The Family (50 page)

2.
Nancy T. Ammerman, “A Brief Introduction and Definition,” in Martin E. Marty and Scott Appleby,
Fundamentalisms Observed
(University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 2. This is one volume in the University of Chicago Press’s comprehensive five-volume “Fundamentalism Project,” in many ways the first and last word on fundamentalism. George M. Marsden’s
Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism
(Oxford University Press, 1980), updated in a new edition in 2006, is another authoritative text on Christian fundamentalism as a specific idea and movement in American history. “A fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something,” Marsden simplified his definition in a follow-up collection of essays,
Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism
(William B. Eerdmans, 1991), a pithy summation from a scholar sympathetic to evangelicalism. It suffices so long as we remember that anger takes many forms, and that the “something” a fundamentalist is opposed to is not, in his or her mind at least, necessarily modernity, but sin, whether defined as sex outside of marriage or the disobedience to God many fundamentalists believe is implicit in managed economies.

1.
IVANWALD

1.
In this chapter, I use the full names of men who held leadership positions at Ivanwald. Such men are activists, and some, such as Gannon Sims, built on their Ivanwald experiences to develop careers in government. (Gannon became a spokesman for the Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Human Trafficking.) Men who were not in leadership or government positions I identify only by their first names. “Zeke” is a pseudonym for a man who I fear might face repercussions for his role in introducing me to the Family. In the years since then, several former members have contacted me with accounts of ostracization and even retaliation for various actions, and while I’ve no way of confirming these stories, there’s no need to unduly expose Zeke to the possibility of similar responses.

2.
A note on notes: In this chapter and throughout
The Family
, I use endnotes to identify archival sources and to provide sources for historical events that may not be well known. Chapters 4–9, which depend largely on historical research, are extensively endnoted, but where I rely on personal experience (chapters 1, 9, 14) or directly reference interviews (chapters 10–14), or on publicly available sources identified within the text (chapters 12–14), I generally refrain from notes. As for this account of Ivanwald: like several of the brothers, I openly kept a journal. When writing about a conversation that had occurred earlier, I often asked individual brothers for their recollections. This was not “undercover.” Although I had no inkling of a book about the Family or fundamentalism at the time, I told the brothers I was a writer, the publications I’d written for, and that I was working on a book about unusual religious communities (
Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible
, with Peter Manseau [Free Press, 2004]). A few documentary notes in chapters 4–10 identify the only general collection in which the relevant documents can be found. I made my first, brief archival research trip in late 2002, after I had decided to write about Ivanwald but before I had even imagined this book. Since magazine fact checkers are more interested in actual evidence than my assurances that memo
x
can be found in folder
y
in an archive, I made Xerox copies instead of notes for future researchers. When I returned to the main archive of the Family at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College with a book in mind, I made note of appropriate filing numbers. In total I or my research assistants reviewed well over 60,000 pages of primary-source documents, and made copies of around 5,000 pages; I lack folder numbers for a very few pages, and those I have copies of.

3.
Senator Brownback, Senator Pryor, and Representative Wolf told me of their involvement in interviews. I met Senator Ensign while he was living in the C Street House, a former convent maintained as a group home for congressmen by a Family-affiliated organization, and Senators Grassley and Nelson and Representative Pitts are well represented in the Family’s archives. Senator Coburn told the reporter Tom Hess of his residence in C Street House and his participation in a Family cell for a feature in James Dobson’s
Citizen
magazine, “‘There’s No One I’m Afraid to Challenge,’” accessed at http://www.family.org/cforum/citizenmag/coverstory/a0012717.cfm on October 10, 2004. Senator Thune cited the Family’s leader, Doug Coe, and a house the Family maintains on Capitol Hill in a
Christianity Today
interview with Collin Hansen (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/februaryweb-only/42.0a.html, accessed January 7, 2007). Most of the rest of these men were spoken of as members by Ivanwalders and senior men in the Family—for instance, Steve South, former senior counsel for Senator Don Nickles, told me of Senator Domenici’s involvement, confirmed in the Family’s archives (file 15, box 354, collection 459, Papers of the Fellowship Foundation, Billy Graham Center Archives [hereafter cited as BGCA]). I’ve no reason to doubt these claims; members of the Family are scrupulous about distinguishing between
members,
those who have joined a prayer cell or made some other commitment to the work, and
friends,
those with whom they’re comfortable working. Representative Eric Cantor, for instance, a Jewish Republican from Virginia, is just a friend. Representative McIntyre, who joined Representative Wolf ’s prayer cell, is a member. This is only a partial list. The Family believes in a concentric model of holiness, with a few key men close to Christ at the center (Representative Pitts, for instance), another circle of active supporters farther out (Senator Grassley), followed by one of casual allies (such as Senator Pryor) who are mostly unaware of the group’s inner workings.

