The Family Read Free

thread into the twentieth century through the story of the founder of the Family, a Norwegian immigrant named Abraham Vereide, and his successor, Doug Coe. Vereide counseled presidents and kings and was spiritual adviser to more senators and generals than Billy Graham has prayed with in all his days of bowing to power. And yet his story is unknown. He preferred it that way; God, thought Vereide, works through men who stay behind the scenes. In Vereide’s day, the Family maintained a formal front organization, International Christian Leadership. In Coe’s, it “submerged,” following instructions he issued in 1966, an era of challenge to the kind of establishment power Vereide and Coe protected as God-ordained.
    Why haven’t we seen them and their work? The secular assumption since the Scopes trial has been that such beliefs are obsessions of the fringe. In their populist manifestations—prurient antipornography crusaders, rabid John Birchers, screaming foes of abortion wielding bloody fetuses like weapons—they often are. But there is another thread of American fundamentalism, invisible to secular observers, that ran through the post-Scopes politics of the twentieth century, concerned not so much with individual morality as with “Christian civilization,” Washington, D.C., as its shining capital. It is this elite thread, the avant-garde of American fundamentalism, and the ways in which it has shaped the broad faith of a nation and the uneasy politics of empire, that is at the heart of my story.
    Part Three, “The Popular Front,” carries that story into the present. The current manifestation of fundamentalist power is only—only!—the latest revival of emotions stirred by Jonathan Edwards nearly three hundred years ago, the fear of an angry God, the love of a personal Jesus, and the ecstasy wrought by the Holy Ghost. That trinity of sentiments was bound together then by the belief that to the European conquerors of the New World was given the burden of spreading their light—their power—to all of humanity.
    This is not a book about the Bible thumpers portrayed by Hollywood, pinched little hypocrites and broad-browed lunatics, representatives of that subset of American fundamentalism that declares itself a bitter nation within a nation. Rather, it’s a story that begins on Ivanwald’s suburban lawn, with a group of men gripping each other’s shoulders in prayer. It is the story of how they got there, where they are going, and where the movement they joined came from; the story of an American fundamentalism, gentle and militant, conservative and revolutionary, that has been hiding in plain sight all along.

IVANWALD
     
    N OT LONG AFTER S EPTEMBER 11, 2001, a man I’ll call Zeke 1 came to New York to survey the ruins of secularism. “To bear witness,” he said. He believed Christ had called him.
    He wandered the city, sparking up conversations with people he took to be Muslims—“Islamics,” he called them—knocking on the doors of mosques by day and sliding past velvet ropes into sweaty clubs by night. He prayed with an imam (to Jesus) and may or may not have gone home with several women. He got as close as possible to Ground Zero, visited it often, talked to street preachers. His throat tingled with dust and ashes. When he slept, his nose bled. He woke one morning on a red pillow.
    He went to bars where he sat and listened to the anger of men and women who did not understand, as he did, why they had been stricken. He stared at photographs and paintings of the Towers. The great steel arches on which they’d stood reminded him of Roman temples, and this made him sad. The city was fallen, not just literally but spiritually, as decadent and doomed as an ancient civilization. And yet Zeke wanted and believed he needed to know why New York was what it was, this city so hated by fundamentalists abroad and, he admitted after some wine, by fundamentalists—“Believers,” he called them, and himself—at