was this a city of terrorists? Humphrey heard Lieutenant DeGiulio reporting in from the Bradley’s cabin, opening up on all doorways that popped off a round, responding to rifle fire—each Iraqi household is allowed one gun—with 25mm shells powerful enough to smash straight through the front of a house and out the back wall.

Humphrey was stunned. He’d been blown off a tower in Kosovo and seen action in the drug war, but he’d never witnessed a maneuver so fundamentally stupid.

The men on the roof thought otherwise. They thought the lieutenant was a hero, a kamikaze on a suicide mission to bring Iraqis the American news:


JESUS KILLED MOHAMMED.

*

When Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office in January, he inherited a military not just drained by a two-front war overseas but fighting a third battle on the home front, a subtle civil war over its own soul. On one side are the majority of military personnel, professionals who regardless of their faith or lack thereof simply want to get their jobs done; on the other is a small but powerful movement of Christian soldiers concentrated in the officer corps. There’s Major General Johnny A. Weida, who as commandant at the Air Force Academy made its National Day of Prayer services exclusively Christian, and also created a code for evangelical cadets: whenever Weida said, “Airpower,” they were to respond “Rock Sir!”—a reference to Matthew 7:25. (The general told them that when non-evangelical cadets asked about the mysterious call-and-response, they should share the gospel.) There’s Major General Robert Caslen—commander of the 25th Infantry Division, a.k.a. “Tropic Lightning”—who in 2007 was found by a Pentagon inspector general’s report to have violated military ethics by appearing in uniform, along with six other senior Pentagon officers, in a video for the Christian Embassy, a fundamentalist ministry to Washington elites. There’s Lieutenant General Robert Van Antwerp, the Army chief of engineers, who has also lent his uniform to the Christian cause, both in a Trinity Broadcasting Network tribute to Christian soldiers called Red, White, and Blue Spectacular and at a 2003 Billy Graham rally—televised around the world on the Armed Forces Network—at which he declared the baptisms of 700 soldiers under his command evidence of the Lord’s plan to “raise up a godly army.”

What men such as these have fomented is a quiet coup within the armed forces: not of generals encroaching on civilian rule but of religious authority displacing the military’s once staunchly secular code. Not a conspiracy but a cultural transformation, achieved gradually through promotions and prayer meetings, with personal faith replacing protocol according to the best intentions of commanders who conflate God with country. They see themselves not as subversives but as spiritual warriors—“ambassadors for Christ in uniform,” according to Officers’ Christian Fellowship; “government paid missionaries,” according to Campus Crusade’s Military Ministry.

As a whole, the military is actually slightly less religious than the general population: 20 percent of the roughly 1.4 million active-duty personnel checked off a box for a 2008 Department of Defense survey that says “no religious preference,” compared with the 16.1 percent of Americans who describe themselves as “unaffiliated.” These ambivalent soldiers should not be confused with the actively irreligious, though. Only half of one percent of the military accepts the label “atheist” or “agnostic.” (Jews are even scarcer, accounting for only one servicemember in three hundred; Muslims are just one in four hundred.) Around 22 percent, meanwhile, identify themselves as affiliated with evangelical or Pentecostal denominations. But that number is misleading. It leaves out those attached to the traditional mainline denominations—about 7 percent of the military—who describe themselves as evangelical; George W. Bush, for instance, is a Methodist. Among the 19 percent of military members who are Roman Catholics, meanwhile, there is a small but vocal subset who tend politically to affiliate with conservative evangelicals. And then there is the 20 percent of the military who describe themselves simply as “Christian,” a category that encompasses both those who give God little thought and the many evangelicals who reject denominational affiliation as divisive of the Body of Christ. “I don’t like ‘religion,’” a fundamentalist evangelical major told me. “That’s what put my savior on the cross. The Pharisees.”

Within the fundamentalist front in the officer corps, the best organized group is Officers’ Christian Fellowship, with 15,000 members active at 80 percent of military bases and an annual growth rate, in recent years, of 3 percent. Founded during World War II, OCF was for most of its history concerned mainly with the spiritual lives of those who sought it out, but since 9/11 it has moved in a more militant direction. According to the group’s current executive director, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Bruce L. Fister, the “global war on terror”—to which Obama has committed 17,000 new troops in Afghanistan—is “a spiritual battle of the highest magnitude.” As jihad has come to connote violence, so spiritual war has moved closer to actual conflict, “continually confronting an implacable, powerful foe who hates us and eagerly seeks to destroy us,” declares “The Source of Combat Readiness,” an OCF Scripture study prepared on the eve of the Iraq War.

But another OCF Bible study, “Mission Accomplished,” warns that victory abroad does not mean the war is won at home. “If Satan cannot succeed with threats from the outside, he will seek to destroy from within,” asserts the study, a reference to “fellow countrymen” both in biblical times and today who practice “spiritual adultery.” “Mission Accomplished” takes as its text Nehemiah 1–6, the story of the “wallbuilder” who rebuilt the fortifications around Jerusalem. An outsider might misinterpret the wall metaphor as a sign of respect for separation of church and state, but in contemporary fundamentalist thinking the story stands for just the opposite: a wall within which church and state are one. “With the wall completed the people could live an integrated life,” the study argues. “God was to be Lord of all or not Lord at all.” So it is today, “Mission Accomplished” continues, proposing that before military Christians can complete their wall, they must bring this “Lord of all” to the entire armed forces. “We will need to press ahead obediently,” the study concludes, “not allowing the opposition, all of which is spearheaded by Satan, to keep us from the mission of reclaiming territory for Christ in the military.”

*

Every man and woman in the military swears an oath to defend the Constitution. To most of them, evangelicals included, that oath is as sacred as Scripture. For the fundamentalist front, though, the Constitution is itself a blueprint for a Christian nation. “The idea of separation of church and state?” an Air Force Academy senior named Bruce Hrabak says. “There’s this whole idea in America that it’s in the Constitution, but it’s not.”1

If the fundamentalist front were to have a seminary, it would be the Air Force Academy, a campus of steel and white marble wedged into the right angle formed by the Great Plains and the Rockies. In 2005, the academy became the subject of scandal because of its culture of Christian proselytization. Today, the Air Force touts the institution as a model of reform. But after the school brought in as speakers for a mandatory assembly three Christian evangelists who proclaimed that the only solution to terrorism was to “kill Islam,” I decided to see what had changed. Not much, several Christian cadets told me. “Now,” Hrabak said, “we’re underground.” Then he winked.

“There’s a spiritual world, and oftentimes what happens in the physical world is representative of what’s happening in the spiritual,” an academy senior (a “firstie,” in the school parlance) named Jon Butcher told me one night at New Life, a nearby megachurch popular with cadets.2 Butcher is wiry and laconic, a former ski bum from Ohio who went to the academy to be closer to the slopes. “For me, it was always like, a little bit of God, a little bit of drinking, a little bit of girls.” He prayed for admission to the academy, though, pledging to God that he’d change his ways if he got in. As far as he was concerned, God delivered; so Butcher did, too, quitting alcohol and committing himself to chastity.

But that commitment took him only so far. He was pure, but was he holy? He needed direction. He found it in Romans 13: “There is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.” It was like a blessing on the academy’s hierarchical system, and Butcher took it to heart, turning his body and spirit over to the guidance of older Christian cadets. A Christian, he explained in full earnestness, “is someone who chooses to be a slave, essentially.” He took time off to be a missionary, and when he returned he realized God had already given him a mission field. “God has told me to become an infantry officer,” Butcher said, explaining his decision to transfer from the Air Force to the Army upon graduation. A pilot has only his plane to talk to; an infantry officer, said Butcher, has men to mold, Iraqis to convert. “Everything is a form of ministry for me,” Butcher said. “There is no separation. I’m doing what God has called me to do, to know Him and to make Him known.”

At the academy, Butcher made his God known by leading what one member described to me as an underground all-male prayer group. I was allowed to attend but not to take notes as around twenty-five cadets discussed lust and missionary work, the girlfriends whose touches they feared and the deceptions necessary for missionary work in China, where foreign evangelism is illegal. Butcher asked me not to disclose the group’s name; those who do believe in separation of church and state might interfere with its goal of turning the world’s most elite war college into its most holy one, a seminary with courses in carpet bombing. He couldn’t imagine military training as anything other than a mission from God. “How,” he asked, “in the midst of pulling a trigger and watching somebody die, in that instant are you going to be confident that that’s something God told you to do?” His answer was stark. “In this world, there are forces of good and evil. There’s angels and there’s demons, you know? And Satan hates what’s holy.”

Following the 2005 religion scandal at the academy, its commander, Lieutenant General John Rosa, confessed to a meeting of the Anti-Defamation League that his “whole organization” had religion problems. It “keeps me awake at night,” he said, predicting that restoring constitutional principles to the academy would take at least six years. Then he retired to become president of the Citadel. To address the problems, the Air Force brought in Lieutenant General John Regni, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a dome of hair streaked black and silver, the very picture of an officer, calm and in command. When I spoke to Regni, I began our phone conversation with what I thought was a softball, an opportunity for the general to wax constitutional about First Amendment freedoms. “How do you see the balance between the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause?” I asked.

There was a long pause. Civilians might reasonably plead ignorance, but not a general who has sworn on his life to defend these words: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

“I have to write those things down,” Regni finally answered. “What did you say those constitutional things were again?”

Sometime early this summer, a general named Mike Gould will succeed Regni as head of the academy. A former football player there, Gould granted himself the nickname “Coach” after a brief stint in that capacity early in his career. Coach Gould enjoys public speaking, and he’s famous for his “3-F” mantra: “Faith, Family, Fitness.” At the Pentagon, a former senior officer who served under Gould told me, the general was so impressed by a presentation Pastor Rick Warren gave to senior officers that he sent an email to his 104 subordinates in which he advised them to read and live by Warren’s book The Purpose-Driven Life.3 “People thought it was weird,” recalls the former officer, a defense contractor who requested anonymity for fear of losing government business. “But no one wants to show their ass to the general.”

*

Christian fundamentalism, like all fundamentalisms, is a narcissistic faith, concerned most of all with the wrongs suffered by the righteous and the purification of their ranks. “Under the rubric of free speech and the twisted idea of separation of church and state,” reads a promotion for a book called Under Orders: A Spiritual Handbook for Military Personnel, by Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William McCoy, “there has evolved more and more an anti-Christian bias in this country.” In Under Orders, McCoy seeks to counter that alleged bias by making the case for the necessity of religion—preferably Christian—for a properly functioning military unit. Lack of belief or the wrong beliefs, he writes, will “bring havoc to what needs cohesion and team confidence.”

McCoy’s manifesto comes with an impressive endorsement: “_Under Orders _should be in every rucksack for those moments when Soldiers need spiritual energy,” reads a blurb from General David Petraeus, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq until last September, after which he moved to the top spot at U.S. Central Command, in which position he now runs U.S. operations from Egypt to Pakistan. When the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) demanded an investigation of Petraeus’s endorsement—an apparent violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, not to mention the Bill of Rights— Petraeus claimed that his recommendation was supposed to be private, a communication from one Christian officer to another.

“He doesn’t deny that he wrote it,” says Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, president of MRFF. “It’s just, ‘Oops, I didn’t mean for the public to find out.’ And what about our enemies? He’s promoting this unconstitutional Christian exceptionalism at precisely the same time we’re fighting Islamic fundamentalists who are telling their soldiers that America is waging a modern-day crusade. That _is _a crusade.”

Petraeus’s most vigorous defense came last August from the recently retired three-star general William “Jerry” Boykin—a founding member of the Army’s Delta Force and an ordained minister—during an event held at Fort Bragg to promote his own book, Never Surrender: A Soldier’s Journey to the Crossroads of Faith and Freedom. “Here comes a guy named Mikey Weinstein trashing Petraeus,” he told a crowd of 150 at the base’s Airborne and Special Forces Museum, “because he endorsed a book that’s just trying to help soldiers. And this makes clear what [Weinstein’s] real agenda is, which is not to help this country win a war on terror.”

“It’s satanic,” called out a member of the audience.

“Yes,” agreed Boykin. “It’s demonic.”4

*

Mikey Weinstein, for his part, doesn’t mind being called demonic by officers like Boykin. “I consider him to be a traitor to the oath that he swore, which was to the United States Constitution and not to his fantastical demon-and-angel dominionism. He’s a charlatan. The fact that he refers to me as demon-possessed so he can sell more books makes me want to take a Louisville Slugger to his kneecaps, his big fat belly, and his head. He is a very, very bad man.” Mikey—nobody, not even his many enemies, calls him Weinstein—likes fighting, literally. In 1973, as a “doolie” (a freshman at the Air Force Academy) he punched an officer who accused him of fabricating anti-Semitic threats he’d received. In 2005, after the then-head of the National Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard, declared that people like Mikey made it hard for him to “defend Jewish causes,” Mikey challenged the pastor to a public boxing match, with proceeds to go to charity. (Haggard didn’t take him up on it.) He relishes a rumor that he’s come to be known among some at the Pentagon as the Joker, after Heath Ledger’s nihilistic embodiment of Batman’s nemesis. But he draws a distinction: “Don’t confuse my description of chaos with advocacy of chaos.”

A 1977 graduate of the academy, Mikey served ten years’ active duty as a JAG before becoming assistant general counsel in the Reagan White House (where he helped defend the administration during the Iran-Contra scandal) and then general counsel for Ross Perot. It is a surprising background for someone who has taken on the role of constitutional conscience of the military, a man determined to force accountability on its fundamentalist front through an assault of lawsuits and media appearances. Fifty-four years old, Mikey is built like a pit bull, with short legs, big shoulders, a large, shaved head, and a crinkled brow between dark, darting eyes. He likes to say he lives at “Mikey speed,” an endless succession of eighteen-hour days, both on the road and at the foundation’s headquarters—that is, his sprawling adobe ranch house, set on a hill outside Albuquerque and guarded by two oversized German shepherds and a five-foot-six former Marine bodyguard called Shorty. MRFF draws on a network of lawyers, publicists, and fund-raisers, but its core is just Mikey, plus a determined researcher named Chris Rodda, author of an unfinished multivolume debunking of Christian-right historical claims entitled Liars for Jesus.

Mikey has won some victories, such as when he forced the Department of Defense to investigate the Christian Embassy video, and intimidated the Air Force Academy into adopting classes in religious diversity, and harassed any number of base commanders into reining in subordinates who view their authority as a license to proselytize. Every time he wins a battle or takes to the television to plead his cause, more troops learn about his foundation and seek its help. He keeps his cell phone on vibrate while he’s exercising on his elliptical machine; he likes to boast that he’ll interrupt sex to take a call from any one of the 11,400 active-duty military members he describes as the foundation’s “clients.”5 He hires lawyers for them, pulls strings, bullies their commanders, tells them they’re heroes. He offered to let one G.I., facing threats of violence because of his atheism, move in with his family.

*

But as Mikey’s client base grows, so too do the ranks of his enemies. The picture window in his living room has been shot out twice, and last summer he woke to find a swastika and a cross scrawled on his door. Since he launched MRFF four years ago, he has accumulated an impressive collection of hate mail. Some of it is earnest: “You are costing lives by dividing military personnel and undermining troops,” reads one missive. “Their blood is on your hands.” Much of it is juvenile: “you little bald-headed fag,” reads an email Mikey received after an appearance on CNN, “what the fuck are you doing with an organization of this title when the purpose of your group is not to encourage religious freedom, but to DENY religious freedom?” Quite a bit of it is anti-Semitic: “Once again, the Oy Vey! crowd whines. This jew used to be an Air Force lawyer and got the email”—a solicitation by Air Force General Jack Catton for campaign donations to put “more Christian men” in Congress, which Mikey made public—“just one more example of why filthy, hook-nosed jews should be purged from our society.”

The abuse has become a regular feature of Mikey’s routine in public appearances. There’s a sense in which Mikey likes it—not the threats, but the evidence. “We’ve had dead animals on the porch. Beer bottles, feces thrown at the house. I don’t even think about it. I view it as if I was Barry Bonds about to go to bat in Dodger Stadium and people are booing. You want a piece of me? Get in line, buddy. Pack a lunch.” Mikey sees things in terms of enemies, and he likes to know he’s rattling his.

Central to Mikey’s worldview are two beatings he suffered as an eighteen-year-old doolie at the academy, retaliations for notifying his superiors about a series of anti-Semitic notes he’d received. Both beatings left him unconscious. Mikey put them behind him, graduating with honors; but his anger reignited in 2004, when his son Curtis, then a doolie himself, told Mikey he planned to beat the shit out of the next cadet—or officer—who called him a “fucking Jew.” In 2005, when he created the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, he ornamented its board with a galaxy of retired generals, the stars on their shoulders meant to make clear that the foundation’s enemy is not the military. His enemy, he says, is “weaponized Christianity,” and his foundation is a weapon too: “We will lay down withering fire and open sucking chest wounds. This country is facing a pervasive and pernicious pattern and practice of unconstitutional rape of the religious rights of our armed forces members,” he says. He calls this “soul rape.”

It’s a strong term that at first sounds like typical over-the-top Mikey, but his struggle goes to the very heart of America’s First Amendment freedoms, dating back to the seventeenth century and Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island [see (items linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39118152 and preceding]. Williams was a devout Christian, but based on his encounters with Native American leaders, whom he deemed honest men, and his dealings with the leaders of the Massachusetts colony, who sent him into exile, he concluded that outward religion—the piety of the Puritans—was no guarantee of inner virtue. What mattered most, he thought, was the ability to seek the good. So if the state restricted that search (through mandatory prayer, for instance, or discrimination against minority faiths), it violated the most basic freedom, that of individual conscience. Without the freedom to choose one’s own beliefs, Williams believed, no other freedom is really possible. Freedom of religion is thus bound to freedom from religion.