4
Thurmond:
Interview, Cliford B. Gosney, former Family member. Thurmond’s association was among the Family’s most long-standing, stretching across the decades. On October 30, 1987, Family leader Doug Coe sent to Representative Tony Hall, a Democrat from Ohio who moved rightward under the Family’s guidance, a sermon preached by Thurmond to a meeting of the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast. The subject was “integrity” and “the unraveling of the fabric of our society,” to which Thurmond—a segregationist who refused to publicly acknowledge his African-American daughter—responded with four suggestions on becoming “men and women of integrity.” Folder 3, box 166, collection 459, BGCA.
Talmadge and Robertson:
Annual Report of the Fellowship Foundation, 1962, folder 2, box 563, collection 459, BGCA.
Ford:
Paul Wilkes, “Prayer: The Search for a Spiritual Life in Washington and Elsewhere: A Country on Its Knees?”
New York Times
, December 22, 1974. Besides Laird and Ford, the other two members of the cell were Republican congressmen John Rhodes, a Barry Goldwater protégé from Arizona, and Al Quie of Minnesota, an early opponent of affirmative action. The four had been organized into a Family prayer group during the late 1960s.
Rehnquist:
Doug Coe to Panayiotis Touzmazis, April 24, 1974, folder 11, box 200, collection 459, BGCA. And then there are the jocks: Buffalo Bills legend and vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp; Seattle Seahawks NFL Hall of Famer Steve Largent, one of the fiercest ideologues of the Republican Revolution of 1994; and Oklahoma Sooners Orange Bowl champ J. C. Watts, the highest-ranking black Republican in congressional history. According to Bob Jones IV, Watts preferred Campus Crusade’s related effort, Christian Embassy (“The Church Inside the State,”
World
, October 12, 1996), but when I interviewed him in 2003, he told me he prayed with “the Prayer Breakfast people” as well.

5.
NCCL News Letter
, April 1948.
Christian Leadership News
, October 1950. Collection 459, BGCA.

6.
On July 15, 1965, the Family’s founder, Abraham Vereide, boasted in an address to a prayer meeting that in Generalissimo Franco’s Spain, initially hostile to the Protestant Family, “there are secret cells, such as the American embassy, the Standard Oil office, allowing [our men] to move practically anywhere.” No box number, collection 459, BGCA.
350
: D. Michael Lindsay, “Is the National Prayer Breakfast Surrounded by a ‘Christian Mafia’? Religious Publicity and Secrecy Within the Corridors of Power,”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
74, no. 2 (June 2006): 390–419.

7.
Quoted in Stephen Scott, “Jesus’ Name Has Drawing Power for Prayer Breakfast,”
St. Paul Pioneer Press
, April 14, 2001.

8.
The Fellowship Foundation’s 2005 990 tax form showed official income of nearly $17 million and program expenses of nearly $14 million. Among the expenses, $900,000 went to the National Prayer Breakfast, a Fellowship-produced event that appears to the world to be an official function of the federal government. (When I attended in 2003, I got my press credentials through the White House.) In 2005, the Fellowship actually turned a profit on the Breakfast, taking in $47,000 more than it cost. In “Showing Faith in Discretion,”
Los Angeles Times
, September 27, 2002, the journalist Lisa Getter noted that the Family has paid for overseas congressional junkets and even loaned congressmen money.

