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Christers

To: Retort

Undercover among America's secret theocrats
Jeffrey Sharlet
Harper's Magazine
New York
Mar 2003

And a man's foes shall be they of his oum household.
Matthew 10:36 _

[PHOTOGRAPH]
This is how they pray: a dozen clear-eyed, smooth-skinned
"brothers" gathered together in a huddle, arms crossing arms over shoulders
like the weave of a cable, leaning in on one another and swaying like the
long grass up the hill from the house they share. The house is a handsome,
gray, two-story colonial that smells of new carpet and Pine-Sol and aftershave;
the men who live there call it Ivanwald. At the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac,
quiet but for the buzz of lawn mowers and kids playing foxes-and-hounds
in the park across the road, Ivanwald sits as one house among many, clustered
together like mushrooms, all devoted, like these men, to the service of
Jesus Christ. The men tend every tulip in the cul-de-sac, trim every magnolia,
seal every driveway smooth and black as boot leather. And they pray, assembled
at the dining table or on their lawn or in the hallway or in the bunk room
or on the basketball court, each man's head bowed in humility and swollen
with pride (secretly, he thinks) at being counted among such a fine corps
for Christ, among men to whom he will open his heart and whom he will remember
when he returns to the world not born-again but remade, no longer an individual
but part of the Lord's revolution, his will transformed into a weapon for
what the young men call "spiritual war."

"Jeff, will you lead us in prayer?"

Surely, brother. It is April 2002, and I have lived with these men for
weeks now, not as a Christian-a term they deride as too narrow for the
world they are building in Christ's honorbut as a "believer." I have shared
the brothers' meals and their work and their games. I have been numbered
among them and have been given a part in their ministry. I have wrestled
with them and showered with them and listened to their stories: I know
which man resents his father's fortune and which man succumbed to the flesh
of a woman not once but twice and which man dances so well he is afraid
of being taken for a fag. I know what it means to be a

"brother," which is to say that I know what it means to be a soldier in
the army of God.

"Heavenly Father," I begin. Then, "O Lord," but I worry that this doesn't
sound intimate enough. I settle on, "Dear Jesus." "Dear Jesus, just, please,
Jesus, let us fight for Your name." .Ivanwald, which sits at the end of
Twentyfourth Street North in Arlington, Virginia, is known only to its
residents and to the members and friends of the organization that sponsors
it, a group of believers who refer to themselves as "the Family." The Family
is, in its own words, an "invisible" association, though its membership
has always consisted mostly of public men. Senators Don Nickles (R., Okla.),
Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Pete Domenici (R., N.Mex.), John Ensign (R.,
Nev.), James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), and Conrad Burns
(R., Mont.) are referred to as "members," as are Representatives Jim DeMint
(R., S.C.), Frank Wolf (R., Va.), Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.), Zach Wamp (R.,
Tenn.), and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.). Regular prayer groups have met in
the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally
fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries.
The Family maintains a closely guarded database of its associates, but
it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to
speak about the group or its activities.

The organization has operated under many guises, some active, some defunct:
National Committee for Christian Leadership, International Christian Leadership,
the National Leadership Council, Fellowship House, the Fellowship Foundation,
the National Fellowship Council, the International Foundation. These groups
are intended to draw attention away from the Family, and to prevent it
from becoming, in the words of one of the Family's leaders, "a target for
misunderstanding." The Family's only publicized gathering is the National
Prayer Breakfast, which it established in 1953 and which, with congressional
sponsorship, it continues to organize every February in Washington, D.C.
Each year 3,000 dignitaries, representing scores of nations, pay $425 each
to attend. Steadfastly ecumenical, too bland most years to merit much press,
the breakfast is regarded by the Family as merely a tool in a larger purpose:
to recruit the powerful attendees into smaller, more frequent prayer meetings,
where they can "meet Jesus man to man."

In the process of introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family has managed
to effect a number of behind-the-scenes acts of diplomacy. In 1978 it secretly
helped the Carter Administration organize a worldwide call to prayer with
Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, and more recently, in 2001, it brought
together the warring leaders of Congo and Rwanda for a clandestine meeting,
leading to the two sides' eventual peace accord last July. Such benign
acts appear to be the exception to the rule. During the 1960s the Family
forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist
(and dictatorial) elements within Africa's postcolonial leadership. The
Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing
regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia,
General Suhatto (whose tally of several hundred thousand "Communists" killed
marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators) was presiding
over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration
the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men
such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by
a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo
Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both
the CIA and death squads before his own demise. "We work with power where
we can," the Family's leader, Doug Coe, says, "build new power where we
can't."

At the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast, George H.W. Bush praised Doug Coe
for what he described as "quiet diplomacy, I wouldn't say secret diplomacy,"
as an "ambassador of faith." Coe has visited nearly every world capital,
often with congressmen at his side, "making friends" and inviting them
back to the Family's unofficial headquarters, a mansion (just down the
road from Ivanwald) that the Family bought in 1978 with $1.5 million donated
by, among others, Tom Phillips, then the C.E.O. of arms manufacturer Raytheon,
and Ken Olsen, the founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation.
A waterfall has been carved into the mansion's broad lawn, from which a
bronze bald eagle watches over the Potomac River. The mansion is white
and pillared and surrounded by magnolias, and by red trees that do not
so much tower above it as whisper. The mansion is named for these trees;
it is called The Cedars, and Family members speak of it as a person. "The
Cedars has a heart for the poor," they like to say. By "poor" they mean
not the thousands of literal poor living barely a mile away but rather
the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom: the senators, generals,
and prime ministers who coast to the end of Twenty-fourth Street in Arlington
in black limousines and town cars and hulking S.U.V.'s to meet one another,
to meet Jesus, to pay homage to the god of The Cedars.

There they forge "relationships" beyond the din of vox populi (the Family's
leaders consider democracy a manifestation of ungodly pride) and "throw
away religion" in favor of the truths of the Family. Declaring God's covenant
with the Jews broken, the group's core members call themselves "the new
chosen."

