The Family (29 page)

The connection seemed to seduce Malik. By the time Coe joined the Fellowship in 1959 and began pushing for the evangelization of African, Asian, and Latin American leaders, Malik, then the president of the thirteenth session of the United Nations’ General Assembly, had veered from his own sense of “universal human rights” to the Fellowship’s, declaring that Christians had a responsibility to eradicate “tribal and national deities” in Africa and Asia.
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As Coe’s influence in the Fellowship grew, so did Malik’s intolerance. Christians, he declared, “worship a person,” while “they”—everyone else—“worship an idea”—words that Campus Crusade’s Bill Bright would convert into mainstream American fundamentalism. Christians, Malik went on, worshipped Christ’s “strength,” and in the end, Malik worshipped strength, indeed, becoming one of the founders of the Lebanese Front, the right-wing alliance of Christian militias in Lebanon’s long and awful civil war. Malik’s old internationalist friends may have been surprised, but it’s hard to imagine that Coe was. Through Malik’s involvement with the group, his name became popular with mainstream American fundamentalists like Bright, happy to add Malik’s intellectual credentials to their case.

In 1963, Coe collected a group of other people’s speeches he labeled “Thoughts on Prayer,” as close to a statement of his beliefs as one can find from his early years.
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Malik’s ideas were well represented, just one clue that Coe’s ideas about what prayer was for were international in scope, despite his own personal mysticism. “Thoughts on Prayer” began with Senator Strom Thurmond railing against the 1962 Supreme Court decision
Engle v. Vitale
, which outlawed official school prayer. Following Thurmond came the once moderate John Mackay, president of the Princeton Theological Seminary, declaring that the nations of the world could now be divided into three categories: the secular (increasingly, Western Europe), the “demonic” (the Communist bloc), and the “covenantal,” an echo of the old “City upon a hill” thinking that understood the United States not so much as a country as a holy mission. But pride of place in “Thoughts on Prayer” belonged to a speech by Bill Bright, based on Malik’s ideas and delivered to a 1962 Fellowship prayer breakfast for the governor of Arizona.

Bright, a candy maker before he launched Campus Crusade, was not a charismatic man. He wore a pencil-thin black mustache that made him look like a cartoon, and he was so stiff that next to him Pat Boone, his musical apostle, seemed like a genuine rocker. Bright’s genius was organizational discipline. To the world, Campus Crusade was as simple as Bright’s “Four Spiritual Laws,” a dumbing-down of the gospel that made even his allies uneasy. Internally, Crusade organizers were required to adhere to a book-length set of rules for fundamentalists that ranged from evangelism techniques to what kind of socks to wear (argyle was forbidden) to the proper way to pick up girls.

Bright took the same approach to politics. He publicly declared that Campus Crusade had none, and since Crusade didn’t donate money to candidates or lobby for specific legislation, the press accepted Bright’s contention. Among friends, he told a different story. “The house is on fire,” he raged to the Arizona governor’s prayer breakfast, “and there is no time to fix the pictures.” The “house” was America; the “pictures” were niceties of the Bill of Rights, such as the First Amendment’s establishment clause separating church and state. Citing Malik, Bright declared that only Christians could save American government from communism. The time had come for America to embrace 2 Chronicles 6.

What did this mean? That was a question the businessmen and politicians assembled that spring day in Arizona must have asked, too, for in the collection of Bible verses bandied about by fundamentalists—as if scripture was
Bartlett’s Quotations
—2 Chronicles 6 had little standing. It was Old Testament, and unlike the prophecies of Isaiah, it could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be said to foretell Christ. Instead, it promised a new political order. It’s the story of Solomon’s construction of a temple to be the heart of an Israelite nation, to house the mythic ark of the covenant, “the ark of your might,” as Solomon called it, that would make his kingdom undefeatable in battle.