9.
Bakke’s deal is documented in Deepak Gopinath, “The Divine Power of Profit,”
Institutional Investor
, March 1, 2001. Bakke isn’t conservative in the conventional sense—he’s a major Democratic donor—but he has made a career out of deregulation and anti-union management, and he’s used his wealth to create the Harvey Fellows Program, which aims to train an “expanding beachhead of evangelicals in the American elite” and “the corridors of power” through funds for graduate students who agree to sign a statement of faith. D. Michael Lindsay,
Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite
(Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 80.

10.
Getter, “Showing Faith in Discretion.”

11.
Lindsay, “Is the National Prayer Breakfast Surrounded by a ‘Christian Mafia’?” Lindsay, a fellow at Princeton University’s Department of Sociology during the period of this study and now on the faculty at Rice University, enjoyed tremendous access to what he refers to as the “backstage” of Family leadership of his study of the “Christian Mafia,” in which he asserts that the Family is not secret but private. Secrecy, he notes, “often protects the interests of the powerful.” Of course, so may privacy when maintained by elites who use it to shield networks of influence from public transparency. The difference between secrecy and privacy, Lindsay argues, is that those who are not in on secrets—especially secrets about power—resent them, whereas those excluded from a private association of elites don’t mind, since such “privacy” appeals to traditions of deference to the elite. Thus, the “privacy” used by the Family to protect the privilege of its members, Lindsay argues, is “legitimated” by the public status of the Family’s members. Such are the justifications for power by the ivory tower so often derided as too leftist by conservative pundits.

12.
Monday Associates Meeting, January 23, 1995, Burnett Thompson presiding.

13.
David Kuo,
Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction
(Free Press, 2006), pp. 21–24.

14.
Doug Coe and General Vessey
: Minutes of a luncheon held at the Cedars, the Family’s Arlington, Virginia headquarters, October 19, 1983, collection 459, BGCA; no box number. The luncheon was organized by Aquilino E. Boyd, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega’s ambassador to the United States. Also in attendance was an inner-circle member of the Family named Herb Ellingwood, a longtime Reagan aide who had been responsible for “psychological warfare” against student protestors in California. In 1970, Ellingwood was one of the small circle of men who laid hands on Reagan and heard a voice, allegedly God’s, promising Reagan the White House. Paul Kengor,
God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life
(Regan Books, 2004), pp. 135–36. When Reagan ascended to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he took Ellingwood with him as a deputy counsel. Ellingwood’s advice? “Economic salvation and spiritual salvation go side by side.” John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge,
The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America
(Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 331–32.
Lugar et al.
: Telegram to General Manual Antonio Noriega, January 25, 1984, collection 459, BGCA.
Casanova and Martinez
: Getter, “Showing Faith in Discretion.”
Military aid to Honduras
: Elaine Sciolino, “U.S. Said to Link Latin Aid to Support for Contras,”
New York Times
, May 18, 1987.

15.
Quoted in Lindsay,
Faith in the Halls of Power
, p. 36.

16
Ibid., p. 35.

17.
Paul N. Temple to James F. Bell, October 7, 1976, collection 459, BGCA; no box number. Phillips gave $30,000 toward the cost of the Cedars; Stone, a self-help author of get-rich-quick books who was also famous for having given $2 million to Nixon’s 1968 and 1972 campaigns, donated $100,000. Temple, a former Standard Oil executive, gave $150,000, while the oilman Harold McClure gave $100,000. Other financing for the Cedars came from: William Loflin, $150,000; James Millen, $150,000; Mike Myers (not the actor), $150,000; Otto Zerbe, $100,000; the PGA pro Jim Hiskey, $100,000; and Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital, $83,000. The president of a local bank who was also a member of a Family prayer group arranged for a loan up to $400,000 (Temple to Bell, January. 6, 1977).