C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy (Interview with Jeff Sharlet)

Two years ago, in a brilliant work of investigative reporting, Jeff Sharlet introduced readers to the Family, an elite, highly secretive, and deeply anti-democratic network of fundamentalist Christians whose members include some of the nation’s highest ranking politicians. Now he’s back with a sequel updating his earlier reporting and tracing the Family’s carefully concealed efforts to shape national policy at home and abroad. Sharlet recently talked by phone with PBC about his new book, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy.

It’s clear from your books that the Family isn’t just another fundamentalist Christian political organization. What sets it apart?

The Family’s fundamentalism doesn’t have its focus on the Bible-thumping, pulpit-pounding issues, but with economics. These are folks who take the invisible hand of the market very literally: they think it’s God’s hand. They think that if you’re poor, God wants you to be poor, and if you’re rich, God wants you to be rich, and that trying to change that through democracy is a kind of blasphemy.

Which ties into their elitism.

Right. The Family began with the idea that Christianity had been getting it wrong for two thousand years by focusing on the poor, the suffering, the weak, the down-and-out; that God was calling this organization to be missionaries to those they called the “up-and-outs,” the top men, the “key men,” the politicians.

Family members say they’re just a group of friends.


Jeff Sharlet
Yes, but they’re a group of friends with tax records, and those records show real estate, property, donations, money moving overseas. There are officers, there’s a board of directors, and there’s a leader, Doug Coe, who’s known sometimes as the “first brother” because he’s considered to be closer to God than anyone else. There’s also a family dynasty; his sons, David and Tim, look to be his successors.

You argue that it’s the most influential Christian conservative political organization in the United States. What makes it so influential?

It’s influential by dint of its members. Think about who has lived at the C Street–John Ensign, Jim DeMint, Tom Coburn, Rep. Zach Wump, Jim Inhoffe, Sam Brownback, John Thune: they’re mostly Republicans, but there are conservative Democrats, too, Rep. Bart Stupak, Sen. Mark Pryor, and you see this convergence of a bipartisan fundamentalist conservative movement going all the way back to the 1930s.

Can you give an example of where they’ve influenced American policy.

You get something like former Congressman Mark Siljander, a leader of the movement, who went to Sudan with other leaders to meet Omar al Bashir, the president, the first sitting head of state ever indicted for genocide, in Darfur. Siljander said, “My meeting with Bashir just melted my heart. And we prayed to Jesus together. And I love him and stand by him, and I don’t want sanctions.” And he’s been an advocate with his very powerful friends against sanctions on Sudan. He says the best way to love Bashir, the dictator of an oil-rich country, is to keep doing business with him. (He pled guilty in July to obstruction of justice, of acting as the unregistered agent of a foreign power, that power being Sudan.)

You see it most terrifyingly in this book in Uganda. Jim Inhofe went to Uganda and became a mentor to a man named David Bahati, who is, very frankly, trying to commit genocide, to wipe out gay folks in Africa. I asked him [Bahati] what the connection was between that and The Family, and he said, “No connection, it’s the same thing.” The Family has tried to distance itself from this, but they’ve stood by the political leaders in Uganda, who they helped move into power as they pursued the most violent, the most murderous anti-gay campaign in the world.

It’s shocking to read in this book of the inroads they’ve made in the military.

Researching the last book I came across an organization called Christian Embassy, a kind of sister organization to The Family that’s focused on the Pentagon. I got hold of a promotional video in which senior officers are testifying–in uniform, on duty–to their Christian faith and putting it ahead of their military duty. Now, you can do that in your private life, but you can’t do it in the military. That’s a court martial offense! A Pentagon Inspector General’s report followed up on my report on this. It was kind of a whitewash, and most of these guys ended up getting promoted. So I looked into who did that IG report, and it turned out he’s on the board of directors of The Family. That seems like a conflict of interest. But when I dug in a little more, it got worse: he had founded Christian Embassy in the Pentagon!

And then you get cadets in the Air Force saying to you very plainly that they’re there to train to fight for God. I met cadets at the most elite war college in America who said God had sent them there to fight spiritual war. They define their mission in the military as reclaiming territory for Christ; and in that they’re echoing the language of senior commanders–this is not fringe, this is not marginal.

The book is subtitled “The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy.” How do you see that threat?

The threat is not theocracy, it’s not jackboots. It’s this paternalistic idea that authority is top-down, not bottom-up. And that’s a message that’s as offensive, frankly, to many Christians, including many conservative Christians, as it is to secular folks.

How worried should we be?

When it comes to fundamentalism, the question that’s most pertinent is not, “What are they going to do?” It’s, “What have they already done? How have they already changed American life?” When you dig into The Family’s archives, the first big issue they put their muscle into was in 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act, the bill that really gutted the New Deal. If you wonder why we don’t have a strong labor movement in this country, or universal health care, go back to Taft-Hartley. Even things like what Stupak did with abortion. He kind of lost that one, but now there’s a process under way they’re calling “Stupak-ing the states”; reproductive rights state by state by state are basically gone. And that same process takes place on any number of issues. Progressives have got to stop focusing on fear scenarios of what’s coming and start looking at what’s already happened–what they haven’t been paying attention to.