In 2001 the darling and I attended the National Prayer Breakfast in D.C. a month after Junior was coronated the first time. I’m not sure how or why we got an invitation—part of an elite 4000 from around the world—but it was on official gold embossed stationery from (republican) Representative Zach Wamp of Tennessee complete with eagles and spiritual quotes from Ben Franklin and George Washington and, on another page, the costs, which were not inconsequential. But, hey, for a foray into the national religious scene I was willing to cough up the bucks, even fully aware that we were marching into the simultaneous victory party of The Other Side. But after all, we were there to pray together for the country, to the god who transcends politics, right? ‘Twas my (phantasmagorical) notion that we’d be shaking hands like two teams after a hard-fought soccer game, and get on with the prayer work at hand.
‘Course then it was also my desperate hope— ‘Please, God, let me only be paranoid’—that the newly-installed administration would not enact the policies called for by The Project for the New American Century, a sort of neocon manifesto declaring the divine right and responsibility of pax Americana for all the world. The most terrifying line declared that only America can be trusted with nuclear weapons; actually, only America can be trusted to rule the world—and so should, our economic interests to be established and maintained militarily, if necessary, because we are good, ‘chosen by history’. This evil national delusion was signed by Rumsfied, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Pearl and the whole lot of them initially for George I, who himself had rejected it as extreme a decade earlier. As history played out, of course, I was correct in my paranoia. I hate it when I’m right. (A prophet is not without honor—except in his own congregation.)
I pride myself on being an existential gourmet of the ironic and bizarre—alas, that’s been the tale of much of my life. But not even I could have anticipated what we encountered there in the nation’s capitol. It just got spookier and spookier, from all the political ‘brothers’ (no women, sorry!) huddled like a rugby team and waves of believers stretching arms and hands in a chain touch on the anointed—’anoint ‘im with yer spirit, lord! amen! amen!’ to the college age free marketeers in their shirts and ties and pressed slacks consulting with me about bringing some poor kid from an even poorer country for an all-expense paid vacation to America for whatever, a week or a month, wouldn’t that be swell? And then what? Send ‘im home with a taste of how good America is. How does this help him? He’ll know how good America is. We’re thinkin’ this is what Jesus wants.
Jesus. Singing Dylan, ‘You know there is something happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?’
The darling—who, incidentally, had not yet learned the appropriate art of paranoia (she has since)—was as weirded out as I, so we bailed on it, rented a car, and drove to my childhood home in Johnstown, PA, where a snow storm led us into a refreshingly different reality. We couldn’t wait to get out of Washington on that trip; the whole thing was too scary for us. I remember thinking to myself at the time, man, this is the way nazis are made. When we got home, I got my tit in a ringer with some folks at the church for an article I wrote about it. The only way I could handle my own haunting was by mockery, which, natch, ‘offended’ certain types. So it goes, as Vonnegut puts it; screw ‘em if they can’t take a joke, as some of us preachers say. I filed the whole experience back there with my stint in a circus band after I got out of the army—memorable only for its weirdness.. (Incidentally, the referenced article is posted at my blogsite, titled ‘Bizarre’.)
This little drive down memory lane was initiated by Jeff Sharlet’s not-so-little book (400 pages, small print, no pictures) called The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, having been clued into it while following the shenanigans at the ‘C-Street House’ registered for tax(free) purposes as a religious institution and, oh yes, the D.C. living quarters of all those family-values guys running around boinkin’ the babes. They pray together and counsel the boinker in his sin, like how to pay off the boinkee and her husband for their silence.
It ain’t, of course, the boinking itself that’s a big issue—coital monogamy has never been a natural human instinct, ’specially among men of power. Martin Luther once got his own tit in a wringer by suggesting to the husband of a frigid wife that he find a boinkee in some distant village (drawing, as it were, a distinction between marriage and boinking). And it ain’t just men, of course, ’cause for every boinker there’s a boinkee (some, actually willing). I always figured that the national outrage at Clinton’s blow job had mostly to do with jealousy. It took me not very long into the counseling side of work to become aware of just how much boinking was actually going on ‘among the people’ and then I became bored with the drama (though it did sparkle my fantasy life). Besides, ‘use it or lose it’ has been my motto from the day I found it until my sanctification (being, um, this morning again in my baptism, a new, flaccid, self arising).