“In the military,” Mikey told me one night in Albuquerque, “many constitutional rights that we as civilians enjoy are severely abridged in order to serve a higher goal: provide good order and discipline in order to protect the whole panoply of constitutional rights for the rest of us.” One of those rights is free speech: a soldier in uniform can’t endorse a political candidate, advertise a product, or proselytize. That rule is for the good of the public—no one wants men with guns telling them whom to vote for—and for the military itself. An officer can tell a soldier what to do, but not what to believe; conscience is its own order.

*

The evangelical transformation of the military began during the Cold War, in a new American “Great Awakening” that has only accelerated across the decades, making the United States one of the most religious nations in the world. We are also among the most religiously diverse, but as the number of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and adherents of hundreds of other traditions has grown, American evangelicalism has entrenched, tightening its hold on the institutions that conservative evangelicals consider most American—that is, Christian.

“It was Vietnam which really turned the tide,” writes Anne C. Loveland, author of the only book-length study of the evangelical wave within the armed forces, American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 1942–1993. Until the Vietnam War, it was the traditionally moderate mainline Protestant denominations (Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians), together with the Catholic Church, that dominated the religious life of the military. But as leading clergymen in these denominations spoke out against the war, evangelicals who saw the struggle in Vietnam as God’s work rushed in. In 1967, the Assemblies of God, the biggest Pentecostal denomination in the world, formally dropped its long-standing commitment to pacifism, embracing worldly war as a counterpart to spiritual struggle. Other fundamentalists took from Vietnam the lessons of guerrilla combat and applied them to the spiritual fight through a tactic they called infiltration, filling the ranks of secular institutions with undercover missionaries.

“Evangelicals looked at the military and said, ‘This is a mission field,’” explains Captain MeLinda Morton, a Lutheran pastor and former missile-launch commander who until 2005 was a staff chaplain at the Air Force Academy and has since studied and written about the chaplaincy. “They wanted to send their missionaries to the military, and for the military itself to become missionaries to the world.”

The next turning point occurred in the waning days of the Reagan Administration, when regulatory revisions helped create the fundamentalist stronghold in today’s military. A long-standing rule had apportioned chaplains according to the religious demographics of the military as a whole (i.e., if surveys showed that 10 percent of soldiers were Presbyterian, then 10 percent of the chaplains would be Presbyterian) but required that all chaplains be trained to minister to troops of any faith. Starting in 1987, however, Protestant denominations were lumped together simply as “Protestant”; moreover, the Pentagon began accrediting hundreds of evangelical and Pentecostal “endorsing agencies,” allowing graduates of fundamentalist Bible colleges—which often train clergy to view those from other faiths as enemies of Christ—to fill up nearly the entire allotment for Protestant chaplains. Today, more than two thirds of the military’s 2,900 active-duty chaplains are affiliated with evangelical or Pentecostal denominations. “In my experience,” Morton says, “eighty percent of the Protestant chaplaincy self-identifies as conservative and/or evangelical.”

The most zealous among the new generation of fundamentalist chaplains didn’t join to serve the military; they came to save its soul. One of these zealots is Lieutenant Colonel Gary Hensley, division chaplain for the 101st Airborne and, until recently, the chief Army chaplain for all of Afghanistan. Last year, a filmmaker named Brian Hughes met Hensley when he traveled to Bagram Air Field to make a documentary about chaplains, a tribute of sorts to the chaplain who had counseled him—without regard for religion—when Hughes was a frightened young airman during the Gulf War. Military personnel forfeit their rights to legal and medical privacy; chaplains are the only people they can turn to with problems too sensitive to take up the chain of command, anything from corruption to a crisis of courage. When Hughes went to Bagram, he was looking for chaplains like the one who’d helped him get through his war. Instead, he found Hensley.

In the raw footage Hughes shot [see http://enduringamerica.com/tag/gary-hensley/ , also http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/scahill/139824/al_jazeera_strikes_back_at_pentagon,_releases_unedited_footage_of_u.s._soldiers'_'bible_study'_in_afghanistan/ and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-scahill/us-soldiers-in-afghanista_b_195639.html ], Hensley strips down to a white t-shirt beneath his uniform to preach an afternoon service in Bagram’s main chapel. On the t-shirt’s breast is a logo for an evangelical military ministry called Chapel NeXt, the “t” in which is an oversized cross slashing down over a map of Afghanistan. “Got your seat belts on?” Hensley hollers. He’s a lean man with thinning, slicked-back gray hair who carries a small paunch like a package, the size and shape of a turtle’s shell. “The Word will not fail!” he shouts. “Now is the time! In the fullness of time”— Hensley leans forward, two fingers on his glasses, his voice dipping to a growl—“God. Sent. His. Son. Whoo!” Then, as if addressing 33 million Muslim Afghans and their belief that Muhammad was a prophet as Jesus before him, he shouts, “There is no one else to come! There is no new revelation! There is no new religion! Jesus is it!” Amen, says the crowd. “If He ain’t it, let’s all go home!”

Hensley brings it back down. “I’m from the Jesus Movement,” he says, presenting himself as a prophet born of American history: “Haight-Ashbury. Watergate. Woodstock. And out of that mess? Came Hensley, glory to God!” He goes on to quote (without attribution) the British theologian C. H. Dodd: “By virtue of the resurrection,” he says, “Jesus was exalted to the right hand of the Father and is the messianic head of the New Israel.” Dodd was no fundamentalist; his ideas are still used by some liberal Christians to combat the apocalyptic fervor of fundamentalism. Not so with Hensley, who takes Dodd’s uncredited words as a battle cry. “That’s us!” he cries. “We are Israel. We are the New Israel!”

At this point, says Hughes, the Army media liaison sitting next to him put his head in his hands.

“There will come a day when there will be no more Holy Spirit!” Hensley shouts, hopping up and down on the stage, his speech no longer directed toward the pews but as if to some greater audience. “When the church shall be raptured up in the skyyy! And we shall be with Hiiim! And all of us shall be with Him!” He slows to an emphatic whisper like a warning: “Glory to God, that’s our message!” A little bit louder now. “The messianic Jesus is comin’ back!” Louder still. “And I expect him to come back before we go to the mess hall, you know that?” And the soldiers say, Amen.

*

I found Lieutenant Colonel Bob Young after MRFF reported on an evangelical reality program, shown on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, that included tape of Colonel Young telling two wandering missionaries about his plan to pray for rain in Afghanistan. I reached him at home in Georgia late one evening. He said he was going to sit on his porch and look at the moon. In the background, I heard dogs barking. He talked for three hours, much of it about what he’d seen in the combat hospital under his command at Kandahar Air Base.

“Kids getting burned,” he recalled. “Bad guys floating in on helicopters. You wouldn’t know who they were.” The base hospital treated 7,000 Afghans that year, and Young, commander of the Army’s 325th Forward Support Battalion, lingered there, watching the bodies. “I want to tell you this. Triage area, guy strapped into gurney, Afghan guy. No shirt, skinny as a rail, sinewy muscle. Restraints on his ankles, his feet, dude is strapped into a wheelchair. He’s got a plastic shield in front of his face because he’s spitting.” A doctor wants to sedate him. “I say, ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong with him. The guy has demons.’” Young decides to pray over him. “Couple minutes later the general’s son-in-law—the Afghan general’s son-in-law, our translator—comes in. I said, ‘What’s wrong with this guy?’ He says, ‘How do you say in English? He has spirits.’ I say, ‘Doc, there’s your second opinion!’”

On the phone, Young laughed, a harsh “Ha!” Then his voice broke. “I’m telling you, it’s real. Evil is real.”

In the Christian reality show, Young extended that thought to the weather. “Interestingly,” he says, “the drought has been in effect since the Taliban took over.” Young has a high mouth and a low brow, his features concentrated between big ears. “People of America,” he tells the camera, “pray that God sends the rain to Kandahar, and they’ll know that our God answers prayers.”

I asked Young if he wanted to contextualize these remarks, since they seemed, on the surface, to radically transcend his mission as a soldier. “Okay!” he said. “Are you ready?” I said I was.

He told me to Google Kandahar, rain, January 2005. The result he was looking for was an article in Stars and Stripes entitled “Rainfall May Signal Beginning of the End to Three-Year Drought in Afghanistan.” Three and a quarter inches in just two days.

“That’s some real rain,” I admitted.

“That’s what I’m saying, brother!”

I asked him about an allegation made to MRFF by a captain who served under Young: that Young had made remarks that led him to be relieved of his command. It was true that he had been relieved of command, he admitted, but he had appealed and won. And the remarks? “All that was, I was speaking in reference to inner-city problems and whatnot. I said that the irony is that it would be better for a black to be a slave in America—I’m thinking now historically—and know Christ, than to be free now and not know Christ.”

With that cleared up, I then asked Young about another of the captain’s allegations: that he had given a presentation on Christianity to some Afghan warlords. Absolutely not, he said. It was a PowerPoint about America. He emailed it to me as we spoke, and then asked me to open it so he could share with me the same presentation he had given “Gulalli” and “Shirzai.” Since it had been President’s Day, Young had begun with a picture of George Washington, who, he explained, had been protected by God; his evidence was that, following a battle in the French and Indian War, when thirty-two bullet holes were found in Washington’s cloak, the general himself escaped unscathed. Young wanted to show the Afghans that nation-building was a long and difficult journey. “I did stress the fact that in America we believe our rights come from God, not from government. Truth is truth, and there’s no benefit in lying about it.”

There were slides about the Wright brothers, the moon landing, and NASCAR—Jeff Gordon, “a Christian, by the way,” had just won the Daytona 500. And then, the culmination of American history: the twin towers, blooming orange the morning of September 11, 2001. Embedded in the slide show was a video Young titled “Forgiveness,” a collage of stills, people running and bodies falling. Swelling behind the images was Celine Dion’s hit ballad from Titanic, “My Heart Will Go On.” Following the video was a slide of the Bush family, beneath the words: “I believe that God has inspired in every heart the desire for freedom.”

*

At the heart of Young’s religion is suffering: his own. Before his battalion deployed for Afghanistan, he tried to armor them with prayer. To do so, he offered up his own testimony, the text that is in truth at the heart of his religion. He told them there were two kinds of phone calls a soldier in a combat zone was likely to encounter. One was from his wife, calling to say she was raising him up in prayer. The other was also from his wife, calling to say she was leaving him. Young had experienced both calls. In 1993, he was a Ranger, a member of the Army’s most elite special forces, away on deployment to Korea. He asked his best friend, the best man at his wedding, to watch over his wife and his two toddlers. And when that worst of all calls came—his wife, telling him the car was packed, that she, his kids, and his friend were leaving—that was when Young found the Lord.

First, he tried to respond like an officer. “Military course of action development,” he lectured himself. “Course of action one: kill him. Two: kill them both. Three: kill myself.” Somebody, he decided, had to die. In the end, somebody did: Young, to the flesh. Raised nominally Catholic, he had never read Scripture. Now, every page seemed to speak to him. I can’t go on, he thought. He opened his Bible and found Matthew 6:34. Do not worry about tomorrow. An eye for an eye, Young thought, then flipped the pages: Love your enemies. I have nothing to go home to, he thought, and then he came to Mark. _Let us go over to the other side. _They did, in a ship, and “a great windstorm arose,” Young read, the murder in his mind subsiding as the story overcame him. “And then Jesus said, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.”

There is a modesty inherent in evangelicalism’s preference for personal stories, for every soul’s version of “I was lost, but now I’m found.” In a Protestant church without rank or reward, that story is democratic, radically so; my testimony is as important as yours, the poor man’s tale just as powerful as that of the rich man. But the marriage of evangelicalism to the military ethos turns public confession into projection, the creation of what the military calls a command climate. It is one thing for your neighbor in the pews to tell you that he was blind and now he sees; it is another for such vision to be described by your commanding officer.

Young has been a Christian soldier ever since that terrible phone call. The tension between war and faith does not disturb him. “We are to live with anticipation and expectation of His imminent return,” he told me. Look at the signs, said Young: nuclear Iran, economic collapse, President Obama’s decision to “unleash science” upon helpless embryos. He seemed to feel that the military was now the only safe place to be. “In the military, homosexuality is illegal. I don’t want to get into all the particulars of ‘Don’t ask,’ but you can’t act on homosexual feelings. And adultery is illegal. Really, arguably, the military is the last American institution that tries to uphold Christian values. It’s the easiest place in America to be a Christian.”

*

In the weeks following Obama’s election, Mikey says, he almost went to Washington. He met with campaign staffers, submitted plans, gathered endorsements from powerful insiders. His dream was a post at the Pentagon from which he could prosecute the most egregious offenders. It didn’t seem entirely out of the realm of possibility. He could have been pitched as another gesture of bipartisanship, since Mikey is a lifelong Republican who probably would have voted for John McCain if, back in 2004, his sons hadn’t run afoul of the Air Force Academy’s burgeoning spirit of evangelism—a culture that McCain, hardly a friend to fundamentalism, showed no interest in challenging this time around.

Another veteran serving in the Senate, who asked that he not be named so as not to compromise his close connections to today’s top officers, offers a variation on Captain Morton’s analysis of the military’s turn toward religion. Although the military was integrated before much of the United States, he points out, it almost split along racial lines, particularly in the last days of Vietnam. If the military was to rebuild itself, the Southern white men at the heart of its warrior culture had to come to an understanding of themselves based on something other than skin color. Many, says the senator, turned toward religion, particularly fundamentalist evangelical Christianity—a tradition that, despite its particularly potent legacy of racism, reoriented itself during the post–civil rights era as a religion of “reconciliation” between the races, a faith that would come to define itself in the early 1990s with the image of white men hugging black men, tears all around, at Promise Keeper rallies. “They replaced race with religion,” says the senator. “The principle remains the same—an identity built on being separate from a society viewed as weak and corrupt.”

For decades, the military built a sense of solidarity out of a singular purpose, the Cold War struggle between free markets and state-planned economies—the shining city on a hill versus the evil empire. In that fight, pluralism, racial or religious, was ultimately on our side; and it meshed neatly with ideologies that might otherwise be challengers, easily subsuming both nationalism and fundamentalism, with Communism presented as the dark alternative should we fail to unite. Fundamentalism thrived not so much in opposition to the liberal state as in tandem with it, a neat, black-and-white theological correlate to a foreign policy—a vision of America’s place in the world, our purpose, you might say—embraced more or less across the mainstream political spectrum.

The end of the Cold War deprived militant evangelicals of that clarity. Absent a clear purpose, a common foe, pluralism itself began to look to some like the enemy. The emergence of “radical Islam” as the object of a new Cold War only complicated the matter. Rather than revealing a new enemy for us all to share, the idea of a monolithic radical Islam fractured pluralism from left to right. Many liberals abandoned even their rhetorical commitments to liberty of conscience, while the very conservatives who had favored arming militant Islamists since the Eisenhower Administration concluded that their universal embrace of religion in the abstract may have been naive. Perhaps pluralism—or at least the Cold War variety that sustained the rise of American empire in the second half of the twentieth century—was nothing but propaganda after all.

Today, fundamentalism, based as it is on a vigorous assertion of narrow and exclusive claims to truth, can no longer justify common cause with secularism. In its principal battle, the front lines are not in Iraq or Afghanistan but right here, where evangelical militants must wage spiritual war against their own countrymen. In a lecture for OCF titled “Fighting the War on Spiritual Terrorism,” Army Lieutenant Colonel Greg E. Metz gar explained that Christian soldiers must always consider themselves behind enemy lines, even within the ranks, because every unsaved member of the military is a potential agent of “spiritual terrorism.” Even secularists with the best intentions may be part of this fifth column, Air Force Brigadier General Donald C. Wurster told a 2007 assembly of chaplains, noting that “the unsaved have no realization of their unfortunate alliance with evil.” What is the nature of this evil? Some conservative evangelicals call it “postmodernism.” What they mean is the very idea of diversity, its egalitarianism—the conviction that my beliefs have as much right to speak in the public square as do yours; that truth, in a democracy, is a mediated affair.

Evangelicalism, the more zealous the better, is an ingenious solution, a mirror image of pluralism that comes with a built-in purpose. It is available to everybody. Its basic rules are easily learned. It merges militancy with love, celebrating the ferocity of spirit necessary for a warrior and the mild amiability required to stay sane within a rigid hierarchy. It’s a populist religion—anyone can talk to the top man—on a vertical axis, an implicit rank system of “spiritual maturity” that runs from “Baby Christians” of all ages straight up to the ultimate commander in chief.

Mikey Weinstein did not get his Pentagon job. In fact, the generals whom Mikey thought would face a reckoning under a Democratic administration remain in place or in line for promotion. Not only did Obama keep on Robert Gates as defense secretary; he retained the secretary of the Army, Pete Geren—another star of the Christian Embassy video, who also, in commencement remarks at West Point last year, characterized America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as struggles for religious freedom against the “darkness and oppression” of radical Islam—and also appointed as his national security adviser the retired Marine general James Jones, a regular on the prayer breakfast circuit. Nobody believes the new president shares Bush’s religious sentiments, but clearly he is willing to shave constitutional protections in exchange for evangelical peace. The new president appears to have adopted a hands-off approach not just to religion in the military but to the very relationship between church and state.