The brothers of Ivanwald are the Family's next generation, its high priests
in training. I had been recommended for membership by a banker acquaintance,
a recent Ivanwald alumnus, who had mistaken my interest in Jesus for belief.
Sometimes the brothers would ask me why I was there. They knew that I was
"half Jewish," that I was a writer, and that I was from New York City,
which most of them considered to be only slightly less wicked than Baghdad
or Amsterdam. I told my brothers that I was there to meet Jesus, and I
was: the new ruling Jesus, whose ways are secret. t Ivanwald, men learn
to be leaders by loving their leaders. "They're so busy loving us," a brother
once explained to me, "but who's loving them?" We were. The brothers each
paid $400 per month for room and board, but we were also the caretakers
of The Cedars, cleaning its gutters, mowing its lawns, whacking weeds and
blowing leaves and sanding. And we were called to serve on Tuesday mornings,
when The Cedars hosted a regular prayer breakfast typically presided over
by Ed Meese, the former attorney general. Each week the breakfast brought
together a rotating group of ambassadors, businessmen, and American politicians.
Three of Ivanwald's brothers also attended, wearing crisp shirts starched
just for the occasion; one would sit at the table while the other two poured
coffee.

[IMAGE PHOTOGRAPH]

The morning I attended, Charlene, the cook, scrambled up eggs with blue
tortillas, Italian sausage, red pepper, and papaya. Three women from Potomac
Point, an "Ivanwald for girls" across the road from The Cedars, came to
help serve. They wore red lipstick and long skirts (makeup and "feminine"
attire were required) and had, after several months of cleaning and serving
in The Cedars while the brothers worked outside, become quite unimpressed
by the high-powered clientele. "Girls don't sit in on the breakfasts,"
one of them told me, though she said that none of them minded because it
was "just politics."

The breakfast began with a prayer and a sprinkle of scripture from Meese,
who sat at the head of the table. Matthew 11:27: "No one knows the Son
except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those
to whom the Son chooses to reveal him." That morning's chosen introduced
themselves. They were businessmen from Dallas and Oregon, a Chinese Christian
dissident, a man who ran an aid group for Tibetan refugees (the Dalai Lama
had been very positive on Jesus at their last meeting, he reported). Two
ambassadors, from Benin and Rwanda, sat side by side. Rwanda's representative,
Dr. Richard Sezibera, was an intense man who refused to eat his eggs or
even any melon. He drank cup after cup of coffee, and his eyes were bloodshot.
A man I didn't recognize, whom Charlene identified as a former senator,
suggested that negotiators from Rwanda and Congo, trapped in a war that
has slain more than 2 million, should stop worrying about who will get
the diamonds and the oil and instead focus on who will get Jesus. "Power
sharing is not going to work unless we change their hearts," he said.

Sezibera stared, incredulous. Meese chuckled and opened his mouth to speak,
but Sezibera interrupted him. "It is not so simple," the Rwandan said,
his voice flat and low. Meese smiled. Everyone in the Family loves rebukes,
and here was Rwanda rebuking them. The former senator nodded. Meese murmured,
"Yes," stroking his maroon leather Bible, and the words "Thank you, Jesus"
rippled in whispers around the table as I poured Sezibera another cup of
coffee.

[IMAGE PHOTOGRAPH]

The brothers also served at the Family's fourstory, redbrick Washington
town house, a former convent at 133 C Street S.E. complete with stained-glass
windows. Eight congressmen-- including Senator Ensign and seven representatives*-lived
there, brothers in Christ just like us, only more powerful. We scrubbed
their toilets, hoovered their carpets, polished their silver. The day I
worked at C Street I ran into Doug Coe, who was tutoring Todd Tiahrt, a
Republican congressman from Kansas. A friendly, plainspoken man with a
bright, lazy smile, Coe has worked for the Family since 1959, soon after
he graduated from college, and has led it since 1969.

Tiahrt was a short shot glass of a man, two parts flawless hair and one
part teeth. He wanted to know the best way "for the Christian to win the
race with the Muslim." The Muslim, he said, has too many babies, white
Americans kill too many of theirs.

Doug agreed this could be a problem. But he was more concerned that the
focus on labels like "Christian" might get in the way of the congressman's
prayers. Religion distracts people from Jesus, Doug said, and allows them
to isolate Christ's will from their work in the world.

"People separate it out," he warned Tiahrt. "`Oh, okay, I got religion,
that's private.' As if Jesus doesn't know anything about building highways,
or Social Security. We gotta take Jesus out of the religious wrapping."


"All right, how do we do that?" Tiahrt asked. "A covenant," Doug answered.
The congressman half-smiled, as if caught between confessing his ignorance
and pretending he knew what Doug was talking about. "Like the Mafia," Doug
clarified. "Look at the strength of their bonds." He made a fist and held
it before Tiahrt's face. Tiahrt nodded, squinting. "See, for them it's
honor," Doug said. "For us, it's Jesus."

Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of
the covenants they had forged with their "brothers": "Look at Hitler,"
he said. "Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Bin Laden." The Family, of course, possessed
a weapon those leaders lacked: the "total Jesus" of a brotherhood in Christ.
"That's what you get with a covenant," said Coe. "Jesus plus nothing."
o the Family, Jesus is not just a name; he is also a real man. "An awesome
guy," a Family employee named Terry told the brothers over breakfast one
morning. "He excelled in every activity. He was a great teacher, sure,
but he was also a real guy's guy. He would have made an excellent athlete."


On my first day at Ivanwald, on an uneven court behind the house, I learned
to play a two-- ball variant of basketball called "bump" that was designed
to sharpen both body and soul. In bump, players compete at free throws,
each vying to sink his own before the man behind him sinks his. If he hits
first then you're out, with one exception: the basket's net narrows at
the chute so that the ball sometimes sticks, at which point another player
can hurl his ball up from beneath, knocking the first ball out. In this
event everyone cries "Bu-u-ump," with great joy.

