Jeff Sharlett discusses The Family on Bill Maher's Real Time

This interview was frightening. I've followed the cluckerfuck of self-righteous Republican politicians who live at the tax-exempt C Street townhouse, speak of family values, and then fuck around on their wives. I didn't realize that these same hypocritical bastards actually lived by a Nietzschean philosophy that morals apply to everyone but themselves.

As I was listening to Sharlet, I almost didn't believe him. What he was describing sounded not just scummy but down right evil. Sharlet had gone undercover and lived at the C Street house. It appears he has particular insight and evidence on what goes on behind the walls of the C Street townhouse.

The "Christian" fundamentalists who run C Street refer to themselves as "The Family" in the same way the Mafia refers to itself as "The Family." This is not a coincidence. According to Sharlet, they see themselves as similar to the Mafia, in so far as "the more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence your organization can have." Doug Coe, the leader of this cabal, sees his group as the leaders of something called "Jesus Plus Nothing" or "The Totalitarianism for Christ", which models the way it wields power on the same way the Mafia, Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama Bin Laden, and Lenin wield power. They also call themselves "The New Chosen" because they believe that if you have reached a certain pinnacle of success, whether financially or in terms of power (in their minds Hitler, Pol Pot, and Lenin are considered successful), your success derives from the fact that God has chosen you to be successful. The founder of this group claims he had a revelation from God that said that Christianity had gotten it wrong. Christians are not meant to concern themselves with the poor and downtrodden. Instead, God wants people to serve the powerful, which they refer to as "The Up and Out."

Sharlet recounts one conversation he overheard between Doug Coe and another man. Coe asked the man, "Suppose I hear you rape three little girls. What would I think?" The man said he thought Coe would consider him awful and a monster. Coe said, "No. No I wouldn't because you're Chosen. As a member of The Family, you're Chosen and, when you're Chosen, the normal rules don't apply. Morality is for the little people."

JS: Five years of direct work, but I’ve been writing about religion, history, and politics for much longer than that. I stumbled into the Family in 2002, with no particular intentions and completely unaware of its political identity. When I left, I thought there might be more of a story, so I traveled to their archives at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois. What I found there both shocked and intrigued. I ended up writing an article for Harper’s, and then a book proposal, largely so that I could afford to go back to the archives and keep digging.

CW: You state on several occasions that you used primary sources, particularly archives left by the Family organization in the Billy Graham Center archives at Wheaton College. Did you have difficulty in persuading the Wheaton librarians to give you access to the Family archives, and are those archives still open to researchers today?

JS: No. It’s a first-rate professional, scholarly archive, and absolutely essential to any serious research on American evangelicalism. But it was a strange experience living, basically, on the campus of Wheaton, the “evangelical Harvard,” for six months. One day I was taking a break and a student came up to me and asked me if I’d heard the Good News about Jesus. I thought the kid deserved a gold star, so to speak — he’d id’d the only Jew on campus. Turned out he was majoring in missiology.

As for the archives, the historical papers are still open, but the more contemporary stuff is closed, restricted following my Harper’s story, a major investigative piece for the LA Times, and research by some foreign journalists.

"The Family" is, for the most part, a history, based in large part on an incredible archive of documents housed at the Billy Graham Center Archives in Wheaton, Illinois. But The Family, or "The Fellowship," as they're sometimes known (after one of The Fellowship Foundation, one of several non-profits in their sphere) continues to exert influence today. "The Fellowship's reach into governments around the world, observes David Kuo -- a Casting Stones regular and former Bush official who has written favorably about The Family -- "is almost impossible to overstate or even grasp.""

That statement becomes especially alarming in light of The Family's political theology. There are three essential points:

1) God cares more about the "up and out" -- the elite -- than the down and out. Help the "up and out," and they'll take care of the rest of us. I call this trickle-down religion.

2) God loves a strongman. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, preaches The Family's leader, Doug Coe, understood Christ's teaching better than almost any other leaders of the 20th century. He's quick to add that they turned those teachings -- in his view, total commitment, authority, and obedience -- toward evil. He admires their methods, not their ends. For some of us, the methods were pretty lousy, too. His defenders say Coe uses Hitler only as a metaphor. What, he couldn't think of a better metaphor for Jesus than Hitler?

3) An effective organization doesn't seek publicity, like James Dobson's Focus on the Family, but sticks to the shadows. Here's Coe preaching on the subject in a sermon posted online by The Navigators. "The Body of Christ functions invisibly like the mafia... They keep their organization invisible. Everything visible is transitory. Everything invisible is permanent and lasts forever. The more you can make your organization invisible, the more influence it will have."

And The Family does have influence. Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay, deeply sympathetic to mainstream evangelicalism, surveyed more than 300 top evangelical politicians in Washington. One in three said The Family (The Fellowship, in his usage) was one of the most influential Christian groups in the capitol. That was more votes than any other group received. Time magazine, listing Family leader Doug Coe among its 25 most powerful evangelicals, dubbed him "The Stealth Persuader."