*

The Air Force Academy chapel is the most popular man-made tourist attraction in Colorado, seventeen silver daggers rising above campus, veined with stained glass that suffuses the space inside with a violet and orange glow. But when one of the academy’s public-relations officers takes me on a tour, it’s empty. Very few cadets worship there anymore. Instead, they meet in classrooms and dorm rooms, at mountain retreats, and at the numerous megachurches that surround the academy.

One of the most popular services, called The Mill, takes place on Friday nights at New Life, in a giant, permanent tent that not long after academy dinnertime fills with fake fog and power chords and more than a thousand men and women ranging in age from their teens to their early twenties. I attended one Friday night in the company of Bruce Hrabak, the cadet who’d told me there was no separation of church and state in the Constitution. Broad-shouldered and broad-smiled, with color in his cheeks and excitable dusk-blue eyes, Hrabak says he’s at the academy both of his own free will and according to the strict Christian doctrine of “predestination,” that is, destiny chosen by God. It is this paradoxical mix, he explains, that allows him to serve both as an officer and as a missionary for the “Great Commission,” the evangelical belief that Christians must spread the Gospel to all nations. The academy, he explains, is a step on his spiritual journey.

The sermon at The Mill was painful—the pastor’s wife had recently delivered a stillborn baby, and he spoke in raw, awful terms about suffering and theodicy, the age-old question of why a loving God permits bad things to happen to good people. It is one of the central dilemmas of the Christian faith, and its persistence, its resistance to easy answers, is what has made Christianity the forge of so much of the world’s great art and philosophy. By the end of this hour-long service, though, everything turned out for the best; even the dead baby had been shoehorned into God’s inscrutable plan.

That cheered Hrabak up. Over dinner afterward, he told me he believed that all suffering, that which he endures and that which he inflicts, has a purpose. He felt this truth was of special solace for soldiers. I asked what he meant. “Well, you’re pulling a trigger, you know?” He thought about that a lot. Not the shot fired or the bomb dropped, but the bodies, the souls at the other end of his actions. In his classes, he watched videos of air strikes. At night, he pictured the dead. He was not as afraid of dying as he was of killing unjustly. He was afraid of sin. His double identity—as a spiritual warrior and as an officer of the deadliest force in the history of the world—was his redemption.

What would he do if he ever received an order that contradicted his faith?

Hrabak looked shocked. He giggled, then composed himself and took a big bite of pizza, speaking confidently through his food. “Impossible, dude. I mean, I guess it could happen. But I highly doubt it.”

What if he was ordered to bomb a building in which terrorists were hiding, even though there were civilians in the way?

He shook his head. “Who are you to question why God builds up nations just to destroy them, so that those who are in grace can see that they’re in grace?” A smile lit up half his face, an expression that might be taken for sarcastic if Hrabak wasn’t a man committed to being in earnest at all times. What he’d just said—a paraphrase from Romans—might be something like a Word of Knowledge, a gift of wisdom from God. It blew his mind so much he had to repeat it, his voice picking up a speed and enthusiasm that bordered on joy. “He”—the Lord—“builds up an entire nation”—Iraq or Vietnam, Afghanistan or Pakistan, who are you to question why?—“just to destroy them! To show somebody else”—America, a young man guided to college by God, distrustful of his own choices—“that they’re in grace.”

Grace, of course, means you’re favored by God, no questions asked, a blessing that you can neither earn nor deserve. To fundamentalists, it’s worth more than freedom, and they’re willing to sacrifice their freedom—and yours—for that glorious feeling. That’s a paradox, a box trap the fundamentalists have built for themselves. The first casualties of the military’s fundamentalist front are not the Iraqis and Afghans on the wrong side of an American F-16. They’re the spiritual warriors themselves, men and women persuaded that the only God worth believing in is one who demands that they break—in spirit and in fact—the oath to the Constitution they swear to uphold on their lives. “You’re laying down your life for others,” Hrabak says. “Well, there has to be some true truth to put yourself in harm’s way for.” True truth; truth that requires an amplifier. For the God soldiers, democracy is not enough.

***

1. That’s technically true; it’s in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

2. See my story “Soldiers of Christ: Inside America’s Most Powerful Megachurch,” May 2005 [at http://word-detective.com/soldiers%20of%20christ.pdf ; also http://www.rickross.com/reference/fundamentalists/fund196.html and http://www.rotharmy.com/forums/front-line/22023-soldiers-christ-inside-americas-most-powerful-megachurch.html ].

3. Warren’s bestseller sometimes displaces Scripture itself among military evangelicals. In March 2008, a chaplain at Lakenheath, a U.S. Air Force–operated base in England, used a mandatory suicide-prevention assembly under Lieutenant General Rod Bishop as an opportunity to promote the principles of The Purpose-Driven Life to roughly 1,000 airmen. In a PowerPoint diagram depicting two family trees, the chaplain contrasted the likely future of a non-religious family, characterized by “Hopelessness” and “Death,” and that of a religious one. The secular family will, according to the diagram, spawn 300 convicts, 190 prostitutes, and 680 alcoholics. Purpose-driven breeding, meanwhile, will result in at least 430 ministers, seven congressmen, and one vice-president.

4. 4 After 9/11, Boykin went on the prayer-breakfast circuit to boast, in uniform, that his God was “bigger” than the Islamic divine of Somali warlord Osman Atto, whom Boykin had hunted. “I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol,” he declared, displaying as evidence photographs of black clouds over Mogadishu: the “demonic spirit” his troops had been fighting. “The principality of darkness,” he went on to declare, “a guy called Satan.” Under fire from congressional Democrats, Boykin claimed he hadn’t been speaking about Islam, but in a weird non sequitur he insisted, “My references to. . . our nation as a Christian nation are historically undeniable.” These strategic insights earned Boykin promotion to deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, a position in which he advised on interrogation techniques until August 2007.

5. A spokeswoman for the Pentagon says the military has dealt with fewer than fifty reports of religion-related problems during the period since Mikey founded MRFF. But an abundance of evidence suggests that the Pentagon is ignoring the problem. I spoke to dozens of Mikey’s clients: soldiers, sailors, and airmen who spoke of forced Christian prayer in Iraq and at home; combat deaths made occasions for evangelical sermons by senior officers; Christian apocalypse video games distributed to the troops; mandatory briefings on the correlation of the war to the Book of Revelation; exorcisms designed to drive out “unclean spirits” from military property; beatings of atheist troops that are winked at by the chain of command.

© The Harper's Magazine Foundation (emphasis in original)

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/05/0082488 [links in the above are my additions]

-----

and see (items linked in);

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=32564734 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39551176 and preceding

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39471610 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39273398 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39252802 and preceding and following (and http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=38788273 and preceding and following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39512205 and preceding and following

[F6]

Wife of ex-GOP Rep. Pickering claims he had affair

EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS | July 16, 2009 09:49 PM EST | AP

JACKSON, Miss. — The estranged wife of former U.S. Rep. Chip Pickering claims in a lawsuit that the Mississippi Republican had an affair that ruined their marriage and derailed his political career.

Leisha Pickering said in the lawsuit filed this week that her husband and the woman dated in college, reconnected and began having an affair while he was in Congress and living in a building where several Christian lawmakers reside on C Street near the U.S. Capitol. Chip Pickering is the third Republican with ties to the building at 133 C Street SE to find his personal life making headlines in recent weeks, after Nevada U.S. Sen. John Ensign and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

Leisha Pickering is seeking unspecified damages in the alienation of affection lawsuit she filed this week against Elizabeth Creekmore Byrd of Jackson. The Pickerings filed for divorce in June 2008, but it is not complete.

Chip Pickering, 45, was elected to Congress in 1996, retired in January and is now a lobbyist in Washington for Cellular South, the company Creekmore Byrd's family owns. The lawsuit does not say when the affair started.

He said in a statement Thursday that his marriage is irreparably damaged.

"I still believe it is in the best interest of our five boys if our differences are resolved privately and before the appropriate court and not in the media," Pickering said.

He cast himself as a defender of decency, particularly on television and the Internet, and was among House members urging then-President George W. Bush to declare 2008 "the National Year of the Bible."

Another lawmaker who lived at the C Street house, Ensign, a member of the Christian ministry Promise Keepers, stepped down from the Senate Republican leadership in June after admitting he had an affair for much of last year with a woman on his campaign staff.

Just days after the story broke, South Carolina Republican Gov. Mark Sanford admitted an affair with a woman in Argentina. He apparently never lived in the house, but has said he turned to "C Street" for counsel and solace while having the affair.

The building, registered in tax records as a religious and commercial building, is affiliated with a Christian group that sponsors the annual National Prayer Breakfast attended by the president, members of Congress and other dignitaries. Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress live there.

Leisha Pickering's lawsuit also says that when Republican Trent Lott resigned from the U.S. Senate in December 2007, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour offered the seat to Chip Pickering, who declined. Barbour spokesman Laura Hipp said Thursday that the governor only offered the Senate seat to U.S. Rep. Roger Wicker, who accepted it.

The lawsuit contends that Creekmore Byrd gave Pickering an ultimatum, saying their relationship could not continue if he became a senator because he would have to stay married.

"Ultimately, Creekmore Byrd gave Pickering the option to remain a public servant or become a private citizen and continue relations with her," the lawsuit says.

The voice mail box at Creekmore Byrd's home was full Thursday and messages left for her divorce attorney were not immediately returned.

The 45-year-old is a member of Mississippi's wealthy Creekmore family, founders of the Cellular South phone company.

She and several relatives and Cellular South executives donated to Pickering while he was in Congress, and he had kind words for the company at a 2007 subcommittee hearing where invited speakers included Cellular South president Victor Meena.

He announced in August 2007 that he wouldn't seek another term. After leaving office in January, he joined the lobbying firm Capitol Resources LLC, in which one of Barbour's nephews is a partner. The firm, which counts Cellular South among its clients, lists Pickering as a member of its Washington and Mississippi teams.

In the House, Pickering specialized in telecommunications issues, including one dear to Cellular South: making sure Congress took into account the interests of cellular companies serving rural areas.

Creekmore Byrd and her husband, Dr. Douglas Byrd, were married in 1990 but stopped living together in June 2006. They were granted a divorce in 2007 on the grounds of irreconcilable differences.

Associated Press writer Sharon Theimer in Washington contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20090716/us-ex-congressman-girlfriend/

[F6]

Sen. DeMint: "I Am Just Going To Have To Create Pain"

Huffington Post | Lila Shapiro
First Posted: 07-17-09 11:35 AM | Updated: 07-17-09 02:17 PM

In an interview [ http://www.gop12.com/2009/07/demint-warns-i-am-just-going-to-have-to.html (below)] with the evangelical World Magazine titled "The Taxpayers' Greatest Ally," Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) had some interesting things to say about his work with his colleagues in the Senate:

"I am not going to be able to persuade my colleagues to do the right things, so I am just going to have to create pain."

Okay, that is a bit intense. However, it may not even be the most intense statement from Sen. DeMint this week. On a conference call this morning, DeMint discussed [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0709/Health_reform_foes_plan_Obamas_Waterloo.html (below)] health care reform: ""This health care issue Is D-Day for freedom in America... If we're able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

Copyright © 2009 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/17/sen-demint-i-am-just-goin_n_237731.html [with comments]


==========


DeMint warns: "I am just going to have to create pain"



Posted by gop 12 at 10:56 AM
Friday, July 17, 2009

In a new interview [ http://www.worldmag.com/articles/15685 ] with evangelical World Magazine, SC Sen. Jim DeMint has a few noteworthy things to say.

1. On his role in the Senate.

"I am not going to be able to persuade my colleagues to do the right things, so I am just going to have to create pain."

2. On the intersection of religion and government.

"Dependency on government reduces dependency on God."

World also notes that in his new book, Saving Freedom [ http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Freedom-Americas-Slide-Socialism/dp/0805449574/ ], DeMint calls Barack Obama a "master of victimology".

Copyright 2009 GOP12.com

http://www.gop12.com/2009/07/demint-warns-i-am-just-going-to-have-to.html [with comments]
[and see in particular (items linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=32615092 and following]


==========


Health reform foes plan Obama's 'Waterloo'

By Ben Smith 12:31 PM
July 17, 2009

Conservative leaders will push delay any vote on health care reform until after the August recess to capitalize on what they say is a growing tide of opposition to reform measures, they said on a conference call with "tea party" participants today.

"I can almost guarantee you this thing won't pass before August, and if we can hold it back until we go home for a month's break in August," members of Congress will hear from "outraged" constituents, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint said on the call, which was organized by the group Conservatives for Patients Rights.

"Senators and Congressmen will come back in September afraid to vote against the American people," DeMint predicted, adding that "this health care issue Is D-Day for freedom in America."

"If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him," he said.

The founder of Conservatives for Patients Rights told the 104 participants in the call, which was organized to coincide with the National Tea Party Patriots group's protests at the offices of members of Congress today, that polling suggests majorities oppose a "government take-over," which is how Scott's group casts the Obama plan.

Rep. Mike Pence, also on the call, also said the tide is turning.

"Every single day more dems are expressing op to government-run health care," he said.

© 2009 Capitol News Company LLC

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0709/Health_reform_foes_plan_Obamas_Waterloo.html [with comments]


==========


and yes, of course, DeMint is another C Street Family guy -- from way back (early in the second item in the post to which this post is a reply)

[F6]

Like I was Jesus:

How to bring a nine-year-old to Christ

By Rachel Aviv
August 2009

Last summer, forty Christian missionaries, members of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, roamed the housing projects of Connecticut telling children the condensed and colorful story of Jesus’ life. The goal was salvation, but the missionaries rarely used that long word. They employed monosyllabic language and avoided abstract concepts and homonyms. “Holy” was a problem, the missionaries said, as children thought it meant “full of holes.” “Christ rose from the dead” was also tricky because children mistook the verb for a flower.

One afternoon in July, on a basketball court in Waterbury, Scott Harris, a black nine-year-old in an oversized sleeveless jersey, was inspecting a wound on his knee. The wound was sloppily stitched and looked grotesque, like a pair of lips. “I’m mad at Adam and Eve,” Scott said to a missionary named Isaac Weaver. “If they hadn’t eaten that apple, there would be no more bushes, prickers, and bugs. I wouldn’t have busted my knee open.”

“But do you ever think,” Isaac asked, “‘What if I were the first one?’ I think I’d probably make the same mistake as Eve.”

“No, I wouldn’t have tasted that fruit,” said Scott, his voice high and hoarse. “I’m trying not to get in trouble all the time. People say, Sit down, and I’m already sitting down. They say, Be quiet, and I’m not even saying anything.”

Isaac, twenty-six years old, blue-eyed, tan, and willowy, picked up his EvangeCube, a plastic toy of eight interlocking blocks that tell the Gospel in pictures. (The cube comes in a box that bears the slogan unfolding the answer to life’s greatest questions.) He pointed to the image of Heaven: a pastel hole in the clouds emanating milky rays of light. “You were right about Adam and Eve,” Isaac said. “Where they lived, everything was perfect.” He asked Scott if he knew his ABCs, and when the boy nodded, Isaac explained that “accepting Jesus is as easy as A B C. ‘A’ stands for Admit you are a sinner. ‘B’ is for Believe that Jesus went on the cross and died for your sins. And ‘C’ is for Choose to accept Him as the boss of your life and go to Heaven forever.”

“But what if you sin when you’re in Heaven?” Scott took the EvangeCube from Isaac and jiggled it in the air. The blocks flipped, moving from the picture of Jesus’ crucifixion to Heaven and back again.

“You don’t.”

“But what if you do?”

“You can’t. You’re in Heaven.”

“Oh, it’s like an ability.”

Isaac nodded vigorously. “Now, Scott, it’s time to tell Jesus you believe what He did for you. And one day when Jesus comes back, He will make everything right.”

“What?”

“Tell Him you believe He died to take your sins away,” Isaac gently prodded.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you really do believe He came and took away your sins. Do you believe that?”

“Yeah, I do.” Scott’s nostrils flared. “You died for me—from taking my sins away.”

Three young boys approached the basketball court, and Scott turned to watch them. When they called his name, he slowly stood up and dusted off the back of his nylon shorts. “I’ve got to play now,” he told Isaac bashfully.

Isaac obliged, gathering together his props—the cube and a worn Bible, bristling with sticky notes. Although he and Scott had only gotten to “B: Believe,” he said he was pleased with the conversation. It was the first time he had performed what the Fellowship calls “open-air evangelism,” approaching strangers with no introduction besides “Do you want to hear a great story?” Before introducing himself to Scott on the basketball court, he had been overtaken by anxiety. He sat down on the curb with another missionary, and they bowed their sweaty heads in prayer. “Father, I don’t know if I can do this,” Isaac said quietly, flicking a fly off his sneaker. “To me it seems like an odd thing to do. But, Lord, if this is what You are calling us to do, then I say no to fear. Please direct us to the right people so that we can show You to them. They need You. We need You.”

*

The world’s largest children’s ministry, the Fellowship conceives of its mission as overseas proselytizers did at the turn of the twentieth century. Its members swoop down on deprived, often illiterate people and inundate them with foreign notions: “Jesus died on the cross”; “Because He loves me”; “I will meet Him in Heaven.” The missionaries’ textbook Teaching Children Effectively: Level I instructs them to draft a map of each neighborhood they visit, drawing crosses by the homes where children have atoned for their sins. According to the Fellowship, once children begin to understand the difference between right and wrong—somewhere between the ages of five and twelve—they are cognitively capable of salvation, and, crucially, at risk for eternal damnation. After apologizing for wrongdoing and praying to accept the Lord’s grace, children are pronounced “saved.” Conversions often take less than ten minutes. Some hear the Gospel while on their bikes or while bathing in inflatable pools in their front yards. Others attend the Fellowship’s Bible classes in parks, homes, and public schools. The ministry is based in Warrenton, Missouri, and maintains chapters in 158 countries and in every American state. It keeps careful count of the number of youngsters it has saved: last year, there were more than one million worldwide.

