[Marxism] The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Robert Christgau on America’s Secret Fundamentalists
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20080905_robert_christgau_on_americas_secret_fundamentalists/
Posted on Sep 5, 2008

By Robert Christgau

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
By Jeff Sharlet
Harper, 464 pages

Any believer in American democracy is obliged to come to terms with a 
wing of the citizenry few secular humanists have the wherewithal to 
think about—Christians. Not mainline modernists, so useful for 
validating progressive pieties when we godless need moral ballast, but 
the 75 million Americans whose Christianity takes such modifiers as the 
respectable evangelical, the unapologetic fundamentalist, the doctrinal 
Bible-believing, the thoughtful convinced and the emotional born-again. 
Especially the white ones, of course—even black churches that oppose 
abortion and homosexuality are aligned with the social gospel, while 
Latino Pentecostals and Korean Presbyterians generally gather in their 
own congregations. Anyway, secular humanists are inclined to cut 
African-Americans and immigrants some slack. White Middle Americans they 
have a problem with.

These generalizations are crude, obviously. For one thing, there are 
plenty of secular humanists in Middle America, where proximity mitigates 
incomprehension a little. But in New York, my eternal home, folks are 
less sophisticated. As someone whose atheism proceeds directly from his 
demographically unlikely childhood in a fundamentalist church in Queens, 
and whose brother has spent his life ministering to conservative 
churches in various distant suburbs, I got on this problem back when my 
colleagues at The Village Voice dismissed Jimmy Carter out of hand 
because he was a Southern Baptist. I argued back then that the specifics 
of Carter’s religious history suggested levels of honesty and compassion 
unusual in a politician, which turned out to be true—in 2000, Carter 
quit the by then explicitly right-wing Southern Baptist Convention after 
a fruitless struggle to moderate it. Other politically prominent 
Southern Baptists include Pat Robertson, who founded the Christian 
Broadcasting Network in 1960, and Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral 
Majority in 1979. They do not include famed born-againer George W. 
Bush—or the most devout Christian currently running for president, 
Barack Obama. Generalizations are often crude.

Jeff Sharlet’s “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of 
American Power” examines a group of politically engaged Christians far 
more secretive than Robertson or Falwell. Sharlet establishes that since 
the end of World War II, the Family, aka the Fellowship, has exerted its 
influence in an impressive and frightening array of mostly dire events. 
Its first coup was the wholesale exoneration of minor Nazis and major 
Nazi collaborators after the war. The addition of under God to the 
Pledge of Allegiance and In God We Trust to U.S. currency were its 
initiatives. Its first major government operative was Sen. Frank Carlson 
(R-Kan.), who persuaded Dwight Eisenhower to run as a Republican, purged 
progressive bureaucrats from his chair at the obscure Civil Service 
Employees Committee and lobbied for such heads of state as Haiti’s “Papa 
Doc” Duvalier. Other dictators abetted by the Family include Ngo Dinh 
Diem of Vietnam, Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Park Chung Hee of South 
Korea, Artur da Costa e Silva of Brazil, Gen. Suharto of Indonesia, 
Mohamed Siad Barre of Somalia and Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova of El 
Salvador, which got its first infusion of special aid at the behest of 
Jimmy Carter, who has called Family leader Doug Coe a “very important 
person” in his life. Hillary Clinton has also been a Family “friend,” 
and not just via its major public manifestation, the relatively anodyne 
annual National Prayer Breakfast. The Family was instrumental in the 
creation of Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship, and of the Community Bible 
Study project through which George W. Bush found Jesus in 1985.

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