The Jewish temple was destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago, in 70 CE. The ark is now nothing but a story. Within Judaism, 2 Chronicles 6 is both history and mystery, scripture to be studied and pondered and parsed for ancient meanings. To Bright, though, guided by Malik, 2 Chronicles 6 was a blueprint for a new God-led nation. Bright wanted to rebuild the temple, but in Washington, not Jerusalem. The prayer armies he dreamed would be unstoppable were those of American fundamentalism. To the world, Bright’s Campus Crusade preached Bible studies for college kids, ice cream socials, and even Christian dance parties. To the movement, he preached spiritual war. Like Coe, he anticipated the coming Jesus wave, and recognized that for the movement to be successful, it would need men to work the deeper currents. Bright organized the masses; Coe cultivated the elite. And Coe’s most successful protégé, Charles W. “Chuck” Colson, would soon do both, combining Bright’s populist style with Coe’s political sophistication.

A
T THE
1970 National Prayer Breakfast, a Washington lawyer named James Bell led a seminar for college men who’d been selected by their institutions’ presidents.
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The men were told only that they’d be having breakfast with Richard Nixon, but in Washington, Fellowship brothers handed them from one instructor to the next, alternating fundamentalist theology with “private” lectures from politicians and businessmen. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird explained that Christ had a special message for elites. The former student body president of Stanford, just back from Vietnam, spoke of the dedication of the Viet Minh as a model for evangelizing Washington. Paul Temple, a Standard Oil executive, explained how the Fellowship had won him access to key men in General Francisco Franco’s government in Spain. “Public events” had two purposes, said Bell: (1) to declare to the world “the relevancy of God in the Establishment’s life”; (2) to recruit “the up and outer.” The real work of the Fellowship that the college men had been chosen for took place in small groups, where, away from publicity, men “attack the basic social problems of America.” Bell didn’t list those problems, but he gave a hint of his meaning: “All of us cry over our martinis about law and order, but very few of us do a blooming thing about it.”
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The Fellowship did. How? Not through proposing laws or campaigning. Its politics were cultural, in the broadest sense; its method the capture of leaders’ souls, the eradication of their egos, the replacement of their will with Christ’s. Their goals were not the rollback of the 1963 school prayer decision, or antiporn laws, or the “Christian Amendment,” a perennial proposal to formally dedicate the nation to Christ. It was bigger, deliberately vague, and so long-term—think generations—that the Fellowship would never have to answer for its successes and failures. Coe made the strategy of deferral into Fellowship doctrine. The distant goal was “a leadership led by God,” said Bell. “Period.” Few men in the Fellowship expected to see it in their lifetimes. But the college boys could get in on it if they felt so called—by conscience or career. “If you want some doors opened…there are men in government, there are senators who literally find it their pleasure to give any kind of advice, assistance, or counsel.”
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Three years later, Chuck Colson, destined to become one of the leading theorists of American fundamentalism, would discover as much as he faced the prospect of prison. Colson was no ordinary criminal. He was one of Richard Nixon’s closest aides, the smartest, toughest man on his staff, Nixon’s “hatchet man”: responsible for Nixon’s “enemies list,” said to be the brains behind schemes to firebomb the Brookings Institution and hire Teamsters to beat up antiwar protesters. He was, the court would soon rule, a Watergate felon, the most powerful of the Nixon “dirty tricksters” to be sent to prison.

He wouldn’t go alone, though; accompanying him would be the Jesus of the Fellowship, whom he’d discovered was a good friend, indeed. The Fellowship, he’d write in his 1976 memoir,
Born Again
, comprised a “veritable underground of Christ’s men all through government.”
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Colson would later claim that it was news to him, but he was a man who understood the power of friends and the politics of religion.

A former marine from Massachusetts, a scholarship student at Brown, and a Harvard lawyer by dint of brain power and no silver spoons, Colson was (and is) a beefy, square-headed man with thick black square-shaped glasses. He’s always had the jowls of a bulldog and a natural sneer like that of late-stage Elvis—the same bloated cockiness but without any sex appeal. His job for Nixon was not to look pretty but to cut deals with constituencies Republicans had either ignored or taken for granted. He brought in the working-class vote by playing to poor men’s fears of hippies, feminists, black power, and, as always, the red tide. And he brought in the religious vote in a way no American politician had attempted to do until then: he arranged for Nixon to hold church services directly in the White House, “quasi-spiritual, quasi-political,” he’d call them. Colson recognized the political power of religion years before he was born again, before he joined the Fellowship. He brought in a different religious leader every Sunday, a photo op every week that put Nixon’s mug in the pastor’s offices of the nation’s most powerful churches. St. Dick of the Second Chance, the most enduring man on the American political scene. Billy Graham’s best political buddy; a friendship, Colson understood, worth more in a changing America than the waning power of the old city machines that had stolen the White House from Nixon in 1960. The machines were rusting; their troops were moving to the suburbs; and the suburbs were getting religion. And Colson got them, because he understood what they wanted, visible access. Proof that they mattered. Image was everything, and they wanted pictures of themselves in the White House, a new visual narrative about the distribution of power in America.