I followed the Connecticut ministry on its summer missions, often crouching beside children while they prayed to be reborn. Every day for a blisteringly hot week last July, Isaac drove a team of six teenage missionaries to Country Village Apartments, a grand name for a cluster of squat brick row houses arrayed in a U around a central road, the pavement cracked. The largely black and Hispanic neighborhood is located at the northern edge of Waterbury, a city of chain stores and abandoned brassware factories. When the missionaries arrived, they canvassed every home in the neighborhood, passing out Bible club invitations to whoever answered the door: an elderly man in boxers in the midst of a teary phone call; a teenager on his way to work; a mother wearing a T-shirt that warned, most likely to steal your boyfriend.

The majority of the missionaries were white—some had heard of the clubs through their local churches; a few had themselves been saved by the Fellowship—and they stuck out as they shuffled from door to door in their crisp khakis or long, loose skirts. They were loath to skip a single house, even when it was clear that nobody was home. Only once did I hear someone express concern about safety, when a fifteen-year-old shrieked that she’d seen a sign that said, trespassers will be persecuted. In fact, it read, trespassers will be prosecuted, and she was put at ease when the distinction was made. She lived in a world of biblical proportions: prosecution was an abstraction while persecution felt probable and near.

The Bible clubs were held on a quilt under a drooping oak tree in the neighborhood park, close enough to the basketball court that children coming to play could be recruited for worship. Although parents were invited to observe the clubs, few attended. Some viewed them as free babysitting. The time was filled with songs, prayers, Bible stories, a personal tale about a missionary, and Scripture memorization. The missionaries taught the line, “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.” They encouraged children to practice the sentence while hopping on one foot, twirling in place, patting their bellies, or tickling themselves. At the end of each session, an instructor asked the students to bow their heads and close their eyes. Those who wanted to “believe on Jesus”—missionaries use the outmoded phrase from the King James translation—were told to follow the instructor away from the quilt where in private they could rid themselves of their sins. They defined sin as “anything we think, say, or do that makes God sad,” drawing a tear on their cheeks.

There were roughly nine children in the club, depending on the day, and several said the A B C steps for salvation and apologized for their sins: shouting, teasing, pushing, stealing, disobeying their mothers. (A few who attended did not complete the steps but seemed to enjoy the snacks.) The older children in particular warmed to the message that there was something deeply, irrevocably wrong with them. (The Fellowship heartily reinforces the doctrine of original sin.) The missionaries nudged children toward self-consciousness yet presented an archaic view of what it means to have a self. Countless times I heard children articulate their guilt, amorphous but ever present, by describing a fantasy that must have been learned from cartoons: an angel is fluttering over one shoulder, and Satan is hovering over the other; each is barking opposing commands.

Scott Harris, the most serious student in the class, was shaken by the discovery that numerous times a day he was personally distressing the Lord. “Yesterday I took ice cream without asking, and I started to tremble,” he told me. He spoke with an embarrassed smile yet seemed eager to share his newfound religious commitment. “I knew I’d get in trouble. Later, I was throwing a ball with my friends, and I threw like a little baby. It only went like five inches. Jesus took away my strength, I think.”

The children had a nebulous sense of time, and when they were told after club to return the next day at three o’clock, the reminder was useless. “But I don’t have a clock,” whimpered a six-year-old named Karizma. “And I don’t know what three is.” The notion that their lives could be transformed in a mere ten minutes did not seem to many children preposterous. The distinction between minutes, hours, and days does not bear much weight until one realizes that these markers will inevitably come to an end. The world described by the missionaries was far removed from the mundanity of school bells and bedtimes. The Bible offered entry into a fairy-tale realm where time is everlasting: the good creatures really do live happily ever after while the bad endure a dark eternity of pain. By saying their vows and consenting to the truth of the Bible, the children became players in a mythical tale that both preceded them and had called them into being. They could enter the story and choose their own ending.

*

When I first met Joshua Guido, the twenty-four-year-old director of the Child Evangelism Fellowship of Connecticut, I told him I had been an uncomfortably religious child, vaguely Jewish but mostly superstitious. I had worried that the Lord would punish me for bad behavior by killing my mother. I was constantly apologizing to Him: for stepping on my own shadow; closing the sock drawer too abruptly; turning the lights off before the moment when I felt a sign, a subtle thrumming through my body, that it was right to flick the switch. I thought I could become the words I spoke and would carefully avoid such threats as “death” (made worse because it rhymed with my mother’s name, Beth) and “Hell.” With the help of a few prayers I learned in Hebrew school, I turned the childhood taunt “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back” into a religious worldview. It would have been a relief if someone had given me a rigid and alphabetized set of beliefs like those the Fellowship offers. (Instead, my parents sent me to therapy.)

Before I met Josh, one of the youngest state directors in the country, I had contacted Fellowship ministry directors in New York and New Jersey, but they both refused me access to their ministries when I told them I was writing for a secular publication. The Fellowship has never been forthcoming with the media, but since it won the right, in a controversial 2001 Supreme Court decision, to hold after-school Bible clubs in public schools, the leadership has been particularly skittish. In my initial talks with Josh at his office in Southington, a town twenty miles south of Hartford, we adopted a mode of conversation that I later realized was fundamental to the ministry: confession. I described how my early excess of religious energy, which dimmed by adolescence, had left me curious as to whether children are naturally inclined toward faith. Although Josh had some reservations about my religious background, he was open to outsiders and said he did not want to “interfere” in case I’d been sent by the Lord. It was clear that he hoped my work might lead to something more than an article, and he encouraged me to research not just through books but lived experience. Abstract learning, he warned, would not get me far. “Unless ye turn and become as little children,” he quoted from Matthew, “Ye shall not enter the kingdom of Heaven.”

Josh, who has pale skin, soft, green eyes, and a long Italian nose, grew up in an evangelical Christian family in Waterbury. He has worked for the Fellowship since his teens, and, by his own reckoning, he has led more than a thousand people to Christ. A charismatic and disciplined man, he is well regarded among children and other Fellowship staff. “I’m not someone you look at and say, ‘Oh wow, I could never be like him.’ I’m pretty average, going by my IQ and SAT scores.” For Josh, as for Isaac and many of the missionary leaders, speaking can become an exercise in self-abnegation. He does not choose what he reads, for instance, but lets “the Lord put certain books in my path.” A ministry saying is “I cannot, but God can, so I will let Him do it through me.” Josh believes children are an ideal receptacle for the Lord’s words because they are still willing to believe, without proof, in the invisible. “The Muslims understand the importance of youth,” he said. “So did the Communists.” He sometimes recites the line, “Give me a child for five years, and I’ll have him for the rest of his life.” He attributed the quotation once to Adolf Hitler and another time to Fidel Castro. When his father, who is active in the ministry, delivered the same line, he cited Karl Marx.1

*

In the Book of Matthew, Jesus holds up the young child as the pinnacle of spiritual wisdom: “I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” In his radical vision, Jesus presents the child’s faith—his undiminished sense of terror and awe—as a model for adults.

The Bible designates no age of accountability, or “age of reason,” although the Church has seldom directed missionary activity toward children younger than seven. When Jesse Overholtzer, a self-described “unobtrusive little farmer” who founded the Child Evangelism Fellowship in 1937, first began counseling children, he hid it from his parishioners, unsure himself whether the effort was not in vain. He called it his “knicker and pigtail experiment.” But what was once a tentative venture has gained increasing acceptance among evangelical Christians. In the past half-century, the born-again child has been emblazoned as an ideal believer, a mascot for anti-intellectualism. In his 2003 book Transforming Children into Spiritual Champions, George Barna, a pioneer in the field of religious marketing, scolds the evangelical community for neglecting youngsters—“the great myth of modern ministry: Adults are where the Kingdom action is”—and treating them merely as “people en route to significance.” Barna produces his own calculations to show that between the ages of five and twelve, there is the greatest “probability of someone embracing Jesus as his or her Savior.”

In course books and publicity materials, the Fellowship proudly cites Barna’s many statistics. Teaching Children Effectively: Level I calls children a “harvest field . . . virtually untouched” and blames this oversight on a culture that distorts the importance of intellect: “subtle worldly philosophies have persuaded the majority of Christians that children cannot make a decision for Christ until they can ‘reason.’” In the textbook’s top-ten list of “Satan’s Attacks on the Child,” number three, after drugs and sex, is “humanism,” man’s capacity for fulfillment through the mind.

In the United States, the Fellowship’s arena for battling these worldly philosophies has been the legal system. By the 1980s, a series of court decisions had effectively removed religious groups from campus during the school day. In 1996, the Fellowship gained a renewed sense of mission when it sued Milford Central School in upstate New York for preventing it from holding Good News Clubs on school premises. In its request to the school board, the ministry described the clubs, which were held at 3:00 p.m., four minutes after the end of the last class of the day, as “a group of boys and girls meeting one hour a week for a fun time of singing songs, hearing a Bible lesson, and memorizing scripture.”

Five years later, in a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in the Fellowship’s favor, accusing the school district of “viewpoint discrimination,” because it permitted other after-school clubs, such as the Boy Scouts and 4H, to use its facilities. In his dissent, Justice David Souter wrote that the “majority’s statement ignores reality” and stands for the “remarkable proposition that any public school opened for civic meetings must be opened for use as church, synagogue, or mosque.” Steven K. Green, the former legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State who filed a brief on behalf of Milford, said, “The instruction takes place in the same school, with snacks, to attract the kids. It’s a little devious. They know if they held it an hour later, the children wouldn’t show up. They are trying to dovetail into the school machinery. For many young children, there won’t be any distinction between this and the rest of the school day. It is a seamless web.”

Since the ruling, the Fellowship, funded by donations, has engaged in more than twenty follow-up suits against schools that refused to comply with the Milford decision. Hundreds of other cases not directly involving the Fellowship have cited the ruling, leading to a level of church-state entanglement that had been prohibited for -decades. Meanwhile, the number of Good News Clubs in public schools has quietly and steadily swelled. The ministry held 1,155 after-school clubs in 2000; in 2007, there were 3,956, reaching 137,361 children. Jaimie Fales, the Fellowship’s spokesperson, says that she still hears people complaining about the good old days before “they took God out of the schools. I have to remind them, ‘Hey, listen, you can have prayer in public schools! You can have the Bible in public schools! That’s just complaining. We can do it. We just got to get up and actually do it! The Supreme Court flung the doors wide open.’” Mathew Staver, a Liberty Counsel lawyer who represents the Fellowship, has asserted that the cases “literally turned back the historical clock.”

If the ministry longs for an earlier stage of history, it also affirms a cruder and more elementary kind of faith, one suited to the child’s inchoate cognitive abilities. “We shall no doubt come across analogies between the child and the primitive at every step,” wrote the psychologist Jean Piaget, whose work is cited throughout Milford’s court briefs as evidence that a child believes indiscriminately in the “infallibility of adult authority.” Piaget found that the child does not yet know the limits of his own mind and confuses “his self with the universe.” He believes in an anthropomorphic God—a doting, towering man who watches his every movement—because it is the only one he can imagine.

The notion that the young mind allows us access to an earlier historical era is one that has been repeatedly, if carelessly, articulated by scholars for centuries. Auguste Comte argued that the life of an individual recapitulates human history, beginning in a theological stage and maturing to scientific thought. The Fellowship, too, equates children with a more primitive phase in our culture. It reaches backward in time, creating a community that is still vulnerable, prone to magical explanations, and free of secular learning. Children are predisposed to the fundamentalist’s literal mode of reading. Unlike adults, they are not yet suspicious of the way that stories—with their seductive yet predictable arcs—try to capture our imaginations. They can still surrender to the world of a narrative.

*

At a ten-day training camp last June in the bucolic town of Cornwallville, New York, Josh, Isaac, and half a dozen other seasoned evangelists supervised the training of thirty missionaries between the ages of eleven and twenty. To learn techniques for presenting the Gospel simply, the young missionaries attended six hours of daily classes in a cavernous barn-shaped dining hall. They were genial, poised, and proudly helpless. When they traveled, they drove in a long, slow line of cars, and only those in the front vehicle knew where they were going. (By the end of the summer, several of the missionaries’ cars were dented.) The girls had angelic voices, high and lilting, and frequently professed their love: for one another, Jesus, black kids, the color green, Chinese food, the smell of gas. The more time I spent with them, the more I came to feel crass and overgrown (made worse when I got poison ivy on my legs from sitting in a playground). They were always friendly and respectful and rarely asked questions, although once, when I responded to an anecdote by calling a coincidence lucky, they took care to correct me. There is no such thing as “luck,” one girl made clear, curling her fingers into quotation marks.

The missionaries juggled two stories and casts of characters at once: a biblical reality and a far more messy and banal existence. The Lord was both the narrator and the love of their lives. With His guidance, their experiences were no longer fragmented but plotted and saturated with meaning. One of the older trainees, Katharine, a -twenty-year-old from an affluent suburb of Hartford, explained that she associated her distaste for men (“As a general rule, I avoid them”) with her fear of losing her attachment to this narrative. “Every little girl wants to be a princess,” she told me. “I became one when I accepted the love that Christ was offering me. That’s one of the reasons I became so wary around guys. Although I had accepted that gift, I didn’t want it to become so commonplace that I was willing to trade it for any—I guess what you would call earth relationships.”

The missionaries displayed little interest in works of fiction not inspired by the Lord, and they had a radical approach to reading. They referred to the Gospel simply as “the Story.” The Bible’s sentences did not just express love, they were love—a gift from the Lord. Teaching Children Effectively instructed them to describe Heaven as a fairy-tale village that would become the home of every believer, the ultimate happy ending: “There is a street of gold—pure like glass. . . . No one is ever sick there. No one ever dies. There is no night. Every person in Heaven will be perfectly happy—always.” The question that follows so many bedtime stories—“Is it true?”—can at last be answered with certainty. Children are offered the possibility of believing, wholly and unabashedly, an extraordinary tale. They can permanently suspend disbelief. “The Bible is not just on a shelf,” one instructor, Jennifer Curtis (affectionately called “the philosopher”), told the class. “Kids are growing up with so many half-truths—but here is a book that is finally all true. The book is alive.”

*

Just after nine one morning in the dining hall, its ten large windows overlooking miles of green hills, the missionaries’ textbooks, sweaters, and tote bags splattered on top of portable cafeteria tables, Josh began a forty-five-minute lesson titled “How to Use the EvangeCube.” It proved to be one of the camp’s liveliest discussions. Josh asked the class whether they had the authority to edit frightening details out of the Story. When many expressed fear that this would violate the sanctity of the Lord’s message, Josh asked them to think about how they would describe Hell if mothers were watching. “What are you going to do with a class of suburban five-year-olds? Soccer moms, and they’re from Wethersfield, Connecticut. These are rich, educated people.”

“We shouldn’t water it down,” said Jake, a stout boy with blond hair and a thick jaw who had appeared lethargic in previous sessions but now spoke with a new energy. “If it’s the truth, it’s the truth.”

Josh considered the comment. “Yes, we do have to make it clear that there’s a punishment if they don’t accept Jesus as their best friend. It’s not just like, ‘Okay, gotta find another friend!’ No, there’s a punishment.” He leaned against a metal music stand that functioned as his lectern. “But does it count if someone is saved based on fear of Hell? Salvation is not just fire insurance.”

A Hispanic boy, Tim, raised his hand. Eleven years old, he was the youngest missionary in the group. “It is not wise to make a child afraid,” he managed in a wavering voice.

“But you have to let Jesus show them the truth!” interrupted Jake. “Jesus died on the cross for us—you can’t say it any other way!”

Josh paced at the front of the room, increasingly ill at ease. He pushed up the sleeves of his blue button-down shirt. “But what is the truth?” he asked. His question was not as existentially charged as it sounded; his uncertainty extended only to whether children must be told all facets of the Story for their salvation to be complete.

“We don’t need to worry about which word will go where,” suggested a twiggy blonde girl in khaki slacks, a silver necklace, and a padded training bra under her T-shirt that made her chest look like a gym mat. “It should be the Holy Spirit speaking, and He’s not going to mess up.” (Over the campfire one night, she had said that she prayed to “get smaller and smaller so that God will take over completely.”)

A few people said, “Amen.” The class seemed exhausted by the discussion and ready to give up all agency. It was an easy method of escape but a slippery one.

“I don’t want to hear the word ‘save’ again,” said Josh’s fifteen-year-old brother Seth. “We’re using that word too much. Let’s just tell it the way we want, and let God do his work. If you pray about it ahead of time, you’ll be fine.”

“We’re just tools,” another said, sighing. “Jesus will move us around.”

*

One of the most effective missionaries was Oscar, an amiable -thirteen-year-old Hispanic boy with small features and shiny black hair that flopped onto his forehead. He had already saved thirty-five children the previous summer. At the Country Village Bible clubs, he talked in a breathless and inspired pant and became friends with his younger students, often borrowing their video games or bikes before class. Of all the missionaries, he had the least trouble speaking what they called “childrenese,” and he was usually chosen to tell a Bible story about Jesus healing a crippled man or calming the sea. At the end of the story, he would ask the class to bow their heads and close their eyes. “Boys and girls, if you have never believed on Jesus, you have a problem,” he said, unconsciously adopting the cadences of local TV commercials. “But if you’d like to receive Jesus as your savior, you can do it today. You can have a friendship with God that starts right now and goes on forever.”

