Has a secretive, informal network of fundamentalist Christians had undue influence over American policy? Over the summer vacation, Religion Dispatches convened its first roundtable, resulting in a lively discussion of Jeff Sharlet’s new book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper, 2008).
The seed of the book was planted a few years back when, after accepting an invitation to live among a group of The Family’s “brothers,” Jeff penned an article for Harper’s magazine entitled “Jesus Plus Nothing.” That experience and the article it inspired form the basis of the book, a detailed and carefully researched exploration of an informal network of powerful Christians known as “The Family,” or “The Fellowship.” In Sharlet’s words, it’s “a story of two great spheres of belief, religion and politics, and the ways in which they are bound together by the mythologies of America.”
Joining us, along with Jeff—a contributing editor for Harper’s, contributing writer for Rolling Stone, and columnist for RD—were: Randall Balmer, author, Episcopal priest, and professor of American religious history at Barnard College; Anthea Butler, assistant professor of religion at the University of Rochester; and Diane Winston, the Knight Chair in Media and Religion at USC, who has worked as a reporter for several of the nation’s leading newspapers.
Jeff’s book fills a significant gap in both scholarship and media. When it comes to the connection between politics and religion in this country, a most talked-about topic as we head into the final weeks of the election, plenty of studies have been conducted—and stories written—on everything from para-church organizations to educational institutions, but very little work has been done on elite manifestations of religion-related power.
One of the first questions a book like The Family raises is how much influence an elite cadre, such as that described in the book, can actually have on the direction of the nation.
The answer to this question, it turns out, depends on the way we understand power in a liberal society, how we conceive of the role of religion in that society, and on our reading of history.
Our discussion ranged over these issues and was punctuated, unexpectedly, by a parenthetical gesture from one of our panelists. During the course of the roundtable, a critical review of the book appeared in the Washington Post by Randall Balmer. In his closing comments, Sharlet responds to Balmer's offstage remarks:
Ah, sour grapes! Yes, I got ’em. Not so much because Randy radically misrepresented my arguments in the Post, where I can’t respond, while offering far more nuanced arguments of his own only in this smaller and more scholarly roundtable, but because such a dichotomy represents exactly the scholarly/popular divide that allows The Family to slip between the cracks. Amongst scholars, he makes arguments that invite engagement. In the public square, he issues proclamations that do no more than police the borders of respectable knowledge, aka “conventional wisdom.”
Balmer had saved some of his most critical points for the readers of the Post, thus our discussion had a ‘sidebar’ of sorts and RD was graced with an exciting and surprise ending.
Enjoy the discussion and by all means join in.
***
Religion Dispatches: Thanks so much to all of you for joining us in a roundtable discussion of Jeff Sharlet’s new book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.
The editors have just returned from a screening of James Carroll’s film, Constantine’s Sword, which does a frighteningly good job of tracing the dangers of the marriage of the Catholic church and the state. So we’re in a fairly grim mood as we begin this discussion of your book, which echoes so many of history’s most catastrophic church/state unions… But here we go:
The predominant perspective, among liberals in general, along with the media, scholars, and other intellectuals, is that through open dialogue, the airing of opposing views, and the difficult work of listening to the “other,” we will approach an increasingly just, balanced, and free society (“the noise of democracy,” as James Buchanan put it). That is to say, left and right, religious and secular (in the widely understood definition of the term), bring us to some moderate, pluralist center in which we can all live.
The Family however, describes an increasingly powerful undercurrent in the United States, which you describe as “aggressively anti-democratic,” which thrives on secrecy, reveres authoritarianism, and consists of an elite, loosely-gathered group of men steering America toward becoming a “Christian civilization” for which “theocracy” is too mild a word (Chuck Colson prefers “theocentrism”). On page 276 you write:
The Family wants to “transcend” left and right with a faith that consumes politics, replacing fundamental differences with the unity to be found in submission to religious authority. Conservatives sit pretty in prayer and wait for liberals looking for “common ground” to come to them in search of compromise.
Does the prevailing liberal intellectual view of compromise “get it” or are we missing the boat?
Jeff Sharlet: Our first (possibly) gay president’s appreciation for the “noise of democracy” has a negative echo in the thought of Family founder Abraham Vereide, who believed that religion and politics mixed best behind closed doors, away from the prying eyes of the press and “the din of the vox populi”—a pretentious little Latin phrase for the voice of the people. As Senator Sam Brownback (a man who first discovered the political advantages of The Family’s behind-the-scenes religion decades ago as an intern for Bob Dole) explains, a “God-led” politician is ultimately accountable not to the electorate, but to “one constituent.”
Guess who?
Brownback and his brothers in The Family more or less abide by the rules of American democracy, and some even believe they are defenders of its virtues. At the same time, they’re committed to a political theology that views democracy as a form of secular humanism, to which they’re deeply opposed. The kingdom of God that’s to be built here on earth, Family organizers are fond of saying, is not a democracy.
That’s what too many liberals don’t get: democracy and its corollary, pluralism, simply aren’t top concerns for many Christian conservatives—especially the elites of The Family, those whom I refer to as an avant-garde of American fundamentalism. (I view “American fundamentalism” as merging the biblical literalism and fetishism of traditional Christian fundamentalism, the belief that the “invisible hand” of unregulated markets belongs to God, and a vision of American empire.)
Too many liberals put their faith in a mythical center, a set of values shared by all. Their commitment to this center is so great, in fact, that they’re willing to travel any distance to get there. That’s what Christian Right leader Chuck Colson understood when he wrote that he loved “dialogue” with liberals because he simply had to hold his ground and wait for them to come to him.
Consider, for example, some of the achievements of our last “liberal” administration: a “free trade” pact deeply opposed by working people; the partial privatization of welfare; and the passage of a “religious freedom” act that allows conservative evangelicals to influence foreign policy according to their analysis of other faiths’ religious customs. Each of these projects had been long dreamed of by the avant-garde of American fundamentalism. That’s not to say that The Family are puppetmasters, pulling invisible strings; rather, The Family is first and foremost an ideological project bent on setting the very terms with which we consider “democracy,” social justice, and freedom. And in that regard, they’ve been tremendously successful. The center slouches rightward, and nobody remembers that it was ever otherwise.
That’s why I think history is one of the most important weapons progressives can use to fight the slow but steady accretion of imperial customs. Compromise is a forward-looking endeavor. But you can’t honestly compromise if you don’t know what you’re giving up. Liberals won’t “get it”—the “it” being the influence of American fundamentalism—until they remember what they’ve already given up: organized labor as a pillar of democracy rather than an increasingly irrelevant special interest; the social gospel of social justice as a main strand—maybe the main strand—of American protestantism; a vigorous, often militant activist rank-and-file with deep roots in black churches, the left flank of the Catholic church, and the “peace churches”; and, maybe most importantly, a prophetic voice, a voice that speaks truth to power, against power, rather than seeking power.
How do liberals, leftists, and other progressives reclaim those foundations, that prophetic voice? The first step, I think, is a long, hard look at how they were lost. That means looking backwards before we can look forwards. It means facing the painful truth that what many of us considered a “moderate, pluralist center,” was, in fact, a political establishment—that Camelot was a layover on the way to Vietnam.
Tags: religious right
Comments closed
The comments for this story have been closed. Thank you to everyone who participated.