There was something almost democratic about it. Only, Colson didn’t let the multitudes in; he simply made room for the bosses, the men who ran the old machines and the new and improved ones. The unions, grinding into irrelevance, and the Jesus-engines, revving, revving, ready to bring the war home, indeed, and fight it with the discipline of the Viet Minh, the stealthiness of the Vietcong, and the revolutionary fervor of rock and roll. What Colson recognized was that in America the time for sermons was past. A new politics, raw and emotional, was being born (again), and Colson did what he could to make it work for the most overcooked, overcalculated president in history.

So, did this political fixer really not know about Abram and Coe and the dozens of congressmen networked in prayer cells before he faced prison time? Was he unaware of the White House cell that met weekly under Nixon’s Federal Reserve chief, Arthur Burns, a Jew for Jesus before anyone had heard of such a notion? Did he not know that Gerald Ford, the House Republican leader, his soul saved by a preacher named Billy Zeoli, had for years been in a prayer cell with Melvin Laird, now Nixon’s secretary of defense?

Well, he says so. White House correspondent Dan Rather found fishy Colson’s sudden discovery of prayer for himself as well as the rubes. At a 1973 press conference, Rather demanded to know why, after Colson had left the White House in disgrace, he continued to pop in on a regular basis. For prayer meetings, answered an embarrassed press secretary. Come on, Rather replied, we all know what goes on when politicians get together to talk about their souls. The press secretary shrugged, Rather gave up, and Colson continued on his amazing spiritual journey. Later that year, a syndicated columnist discouraged further inquiries into Colson’s “underground prayer movement,” lest the press undermine its ability to humbly arrange for the redemption of “big” men: “they meet in each other’s homes, they meet at prayer breakfasts, they converse on the phone…. They genuinely avoid publicity. In fact, they shun it.”
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Colson wasn’t the only Watergate conspirator to find solace in the Fellowship as the indictments began. James W. McCord, the ex-CIA man who served as “security director” of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, CREEP (sentenced to two and a half to eight years), received “spiritual undergirding” from Halverson; Egil “Bud” Krogh, the chief of the “plumbers” (sentenced to six months), who tried to silence Daniel Ellsberg, prayed with a Fellowship prayer cell right before heading off to prison; and Jeb Magruder (sentenced to four months to ten years), who blamed his participation in the plot on the liberal ethics he’d been taught at Williams College by the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, joined a Fellowship cell just as he was pleading guilty, albeit only to get “the best possible deal.” But Colson was the one who actually made something real of his new faith—indeed, he transformed it.
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Colson’s first contact with the Fellowship came through Tom Phillips, the CEO of the missile manufacturer Raytheon. Back in private practice after leaving the White House under a black cloud, waiting to go to trial, Colson was pumping his Republican network hard for new clients. One such was the International Brotherhood of Teamsters under Frank “Fitz” Fitzsimmons, the mafia-friendly successor to Jimmy Hoffa and one of Nixon’s staunchest allies. Nixon was no friend to working people, but with Colson’s help, he managed to seduce right-wing union bosses by turning a blind eye toward their looting of their own treasuries (Nixon ordered the Justice Department to drop its investigations of the Teamsters after Fitz took over in 1971) in exchange for their muscle at the ballot box and in the streets, as when Colson asked the Teamsters to crack skulls at an antiwar rally. (From the Nixon tapes: “Haldeman: Colson’s gonna…do it with the Teamsters. Nixon: They’ve got guys who’ll go in and knock their heads off. Haldeman: Sure. Murderers…They’re gonna beat the [expletive deleted] out of some of these people. And, uh, and hope they really hurt ’em.”)