Jeff Sharlet - C Street: the fundamentalist threat to American democracy

L ITTLE , B ROWN AND C OMPANY
N EW Y ORK B OSTON L ONDON

For Robert Sharlet and
Roxana Ruth

talk about going to the Appalachian Trail that isnt where I ended up.

South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, at the
June 24, 2009, press conference at which
he confessed to cheating on his wife.

I N 2008 I published a book called The Family, which took as its main subject a religious movement known to some as the Fellowship and to others as the Family and to most only through one of the many nonprofit entities created to express the movements peculiar approach to religion, politics, and power. One of these entities is the C Street Center Inc., in Washington, DC, or, simply, C Street, made infamous in the summer of 2009 by the actions of three Family associates: a senator, a governor, and a congressman, each with his own special C Street connection.

The senator lived there; the governor sought answers there; and , in the words of one Family leader: to assist [congressmen] in better understandings of the teachings of Christ, and applying it to their jobs.

Among the men thus assisted by the Family have been in the long war against abortion.

Buried in the 592 boxes of documents dumped by the Family at the Billy Graham Center Archives in Wheaton, Illinois, are five decades worth of correspondence between members equally illustrious in their day: segregationist Dixiecrats and Southern Republican converts Sen. Absalom Willis Robertson (Pat Robertsons father) and Sen. Strom Thurmond; a Yankee Klansman named Ralph Brewster and a blue-blooded fascist sympathizer named Merwin Hart; a parade of generals, oilmen, bankers, missile manufacturers; little big men of the provinces with fast food fortunes or chains of Piggly Wiggly supermarkets or gravel quarry empires. There was even the occasional liberalSen. Mark Hatfield, Republican of Oregon, and Sen. Harold Hughes, Democrat of Iowamen of good faith and bad judgment who lent their names to the causes of the Familys brothers overseas, the Indonesian genocidaire Suharto (Hatfield), the Filipino strongman Ferdinand Marcos (Hughes).

revivals but through private relationships with the kingor other leaders of our worldwho hold enormous influencefor better or worseover vast numbers of people. The Family sees itself as a ministry for the benefit of the poor, by way of the powerful. The best way to help the weak, it teaches, is to help the strong.

In 2008 and 2009, the Family did so by helping Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC), and former representative Chip Pickering (R-MS) cover up extramarital affairs, and in Ensigns case secret payments. Not to avoid embarrassment for the Family, an organization that until 2009 denied its own existence, but because the Family believes that its members are placed in power by God; that they are his new chosen; that the senator, the governor, and the congressman were with which to advance his kingdom, an ambition so worthy that beside it all personal failings pale.

On June 16, 2009, Sen. Ensign flew home to Las Vegas to confess his affair. Ensign, fourth-ranking Republican and a man with Iowa and Pennsylvania Avenue on his mind, had made a career of going against the grain of his hometown. He was a moral scold whod promoted himself as a Promise Keepera member of the conservative mens ministryand a family values man. Hed been a hound once, according to friends, but hed come to Christ before he came to politics; for Ensign, the two passions were intertwined. He didnt just go to church, he lived in one, the Familys house at 133 C Street, SE, for tax purposes.

Id met Ensign there once, when I was writing an earlier book on unusual religious communities around the country. Id seen some strange things: a Pentecostal exorcism in North Carolina; a massive outdoor Pagan dance party in honor of the Horned One in rural Kansas; a cowboy church in Texas featuring a cross made of horseshoes and, in lieu of a picture of Jesus, a lovely portrait of a seriously horned Texas Longhorn steer.

But C Street was in its own category, simultaneously banala prayer meeting of congressmen in which they insisted on calling God Coachand more unsettling than anything Id witnessed. Doug Coe, the first brother of the Family since 1969, used to say that Jesus was not a sissy. That disdain for weakness infuses the movements theology so completely, so naturally, that it comes across as almost amiable. Hinduism, to Coes routine invocation of historys worst villains as models for the muscle hed rather see applied on Christs behalf. The first time I met Coe, he was in the midst of a spiritual mentoring session in which he cited Hitler, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh [and] bin Laden as models with which to understand the total Jesus worshipped by the Family. He sipped hot cocoa while he lectured.

Ensign seemed to fall on the banal end of that spectrum. He missed the prayer meeting, bouncing into the foyer in red jogging shorts and a white T-shirt that made his tanthe most impressive tan in the Technicolor portrait gallery of golf-happy, twenty-first-century political Americaglow beneath his equally striking silver hair. Ensigns hair, prematurely gray, is his most senatorial feature; it possesses a gravitas all its own. The man beneath it, though, square-jawed and thick-browed, is something of a giggler. Jogging in place, grinning, bobbing his head back and forth, he boasted to a young female aide whod been sent to fetch him about the time hed clocked on his run. Thats great! she said, then asked him what kind of time he could make showering and getting ready for work. Up popped Ensigns arched black brows: a challenge! Im all about setting records today! he said.

And away he went. When I wrote The Family, I devoted only a sentence to him, describing him as a conservative casino heir elected to the Senate from Nevada, a brightly tanned, hapless figure who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling-fortune name. After his press conference, a magazine editor, noting Ensigns Washington address and recalling my book, asked me if I wanted to write something about Ensigns apparent hypocrisy. I didnt. The senators sins were his own.

Next up was Mark Sanford, the weather-beaten governor of South Carolina, his tan the result of days spent in the woods, hunting, or on his tractor, planting. He was famous for his frugality. As a congressman, he slept on a futon rolled out across his office rather than coughing up rent, and as governor he turned down $700 million in federal stimulus money because he feared it would lead to for the GOP, fabric to be cut, folded, and sewn.

So, when on June 18, 2009, Sanford disappeared, some assumed it was for a good or maybe even a noble reason. For days, there were whispers about where the governor had gonegone being the operative word, because nobody knew where the governor was. Not in the governors mansion in Columbia, not in the airy beach house on Sullivans Island he shared with his wife, Jenny Sanford, and their four boys, not at Coosaw, the semi-feral, falling-down plantation along the Combahee River that had originally brought the Sanford clan, Floridians, to South Carolina. Calls to his wife, the states elegantly beautiful First Lady, a