Bengt began it. He was one of the house's leaders, a twenty-four-year-old
North Carolinian with sad eyes and spiky eyebrows and a loud, disarming
laugh that made him sound like a donkey. From inside the house, waiting
for a phone call, he opened a second-floor window and called to Gannon
for a ball. Gannon, the son of a Texas oilman, worked as a Senate aide*;
he had blond hair and a chin like a plow, and he sang in a choir. He tossed
one up, which Bengt caught and dispatched toward the basket. "Nice," Gannon
drawled as the ball sank through.

As soon as the ball bounced off the rim, Beau was at the free-throw line,
taking his shot. Beau was a good-natured Atlantan with the build of a wrestler;
as a bumper he was second only to Bengt.

"It's okay if you bump into the other guys, too," Gannon told me as my
turn approached. "The idea's kinda to get that tension building." Ahead
of me Beau bent his knees to take another shot. The moment the ball rolled
off his fingers, Wayne, also from Georgia, jumped up and hurled his own
ball over Beau's head. As he returned to earth, his elbow descended on
Beau's shoulder like a hammer. "Bump that," he said.

Bump was designed to bring out your hostilities. The Family believes that
you can't grow in Jesus unless you "face your anger," and then abandon
it. When bump worked right, each man was supposed to lose himself, forgetting
even the precepts of the game. Sometimes you wanted to get the ball in,
sometimes you wanted to knock it out. In, out, it didn't matter. Your ball,
his, who cared? Bump wasn't horseplay, it was a physicalized theology.
It was to basketball what the New Testament is to the Old: stripped down
to one simple story that always ends the same. Bump, Jesus. Bump, Jesus.


I stepped to the line and, after missing, moved in for a layup. Wayne jumped
to the line and shot. "Dude!" he shouted. I looked up. His ball, meant
to hit mine, slammed into my forehead. Bu-u-ump! the boys hollered. They
had bumped me with Christ.

Bengt bumped. Beau bumped. Gannon bumped. I was out of contention. Gannon
joined me, then Beau. The game was down to Bengt and Wayne. When Wayne
threw from behind Bengt, he hurled the ball with such force that it sent
Bengt chasing his ball into the neighboring yard. "Tenacious Wayne!" Gannon
roared. Wayne scooped up his own ball, leapt, and slam-dunked Bengt out.
"That's yo motha!" he hollered.

Trotting back to the court, Bengt shook his head. "You the man, Wayne,"
he said. "Just keep it calm." Wayne was ready to burst.

"Huddle up guys," said Bengt. We formed a circle, arms wrapped around shoulders.
"Okay," he said. "We're gonna pray now. Lord, I just want to thank you
for bringing us out here today to have fellowship in bump and for blessing
this fine day with a visit from our new friend Jeff. Lord, we thank you
for bringing this brother to us from up north, because we know he can learn
to bump, and just-love you, and serve you and Lord, let us all just-Lord,
be together in your name. Amen." he regimen was so precise it was relaxing:
no swearing, no drinking, no sex, no self. Watch out for magazines and
don't waste time on newspapers and never watch TV. Eat meat, study the
Gospels, play basketball: God loves a man who can sink a three-pointer.
Pray to be broken. 0 Heavenly Father. Dear Jesus. Help me be humble. Let
me do Your will. Every morning began with a prayer, some days with outsiders-Wednesdays
led by a former Ivanwald brother, now a businessman; Thursdays led by another
executive who used tales of high finance to illuminate our lessons from
scripture, which he supplemented with xeroxed midrash from Fortune or Fast
Company; Fridays with the women of Potomac Point. But most days it was
just us boys, bleary-eyed, gulping coffee and sugared cereal as Bengt and
Jeff Connolly, Bengt's childhood friend and our other house leader, laid
out lines of Holy Word across the table like strategy.

The dining room had once been a deck, but the boys had walled it in and
roofed it over and unrolled a red Persian carpet, transforming the room
into a sort of monastic meeting place, with two long tables end to end,
ringed by a dozen chairs and two benches. The first day I visited Ivanwald,
Bengt cleared a space for me at the head of the table and sat to my right.
Beside him, Wayne slumped in his chair, his eyes hidden by a cowboy hat.
Across from him sat Beau, still wearing the boxers and T-shirt he'd slept
in. Bengt alone looked sharp, his hair combed, golf shirt tucked tightly
into pleated chinos.

Bengt told Gannon to read our text for that morning, Psalm 139: "'0 Lord,
you have searched me and you know me."' The very first line made Bengt
smile; this was, in his view, an awesome thing for God to have done. Bengt's
manners and naive charm preceded him in every encounter. When you told
him a story he would respond, "Golf-y!" just to be nice. When genuinely
surprised he would exclaim, "Good ni-fight!" Sometimes it was hard to remember
that he was a self-professed revolutionary.

He asked Gannon to keep reading, and then leaned back and listened.

"`Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths,
you are there."'

Bengt raised a hand. "That's great, dude. Let's talk about that." The room
fell silent as Bengt stared into his Bible, running his finger up and down
the gilded edge of the page. "Guys," he said. "What-how does that make
you feel?"

"Known," said Gannon, almost in a whisper. Bengt nodded. He was looking
for something else, but he didn't know where it was. "What does it make
you think of?"

"Jesus?" said Beau. Bengt stroked his chin. "Yeah ... Let me read you a
little more." He read in a monotone, accelerating as he went, as if he
could persuade us through a sheer heap of words. "`For you created my inmost
being; you knit me together in my mother's womb,"' he concluded. His lips
curled into a half smile. "Man! I mean, that's intense, right? ' `In my
mother's womb'-God's right in there with you." He grinned. "It's like,"
he said, "it's like, you can't run. Doesn't matter where you turn, 'cause
Jesus is gonna be there, just waiting for you."