Oscar transformed the poetry of the Bible into something so spare and literal it nearly sounded blasphemous, but the children seemed to comprehend best his version of the Story, purged of abstractions. Each time Oscar counseled a child, he repeated roughly the same script, which he had memorized at training camp. To make the message personal, he asked the child’s age and promptly reminded him that “Jesus was your age once, too.” Then he asked the age of the child’s mother and remarked, “Jesus died at about your mom’s age,” a detail likely more unsettling than he realized.

On the second day of club, Scott Harris followed Oscar to a shady patch of grass, about ten yards away from the rest of the group, to finish the conversation about Jesus that Isaac started on the basketball court. Sitting cross-legged with his hands between his legs, Scott listened for the second time to the story of Jesus’ life, illustrated through the EvangeCube. He was particularly attentive when Oscar arrived at the image of Jesus splayed out on the cross, blood dripping from his wrists. “God really did die for our sins,” Oscar said.

“I know,” said Scott. “They whipped Him with whips. Spiky whips, and they kept hitting Him.”

“Yeah, but Jesus made a way so that we don’t have to go there.” Oscar pushed his glasses up to his face with his palm. “Because He loves you so much. Nobody else could have come back to life. But He’s God. Have you ever seen a dirty shirt? What happens when you put it in the washing machine?”

“It gets clean?”

“Yeah, Jesus wanted us all to be clean. Now you have a choice. If you ask God into your heart, you can become clean.”

Scott nodded, his knees bobbing.

“Do you need a little help?”

Scott nodded again, eager to please the older boy.

“Say, ‘Dear God.’”

Scott pinched his eyes shut. “Dear God.”

“Tell God you have sinned.”

“I have sinned,” he said, a bit too loudly. “Can You please forgive me?”

“When you’re all done, just say ‘Amen.’”

“Amen.”

“Lord, thank you for Scott,” Oscar said. “Right now Scott is going to Heaven.”

His face flushed, Scott stood up and followed Oscar back to the quilt for the final minutes of club. With the other children, he sang a peppy tune called “God Is So Good,” and then lined up for cookies and juice.

*

The week after the clubs ended, I returned to Country Village Apartments to see the children who had accepted Christ as their savior. Although the Fellowship follows up with some children through Good News Clubs during the school year and with others by mail, many the missionaries never see again. The children are left on their own to make sense of the new contract they’ve struck with the Lord.

While several parents had chosen not to send their children to the clubs—usually with a quick “No thanks, we’re not interested”—those who had allowed it were equally trusting when I knocked on their doors. None of them chose to be present for my interviews. Scott, whose family lives in Tennessee, was in Waterbury spending the summer with a family friend who was Catholic but not observant. She lived in a small, dimly lit two-story house crammed with furniture. When I visited, three children from the neighborhood were watching television on her couch, and she was holding an infant in her arms. She did not know whether Scott’s family believed in Jesus, nor did it seem a particularly relevant topic of conversation. “I don’t think Scott would care if the clubs were Christian or not,” she said, stroking the baby’s back. “As long as it can hold his attention, it must be doing something right.”

Scott and his two friends, Jamal and Lamar Sims, were more enthusiastic. We sat by the oak tree where the clubs had been held and they shared one popsicle I had brought, cutting it into equal sections with a plastic knife. All of them recognized me from club meetings—I imagined that they saw me as one of the Bible teachers, the silent, boring one—and it took several minutes to establish that I was just a writer and that my visit would be devoid of songs and prayers. Because I had not brought a blanket, none of them wanted to sit down. They said there were ants in the grass: Scott sat on a rock, Lamar stood up, and his younger brother, Jamal, who was nine, kneeled on the ground.

While all three children had prayed to Jesus to wash away their sins, Jamal and Lamar, who said they did not come from a religious family, had not appeared particularly moved by the process, and I was surprised by how much importance they later assigned to their conversion. On these long, blank summer days, they had been waiting for a tangible sign that Jesus had, indeed, altered their lives, as the missionaries promised. They were filled with a sense of their own potential.

“I thought we’d start helping people,” said Lamar, a handsome twelve-year-old who wore a jersey so large that most of his chest peeked out through the armholes. “If someone was having a baby, we’d just take them to the hospital and leave. We’d want to be good.” He walked behind me and leaned against the tree. “Nothing changed.” When I asked him if he would consider going back to club to try again, he became plaintive. “I took my heart out for God. One time should be enough.”

Scott was more hopeful about his conversion. He said that it made him feel “smart.” “I don’t know why, but I’ll get a feeling,” he said. “God, like, reads your mind. He knows your brain. He crawls up inside you.”

At home, in Knoxville, Scott had gone to a “big church with singers,” and he said that since the age of six he had been praying—usually that it wouldn’t rain, because he didn’t like when he couldn’t play outside. Disapprovingly, he added that his older sisters “only believe in God when it thunders.” I asked Scott if he knew what kind of Christian he was, and Lamar suggested he might be “African American.” “No, I’m not,” Scott said, shaking his head. “Yes, you are,” insisted Lamar. “You’re black—that’s what you call a black person, ‘African American.’”

Scott had been chronicling his spiritual progress through his cut-up knee. At the Bible club, he had listened carefully when Oscar told the story about Jesus healing a paralytic by saying the words, “Your sins are forgiven . . . Stand up and walk.” Scott assumed the same would happen to him, although he could walk just fine. But it had been a week since his fall, and he touched the scab so much that he kept reopening parts of the wound. “I’d been hoping He’d heal me, but I think He just sits there and watches,” he explained, bending his head near his knee and examining the tiny scab particles. “But it is getting better now. I think He takes care of me a week after I do it. See, I busted it open last Wednesday, and nothing happened. But He started healing me a week after. He listens a week late pretty much.” He sounded increasingly certain of this impromptu theory.

Having only recently learned to narrate their experiences, children see patterns and correspondences in everything. James W. Fowler, in his 1981 work Stages of Faith [ http://www.amazon.com/Stages-Faith-Psychology-Human-Development/dp/0060628669 ], a psychological study of religious development, writes that children are more disposed than adults toward “Hierophanies, the giving of signs—both blessed and cursed.” Through the passage of time, most of us learn to discard these invisible threads of connection—the signs we once thought were ominous prove meaningless, and moments that felt Promethean pass without memory.

The missionaries attempted to present the Bible as clearly and simply as possible, but it was the rigidity of their lessons that ultimately disoriented the children I spoke to. As they discovered that, in fact, the Lord had not swooped down to heal their wounds and scrapes and disappointments, the new beliefs they had adopted seemed destined to break down, along with whatever was driving them to have faith in the first place. And that original impulse may have been quite simple: Something is wrong with me; it is out of my control. Perhaps Jesus’ praise for the child is simply an acknowledgment of that primal sentiment—lonely fear in its purest form.

When I asked the three boys if they could imagine the world if God had never existed, they got lost in a mess of apocalyptic plot details.

“The world would be crappy,” said Scott, under his breath.

“No one would be living,” added Lamar. “We wouldn’t be here.”

“The dinosaurs would still be killing us!” Jamal said.

“No,” Lamar corrected him, “there wouldn’t be any dinosaurs. God wouldn’t have ever created dinosaurs, because He wouldn’t be here.”

Jamal looked around the park. His eyes darting, he pulled a clump of grass from the ground. “True, true. The tree wouldn’t be right here. There wouldn’t be grass. We’d probably be beat up by a lot of people and never die.”

“How can we be beat up when we’re not even alive anymore? We wouldn’t be thinking. We wouldn’t even know what’s happening.”

“We would be in the caves, tortured,” said Jamal, as if he hadn’t yet processed his older brother’s words.

“We wouldn’t be alive!” insisted Lamar.

Scott, who had been quiet throughout the conversation, suddenly perked up. “Mary. Mary would be there.”

“Who’s Mary?” Jamal asked.

“God’s mom.”

“Oh, yeah,” Lamar said. “Then she would have created us. God’s mom.”

*

The Fellowship has established a robust presence in the public schools of Southern states; last year, in South Carolina, after-school Good News Clubs in 183 public schools reached 13,524 children. The Connecticut Fellowship has made fewer inroads. In the past few years, it focused its after-school efforts on three districts: two in rural towns in eastern Connecticut and one in Wolcott, near Waterbury. Thomas Smyth, the superintendent of Wolcott Public Schools, received several letters from Josh Guido and the Fellowship’s lawyers before approving the clubs. The memos he showed me were rife with such watery sentences as, “We strive to promote positive moral character, provide training, and reinforce values.” Smyth had only a vague sense of the club’s activities, except that the missionaries had offered to help children with their homework (a task for which they were not trained). “For single moms, that was a big hook,” he told me. “Parents wanted the kids to get assistance with homework, even if they had to sit through the Gospel message.”

Although after-school clubs are a relatively new piece of the Fellowship’s mission, Josh says that they have become the predominant measure of success. “At conferences, everyone is asking how many schools you have,” he told me. “No one is asking how many projects you have.” Josh prefers holding clubs in city housing developments because he does not have to waste time on legal negotiations, and he can reach more children at once. After every session, missionaries call Josh to report the number of children led to Christ. “When someone says, ‘Oh, it’s not about the numbers,’ often those are the ones who didn’t reach many. They’ll say, ‘It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.’ I say, ‘No, if you were one of the numbers that didn’t get reached, you would care.’”

Of course, Josh believed that I, too, should be reached, and he frequently spoke of my soul with thinly disguised homilies (“You go to a gas station, you’re lost, and you need directions . . . ”). His language would become hackneyed, and I would find myself tuning out. Josh was far more arresting when he spoke of his own beliefs, which felt intimate and mystical, beyond words. He was empowered by the acknowledgment of his own helplessness. His conversations with God were so encompassing that he admitted he would leave friends voicemail messages and accidentally end the call by saying, “In Jesus’ name, Amen,” confusing the phone message with a prayer. There was little distinction between the spiritual reality he felt and the actual one he lived, and this convergence, I assumed, was why he continued to feel so hopeful about the potential for my salvation. He must have taken comfort in the idea that my resistance to Jesus would make my ultimate submission more beautiful. I imagined that he thought of me as a version of the Samaritan woman at the well in the Book of John who, while waiting for someone to “explain everything,” recognizes what she has failed to comprehend. If Josh did not take favorably to this article and decided I was blind, I might be cast in a new role: someone who tests, and ultimately affirms, his faith. Perhaps one of the Pharisees who know not the extent of their foolishness.

The last time I visited Josh at his office in Southington, he was in an expansive mood, looser than I had ever seen him before. We sat in a small, stuffy conference room, at the corner of a long table used for staff meetings. With considerable calm, he told me he was contemplating marriage. When he began speculating about where he and his bride-to-be would live, he became visibly excited. He told me he wanted to move to Laurel Estates, a predominantly black and Hispanic housing development in Waterbury where the ministry had held two Bible clubs the previous summer. He would buy an apartment and “adopt the community.” He leaned forward against the desk, with his palms on the table. “In John, it says, ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.’” As he often did, Josh offered a Jewish analogue for me; Moses, too, built his tent in the wilderness, and it has always been God’s will to reside among his people. “It would just be so exciting to be Jesus to them, to have the kids over every week for pizza and movies.” His dream of a simple life would require a total immersion in the narrative. He would become a character, too.

*

It was not the first time I had heard someone admit to identifying so intensely with Jesus that he felt he could actually become Him. The most devout child I met at all the summer Bible clubs was Edwin Pareles, a tall, articulate nine-year-old with wire-rim glasses who lived in a public-housing complex in Hartford. He attended a Pentecostal church with his father, and he had already heard many stories about Jesus. Still, he called his conversion with Oscar, atop a rusted playground slide, “the most important moment of my life.”

After the missionaries had left, I asked Edwin to reflect on his conversion. “I was pretending like I was at the beach with Jesus,” he said, sitting on the untrimmed lawn outside his barrackslike brick apartment. “There were some huge waves coming to me, but Jesus said, ‘Don’t worry about the waves, I’m here.’ I felt great because Jesus was with me. I felt I was a grown-up already. I was feeling like I was Jesus.”

Edwin had been so inspired by the clubs that he said he, too, wanted to become “the kind of missionary that tells poor people about God.” Although he was excited by the prospect of answering abstract questions—“This is philosophical,” he asserted proudly—he had a habit of suddenly losing the thread of his thought. He described its loss as something tangible, as if an idea had been placed in his mind by an outside force and then suddenly whisked away. After a long conversation about the books he liked to read (tales of gothic fantasy), he told me, “In my head I’m thinking of a question from the Devil.” His younger brother ran across the lawn in a futile attempt to catch a bee with a Gatorade bottle. I asked Edwin what the question was, and he said he had already forgotten. “Boom! It just erased.”

When I visited him the next day, he said he had remembered the question, but this time it came from a dream. It was not clear whether it was a dream at all or just a new thought he wasn’t sure was his own. He sat with his knees pressed close to his body on the overgrown lawn in front of his apartment. “The Devil told me the story of Jesus rising is kind of like Goosebumps,” he said, referring to R. L. Stine’s popular horror novellas, Edwin’s favorite books. He paused and looked up at me to see if I had followed his logic, which had drawn him, for one fleeting moment, to an unnerving conclusion: the Bible was not inherently distinct in shape from a work of fiction. Jesus was like many triumphant heroes, Satan like many villains. When I asked him what made the Bible feel different, he quickly explained away his anxiety. “Well, there’s something about Jesus,” he said. “Everyone talks about Him, and then you believe in Him. And when you see Him on the cross, then you really believe in Him.” Now he was on more stable ground. The afternoon sun reflected off his glasses, and he looked calm and studious. “Jesus died for our sins. All R. L. Stine did was make a book for us. That’s the big difference.”

The Bible promises to reach out and absorb its readers, to sweep them into its tale. Edwin took comfort in the idea that his future was already written. “Sometimes when my brother is asleep and the TV is off, I imagine God standing in my room,” he said. “I hear Him whispering, ‘I will come for you, son. I will come.’”

***

1. The source is more likely a Jesuit maxim, “Give me the child, I will give you the man,” sometimes attributed to St. Ignatius Loyola [e.g. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=66039 ].

Rachel Aviv is a writer living in Brooklyn. This is her first article for Harper’s Magazine.

© The Harper's Magazine Foundation (emphasis in original)

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/08/0082606 [the links in the above are my additions]

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in addition generally to (items linked in) the post to which this post is a reply and preceding and (other) following (in particular http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39632707 ), see in particular (items linked in):

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=36957712

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=37034097

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=26739921

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=30820541

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39664994

[F6]

Sex and power inside "the C Street House"


Left: The Family's "C Street House" at 133 C Street, S.E. Right: South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who revealed that he had confided in his "C Street" "Christian friends" the affair he had hidden from his wife.
Left, AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, right, AP Photo/Mary Ann Chastain, File

Sanford, Ensign, and other regulars receive guidance from the invisible fundamentalist group known as the Family

Editor's note: Sharlet is the author of the bestselling "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power."

By Jeff Sharlet

July 21, 2009 | I can't say I was impressed when I met Sen. John Ensign at the C Street House, the secretive religious enclave on Capitol Hill thrust into the news by its links to three political sex scandals, those of Gov. Mark Sanford; former Rep. Chip Pickering, R-Miss., who allegedly rendezvoused at the C Street House with his mistress, an executive in the industry for which he then became a lobbyist; and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev. Although Sanford [ http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39476306 and following] declared today that his scandal will actually turn out to be good for the people of South Carolina because he's now more firmly in God's control, the once-favored GOP presidential prospect will finish out his term and fade away. And Ensign's residence at the C Street House during his own extramarital affair now threatens to end a career that he and other Republicans hoped would lead him to the White House.

When I met Ensign, he was just back from a run, sweaty and bouncing in place, boasting about the time he'd clocked and teasing a young woman from his office. She seemed annoyed that the senator wouldn't get himself into a shower and back on the job. When I wrote about Sen. Ensign in my book about the evangelical political organization that runs the C Street House, "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," I described him as a "conservative casino heir elected to the Senate from Nevada, a brightly tanned, hapless figure who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling-fortune name."

Now, of course, I know I was wrong: John Ensign is a brightly tanned, hapless figure who used his Family connections to cover up the fruits of his flirtations, to make moral decisions for him, and to do his dirty work when his secret romance sputtered. Doug Hampton, the friend and former aide whom Ensign cuckolded, tells us that it was Family leader David Coe, along with Coe's brother Tim and Family "brother" Sen. Tom Coburn, who delivered the pink slip when it was time to put Cynthia Hampton out of Ensign's reach [ http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39425278 and following].

If sexual license was all the Family offered the C Street men, however, that would merely be seedy and self-serving. But Family men are more than hypocritical. They're followers of a political religion that embraces elitism, disdains democracy, and pursues power for its members the better to "advance the Kingdom." They say they're working for Jesus, but their Christ is a power-hungry, inside-the-Beltway savior not many churchgoers would recognize. Sexual peccadilloes aside, the Family acts today like the most powerful lobby in America that isn't registered as a lobby -- and is thus immune from the scrutiny attending the other powerful organizations like Big Pharma and Big Insurance that exert pressure on public policy.

The Family likes to call itself a "Christian Mafia," but it began 74 years ago as an anti-New Deal coalition of businessmen convinced that organized labor was under the sway of Satan. The Great Depression, they believed, was a punishment from God for what they viewed as FDR's socialism. The Family's goal was the "consecration" of America to God, first through the repeal of New Deal reforms, then through the aggressive expansion of American power during the Cold War. They called this a "Worldwide Spiritual Offensive," but in Washington, it amounted to the nation's first fundamentalist lobby. Early participants included Southern Sens. Strom Thurmond, Herman Talmadge and Absalom Willis Robertson -- Pat Robertson's father. Membership lists stored in the Family's archive at the Billy Graham Center at evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois show active participation at any given time over the years by dozens of congressmen.