No, it isn’t the boinking that is the main issue—in spite of the pain and humiliation inflicted on the boinked families—but rather the demonic in the hypocrisy of it. It’s far more sinister than the moralist getting caught in his own peccadilloes, because these guys have the power to—and do—destroy lives. From The Family:
Uganda, which following the collapse of Siad Barre’s Somalia became the focus of The Family’s interests in the African Horn, has been the most tragic victim of this projection of American sexual anxieties. Following the implementation of one of the continent’s only successful anti-AIDS program, President Yoweri Museveni, the Family’s key man in Africa, came under pressure from the United States to emphasize abstinence instead of condoms. Congressman Pitts wrote that pressure into law, redirecting millions of dollars from effective sex-ed programs to projects such as Unruh’s (of the ‘purity’ movement—lsk). This pressure achieved the desired result: an evangelical revival in Uganda, and a stigmatization of condoms and those who use them so severe that some college campuses held condom bonfires. Meanwhile, Ugandan souls may be more “pure,” but their bodies are suffering; following the American intervention, the Ugandan AIDS rate, once dropping, nearly doubled. (p.328)
How’s that for family values?
And The Family’s interests? To spread the gospel of what Sharlet calls ‘American fundamentalism’ around the world. Now, this ain’t your typical camp-meetin’ come-to-Jesus fundamentalism we normally think of with a bit of enlightened sympathy for the adherent and christian disdain for the preacher. Indeed, The Family eschews the label ‘christian’ as carrying too much baggage, even while they claim to follow Christ: ‘Jesus, plus nothing.’ Yeah, we all say that to some degree, but I have never before encountered the Christ they claim. Their Christ is the raw power of being one of god’s ‘key men.’ Like Jesus; though without the ethical responsibilities, Jesus plus literally nothing. Hence in a presentation by its current leader, Doug Coe:
Coe cites one of his favorite scripture verses, Matthew 18:20, “When two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” “Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler were three men. Think of the immense power these three men had, these nobodies from nowhere. Actually emotional and mental problems. Prisoners. From the streets. But they bound themselves together in an agreement and they died together. Two years before they moved into Poland these three men had a study done, systematically a plan drawn out and put on paper to annihilate the entire Polish population and destroy by numbers every single house”—he bangs the podium, dop, dop, dop—“and every single building in Warsaw and then start on the rest of Poland.”
It worked, Coe says; they killed 6 1/2 million “Polish people”. . . .
“These three men by their decision alone.” What he’s trying to explain, Coe says, is the power of friendship: between man and Christ, between brothers in Christ (p.254).
Wow. Kinda sheds a whole different light on the old gospel tune ‘There’s Power in the Blood,’ eh?
The Family (sometimes, too, The Fellowship) is the current moniker of a network of True Believers begun back in the 30’s by an immigrant fundamentalist preacher named Abram Vereide who experienced a call from god to minister to the fabulously powerful, thus, natch, ushering in god’s fundamentalist kingdom. So he developed a ‘key-man’ theology, in the tradition, maybe of ‘christ as ceo’. In his universe god selects and anoints particular ‘key men’ with both spiritual and worldly power in order to bring the whole world under god’s reign. Doug Coe inherited his leadership mantle back around the 60’s. These are god’s elite leaders—like Jesus—in the world, and as such they are not accountable to human rules, but only the Christ who gives them daily marching orders. Nor do they hold one another accountable in their cell group bible studies there in D.C. and around the world; thus Coe could maintain ‘bible study fellowship’ with Indonesia’s Suharto—a dictator whose reign was as brutal and murderous as Pol Pot’s—and not confront him about it. About the 600,000 he slaughtered one of The Family’s devotees says, “If not for Doug, maybe Suharto would have killed a million” (p. 252).
The presence of Christ.
‘Course, all this burdensome power doesn’t come without a cost—nothing less than the total relinquishment of the self to god, though that process happens not in the eternal internal struggle with the Old Adam, no siree. It happens instead by receiving your literal daily marching orders from god, and so you are not morally accountable for what happens. Vereide’s theophany is described this way:
“What did God say to you?” Buchman asked Abram when their Quiet Time was completed. Abram believed he had heard God’s voice several times in his life, and even had considered the possibility that he might be a prophet, but he had not yet been exposed to the idea that God spoke to men regularly and in detail. “He didn’t say anything,” Abram confessed, disappointed.