Beau's eyes cleared and Gannon nodded. "Yeah, brother," Bengt said, an
eyebrow arched. "Jesus is smart. He's gonna get you."

Gannon shook his head. "Oh, he's already got me."

"Me, too," Beau chimed, and then each man clasped his hands into one fist
and pressed it against his forehead or his chin and prayed, eyes closed
and Jesus all over his skin. e prayed to be "nothing." We were there to
"soften our hearts to authority." We instituted a rule that every man must
wipe the toilet bowl after he pisses, not for cleanliness but to crush
his "inner rebel." Jeff C. did so by abstaining from "shady" R-rated movies,
lest they provoke dreams of women. He was built like a leprechaun, with
curly, dark blond hair and freckles and a brilliant smile. The Potomac
Point girls brought him cookies; the wives of the Family's older men asked
him to visit. One night, when the guys went on a swing-dancing date with
the Potomac Pointers, more worldly women flocked to Jeff C., begging to
be dipped and twirled. The feeling was not mutual. "I just don't like girls
as much as guys," he told me one day while we painted a new coat of "Gettysburg
Gray" onto Ivanwald. He was speaking not of sex or of romance but of brotherhood.
"I like"-he paused, his brush suspended midstroke-"competence."

He ran nearly every day, often alone, down by the Potomac. On the basketball
court anger sometimes overcame him: "Shoot the ball!" he would snap at
Rogelio, a shy eighteen-year-old from Paraguay, one of several international
brothers. But later Jeff C. would turn his lapse into a lesson, citing
scripture, a verse we were to memorize or else be banished, by Jeff C.
himself, to a night in the basement. Ephesians, chapter 4, verses 26-27:
"`In your anger do not sin': Do not let the sun go down while you are still
angry, and do not give the devil a foothold."

Jeff C.'s pride surfaced in unexpected ways. Once, together in the kitchen
after lunch, I mentioned that I'd seen the soul singer Al Green live. Jeff
C. didn't answer. Instead he disappeared, reemerged with a Green CD, and
set it in the boom box. He pressed PLAY, and cracked his knuckles and his
neck bones. His hands batted into fists, his eyes widened, and his torso
became a jumping bean as his chest popped out on the downbeat. He heard
me laughing, applauding, but he didn't stop. He started singing along with
the Reverend. He grabbed his crotch and wrenched his shirt up and ran his
hand over his stomach. Then he froze and dropped back to his ordinary voice
as if narrating.

"I used to work in this pizza parlor," he said. "It was, like, a buncha...
I dunno, junkies. Heroin." He grinned. "But man, they loved Al Green. We
had a poster of him. He was, he was ... man! Shirtless, leather pants.
Low leather pants." Jeff C. tugged his waistband down. "Hips cocked." He
shook his head and howled. Moonwalking away, he snapped his knees together,
his feet spread wide, his hands in the air, testifying.

Jeff C. figured I had a thing against South-- erners. Once, he asked if
I thought the South was "racist." I got it, I tried to tell him, I knew
the North was just as bad, but he wouldn't listen. He told me I could call
him a redneck or a hillbilly (I never called him either), but the truth
was that he was "blacker" than me. He told me of his deep love for black
gospel churches. Loving black people, he told me, made him a better follower
of Christ. "Remember that story Cal Thomas told?" he asked. Thomas, a syndicated
columnist, had recently stopped by Ivanwald for a mixer with young congressional
staffers. He had regaled his audience with stories about tweaking his liberal
colleagues, in particular about when he had addressed a conference of nonbelievers
by asking if anyone knew where to buy a good "negro." Jeff C. thought it
was hilarious but also profound. What Thomas had meant, he told me, was
that absent the teachings of Jesus there was no reason for the strong not
to enslave the weak. wo weeks into my stay, David Coe, Doug's son and the
presumptive heir to leadership of the Family, dropped by the house. My
brothers and I assembled in the living room, where David had draped his
tall frame over a burgundy leather recliner like a frat boy, one leg hanging
over a padded arm.

"You guys," David said, "are here to learn how to rule the world." He was
in his late forties, with dark, gray-flecked hair, an olive complexion,
and teeth like a slab of white marble. We sat around him in a rough circle,
on couches and chairs, as the afternoon light slanted through the wooden
blinds onto walls adorned with foxhunting lithographs and a giant tapestry
of the Last Supper. Rafael, a wealthy Ecuadoran who'd been a college soccer
star before coming to Ivanwald, had a hard time with English, and he didn't
understand what David had said. So he stared, lips parted in puzzlement.
David seemed to like that. He stared back, holding Raf's gaze like it was
a pretty thing he'd found on the ground. "You have very intense eyes,"
David said.

"Thank you," Raf mumbled.

"Hey," David said, "let's talk about the Old Testament. Who would you say
are its good guys?" "David," Beau volunteered.

"King David," David Coe said. "That's a good one. David. Hey. What would
you say made King David a good guy?" He was giggling, not from nervousness
but from barely containable delight.

"Faith?" Beau said. "His faith was so strong?" "Yeah." David nodded as
if he hadn't heard that before. "Hey, you know what's interesting about
King David?" From the blank stares of the others I could see that they
did not. Many didn't even carry a Hebrew Bible, preferring a slim volume
of just the New Testament Gospels and Epistles and, from the Old, Psalms.
Others had the whole book, but the gold gilt on the pages of the first
two thirds remained undisturbed. "King David," David Coe went on, "liked
to do really, really bad things." He chuckled. "Here's this guy who slept
with another man's wife-Bathsheba, right?-and then basically murders her
husband. And this guy is one of our heroes." David shook his head. "I mean,
Jiminy Christmas, God likes this guy! What," he said, "is that all about?"


[IMAGE PHOTOGRAPH]

The answer, we discovered, was that King David had been "chosen." To illustrate
this point David Coe turned to Beau. "Beau, let's say I hear you raped
three little girls. And now here you are at Ivanwald. What would I think
of you, Beau?"