Today's roll call is just as impressive: Men under the Family's religio-political counsel include, in addition to Ensign, Coburn and Pickering [ http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39664554 ], Sens. Chuck Grassley [ http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39257687 and preceding and following], R-Iowa, and Jim DeMint [ http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39664773 and following] and Lindsey Graham, both R-S.C.; James Inhofe, R-Okla., John Thune, R-S.D., and recent senators and high officials such as John Ashcroft, Ed Meese, Pete Domenici and Don Nickles. Over in the House there's Joe Pitts, R-Penn., Frank Wolf, R-Va., Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., Ander Crenshaw, R-Fla., Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., and John R. Carter, R-Texas. Historically, the Family has been strongly Republican, but it includes Democrats, too. There's Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, for instance, a vocal defender of putting the Ten Commandments in public places, and Sen. Mark Pryor, the pro-war Arkansas Democrat responsible for scuttling Obama's labor agenda. Sen. Pryor explained to me the meaning of bipartisanship he'd learned through the Family: "Jesus didn't come to take sides. He came to take over." And by Jesus, the Family means the Family.

Family leaders consider their political network to be Christ's avant garde, an elite that transcends not just conventional morality but also earthly laws regulating lobbying. In the Family's early days, they debated registering as "a lobby for God's Kingdom." Instead, founder Abraham Vereide decided that the group could be more effective by working personally with politicians. "The more invisible you can make your organization," Vereide's successor, current leader Doug Coe preaches, "the more influence you can have." That's true -- which is why we have laws requiring lobbyists to identify themselves as such.

But David Coe, Doug Coe's son and heir apparent, calls himself simply a friend to men such as John Ensign, whom he guided through the coverup of his affair. I met the younger Coe when I lived for several weeks as a member of the Family [the post to which this post is a reply, 2d item]. He's a surprising source of counsel, spiritual or otherwise. Attempting to explain what it means to be chosen for leadership like King David was -- or Mark Sanford, according to his own estimate -- he asked a young man who'd put himself, body and soul, under the Family's authority, "Let's say I hear you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?" The man guessed that Coe would probably think that he was a monster. "No," answered Coe, "I wouldn't." Why? Because, as a member of the Family, he's among what Family leaders refer to as the "new chosen." If you're chosen, the normal rules don't apply.

So it is for Ensign. Sen. Jim DeMint, one of Ensign's C Street roommates, insists that the prayer groups that meet there -- "invisible believing groups," in the Family's words, designed to facilitate private prayer between partners of equally high status -- are all about accountability. That is, the kind that takes place behind closed doors. We now know that the Family was aware of Sen. Ensign's affair long before Doug Hampton's wounded pride forced it into the public. What's more, if Hampton is to be believed, their concern with the payoffs made by Ensign and his parents to his mistress's family was that they were too small; operating in a medical and spiritual capacity, Sen. Coburn counseled $1.2 million, according to Hampton. Coburn is no hypocrite -- he's a true believer in the faith of the Family, the idea that the chosen need to look out for one another. Christian right leader -- and Watergate felon -- Chuck Colson, converted through the efforts of the Family, has boasted of it as a "veritable underground of Christ's men all through government."

What do they do? Rep. Zach Wamp, one of Ensign's fellow C Streeters who's been in the news for defending the Family's secrecy, has teamed up with Family-linked Reps. Ander Crenshaw, R-Fla., and John R. Carter, R-Texas, on an obscure appropriations committee to help greenlight tens of millions in federal funds for new megachurch-style chapels on military bases around the country [ http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39632707 and (upcoming) following, as well as the post to which this post is a reply and preceding]. Former Rep. Chip Pickering was not only sleeping on the sly with a representative of the telecom industry, he was living with one -- former Oklahoma Republican Rep. Steve Largent, a C Streeter who in his post-Congress capacity as the head of a telecom association paid for travel by Pickering and John Ensign. Some might call that "crony capitalism"; Family members call it "biblical capitalism."

A review of Ensign's and Sen. Coburn's travel records, undertaken with researcher Chris Rodda of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, reveals an even more disturbing overlap of the pious and the political. On at least three occasions in recent years, Sen. Ensign traveled to Asia and the Middle East on what he described as official policy trips, paid for entirely by the International Foundation, one of the network of little-known nonprofits that make up the Family. Sen. Coburn, meanwhile, traveled to Beirut in 2005 on the Family's dime, with the explicit mission of setting up Lebanese political prayer groups, just like the one that covered for Ensign. The following year, Coburn humbled himself in prayer at a special Family event in the British Virgin Islands, a Christian mission of earthly rewards also undertaken, at Family expense, by fellow C Streeter Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Penn., who also sacrificed himself for God with a Family-paid trip to Aruba.

To be fair, most of the trips sponsored by the Family aren't pleasure junkets. They're missionary work. Only the Family missionaries aren't representing the United States. They're representing "Jesus plus nothing," as Doug Coe puts it, the "totalitarianism of God," in the words of an early Family leader, a vision that encompasses not just social issues but also the kind of free-market fundamentalism that is the real object of devotion for Ensign, Coburn, Pickering, Wamp and Sanford, along with Family insiders such as Sens. DeMint, Sam Brownback and Chuck Grassley. At the heart of the Family's spiritual advice for its proxies in Congress is the conviction that the market's invisible hand represents the guidance of God, and that God wants his "new chosen" to look out for one another.

When they arrive in other countries, on trips paid for by the Family, at the behest of the Family, they are still traveling under official government auspices, on official business, with the pomp and circumstance -- and access -- of their taxpayer-funded, elected positions. Here's how a former National Security Council official who traveled with Family leader Doug Coe on a tour of Pacific nations described the Family effect in small nations where a visitor like John Ensign is a major event: "It reminded me of the story in World War II, where the British sent an OSS type into Borneo ... And this guy parachuted out of the sky and they had never seen anything like this so they looked on him as -- he had blonde hair and white skin and he was a white god who had come out of the sky to mobilize them. Obviously his side was going to win so they had no trouble aligning themselves."

One needn't be a Marxist to find fault with the Family's mash-up of New Testament and unfettered capitalism -- Adam Smith himself would have recognized that theology as a disingenuous form of self-interest by proxy. Such interests have led the Family into some strange alliances over the years. Seduced by the Indonesian dictator Suharto's militant anti-communism, they described the murder of hundreds of thousands that brought him to power as a "spiritual revolution," and sent delegations of congressmen and oil executives to pray to Jesus with the Muslim leader. In Africa, they anointed the Somali killer Siad Barre as God's man and sent Sen. Grassley and a defense contractor as emissaries. Barre described himself as a "Koranic Marxist," but he agreed to pray to Grassley's American Christ in return for American military aid, which he then used to wreak a biblical terror on his nation. It has not yet recovered. More recently, the Family has paid for congressional Christian junkets to bastions of democracy such as Serbia, Sudan, Belarus, Albania, Macedonia and Musharraf's Pakistan.

If the Family men who stood over John Ensign as he wrote a baldly insincere breakup letter to his mistress were naive about hearts that want what they want, they don't claim ignorance about the strongmen with whom they build bonds of prayer and foreign aid. They admire them. Counseling Rep. Tiahrt, Doug Coe offered Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden as men whose commitment to their causes is to be emulated. Preaching on the meaning of Christ's words, he says, "You know Jesus said 'You got to put Him before mother-father-brother sister? Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that's what they taught the kids. Mao even had the kids killing their own mother and father. But it wasn't murder. It was for building the new nation. The new kingdom."

Sen. Ensign, facing calls for an investigation of what may have been felony abuses of campaign funds in his attempt to cover up his affair, might not get there. Then again, the Family's preview of a "new kingdom" -- a private club of men protecting one another's secrets -- doesn't sound so different from the old kingdom. That's the awful secret behind the closed doors of the C Street House, the Family's authoritarian rhetoric, and even the Family's real mission: business as usual, fortified by faith in more power for the powerful and privilege itself a form of piety.

Cambridge-based journalist Jeff Sharlet is the author of "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [ http://www.amazon.com/Family-Secret-Fundamentalism-Heart-American/dp/0060559799 ]" and a contributing editor for Harper's and Rolling Stone. He is also co-editor of a new book, "Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith [ http://www.amazon.com/Believer-Beware-First-Person-Dispatches-Margins/dp/0807077399 ]."

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Related

GOP Rep.: Would Obama's mother have aborted him?
Kansas Rep. Todd Tiahrt says taxpayer funding might have given the president's mother incentive to abort
July 17, 2009
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/07/17/tiahrt/index.html

Remind me: Which political party is "decadent"?
Mark Sanford's zipper problem is yet more proof that Republican conservatives are just liberals in right-wing drag
June 26, 2009
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2009/06/26/sanford/index.html

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Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/07/21/c_street/index1.html [comments at http://letters.salon.com/news/feature/2009/07/21/c_street/view/?show=all ]

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and see in particular (items linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39551176 and http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39665827

[F6]

Following up on “The Family”: Six Questions for Jeff Sharlet


Photo © Greg Martin

By Bill Wasik
June 2, 1:36 PM, 2008

Jeff Sharlet [ http://www.harpers.org/subjects/JeffSharlet ] is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. His first story for the magazine, “Jesus Plus Nothing, [2d item in the post to which this post is a reply]” appeared in March 2003, and five years later it has grown into a book, entitled The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [ http://www.amazon.com/Family-Secret-Fundamentalism-Heart-American/dp/0060559799 ]. Senior Editor Bill Wasik recently asked Sharlet six questions about his original piece and what he has learned since then.

1. Your exposé on The Fellowship, aka “The Family,” appeared five years ago. Has your understanding of the group changed?

When I was working on that story, I remember debating how much Hitler we should put in the piece. That is, we wondered how fair it was to dwell on The Family’s invocations of Hitler as a model of “total commitment.” As it turns out, it was quite fair. After I left Ivanwald, a team of researchers and I spent years combing through hundreds of thousands of documents in archives around the country. We discovered that as far back as the 1940s, when The Family began organizing congressmen, the group’s founder, Abraham Vereide, was praising Hitler’s “youth work” as a model to be adopted by Americans. He denounced Hitler himself, but he admired fascism’s cultivation of elites, crucial to what he saw as a God-ordained coming “age of minority control.”

The Family has put that concept, which they call “Jesus plus nothing,” into action for decades, from their early successes fighting the New Deal in the 1930s and 40s to their recruitment of war criminals such as Herman J. Abs, known as “Hitler’s banker,” into postwar European leadership, to their facilitation of U.S. support for dictators ranging from Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti to Suharto of Indonesia to Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, now their “key man” for Africa. The fetish for strongman leadership has continued with Vereide’s successor, Doug Coe, who leads the group today. Throughout his letters in the Billy Graham Center Archive at Wheaton College, I found references to the leadership model of Hitler. In one sermon, variations of which he’s given many times, Coe says: “Jesus said ‘You got to put Him before mother-father-brother-sister.’ Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that’s what they taught the kids. Mao even had the kids killing their own mother and father. But it wasn’t murder. It was for building the new nation. The new kingdom.”

2. Given the unbelievable amount of influence brokered by the Fellowship Foundation, and by Doug Coe, why have so few national media outlets have picked up on the story?

The problem is that we just don’t have a press that really wants to challenge power on issues they consider “personal.” Speaking at the 1985 Prayer Breakfast, Ronald Reagan said, “I wish I could say more about it, but it’s working precisely because it’s private.” That should have been an invitation for investigative reporting. Instead, the media, then and now, tends to acquiesce to elite secretiveness, not out of any conspiracy, but due to a culture of reverence for established power, liberal or conservative. Most journalists believe in meritocracy—not merely that it’s a good idea, but that it actually exists. They know some politicians game the system, but they’re committed to the idea that the system basically works. And it does, but not in favor of democracy.

3. It seems like the National Prayer Breakfast, which The Family administers, is a big part of why the press doesn’t pick up on the story. It seems inconceivable that a group that attracts so many powerful public figures from around the world to its annual event could be up to anything untoward.

It’s the Family’s only public event, but the few hours that the press is allowed to attend are the dullest thing imaginable, the blandest kind of ecumenical civil religion, with the main address presented by some figure distinct from the Christian Right—Joe Lieberman, or the Saudi Prince Bandar, or even Bono. How threatening is that? But internal documents tell a different story. “Anything could happen,” reads one, “the Koran could even be read, but JESUS is there. He is infiltrating the world.”

4. What happened to the young men featured in “Jesus Plus Nothing”? In the article, we get the sense that they are being groomed for leadership, both in the Family and in the world.

The man who introduced me to The Family returned to a successful financial career. He’s not a boldfaced name, but he’s doing well, and The Family has always understood that there’s a lot of power to be found in the ranks of middle management, the men and (a few) women who actually do most of the work.

Gannon Sims went on to work as a State Department spokesman, and now he’s training for a pulpit. One of the brothers called me after the story appeared in Harper’s. To be honest, I’d hoped that they’d be as dismayed as I was to learn what The Family was really up to, but this brother—who asked that he not be identified—said, “I hope you don’t think I didn’t know all that.” That is, he’d known about The Family’s role in propping up dictators around the world, and he was just fine with it.

In the book, I tell the story of another former Ivanwalder named Greg Unumb, now an executive with Pride Foramer, a division of the oil drilling company Pride International that takes care of business in Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Angola, and India. Greg had once held Bengt’s position, as leader of Ivanwald. “What’s secret is the top guys working with the leadership,” he told me. “It’s not unlike a business. Business is a network. This is a Christian network, with a few people running it. There are two types of people at Ivanwald. Sharp guys with leadership potential, and problem kids. The sharp ones use Ivanwald to build their network. If they do become successful, there’s an emphasis on maintaining contact.” And here was Greg, contacting me.

As for myself, I also tell the story of a woman I call “Kate,” who claimed to be a fan. She turned out to be a sister in The Family, this young, good-looking woman who had been sent, she said, by the Coes to “learn my heart.” That was sweeter than the response from former Senator Dan Coats, who as ambassador to Germany killed funds for a speaking gig I had in a series usually paid for by the U.S. embassy. Fortunately, my hosts, the University of Potsdam, made up the difference. They also told me that Coats had declared me “an enemy of Jesus.”

5. I remember that when you were writing “Jesus Plus Nothing,” the themes of secrecy and betrayal loomed very large in your mind. The Family was a self-avowedly secret group, engaged in essentially subversive acts of behind-the-scenes power-brokering. And you, meanwhile, were learning all this undercover, fully prepared to betray these young men with whom you lived. How do you look back on that betrayal?

I used my real name, I took notes openly, I told them I was a journalist and that I was working on a book (my first), about unusual religious communities around the country. I told them the title, too, Killing the Buddha. Maybe they thought I meant it literally. Regardless, they had a pretty full dossier on me. I even talked about writing and betrayal with them—I tend to agree with Joan Didion’s assessment that “writers are always selling somebody out.” It’s inherent in the process. “Undercover” is a funny word, in that many people think it means the journalist has some kind of secret identity, maybe a fake mustache. I didn’t—it wasn’t necessary. The Family couldn’t imagine that someone might learn to speak their language without sharing their beliefs.

That sentiment is reflected in a letter I found in The Family’s archive, from an inner circle leader to a South African operative. “The Movement,” he writes, “is simply inexplicable to people who are not intimately acquainted with it.” The Family’s political initiatives, he goes on, “have always been misunderstood by ‘outsiders.’” Then he talks about how whole projects have been hurt when Family members leak information to the public. “Thus,” he writes, in conclusion, “I would urge you not to put on paper anything relating to any of the work that you are doing… [unless] you know the recipient well enough to put at the top of the page, ‘PLEASE DESTROY AFTER READING.’”

This is one of my favorite documents out of the hundreds of thousands I reviewed because A, it’s funny—the recipient immediately wrote back to say that he understood and he’d made multiple copies of the letter for all of his associates, one of which I now have; B, it reveals the sense of persecution and victimhood which undergirds so much of that culture of secrecy on the right.

This secrecy is pragmatic—“The more you can make your organization invisible,” preaches Doug Coe, “the more influence it will have”—but it’s also a way for these very influential people to conceive of themselves as akin to the Christians of the first century, struggling nobly against a dominant culture of secularism. Family members imagine themselves as revolutionaries, even as they function as defenders of status quo power.

That kind of self-deception allows a writer only two real responses—deference, or betrayal.

6. So is your book a betrayal?

According to their belief in themselves as a “new chosen,” an anointed elite that have replaced the Jews in God’s esteem, I am still a member of The Family. And yet here I am, baring their secrets to the world. Does that make me a journalist, or a traitor? You need to enter the moral gray zone between those two terms if you’re going to really explore the inner workings of power. You have to be an insider and an outsider at the same time.

I remember one day Jeff C., one of the house leaders, said, “You oughtta write a book about us. But nobody would believe it.” It was like he was daring me, but he felt safe doing so because he didn’t think the truths of The Family would translate to the outside world. They believe Christ had one message for those closest to him, and then another, diluted message for the rest of the twelve, and so on out to the masses.

One of the brothers called me up after we published “Jesus Plus Nothing” to explain to me that they weren’t upset by the details of what I’d written, all of which he thought were more or less accurate, but by the fact that I’d written anything at all. That, he said, was the betrayal—telling the truth about The Family.

