What Is “The Fellowship”?

The skeleton in Barack Obama’s religious closet is Jeremiah Wright–the skeleton in Hillary Clinton’s closet is “The Fellowship” (also known as “The Family”).

Never heard of it? Neither had I. It has been a player in Washington since 1942. It works quietly, behind the scenes, connecting men and women in power around the world, and organizing Bible studies in DC. Its one public event is the National Prayer Breakfast.

Its director since 1969 has been Doug Coe. I didn’t recall hearing of him, either. But he was named as one of Time magazine’s “25 most influential evangelicals” (the “stealth persuader,” it called him).

Lots of Republicans are connected with it–but so is Hillary Clinton. Barbara Ehrenreich, writing in the March 21 issue of The Nation, thinks this could be more explosive for her than Wright was for Obama. Now, I’d take Ehrenreich’s article with a grain of salt; she attacks what she calls “Clinton’s rightward legislative tendencies,” such as support for the Workplace Religious Freedom Act. She calls The Fellowship “the sinister heart of the international right.”

Jeff Sharlet has a new book about it: The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of America’s Civil Religion. From the jacket:

They are “the Family”—fundamentalism’s avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the “new chosen,” congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential “cells,” to pray and plan for a “leadership led by God,” to be won not by force but through “quiet diplomacy.” Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have written from inside its walls.

The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power—not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the Far Right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a “family” that thrives to this day. In public, they host prayer breakfasts; in private they preach a gospel of “biblical capitalism,” military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao, Doug Coe, the Family’s current leader, declares, “We work with power where we can, build new power where we can’t.”

Sharlet’s discoveries dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the Cold War, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not “What do fundamentalists want?” but “What have they already done?”

Jeff’s written about it before. See, for example, Hillary’s Prayer: Hillary Clinton’s Religion and Politics (Mother Jones, September 1, 2007), written with Kathryn Joyce. Also, Jesus plus nothing: Undercover among America’s secret theocrats (Harper’s, March 2003). And, from “The Revealer” (February 1, 2007) Everybody Loves Jesus (about the National Prayer Breakfast). See also Lisa Getter, Showing Faith in Discretion (LA Times, September 27, 2002).

An Afternoon at Congress

Roy Adams reports in the Adventist Review on a couple of Congressional hearings last month. He was there to hear James Standish and others testify on behalf of the Workplace Religious Freedom Act. He got there a little early, and managed to hear testimony before a different committee: Jamie Leigh Jones telling of her experience of rape as an KBR employee in Iraq.

The hearing room was quiet, with no swarming battery of reporters and photographers. I got home too late for the evening news that day, but I would hazard there was nothing on it about Jones and her tragedy, let alone anything about the severe hardship and discrimination cases documented by Standish and the Jewish and Muslim witnesses. The day following, however, a Congressional hearing on the use of steroids in baseball would see the media falling all over itself to cover it, with sizeable chunks of airtime on the evening news—which also featured Uno, the beagle that took Best in Show at a dog contest in New York’s Madison Square Garden.

The Georgia Catholic Bishops Oppose Human Life Amendment

In Georgia, the Catholic bishops have come out in opposition to a Human Life Amendment promoted by Georgia Right to Life. Deal Hudson has the details. The Catholic bishops and National Right to Life are against it; Georgia Right to Life and the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, are in favor of it.

“We thought the time was right to offer this challenge to Roe,” explained [Brian] Rooney [of Thomas More Law Center]. But the Catholic bishops, and National Right to Life, disagreed. “They want to continue the abortion battle within the framework of Roe; we want to fight it by repealing it.” …

“The problem with the bishops taking this position,” according to Rooney, “is that it’s being used to label pro-lifers as extremists. This was clear at the hearings where the legislators cited the archbishop’s opposition to the amendment and by the dismissive way they treated those of us testifying for the bill.”

And the bishops made clear to Catholics that they must toe the party line on this, and advocate only those positions approved by the bishops.

After Archbishop Gregory announced his opposition to the amendment, the archdiocesan pro-life office sent out “guidelines” to all parish pro-life committees reminding their members that lobbying activities on specific legislation had to be preapproved by the archdiocese: “The Pro-Life Office will communicate with lay leaders when a decision has been made to participate in a public policy effort relating to the life issues.”

The text of the proposed amendment (which has been tabled in committee):

Paramount right to life. (a) The rights of every person shall be recognized, among which in the first place is the inviolable right of every innocent human being to life. The right to life is the paramount and most fundamental right of a person. (b) With respect to the fundamental and inalienable rights of all persons guaranteed in this Constitution, the word ‘person’ applies to all human beings, irrespective of age, race, sex, health, function, or condition of dependency, including unborn children at every state of their biological development, including fertilization.

Vigilante Spying

Julia Duin of the Washington Times reports on a freelance spying group that has been trying to infiltrate mosques. I’m more worried about the actions of these vigilantes than I am about the folks they are spying on.

Chaplains

AP has a profile of some chaplains serving in Iraq.

Legalized Gambling

From the Dallas Morning News blog:

As more states turn to casinos, lotteries and other forms of gambling to fill their coffers, religious opponents of legalized wagering say their words are increasingly falling on deaf ears, reports Greg Trotter of Religion News Service.

Indeed, he says, “moral opposition to gambling might be gasping its last breaths.”

Magdi Allam as Mythic Hero

Rod Dreher sees Magdi Allam and thinks of Ronald Reagan, especially his approach to the Soviet Union. He cites “Spengler” in Asia Times.

A self-described revolution in world affairs has begun in the heart of one man. He is the Italian journalist and author Magdi Cristiano Allam, whom Pope Benedict XVI baptized during the Easter Vigil at St Peter’s. Allam’s renunciation of Islam as a religion of violence and his embrace of Christianity denotes the point at which the so-called global “war on terror” becomes a divergence of two irreconcilable modes of life: the Western way of faith supported by reason, against the Muslim world of fatalism and submission. As Magdi Allam recounted , on his road to conversion the challenge that Pope Benedict XVI offered to Islam in his September 2006 address at Regensburg was “undoubtedly the most extraordinary and important encounter in my decision to convert”. Osama bin Laden recently accused Benedict of plotting a new crusade against Islam, and instead finds something far more threatening: faith the size of a mustard seed that can move mountains. Before Benedict’s election, I summarized his position as “I have a mustard seed and I’m not afraid to use it.” Now the mustard seed has earned pride of place in global affairs.

At the heart of this is a cartoonish depiction of both Allam and Islam, of Allam as hero bravely choosing between Islam as “a religion of violence,”"fatalism and submission,” and “the Western way of faith supported by reason.”

I’ve never met a Muslim, Sunni or Shia, who would accept the characterization of Islam as a religion of violence–they see instead that some Muslims have warped the religion–just as Christians would say when confronted by tales of Church-authorized torture and crusade.

As to “fatalism”–Christianity certainly has an element of that, as well. It’s called “predestination,” and you can find it in Augustine and in Reformed Protestantism.

And this “Western way of faith supported by reason” … from whom did the West learn it? Medieval scholastics such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas got their Aristotelianism by way of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Ibn Sina (Avicenna).

As to submission …? It seems to me the Bible teaches a few things about submission to God and to one another.

Here’s a suggestion–if we want to create peace in the world, especially peace between religions, why not look at examples in history and in the world today where people get along? Why not look at examples where people still have their convictions, still share them freely, and yet live peaceably as friends and neighbors? That’s what life is like here in Houston.

Contemporary Worship

Do you think your church has “contemporary worship”? Are the songs your church sings controversial? Check this out.