Beau shrank into the cushions. "Probably that I'm pretty bad?"

"No, Beau. I wouldn't. Because I'm not here to judge you. That's not my
job. I'm here for only one thing."

"Jesus?" Beau said. David smiled and winked. He walked to the National
Geographic map of the world mounted on the wall. "You guys know about Genghis
Khan he asked. "Genghis was a man with a vision. He conquered"-David stood
on the couch under the map, tracing, with his hand, half the northern hemisphere-"nearly
everything. He devastated nearly everything. His enemies? He beheaded them."
David swiped a finger across his throat. "Dop, dop, dop, dop."

David explained that when Genghis entered a defeated city he would call
in the local headman and have him stuffed into a crate. Over the crate
would be spread a tablecloth, and on the tablecloth would be spread a wonderful
meal. "And then, while the man suffocated, Genghis ate, and he didn't even
hear the man's screams." David still stood on the couch, a finger in the
air. "Do you know what that means?" He was thinking of Christ's parable
of the wineskins. "You can't pour new into old," David said, returning
to his chair. "We elect our leaders. Jesus elects his." He reached over
and squeezed the arm of a

brother. "Isn't that great?" David said. "That's the way everything in
life happens. If you're a person known to be around Jesus, you can go and
do anything. And that's who you guys are. When you leave here, you're not
only going to know the value of Jesus, you're going to know the people
who rule the world. It's about vision. `Get your vision straight, then
relate.' Talk to the people who rule the world, and help them obey. Obey
Him. If I obey Him myself, I help others do the same. You know why? Because
I become a warning. We become a warning. We warn everybody that the future
king is coming. Not just of this country or that, but of the world." Then
he pointed at the map, toward the Khan's vast, reclaimable empire. one
night I asked josh, a brother from Atlanta who was hoping to do mission
work overseas, if I could look at some materials the Family had given him.
"Man, I'd love to share them with you," he said, and retrieved from his
bureau drawer two folders full of documents. While my brothers slept, I
sat at the end of our long, oak dining table and copied them into my notebook.


In a document entitled "Our Common Agreement as a Core Group," members
of the Family are instructed to form a "core group," or a "cell," which
is defined as "a publicly invisible but privately identifiable group of
companions." A document called "Thoughts on a Core Group" explains that
"Communists use cells as their basic structure. The mafia operates like
this, and the basic unit of the Marine Corps is the four man squad. Hitler,
Lenin, and many others understood the power of a small core of people."


Another document, "Thoughts and Principles of the Family," sets forth political
guidelines, such as

21. We recognize the place and responsibility of national secular leaders
in the work of advancing His kingdom. 23. To the world in general we will
say that we are "in Christ" rather than "Christian"-"Christian" having
become a political term in most of the world and in the United States a
meaningless term.

24. We desire to see a leadership led by God-leaders of all levels of society
who direct projects as they are led by the spirit. and self-examination
questions: 4. Do I give only verbal assent to the policies of the family
or am I a partner in seeking the mind of the Lord?

7. Do I agree with and practice the financial precepts of the family?*
13. Am I willing to work without human recognition? When the group is ready,
"Thoughts on a Core Group" explains, it can set to work: After being together
for a while, in this closer relationship, God will give you more insight
into your own geographical area and your sphere of influence-make your
opportunities a matter of prayer. ... The primary purpose of a core group
is not to become an "action group," but an invisible "believing group."
However, activity normally grows out of agreements reached in faith and
in prayer around the person of Jesus Christ. Long-term goals were best
summarized in a document called "Youth Corps Vision." Another Family project,
Youth Corps distributes pleasant brochures featuring endorsements from
political leaders-among them Tsutomu Hata, a former prime minister of Japan,
former secretary of state James Baker, and Yoweri Museveni, president of
Uganda-and full of enthusiastic rhetoric about helping young people to
learn the principles of leadership. The word "Jesus" is unmentioned in
the brochure.

But "Youth Corps Vision," which is intended only for members of the Family
("it's kinda secret," Josh cautioned me), is more direct. The Vision is
to mobilize thousands of young people world wide-committed to principle
precepts, and person of Jesus Christ....

A group of highly dedicated individuals who are united together having
a total commitment to use their lives to daily seek to mature into people
who talk like Jesus, act like Jesus, think like Jesus. This group will
have the responsibility to:

-see that the commitment and action is maintained to the overall vision;


--see that the finest and best invisible organization is developed and
maintained at all levels of the work; even though the structure is hidden,
see that the family atmosphere is maintained, so that all people can feel
a part of the family. Another document "Regional Reports, January 3, 2002"-lists
some of the nations where Youth Corps programs are already in operation:
Russia, Ukraine, Romania, India, Pakistan, Uganda, Nepal, Bhutan, Ecuador,
Honduras, Peru. Youth Corps is, in many respects, a more aggressive version
of Young Life, a better-known network of Christian youth groups that entice
teenagers with parties and sports, and only later work Jesus into the equation.
Most of my American brothers at Ivanwald had been among Young Life's elite,
and many had returned to Young Life during their college summers to work
as counselors. Youth Corps, whose programs are often centered around Ivanwald-style
houses, prepares the best of its recruits for positions of power in business
and government abroad. The goal: "Two hundred national and international
world leaders bound together relationally by a mutual love for God and
the family." Between 1984 and 1992 the Fellowship Foundation consigned
592 boxes-decades of the Family's letters, sermons, minutes, Christmas
cards, travel itineraries, and lists of members-- to an archive at the
Billy Graham Center of Wheaton College in Illinois. Until I visited last
fall, the archive had gone largely unexamined.