© The Harper's Magazine Foundation

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/06/hbc-90003020

[F6]

Jeff Sharlet on tonight's Coast to Coast AM -- main guest; will be interviewed and take calls during the latter 3 hours of the show, from 2am-5am ET/11pm-2am PT (with weekend host Ian Punnett, an ordained minister who is by far the best, most intelligent host the show currently has; it's only the weekend shows with Ian that I even bother checking to see what's on anymore) -- this 3 hours with Jeff Sharlet will be the first long-form appearance of his that I've heard of, and should be quite something -- hope to find a transcript, or perhaps even a replay (doubtful), available somewhere or other in the coming days:

Fundamentalism & Cults

Date: 08-22-09

Host: Ian Punnett

Guests: Jeff Sharlet [ http://www.coasttocoastam.com/guest/sharlet-jeff/40579 ], Andrew Collins [ http://www.coasttocoastam.com/guest/collins-andrew/6942 ]

In the first hour, author Andrew Collins [ http://www.andrewcollins.com/ ] will provide details about the system of caves he discovered beneath the Giza Pyramids [ http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/08/13/caves-giza.html ].

Then, researcher Jeff Sharlet [ http://www.jeffsharlet.com/ ] will discuss the frightening connection between power and fundamentalism in a secretive cult called "The Family", that teaches Washington lawmakers that people chosen for leadership are above morality.

Website(s):
•jeffsharlet.com [ http://www.jeffsharlet.com/ ]
•andrewcollins.com [ http://www.andrewcollins.com/ ]

Book(s):
•The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [ http://www.amazon.com/Family-Secret-Fundamentalism-Heart-American/dp/0060560053/ ]
•Beneath the Pyramids: Egypt's Greatest Secret Uncovered [ http://www.amazon.com/Beneath-Pyramids-Egypts-Greatest-Uncovered/dp/0876045719/ ]

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2009/08/22

[F6]

The Rowhouse at 133 C Street, Washington, D.C. ...


[ http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20090803 ]


[ http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20090804 ]


[ http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20090805 ]


[ http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20090806 ]


[ http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20090807 ]


[ http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20090808 ]

[fuagf]

Theocrats and the Separation of Church and State Who Are the Theocrats? What Do They Want?

F6: One tiny contribution to your book. LOLLOL

By Austin Cline, About.com .. See More About:

* religion in government .. http://atheism.about.com/lr/religion_in_government/283968/1/
* christian right in america .. http://atheism.about.com/lr/christian_right_in_america/283968/2/
* christian nationalism & dominion theology .. http://atheism.about.com/lr/christian_nationalism_dominion_theology/283968/3/

Sponsored Links
New Emerging ReligionThe Only Major Religion To Emerge in 20th Century. Watch Online VideoScientology.org ..
Insert: video inside if you wish .. this a fuagf, substitute .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology ]

The most extreme position opposed to separationism in all of its forms is held by those who can be called “theocrats,” these are people who wish to create a theocratic government in the United States. To state it plainly, the theocrats consider even the most conservative Christians in the Religious Right to not be “godly” enough. Sometimes arguing that a theocracy was intended for the United States from the very beginning, theocrats believe that any sort of compromise would be invalid.

The theocracy they want would, of course, be entirely Christian in nature. Theocrats oppose the “neutrality” among various religious groups which is advocated by non-preferentialists, and they even oppose the more extreme views held by some “accommodationists” which would allow for local communities to impose some particular religion on minorities (because in some communities, the majority might be non-Christian).

Despite their extremism, however, theocrats have a lot of support from the rest of the Religious Right for many of their basic principles. For example, their arguments that the United States is a “Christian Nation” is echoed by many who would not otherwise admit to wanting to replace American democracy with a more repressive system.

One way of understanding this phenomenon is to consider the label “Christian Nationalism” (also sometimes referred to as "Christianism," an analogue to the label "Islamism"). For Christian Nationalists, America is God’s chosen country which he has blessed beyond all others for our faith and belief in him. American leaders are directly empowered by God to do his work here on earth. Anyone who opposes the work of American leaders must, therefore, also be opposing the will of God. This makes them simultaneously blasphemers and traitors.

As should be evident, such an ideology conflates America and Christianity to a great extent — a Christian Nationalist is quite unable to differentiate between American Patriotism and Chrisitan Dogma. They portray America as ever being under attack by enemies — whether enemies of the body politic or enemies of God (rhetoric usually starts out by describing someone as belonging to one of those two categories, but by the end they become a member of the other as well).

Christian Nationalism owes a great deal to Christian Reconstructionism — and, in fact, can probably be regarded as a form of Reconstructionism. They share with Reconstructionists the idea that American laws should be modeled on biblical laws. The primary difference seems to be that whereas Reconstructionists emphasize in their writings the Bible and biblical laws, Christian Nationalists give equal weight to American patriotism and the Bible. Reconstructionists might actually argue that the Christian Nationalists are making idols out patriotic symbols like the American flag, but in the end the goals of both groups are largely the same.

Suggested Reading
Church & State 101Books on Church & State SeparationSeparation of Church & State: News .. Church & State Issues ..

Pledge of AllegianceTen CommandmentsChurch/State Myths

Related Articles

* One Nation, Under God: America is a Christian Nation, You Aren't a Real...
* One Nation, Under God: America is a Christian Nation, You Aren't a Real...
* Christian Reconstructionism: Biblical Law, Theocracy, and Rule by Christian...
* Reconstructionist Christianity
* Christianism & Christian Nationalism: Extreme Nationalism plus Extremis... [MULTI links inside]
http://atheism.about.com/od/churchstate101/a/theocrats.htm

Dominionism as a broader movement

In the early 1990s, sociologist Sara Diamond and journalist Frederick Clarkson defined dominionism as a movement that, while including Dominion Theology and Reconstructionism as subsets, is much broader in scope, extending to much of the Christian Right. In his 1992 study of Dominion Theology and its influence on the Christian Right, Bruce Barron writes,

In the context of American evangelical efforts to penetrate and transform public life, the distinguishing mark of a dominionist is a commitment to defining and carrying out an approach to building society that is self-consciously defined as exclusively Christian, and dependent specifically on the work of Christians, rather than based on a broader consensus. (p. 14, emphasis in original) [fuagf: added emphasis here]

According to Diamond, the defining concept of dominionism is "that Christians alone are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns". In 1989, Diamond declared that this concept "has become the central unifying ideology for the Christian Right" (p.138, emphasis in original). In 1995, she called it "prevalent on the Christian Right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominionism

[StephanieVanbryce]

C Street House No Longer Tax Exempt


Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC)

Zachary Roth | November 17, 2009, 1:40PM

Residents of the C Street Christian fellowship house will no longer benefit from a loophole that had allowed the house's owners to avoid paying property taxes.

Previously, the house -- despite being home to numerous lawmakers -- had been tax exempt, because it was classified as a church. That arrangement had allowed the building's owner, the secretive international Christian organization The Family, to charge significantly below market rents to its residents. In recent year, Senators John Ensign (R-NV), Tom Coburn (R-OK), Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Jim DeMint (R-SC), and Reps. Zach Wamp (R-TN), Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Mike Doyle (D-PA) have all reportedly called C Street home.

Natalie Wilson, a spokeswoman for the Office of Tax and Revenue for Washington D.C., told TPMmuckraker that her office inspected the house this summer. "It was determined that portions of it were being rented out for private residential purposes," she said. As a result, the tax exempt status was partially revoked. Sixty-six percent of the value of the property is now subject to taxation.

According to online records, the total taxable assessment is $1,834,500. The building's owner last month paid taxes of $1714.70 on the property.

A commenter using the name Vince Treacy, posting on a blog run by George Washington Law professor Jonathan Turley, noted in June that the property enjoyed tax exempt status. In a comment yesterday, he wrote:

.....Well, at least one complaint just happened to be filed a few months ago, by some anonymous citizen who will remain nameless ""wink, wink," with the taxpayer hotline at the DC tax office.

The C Street house has lately been the subject of unwanted attention thanks to its role in three GOP sex scandals. Ensign, who reportedly recently moved out of the house, was confronted there last year by his fellow C Streeters, including Coburn, about his affair with a top aide's wife. South Carolina governor Mark Sanford revealed this summer that he had received counseling from the house's denizens over his own randy hijinx with his Argentinean mistress. And the wife of former GOP congressman Chip Pickering has alleged in divorce proceedings that the house was the site of "wrongful conduct" between her husband and his girlfriend.


* This post originally reported, based on online records for the city of Washington, D.C., that C Street is owned by Youth With A Mission (YWAM), an international Christian group, and that YWAM is affiliated with The Family. But YWAM official Ron Boehme told TPMmuckraker that the city's records are inaccurate, and that his group sold the house to The Family in 1989. He also said that YWAM is not affiliated with The Family.

embedded links
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/11/c_street_house_no_longer_tax_exempt.php?ref=fpa

[fuagf]

Is Living in the C Street House An Ethics Violation?

— By Nick Baumann
| Thu Apr. 1, 2010 8:32 AM PDT

Regular Mother Jones readers will recall the story of "the Fellowship," or "the Family," a secretive fundamentalist Christian group that boasts a large number of prominent politicians as members. In May 2008, we published an excerpt .. http://motherjones.com/politics/2008/05/book-excerpt-family .. from Jeff Sharlet's bestselling book on the organization. Last year, scandal rocked the Family as Sen. John Ensign .. http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/03/john-ensign-soldiers .. (R-Nev.), a member of the group, was caught up in a sordid sex scandal. (Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who was affiliated with the Family during his time in Congress, also got caught up in a sex scandal.)

Ensign, along with Senators Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), and John Ensign (R-Nev.); and Representatives Mike Doyle (D-Penn.), Heath Shuler (D-N.C.), Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) and Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), was one of the residents of a house on C Street .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/25/AR2009062504480.html .. in Washington, near the Capitol. The so-called "C Street house" is owned by a Family-affiliated group and is a center for Family-related activity.

Now the C Street residents are facing new problems—and this time, they're not related to a sex scandal. An August 2009 article in World magazine about the C Street house .. http://www.worldmag.com/articles/15778 .. revealed that its residents pay around $950 per month to live in the house. In exchange, they don't just get a room—they get housekeeping service, too, and meals are sometimes available. Clergy VOICE, a group of clergy from different faith traditions, thought that sounded fishy, so they did a little digging:

........ "The group surveyed the Capitol Hill rental market and discovered that nearby hotels charge a minimum of $2,400 per month, corporate housing costs a minimum of $4,000 per month and efficiency or one bedroom apartments typically go for at least $1,700 per month. None of these rates include any meals."

It appears that the residents of the C Street house are the beneficiaries of subsidized housing. So Clergy VOICE filed an IRS complaint asking how the subsidy might affect the C Street residents' taxes. On Thursday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a DC good-government group, filed ethics complaints .. http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/44583 .. against the house's occupants:

........ "The House and Senate gift rules specifically include “lodging” as a prohibited gift. There are only two exceptions to the ban on accepting lodging: if it is provided by an individual based on personal friendship, or if it is hospitality in a personal residence owned by an individual. Here, because a corporate entity – C Street Center, Inc. – owns the property, neither exception applies. In addition, members may not accept gifts offered to members of Congress because of their official positions. As only members of Congress appear to live in the C Street House, it seems likely that it is because of their positions that they are permitted to live there and are offered below market rent.

........ CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan stated, “At a time when so many Americans are losing their housing it is surprising to discover that some members of Congress are lucky enough to have a landlord that charges below market rent for fairly luxurious accommodations – and offers housekeeping and meal service to boot.” Sloan continued, “Rarely does someone – particularly a member of Congress – receive something for nothing, so you can’t help but wonder exactly what these members may be doing in return for all of this largess. Of course, this is the reason the gift ban was enacted in the first place. This situation cries out for an immediate ethics inquiry.”"

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/04/living-in-c-street-house-ethics-violation

[SilverSurfer]

speaking of SC , Robert B Reich sites agreement with Sen Jim DeMint ,, that's got to be a first!
http://robertreich.org/post/489217942/the-fed-in-hot-water

[Garden Rose]

I don't see anything unusual about having a fellowship group and they really don't have to share it with the public. You are into a conspiracy theory w/o much more.

[fuagf]

Secretive Christian group at heart of D.C. politics ready for its close-up in Netflix docuseries

"The Political Enclave That Dare Not Speak Its Name"

"The Family" puts the spotlight on the enigmatic Fellowship Foundation, the Christian group behind the National Prayer Breakfast.


Sen. James Lankford, President Donald Trump and Sen. Christopher Coons pray during the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on Feb. 7, 2019.Brendan Smialowski / AFP - Getty Images file
Aug. 9, 2019, 8:36 PM GMT+10 / Updated Aug. 10, 2019, 12:36 AM GMT+10

By Ethan Sacks

A secretive organization that has courted political leaders and built international influence while undermining the constitutional division of the church and the state in the process is at the center of a new five-episode documentary series called “The Family.”

Since 1953, the National Prayer Breakfast has remained a fixture in American politics that has boasted attendance by every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower on the first Thursday of every February. It has been hyped as an opportunity for the political elite of Washington, D.C., and visiting international dignitaries to put aside partisan differences and reflect on a higher purpose.

While the annual event is purportedly hosted by members of Congress, it is actually organized and run by an evangelical Christian organization called The Fellowship Foundation, or "The Family," as it is referred to internally by its members.

The series, which debuts on Netflix on Friday, takes a look at the group that operates with its own higher purpose — quietly building its influence on global politics "in the name of Jesus."

"The Fellowship isn't about faith and it spreads very little. It's about power," said Jeff Sharlet, whose books, "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," and "C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy," inspired the Netflix series.

"Internally, it is spoken of primarily as a 'recruiting device' with which to draw 'key men' into smaller prayer cells to 'meet Jesus man to man,'” according to Sharlet. "Practically, the Prayer Breakfast has functioned from the very beginning as an unregistered lobbying festival."

The Fellowship Foundation did not return an NBC News request for comment, and a publicist linked to the group previously also declined to respond


The Family leader Doug Coe meets with then-President Ronald Reagan
and First Lady Nancy Reagan.Courtesy of Netflix

Abraham Vereide started the first iteration of the Fellowship in Seattle in 1935 when he hosted 19 business leaders with the aim of crushing organized labor. However, using the Prayer Breakfast as a discreet Christian recruiting platform was perfected under longtime leader Doug Coe, who was considered one of the most powerful influencers in the Beltway before his death in 2017.

The Prayer Breakfast isn't the only way the Fellowship has infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Documents have also tied the group to a D.C. residence, dubbed “C Street” for the street on which it is located, which provided low-cost housing for prominent legislators before news stories spurred by Sharlet's book drew attention to its violation of congressional gift regulations.

"There is simply a great deal of hypocrisy, partiality, favoritism in D.C., (which are) all things Jesus' life and teachings directly oppose," Douglas Hampton, a former associate of the Fellowship, said by email.

"It's become about power and position, not (public service) and what's best for others,” he said.

Hampton came to the group in the mid-1990s as a staffer of then-Republican Congressman John Ensign from Nevada. He would leave both the Fellowship and his position with Ensign, after the then-senator was exposed for having an extramarital affair with Hampton's wife.

But despite all of that, Hampton, who was recruited into the group at a golf tournament, credits Coe with enriching his life spiritually.

"His teachings on Jesus compelled men to hear what was being shared, compelled me," Hampton said by email.

"One of Doug Coe's beliefs was that if you lifted up the name of Jesus, that God would draw people in, all sorts of people from all over the world — thus the National Prayer Breakfast — that people would have a desire to learn and embrace the teachings of Jesus and come to Washington to support the breakfast."

Unlike most traditional evangelical Christian groups, which prioritize mobilizing as large a base as possible, the "Family" strategically keeps its membership purposely exclusive.

"It’s so different than our popular impression of the Christian right, it's different than the image of the sweaty pulpit pounders," said "The Family" director Jesse Moss. "Those are mass movements, this is the opposite of that.

"Doug Coe very intentionally took the group underground. There was a recognition that they could do their best work anonymously."

Citing 2006 documents, Sharlet estimates the number of dedicated organizers who handle recruitment at just 350. Those organizers, however, have built a network of prayer cells that the late Christian Right leader Chuck Colson pegged at 20,000-strong, calling it, "a veritable underground of Christ's men all through government."

Sometimes that has meant aligning with politicians who stray from Jesus' example. In 2009, former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford gave a press conference outside of C Street emphasizing his religious pedigree upon resurfacing after disappearing from his state for days to visit a mistress in Argentina.


South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford addresses the press outside the C
Street residence in Washington in 2009. Courtesy of Netflix

So, while President Donald Trump may not have the most pious of track records, Sharlet says the Family has embraced the unique opportunity provided by the most fundamentalist Cabinet in recent American history to advocate evangelical policy.

"The Fellowship believes God uses who He wants, and that power itself is an indicator of who He has chosen — it's a theology of more power for the powerful," Sharlet explained.

"The fact that Trump, with his "art of the deal," is especially well-prepared to embrace this transactional theology — Trump puts the Christian Right's people in power in return of their support — seals the deal."


Jeff Sharlet in a scene from 'The Family'Courtesy of Netflix

The reach of the Fellowship has extended well beyond the confines of Washington. Politicians and businessmen affiliated with the group have met to pray and parlay with the likes of the late Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, Indonesian despot Suharto and Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier, Sharlet said.

Moss points to the episode of "The Family" that chronicles the more recent international trips made by politicians tied to the group to proselytize Christian policy, such as Rep. Robert Aderholt's on-the-ground campaigning for a strict anti-LGBTQ law in Romania.

