The Family

God works in mysterious ways, they say. Also that politics make strange bedfellows. The National Prayer Breakfast, held annually since 1953 and garnering less media attention than the equally traditional Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn, is pretty good evidence of both cliches: a weird and whacked post-coital event.

The 400 attendees of the first Prayer Breakfast gathered at the Mayflower Hotel to hear President Eisenhower, among other more fervent speakers, discourse on "Government Under God." Those speakers stood below a banner depicting Uncle Sam on bended knees before Jesus Christ. Today, the event draws more than 3,000 breakfasters, many of them foreign dignitaries lacking both literal and implied characteristics of good Christians: Benazir Bhutto for one, Yoweri Musaveni for another, Generals Suharto and Costa de Silva some more. And yet the event, and the organization behind it — an elite network of politically connected Christian fundamentalists known as "The Family" — are committed to changing the world in God's name, and that God's name is Christ.

How this inconspicuous network of ideological believers came to roost at the highest levels of American government and business is the subject of Jeff Sharlet's The Family. So too is the charge that many a foreign atrocity has resulted from alliances made in God's name on America's dime at meetings sanctioned by this fellowship.

But there's more: There's a recap of three centuries of American fundamentalist fervor molding foreign policy and domestic politics — lessons in "getting the Christian spirit into the Marshall Plan" and trickle-down grace; there's the recasting of containment as the B-movie Blob and of post-war suburbanism as "a nation of cozy little kingdoms ruled by the father"; there's an algebraic proof of fundamentalism's theorem "Jesus plus nothing"; a dalliance into the hypocrisies of the country's most powerful charismatic evangelicals and a portrait of hipsters choosing virginity for Jesus. With that many open avenues of inquiry, it helps to have a guide like Sharlet to navigate them. Many will taper off short of their destination. Others end far from where they began. None are immaterial in Sharlet's thesis.

Sharlet introduced himself as a journalist of uncommon curiosity in Killing the Buddha, an account of a trip across America in search of fringe believers. That book, a postmodern adventure taken with co-author Peter Manseau, was heavy on anecdote and wonderment, establishing Sharlet as a clever and ever-game roadie of Belief.

The Family sprang from one of Sharlet's longer courtships — a month-long stay at Ivanwald, a sort of junior training camp and Family sanctum just outside DC. His account of his time at the retreat, where devotion manifests itself in sophomoric glory-speech and goofy athletics, launches the book and echoes the ambivalence and skepticism of Buddha. But unlike his partings with the cowboy preachers and Catholic dirt-eaters of past escapades, Sharlet leaves Ivanwald with real trepidation, turning him from essayist to investigative reporter.

Extensive archival research has allowed Sharlet to write the first history of the Family network, from its founding by a heretofore obscure Norwegian named Abram Vereide in the mid 1930s as a divinely inspired bulwark against the Reds, to its recent dealings under leader Douglas Coe with presidential contenders John McCain and Hilary Clinton. (Barack Obama, is absent from the book — evidence, perhaps, of his relative inexperience in DC and international politics). It is a loose history, one dependent on the biographies of many obscure men of God with well-worn passports.

Sharlet assures us that every US President and too many unsavory third world dictators are indebted to the Family to some degree. The book's most shocking revelations find genocidal policies in Somalia and East Timor as heinous examples of the Family's influence as laissez faire apostles. These were human catastrophes that the leaders of the Family turned a blind eye too, writes Sharlet, raising one of the book's most affecting conundrums.

"Jesus plus nothing, remember, does not depend on scripture, its nuances, its hard lessons. Jesus plus nothing does not include, for instance the ninth verse of the fourth chapter of the Book of Genesis. God asks Cain who has murdered Abel, where his brother is. "I do not know," replies Cain. "Am I my brother's keeper?" It's a genuinely difficult question. God never answers it directly, instead responding with what sounds like divine distress: "What have you done?" To Cain's existentialism, God answers with a demand for history. That's a more straightforward query, one I've attempted to answer with regard to the Family. But Cain's question, that one's too hard for me."

Sharlet makes a strong case that "American fundamentalism, gentle and militant, conservative and revolutionary — has been hiding in plain sight all along." He's not talking about Jefferson hiding on the nickel along with an ocular pyramid, nor of "dada Rotarianism" or "country-club freemasonry." (Indeed, the failure to clearly differentiate the Freemason movement with its penchant for hierarchical, under-the-radar, faith-based civics, from the fundamentalist power base which Sharlet himself dates back to Jonathan Edwards is the book's greatest failing.)

What he is talking about are men who, even with his research and documentation, will certainly pass into mainstream historical oblivion, believing as they did that "God works through men who stay behind the scenes." Men like Frank Carlson, and Manfred Zapp, Clif Robinson and Mark Hatfield, who figured denazification a hate crime and famine a better fate than communism; Christians who believe in a God of Power rather than a God of Morality. Righteous idealists who promise to "keep on loving on ... the savages" they have helped bring to Power... and thereby, to God. Men who flaunt their bedfellows only at select breakfasts.