Well, Buchman replied, God had spoken to him. “God told me, ‘Christianize what you have. You have something to share.’”
Blander words no Sunday school teacher ever spoke, but to Abram they seemed like a revelation. God had told Buchman not to join Goodwill, but that didn’t matter. What was important was the discovery that God should be consulted not just on broad spiritual questions but on absolutely everything. This, Abram decided, was what it meant to die to the self: to turn all responsibility over to God. That such a transfer meant the abdication of any accountability for one’s actions, that it provided justification for any ambition, did not occur to him (p.127).
And for the benefit of my preacher pals, another sermon story, this time of Sharlet’s conversation with his pal Bengt, as they shared a training week at The Family’s posh retreat in D.C.
“Bengt,” I said, “I don’t understand.”
“You know,” he said, “I don’t either. That’s what I’ve kind of come to realize. The thing is, I don’t need to. I can just trust in the Lord for my directions. He’ll tell me what I need to know.”
“A voice?” I said, surprised.
“A prayer,” he answered. The voice he heard was his own, his prayers, transformed by his inverted theology into revelation. What he wanted was what God wanted.
“Absence?” I said, realizing that what he’d meant by the absence of doubt was the absence of self-awareness, the absence of an understanding of his thoughts as distinct from God’s and thus always subject to—doubt. But I did not say this. Instead, I just repeated myself. “Absence,” I said, without a question mark.
“Totally, brother.”
He half smiled, satisfied with this alchemy of logic by which doubt became the essence of dogma. God was just what Bengt desired him to be, even as Bengt was, in the face of God, “nothing” (p. 51).
Nice, eh? Self-deification via the immolation of self-awareness—that’s the conversion experience. ‘I am a powerful man, and therefore a key man appointed by god to run things and I’ve dedicated myself to this, and so whatever I think is what god thinks, and all these people in the fellowship help me keep my head straight about that.’ So you got this all-powerful Christ who never suffers the doubts spawned by the inconvenient thought that there might in fact be two wills at work here; ‘not mine but thine’ is overcome by the denial that I even have a will. A doubtless Christ accountable only to the god he hears speaking to him alone; certainly not to the rulers—or the rules—of the world.
Power—with neither doubt nor accountability. Just given by god. Jesus plus nothing. Swell.
The historian in me recognizes this as the theological structure of the Imperial Cult of the Roman Empire dressed in contemporary flags and faces (Christ standing in for Zeus), the establishment of the sacred social pyramid with god at top giving his power to the emperor and key men to rule the masses ‘beneficently’. Later it was called the divine right of kings. It is the theological structure of every caste system in history; god chooses an elite few to which he gives his absolute power over the lower little ones. The divinization of the leader: it’s a terrific theology, if you happen to be the guy in power. That this is the theology that the new testament in fact opposes is only an inconvenient reality to be ignored as much as self-awareness. Caesar remains Caesar even if you dub him ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ.’ In the words of Doug Coe: “We work with power where we can, build new power where we can’t” (p. 121).
The bummer is that according to Sharlet this is the official unofficial religious cultus operative among the political, corporate, and military leadership in Washington and other power centers in the world. (Certainly explains their jaw-dropping lawlessness we call hypocrisy: I’m a key men and therefore beyond the regular laws; say, ‘If the president does it, then it’s not illegal.) He documents the rise of The Family from its beginnings in the 30’s, through the Cold War—which it was both formed by and formed, to its predominance today—they ‘all’ (as it were) participate in cell/prayer groups, and if not, at least pay political homage to The Family. Thus it was that Zack Wamp lived at The Family’s C-Street house, himself a member of The Family, who’d sent us the invitation to the National Prayer Breakfast, which is The Family’s only public event, and which is intended, of course, for networking and recruiting. Presidents and senators and powerful people from around the world attend, even if they’re not part of the official Fellowship.
And from which, as you may recall, the darling and I fled those years ago. Then we did not know the spirit of the thing, only that we were frightened by it. After reading his book, I can now at least name it.
But it don’t make me feel any better. If it’s this Jesus plus nothing, I’d rather have nothing.
Larry