The Family was founded in April 1935 by Abraham Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant
who made his living as a traveling preacher. One night, while lying in
bed fretting about socialists, Wobblies, and a Swedish Communist who, he
was sure, planned to bring Seattle under the control of Moscow, Vereide
received a visitation: a voice, and a light in the dark, bright and blinding.
The next day he met a friend, a wealthy businessman and former major, and
the two men agreed upon a spiritual plan. They enlisted nineteen business
executives in a weekly breakfast meeting and together they prayed, convinced
that Jesus alone could redeem Seattle and crush the radical unions. They
wanted to give Jesus a vessel, and so they asked God to raise up a leader.
One of their number, a city councilman named Arthur Langlie, stood and
said, "I am ready to let God use me." Langlie was made first mayor and
later governor, backed in both campaigns by money and muscle from his prayer-breakfast
friends, whose number had rapidly multiplied.* Vereide and his new brothers
spread out across the Northwest in chauffeured vehicles (a $20,000 Dusenburg
carried brothers on one mission, he boasted). "Men," wrote Vereide, "thus
quickened." Prayer breakfast groups were formed in dozens of cities, from
San Francisco to Philadelphia. There were already enough men ministering
to the down-and-out, Vereide had decided; his mission field would be men
with the means to seize the world for God. Vereide called his potential
flock of the rich and powerful, those in need only of the "real" Jesus,
the "upand-out."

Vereide arrived in Washington, D.C., on September 6, 1941, as the guest
of a man referred to only as "Colonel Brindley." "Here I am finally," he
wrote to his wife, Mattie, who remained in Seattle. "In a day or two-many
will know that I am in town and by God's grace it will hum." Within weeks
he had held his first D.C. prayer meeting, attended by more than a hundred
congressmen. By 1943, now living in a suite at Colonel Brindley's University
Club, Vereide was an insider. "My what a full and busy day!" he wrote to
Mattie on January 22. The Vice President brought me to the Capitol and
counseled with me regarding the programs and plans, and then introduced
me to Senator [Ralph Owen] Brewster, who in turn to Senator [Harold Hitz]
Burton-then planned further the program [of a prayer breakfast] and enlisted
their cooperation. Then to the Supreme Court for visits with some of them
.. . then back to the Senate, House .... The hand of the Lord is upon me.
He is leading. By the end of the war, nearly a third of U.S. senators attended
one of his weekly prayer meetings.

In 1944, Vereide had foreseen what he called "the new world order." "Upon
the termination of the war there will be many men available to carry on,"
Vereide wrote in a letter to his wife. "Now the ground-work must be laid
and our leadership brought to face God in humility, prayer and obedience."
He began organizing prayer meetings for delegates to the United Nations,
at which he would instruct them in God's plan for rebuilding from the wreckage
of the war. Donald Stone, a high-ranking administrator of the Marshall
Plan, joined the directorship of Vereide's organization. In an undated
letter, he wrote Vereide that he would "soon begin a tour around the world
for the [Marshall Plan], combining with this a spiritual mission." In 1946,
Vereide, too, toured the world, traveling with letters of introduction
from a half dozen senators and representatives, and from Paul G. Hoffman,
the director of the Marshall Plan. He traveled also with a mandate from
General John Hildring, assistant secretary of state, to oversee the creation
of a list of good Germans of "the predictable type" (many of whom, Vereide
believed, were being held for having "the faintest connection" with the
Nazi regime), who could be released from prison "to be used, according
to their ability in the tremendous task of reconstruction." Vereide met
with Jewish survivors and listened to their stories, but he nevertheless
considered ex-- Nazis well suited for the demands of "strong" government,
so long as they were willing to worship Christ as they had Hitler.

In 1955, Senator Frank Carlson, a close adviser to Eisenhower and an even
closer associate of Vereide's, convened a meeting at which he declared
the Family's mission to be a "worldwide spiritual offensive," in which
common cause would be made with anyone opposed to the Soviet Union. That
same year, the Family financed an anti-Communist propaganda film, Militant
Liberty, for use by the Defense Department in influencing opinion abroad.
By the Kennedy era, the spiritual offensive had fronts on every continent
but Antarctica (which Family missionaries would not visit until the 1980s).
In 1961, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia deeded the Family a prime parcel
in downtown Addis Ababa to serve as an African headquarters, and by then
the Family also had powerful friends in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya.
Back home, Senator Strom Thurmond prepared several reports for Vereide
concerning the Senate's deliberations. Former president Eisenhower, Doug
Coe would later claim at a private meeting of politicians, once pledged
secret operatives to aid the Family's operations. Even in Franco's Spain,
Vereide once boasted at a prayer breakfast in 1965, "there are secret cells
such as the American Embassy [and) the Standard Oil office [that allow
us] to move practically anywhere."

By the late sixties, Vereide's speeches to local prayer breakfast groups
had become minor news events, and Family members' travels on behalf of
Christ had attracted growing press attention. Vereide began to worry that
the movement he had spent his life building might become just another political
party. In 1966, a few years before he was "promoted" to heaven at age eighty-four,
Vereide wrote a letter declaring it time to "submerge the institutional
image of [the Family]." No longer would the Family recruit its powerful
members in public, nor recruit so many. "There has always been one man,"
wrote Vereide, "or a small core who have caught the vision for their country
and become aware of what a `leadership led by God' could mean spiritually
to the nation and to the world .... It is these men, banded together, who
can accomplish the vision God gave me years ago." wo weeks into my stay,
Bengt announced to the brothers that he was applying to graduate school.
He had chosen a university close enough to commute from the house, with
a classics program he hoped would complement (maybe even renew, he told
me privately) his relationship with Christ. After dinner every night he
would disappear into the little office beside his upstairs bunk room to
compose his statement of purpose on the house's one working computer.

Knowing I was a writer, he eventually gave me the essay to read. We sat
down in Ivanwald's "office," a room barely big enough for the two of us.
We crossed our legs in opposite directions so as not to knock knees.