"Everyone has an agenda, and not everyone is welcome — only the significant," Hampton said.

Ethan Sacks

Ethan Sacks writes for NBCNews.com.

https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/tv/secretive-christian-group-heart-d-c-politics-ready-its-close-n1040011

-

SEATTLE-KING COUNTY PRAYER BREAKFAST
https://centered.org/seattle-king-county-prayer-breakfast/

See also: These are mostly from the now 16 replies to F6's
post "The Political Enclave That Dare Not Speak Its Name"

Following up on “The Family”: Six Questions for Jeff Sharlet
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39979679

Stephanie -- took me long enough -- but here's my reply -- had started
it more than a month ago, and then there was the Holocaust Museum shooting
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39551176

Is Living in the C Street House An Ethics Violation?
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=48537893

C Street House No Longer Tax Exempt
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=43666880


With more strips, https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=41143407

Like I was Jesus:
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39665827

Jesus killed Mohammed:
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39632707

Jesus Camp [the complete film]
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=32564734

Torture Versus Freedom
[Remember Trump has said torture works]
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39471610

Hypocrisy in Red and Blue: How Republicans and Democrats Betray Their Principles Differently
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39273398

I don't see anything unusual about having a fellowship group and they really don't
have to share it with the public. You are into a conspiracy theory w/o much more.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=97916417
.. then 3 clicks down that string ..
pro_se -- well, almost totally -- and that's been cracked back open a bit with the recent passage and
signing of anti-gay bills in Uganda and Nigeria (I've got more on that, hopefully will get around to posting it)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=97920713

Which, in conclusion, brings to mind ergo sum's earlier today, in full

By Jo Becker
• Aug. 10, 2019
•
o
o
o
o
o
o 315
RINKEBY, Sweden — Johnny Castillo, a Peruvian-born neighborhood watchman in this district of Stockholm, still puzzles over the strange events that two years ago turned the central square of this predominantly immigrant community into a symbol of multiculturalism run amok.
First came a now-infamous comment by President Trump, suggesting that Sweden’s history of welcoming refugees was at the root of a violent attack in Rinkeby the previous evening, even though nothing had actually happened.
“You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this? Sweden!” Mr. Trump told supporters at a rally on Feb. 18, 2017. “They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.”
The president’s source: Fox News, which had excerpted a short film promoting a dystopian view of Sweden as a victim of its asylum policies, with immigrant neighborhoods crime-ridden “no-go zones.”
But two days later, as Swedish officials were heaping bemused derision on Mr. Trump, something did in fact happen in Rinkeby: Several dozen masked men attacked police officers making a drug arrest, throwing rocks and setting cars ablaze.
And it was right around that time, according to Mr. Castillo and four other witnesses, that Russian television crews showed up, offering to pay immigrant youths “to make trouble” in front of the cameras.
“They wanted to show that President Trump is right about Sweden,” Mr. Castillo said, “that people coming to Europe are terrorists and want to disturb society.”
hat nativist rhetoric — that immigrants are invading the homeland — has gained ever-greater traction, and political acceptance, across the West amid dislocations wrought by vast waves of migration from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. In its most extreme form, it is echoed in the online manifesto of the man accused of gunning down 22 people last weekend in El Paso.
In the nationalists’ message-making, Sweden has become a prime cautionary tale, dripping with schadenfreude. What is even more striking is how many people in Sweden — progressive, egalitarian, welcoming Sweden — seem to be warming to the nationalists’ view: that immigration has brought crime, chaos and a fraying of the cherished social safety net, not to mention a withering away of national culture and tradition.
Fueled by an immigration backlash — Sweden has accepted more refugees per capita than any other European country — right-wing populism has taken hold, reflected most prominently in the steady ascent of a political party with neo-Nazi roots, the Sweden Democrats. In elections last year, they captured nearly 18 percent of the vote.
To dig beneath the surface of what is happening in Sweden, though, is to uncover the workings of an international disinformation machine, devoted to the cultivation, provocation and amplication of far-right, anti-immigrant passions and political forces. Indeed, that machine, most influentially rooted in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and the American far right, underscores a fundamental irony of this political moment: the globalization of nationalism.
The central target of these manipulations from abroad — and the chief instrument of the Swedish nationalists’ success — is the country’s increasingly popular, and virulently anti-immigrant, digital echo chamber.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/world/europe/sweden-immigration-nationalism.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
.. here .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=150449849

[fuagf]

The Patriarchal Allure of The Family

"The Political Enclave That Dare Not Speak Its Name"

A new Netflix series delves into a shadowy religious group with long-standing political ties to Washington. Is it as powerful as the show suggests?

Sophie Gilbert
Aug 14, 2019


The Fellowship, the writer Jeff Sharlet says in one scene, is “the darkest expression of religious
life that I’ve found in 20 years.”Netflix

In 2007, Senator John Ensign of Nevada was a glittering star in the Republican firmament, with a maple-syrup tan, born-again bona fides, and presidential ambitions. He was one of a handful of congressmen who lived in a C Street row house owned by an organization known as “the Fellowship,” an unorthodox group home that the New Yorker once likened to a frat house for Jesus. The Fellowship’s members crossed party lines, but they had a few things in common. They were male. They were white. They paid a token fee to occupy rooms rented out by a nebulous faith group that encouraged them to believe that they had been chosen as leaders by God himself, and that none but God could judge them.

[Insert: Yet, so many still serve the "chosen one" lie up to Trump.
To link - rooster, Trump, has "deemed himself "the chosen one"". is not original as you suggest.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=150707614]

For Ensign, at least, it didn’t quite work out that way. In 2009, he was forced to confess that he’d been having an extramarital affair with the wife of his staffer and friend Doug Hampton. Then it emerged that Ensign’s parents had given the Hamptons a “gift” of $96,000 after Hampton discovered the affair, while Ensign had helped Hampton get a lobbying job at a Nevada-based consulting group. Ensign moved out of the C Street house, and his fellow Republican senators reportedly distanced themselves from him. He left office in 2011 and returned to working as a veterinarian .. https://www.bocaparkanimalhospital.com/about-us/staff/dr-john-ensign .. in Las Vegas, where he also volunteers for a charity offering low-cost spaying and neutering services. There are some ignominious second acts in American politics, but the path from one of Jesus’s own representatives on Earth to a humble agent in the fight against animal overpopulation nevertheless stands out.

But what happened to the Fellowship? The Family, a five-part documentary series by Jesse Moss that debuted on Netflix earlier this month, makes the case that this shadowy religious organization best known for the moral incontinence of some of its members is actually one of the most nefarious operations in American politics. Based in large part on the 2008 book of the same name by Jeff Sharlet, The Familydraws a through line from the Fellowship to President Donald Trump, casting the latter as a crucial component in the Fellowship’s quest for global domination. Members of Congress, Moss and Sharlet argue, are secretly lobbying for an invisible organization that’s been “hiding in plain sight” for the past eight decades. The Fellowship, Sharlet says in one scene, is “the darkest expression of religious life that I’ve found in 20 years.” (It’s hard to hear this quote and not immediately think about a few other potential contenders .. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ .)

Over four and a bit hours, The Family tries to expose an institution whose most prized currency has always been secrecy, delving into its origins at the hands of a Norwegian minister and fervent capitalist, its ties to some of the world’s nastiest autocrats,

[Jesus sat with sinners, soo we and Trump should too]

its more recent amity with Russia, and its eager embrace of Trump as a “wolf-king” who can change the course of history. Moss embraces the stylistic trappings of conspiratorial exposés to tell his story—dramatic reenactments, a plinky and faintly menacing piano score, selective splicing of clips featuring Maria Butina and Muammar Qaddafi. And yet, as the series continues, it’s unclear whether the Fellowship is as powerful as it would like to be, or whether its aura of mystery is its most distinct asset. In one interview, Doug Coe, the Fellowship’s former longtime leader, is likened to the Wizard of Oz, the enigmatic architect of a kingdom. But Oz was also just a man behind a curtain with a prodigious gift for self-aggrandizement. At times, The Family’s willingness to buy into the Fellowship’s mythology to tell a more compelling story seems to distract the show from the core of the real con.

In 2002, Sharlet was only beginning to carve out a career as a writer when he applied to live at Ivanwald, a sort of dormitory in suburban Washington, D.C., for young men of faith whose backgrounds implied both privilege and political connections. Sharlet had recently met with a friend, Luke, a “promising guy” with an upper-middle-class upbringing and a “fine trajectory to his life,” who’d abandoned everything to join what his family feared was a cult. Luke told Sharlet that this was nonsense, and that he was simply living with a bunch of other guys who were followers of Jesus. He invited Sharlet to join them. Moss re-creates this interaction with actors, and in the scene, the dramatized Luke has the kind of vacant smile on his face that implies either total spiritual and emotional peace or devotion to Charles Manson .. https://miro.medium.com/max/4800/1*lREXpp7_Jq1ZCFonAksNIA.jpeg .

Ivanwald, Sharlet found out, was an enclave where young Christian men could eat meat, study the Gospels, play basketball, and be indoctrinated into a group that promised them exceptionalism. [the 'Chosen Ones'] Coe, the purported leader of the Fellowship, had long expressed admiration for the ways in which leaders engendered loyalty through brotherhood, citing Hitler, Mao, and the Mafia as inspiration. The residents of Ivanwald learned to be humble by submitting to God and doing menial work. The Fellowship, in the meantime, was building relationships with people in power, establishing an 8,000-square-foot townhouse in D.C. where Fellowship-affiliated congressmen could live, hosting the National Prayer Breakfast once a year, and making overtures to world leaders with the capacity to advance a Christian agenda.

The first episode largely re-creates Sharlet’s account of his exposure to Ivanwald, in scenes that (despite casting James Cromwell as Coe) aren’t nearly as compelling as the talking-head analysis of what’s actually going on. The second breaks down the two scandals that threatened to derail the C Street house: Ensign’s very public affair, and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s admission in 2009 that he’d also been unfaithful, in a speech that outed the Fellowship as a “Christian bible study” group that Sanford had been leaning on for support. (In doing so, Sharlet explains, Sanford violated the first rule of C Street, which is never to talk about C Street.) The revelation that not one but two Republican members of a shadowy faith group had fallen from grace led to feverish speculation about the Fellowship, including a lengthy 2010 New Yorker feature .. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/13/frat-house-for-jesus .. that likened the group to “a kind of theocratic Blackwater.”

Moss delves into the Fellowship’s history, and along the way provides a fascinating portrait of an organization that seems uniquely motivated by power. The Ivanwald approach to Christianity, Sharlet reveals, is a limited one—the organization has only minimal interest in the Bible and leans on an unorthodox interpretation of Jesus as a brawny avatar of alpha masculinity, a kind of spiritual Navy SEAL or post-career Peyton Manning. Jesus, in the Fellowship’s eyes, isn’t the Lamb of God so much as a license to expand and project patriarchal power. The young men of Ivanwald are told repeatedly that they’ve been chosen by God to be future leaders, significant cogs in a worldwide spiritual offensive. Coe, meanwhile, uses the truism that Jesus sat down with sinners to justify building dubious relationships with genocidal tyrants such as Omar al-Bashir, General Suharto, and Siad Barre. “Most of my friends are bad people,” Coe once said. In the period after the Soviet Union was dismantled, he visited 16 bloc countries in 16 days.

[Did Trump get the idea, even indirectly, that he was 'the chosen one' from the band of brothers with a covenant with
God, The Family? How influential are others connected to The Family today? Was Pence installed as a fall-back option?]

In its third episode, The Family explores the recent ties between the Christian right and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. (Doug Burleigh, one of the Fellowship’s current leaders, was interviewed by the FBI about his dealings with the convicted Russian agent Maria Butina .. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/12/maria-butina-pleads-guilty-russian-agent/578146/ .) The fourth details the Fellowship’s previous relationships with dictators, and its ongoing attempts to enforce “Christian” and anti-LGBTQ policies in countries such as Romania, with gay marriage in the United States seeming at this point like a lost battle. Along the way, Fellowship-affiliated congressmen seem depressingly eager to embrace strongmen under the pretense of Jesus’s name. Senator James Inhofe A top pet hate because of his anti-climate change science position, for one.] tells the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha that he “loves him.” Representative Mark Siljander travels to Libya, where he asks Qaddafi for forgiveness for the U.S. bombing that killed his daughter. (Siljander was later sentenced to a year in prison for accepting stolen funds from a charity with ties to terrorism.)

Almost everything Moss details is egregious: the elected representatives working not for their constituents, but in the service of an unaccountable faith leader with a yen for global bully boys, one who is so willing to build back-channel relationships with foreign regimes that he is, in Sharlet’s words, either hopelessly cynical or hopelessly naive. The “rhetorical self-empretzelment,” in one observer’s words, that leads evangelical Christians to embrace Trump not because of his principles, but because of the brute force that he represents. Still, it’s hard to believe after five episodes that the Fellowship has more political influence than any K Street lobbying shop or Christian coalition. Its most prized stars, Ensign and Sanford, now languish in the shadows, although Sanford apparently still believes so fervently in his own status as a predestined leader that he’s even now considering a run for president .. https://www.apnews.com/6fa8ce49316a4f778392fa4e526d1f3a .

What’s almost more interesting about the Fellowship are the elements that Moss notes but doesn’t dig into. This is a group that sees privilege as potential, whiteness as power, masculinity as proof of leadership prospects. In the first episode, Sharlet describes how Ivanwald had an equivalent arm for women, Potomac Point, but while the young men were being groomed for future authority, the women were being “mentored in service” and directed toward future relationships with Ivanwald members. The Family similarly hints at the extent to which the Fellowship identifies whiteness as a pivotal component of God’s chosen agents. One member, former Representative Zach Wamp of Tennessee, says on camera that the group needs to diversify. And yet Russia remains idealized by both the religious right .. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/how-russia-became-a-leader-of-the-worldwide-christian-right-214755 .. and white nationalists .. https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/the-rise-of-the-traditionalist-international-how-the-american-right-learned-to-love-moscow-in-the-era-of-trump/ , presumably not just for its supposedly muscular leadership and “traditional values.”

The Family seems to think it’s only telling a compelling story if the Fellowship is actually a potent political force. But there’s something fascinating, and tragic, in the way it documents a group of ordinary men so easily convinced that they’re exceptional, even to the point of being handpicked by God like ripe fruit in a celestial grocery store. It’s a thread in contemporary politics that runs all the way to Number One Observatory Circle, if not the White House. That politicians are, instead, chosen by voters is an inconvenient fact that keeps interrupting so many careers. But it is, nevertheless, a fact, and one that Ensign, Sanford, Siljander, Wamp, and so many of their former congressional colleagues each has to attest to.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/08/the-family-netflix-review-religious-political-group/596035/

Are they merely a minor lobbying group? Or not. Anyway, whatever, Trump's do anything for power mindset
and his snuggling up to authoritarian despots is straight out of The Fellowship's (The Family's) playbook.

In Trump, Pence, and Pompeo they seem to have three.

Following up on “The Family”: Six Questions for Jeff Sharlet

[gone]
Photo © Greg Martin

By Bill Wasik
June 2, 1:36 PM, 2008

Jeff Sharlet [ http://www.harpers.org/subjects/JeffSharlet ] is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. His first story for the magazine, “Jesus Plus Nothing, [2d item in the post to which this post is a reply]” appeared in March 2003, and five years later it has grown into a book, entitled The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [ http://www.amazon.com/Family-Secret-Fundamentalism-Heart-American/dp/0060559799 ]. Senior Editor Bill Wasik recently asked Sharlet six questions about his original piece and what he has learned since then.

1. Your exposé on The Fellowship, aka “The Family,” appeared five years ago. Has your understanding of the group changed?

When I was working on that story, I remember debating how much Hitler we should put in the piece. That is, we wondered how fair it was to dwell on The Family’s invocations of Hitler as a model of “total commitment.” As it turns out, it was quite fair. After I left Ivanwald, a team of researchers and I spent years combing through hundreds of thousands of documents in archives around the country. We discovered that as far back as the 1940s, when The Family began organizing congressmen, the group’s founder, Abraham Vereide, was praising Hitler’s “youth work” as a model to be adopted by Americans. He denounced Hitler himself, but he admired fascism’s cultivation of elites, crucial to what he saw as a God-ordained coming “age of minority control.”

The Family has put that concept, which they call “Jesus plus nothing,” into action for decades, from their early successes fighting the New Deal in the 1930s and 40s to their recruitment of war criminals such as Herman J. Abs, known as “Hitler’s banker,” into postwar European leadership, to their facilitation of U.S. support for dictators ranging from Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti to Suharto of Indonesia to Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, now their “key man” for Africa. The fetish for strongman leadership has continued with Vereide’s successor, Doug Coe, who leads the group today. Throughout his letters in the Billy Graham Center Archive at Wheaton College, I found references to the leadership model of Hitler. In one sermon, variations of which he’s given many times, Coe says: “Jesus said ‘You got to put Him before mother-father-brother-sister.’ Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that’s what they taught the kids. Mao even had the kids killing their own mother and father. But it wasn’t murder. It was for building the new nation. The new kingdom.”

2. Given the unbelievable amount of influence brokered by the Fellowship Foundation, and by Doug Coe, why have so few national media outlets have picked up on the story?

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See also:

Trump's biggest sycophants are all evangelical Christians
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.. and in reply ..
Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of Trump
How he became a heartland evangelical—and the President’s most loyal soldier.
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Faith and freedoms: why evangelicals profess unwavering love for Trump
[...]
‘Brought to Jesus’: the evangelical grip on the Trump administration
Read more > https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/11/trump-administration-evangelical-influence-support
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