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It's an early June morning this past year. I'm sifting through the accumulated e-mail messages and blogs, and have been momentarily snared by the title of an AlterNet interview: "Worse than Fascists: Christian Political Group 'The Family' Openly Reveres Hitler." I know I should hit the delete button and get on with the day's work, but like a shopper suckered by the tabloids in the supermarket checkout line, I let my eyes stray to the first sentence. And suddenly I'm shifting into a different gear. "Did you know that the National Prayer Breakfast is sponsored by a shadowy cabal of elite Christian fundamentalists?" [1]
So much for the comfortable assumption that this is probably an exposé of Christian white supremacists hunkered down in an Idaho commune. I've never been to a National Prayer Breakfast myself, but I've known a number of people who have. I decide I'd better read a little farther.
The AlterNet piece is an interview with an author named Jeff Sharlet, concerning his new book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. The first question in the interview is also my first question:
"What is the Family?"
Sharlet's answer: "It's an international network of evangelical activists in government, military, and business. The Family is dedicated to the idea that Christianity has gotten it all wrong for two thousand years by focusing on the poor, the suffering, and the weak."
Well, I think, that will surely be news to Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo. And others. Me too, as a matter of fact.
Sharlet goes on: "The Family says that instead, what Christians should do is minister to the up-and-out—as opposed to the down-and-out—to those that are already powerful. Because if they can win those people for Christ, they win the whole deal. That's what this network is dedicated to. It includes nonprofit organizations, it includes think tanks, it includes various ministries."
Never having heard of the Family, I have no idea whether or not this is an accurate description. But at least it's understandable. The idea, Sharlet says, goes back to a middle-of-the-night "new revelation" that the organization's founder, Abraham Vereide, had in the 1930s. What I'm more interested in, though, is the alleged reverence for Hitler proclaimed in the interview's headline. The Family's admiration, Sharlet says, is for Hitler's authoritarian leadership style. Not very reassuring. I read on.
"The Family is an American ideology," Sharlet says, "an imperial ideology, which is why I think it's ultimately worse than fascism. Since the Second World War, fascism hasn't been a very powerful ideology, but imperialism has."
I'm no cheerleader for American imperialism—not historically and especially not with an eye to what's been going on in the eight years of this administration. But Sharlet proceeds to expand his analysis of postwar history:
"In the immediate postwar era, they were talking about Christian D-Day and Washington as the world's Christian capital. And World War Three, they were very excited about that, all full-steam ahead. But they sort of subsided and were subsumed into the American Cold War project, which ended up being an imperial project."
Excited about World War III? I've just begun to process that horrendous notion when Lindsay Beyerstein, the interviewer, throws this question at Sharlet: "What did the Family have to do with a B-movie called The Blob?"
Is she serious? The Blob?
Sharlet's answer leaves no room for ambiguity. The famous 1958 horror movie, he says, was "the best illustration of the Family's involvement in the Cold War." In fact, the alien goo from outer space, with its insatiable appetite for warm-blooded earthlings, was "a metaphor for Communism."
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