My formal education has been a progression from confusion and despair to
hope, the essay began. Its story hewed to the familiar fundamentalist routine
of lost and found: every man and woman a sinner, fallen but nonetheless
redeemed. And yet Bengt's sins were not of the flesh but of the mind. In
college he had abandoned his boyhood ambition of becoming a doctor to study
philosophy: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Hegel. Raised in the faith, his ideas
about God crumbled before the disciplined rage of the philosophers. "I
cut and ran," he told me. To Africa, where by day he worked on ships and
in clinics, and by night read Dostoevsky and the Bible, its darkest and
most seductive passages: Lamentations, Job, the Song of Songs. These authors
were alike, his essay observed: They wrote about [suffering like a companion.
I looked up. "A double," I said, remembering Dostoevsky's alter egos.

Bengt nodded. "You know how you can stare at something for a long time
and not see it the way it really is? That's what scripture had been to
me." Through Dostoevsky he began to see the Old Testament for what it is:
relentless in its horror, its God a fire, a whirlwind, a "bear, lying in
wait," "a lion in secret places." Even worse is its Man: a rapist, a murderer,
a wretched thief, a fool.

"But," said Bengt, "that's not how it ends." Bengt meant Jesus. I thought
of the end of The Brothers Karamazov: the saintly Alyosha, leading a pack
of boys away from a funeral to feast on pancakes, everyone clapping hands
and proclaiming eternal brotherhood. In Africa, Bengt had seen people who
were diseased, starving, trapped by war, but who seemed nonetheless to
experience joy. Bengt recalled listening to a group of starving men play
the drums. "Doubt," he said, "is just a prelude to joy."

I had heard this before from mainstream Christians, but I suspected Bengt
meant it differently. A line in Dostoevsky's The Possessed reminded me
of him: when the conservative nationalist Shatov asks Stavrogin, the cold-hearted
radical, "Wasn't it you who said that even if it was proved to you mathematically
that the Truth was outside Christ, you would prefer to remain with Christ
outside the Truth?" Stavrogin, who refuses to be cornered, denies it.

"Exactly," Bengt said. In Africa he had seen the trappings of Christianity
fall away. All that remained was Christ. "You can't argue with absolute
power."

I put the essay down. Bengt nudged it back into my hands. "I want to know
what you think of my ending."

As I have read more about Jesus, it ran, I have also been intrigued by
his style of interaction with other people. He was fascinated in particular
by an encounter in the Gospel of John, chapter 1, verse 35-39, in which
Jesus asks two men why they are following him. In turn, the men ask where
Jesus is staying, to which he replies, "Come and see." I am not sure how
Jesus asks the question, Bengt had concluded, but from the response, it
seems like he is asking, "What do you desire?"

"That's what it's about," Bengt said. "Desire." He shifted in his chair.
"Think about it: `What do you desire?"'

"God?" "Yes."

"That's the answer?" I asked. "He's the question," Bengt retorted, half-smiling,
satisfied with his inversion by which doubt became the essence of a dogma.
God was just what Bengt desired Him to be, even as Bengt was, in the face
of God, "nothing." Not for aesthetics alone, I realized, did Bengt and
the Family reject the label "Christian." Their faith and their practice
seemed closer to a perverted sort of Buddhism, their God outside "the truth,"
their Christ everywhere and nowhere at once, His commands phrased as questions,
His will as simple to divine as one's own desires. And what the Family
desired, from Abraham Vereide to Doug Coe to Bengt, was power, worldly
power, with which Christ's kingdom can be built, cell by cell. of long
after our conversation, Bengt put a bucket beside the toilet in the downstairs
bunk room. From now on, he announced, all personal items left in the living
room would go into the bucket. "If you're missing anything, guys," Bengt
said over dinner, "look in the bucket." I looked in the bucket. Here's
what I found: One pair of flip-flops. One pocket-sized edition of the sayings
of Jesus. One Frisbee. One copy of Executive Orders, by Tom Clancy, hardcover.
One brown-leather Bible, well worn, beautifully printed on onion skin,
given to Bengt Carlson by Palmer Carlson. One pair of dirty underwear.


When I picked up the Bible the pages flipped open to the Gospel of John,
and my eyes fell on a single underlined phrase, chapter 15, verse 3: "You
are already clean."

Whenever a sufficiently large crop of God's soldiers was bunked up at Ivanwald,
Doug Coe made a point of stopping by for dinner. Doug was, in spirit, Christ's
closest disciple, the master bumper; the brothers viewed his visit as far
more important than that of any senator or prime minister. The night he
joined us he wore a crisply pressed golf shirt and dark slacks, and his
skin was well tanned. He brought a guest with him, an Albanian politician
whose pale face and ill-fitting gray suit made Doug seem all the more radiant.
In his early seventies, Doug could have passed for fifty: his hair was
dark, his cheeks taut. His smile was like a lantern.

[IMAGE PHOTOGRAPH]

"Where," Doug asked Rogelio, "are you from, in Paraguay?"

"Asuncion," he said.

Doug smiled. "I've visited there many times." He chewed for a while. "Asuncion.
A Latin leader was assassinated there twenty years ago. A Nicaraguan. Does
anybody know who it was?"

I waited for someone to speak, but no one did. "Somoza," I said. The dictator
overthrown by the Sandinistas.

"Somoza," Doug said, his eyes sweeping back to me. "An interesting man."


Doug stared. I stared back. "I liked to visit him," Doug said. "A very
bad man, behind his machine guns." He smiled like he was going to laugh,
but instead he moved his fork to his mouth. "And yet," he said, a bite
poised at the tip of his tongue, "he had a heart for the poor." Doug stared.
I stared back.

"Do you ever think about prayer?" he asked. But the question wasn't for
me. It wasn't for anyone. Doug was preparing a parable.

There was a man he knew, he said, who didn't really believe in prayer.
So Doug made him a bet. If this man would choose something and pray for
it for forty-five days, every day, he wagered God would make it so. It
didn't matter whether the man believed. It wouldn't have mattered whether
he was a Christian. All that mattered was the fact of prayer. Every day.
Forty-five days. He couldn't lose, Doug told the man. If Jesus didn't answer
his prayers, Doug would pay him $500.

"What should I pray for?" the man asked.

"What do you think God would like you to pray for?" Doug asked him.

"I don't know," said the man. "How about Africa?"

"Good," said Doug. "Pick a country." "Uganda," the man said, because it
was the only one he could remember.

"Fine," Doug told him. "Every day, for fortyfive days, pray for Uganda.
God please help Uganda. God please help Uganda."

On the thirty-second day, Doug told us, this man met a woman from Uganda.
She worked with orphans. Come visit, she told the man, and so he did, that
very weekend. And when he came home, he raised a million dollars in donated
medicine for the orphans. "So you see," Doug told him, "God answered your
prayers. You owe me $500."

There was more. After the man had returned to the United States, the president
of Uganda called the man at his home and said, "I am making a new government.
Will you help me make some decisions?"

"So," Doug told us, "my friend said to the president, `Why don't you come
and pray with me in America? I have a good group of friends-senators, congressmen-who
I like to pray with, and they'd like to pray with you.' And that president
came to The Cedars, and he met Jesus. And his name is Yoweri Museveni,
and he is now the president of all the presidents in Africa. And he is
a good friend of the Family."

"That's awesome," Beau said.

"Yes," Doug said, "it's good to have friends. Do you know what a difference
a friend can make? A friend you can agree with?" He smiled. "Two or three
agree, and they pray? They can do anything. Agree. Agreement. What's that
mean?" Doug looked at me. "You're a writer. What does that mean?"

I remembered Paul's letter to the Philippians, which we had begun to memorize.
Fulfill ye my joy, that ye be likeminded.

"Unity," I said. "Agreement means unity." Doug didn't smile. "Yes," he
said. "Total unity. Two, or three, become one. Do you know," he asked,
"that there's another word for that?"

No one spoke.

"It's called a covenant. Two, or three, agree? They can do anything. A
covenant is ... powerful. Can you think of anyone who made a covenant with
his friends?"

We all knew the answer to this, having heard his name invoked numerous
times in this context. Andrew from Australia, sitting beside Doug, cleared
his throat: "Hitler."

"Yes," Doug said. "Yes, Hitler made a covenant. The Mafia makes a covenant.
It is such a very powerful thing. Two, or three, agree." He took another
bite from his plate, planted his fork on its tines. "Well, guys," he said,
"I gotta go."

As Doug Coe left, my brothers' hearts were beating hard: for the poor,
for a covenant.

"Awesome," Bengt said. We stood to clear our dishes.

On one of my last nights at Ivanwald, the neighborhood boys asked my brothers
and me to play. There were roughly six boys, ranging in age from maybe
seven to eleven, all junior members of the Family. They wanted to play
flashlight tag. It was balmy, and the streetlight glittered against the
blacktop, and hiding places beckoned from behind trees and in bushes. One
of the boys began counting, and my brothers, big and small, scattered.
I lay flat on a hillside. From there I could track movement in the shadows
and smell the mint leaves planted in the garden. A figure approached and
I sprang up and ran, down the sidewalk and up through the garden, over
a wall that my pursuer, a small boy, had trouble climbing. But once he
was over he kept charging, and just as I was about to vanish into the trees
his flashlight caught me. "Jeff I see you you're It!" the boy cried. I
stopped and turned, and he kept the beam on me. Blinded, I could hear only
the slap of his sneakers as he ran across the driveway toward me. "Okay,
dude," he whispered, and turned off the flashlight. I recognized him as
little Stevie, whose drawing of a machine gun we had posted in our bunk
room. He handed the flashlight to me, spun around, started to run, then
stopped and looked over his shoulder. "You're It now," he whispered, and
disappeared into the dark.

* The Los Angeles Times reported in September that the Fellowship Foundation
alone has an annual budget of $ 10 million, but that represents only a
fraction of the Family's finances. Each of the Family's organizations raises
funds independently. Ivanwald, for example, is financed at least in part
by an entity called the Wilberforce Foundation. Other projects are financed
by individual "friends": wealthy businessmen, foreign governments, church
congregations, or mainstream foundations that may be unaware of the scope
of the Family's activities. At Ivanwald, when I asked to what organization
a donation check might be made, I was told there was none; money was raised
on a "man-to-man" basis. Major Family donors named by the Times include
Michael Timmis, a Detroit lawyer and Republican fund-raiser; Paul Temple,
a private investor from Maryland; and Jerome A. Lewis, former CEO of the
Petro-Lewis Corporation.

According to the Los Angeles Times, congressmen who have lived there include
Rep. Mike Doyle (D., Pa.), former Rep. Ed Bryant (R., Tenn.), and former
Rep. John Elias Baldacci (D., Maine). The house's eight congressman-- tenants
each pay $600 per month in rent for use of a town house that includes nine
bathrooms and five living rooms. When the Times asked then-resident Rep.
Bart Stupak (D., Mich.) about the property, he replied, "We son of don't
talk to the press about the house."

* Gannon worked for Senator Don Nickles, then the second-ranking Republican.
The man who oversaw Ivanwald and interviewed us for admission was a lawyer
named Steve South, who formerly had been Senator Nickles's chief counsel
and was still a close associate.

* The Family's "financial precepts" apparently amount to the practice of
soliciting funds only privately, and often indirectly. This may also refer
to what some members call "biblical capitalism," the belief that God's
economics are laissez-faire.

* As Vereide recounted in a 1961 biography, Modem Viking, one union boss
joined the group, proclaiming that the prayer movement would make unions
obsolete. He said, "'I got down on my knees and asked God to forgive me
. . . for I have been a disturbing factor and a thorn in Your flesh. "'
A "rugged capitalist who had been the chairman of the employers' committee
in the big strike" put his left hand on the labor leader's shoulder and
said, "`Jimmy, on this basis we go on together. "'

Jeffrey Sharlet is an editor of the online magazine KilingtheBuddha.com
and a co-author of the forthcoming book Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's
Bible (The Free Press).
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