Does Hillary Still Belong to The Family aka The Fellowship? Worse than Goldwater. [View all]

[99th_Monkey]

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

Did you know that the National Prayer Breakfast is sponsored by a shadowy cabal of elite Christian fundamentalists? Jeff Sharlet's new book, "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," offers a rare glimpse of this remarkable network, which is known variously as the Family, the Fellowship and the International Foundation.

The Family was founded 70 years ago by Abraham Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant evangelist based in Seattle. In 1935, Vereide said, God appeared to him in a vision and revealed where Christianity had gone wrong: preoccupation with the poor, the weak and the suffering.

The down-and-out were in no position to bring about the Kingdom of God, Vereide realized. ...(God's) new plan was to target men who were already powerful and turn them to God -- and wouldn't you know it, God hated unions, too. ...The Family does not publish membership lists, and its members are sworn to secrecy, so a full accounting is impossible.

Sen. Hillary Clinton has been involved with the Family since 1993 when, as first lady, she joined a White House prayer circle for political wives. Clinton has also sought spiritual counseling from the current head of the Family, Doug Coe. Sharlet argues that Clinton's longtime association with the Family has helped her forge working relationships with powerful religious conservatives such as Family member and anti-abortion crusader Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas. ...

The Family also runs a house on C Street in Washington, D.C. The C Street Center has housed a number of federal legislators, including Sen. John Ensign of Nevada. Residents allege that the center is just a cheap place to live, but as an Ivanwald brother, Sharlet saw firsthand that the center is a religious community. As far as the IRS is concerned, the C Street Center is a church.
http://www.alternet.org/story/87665/worse_than_fascists%3A_christian_political_group_'the_family'_openly_reveres_hitler

Hillary's Nasty Pastorate

The Family's most visible activity is its blandly innocuous National Prayer
Breakfast, held every February in Washington. But almost all its real work goes
on behind the scenes -- knitting together international networks of rightwing
leaders, most of them ostensibly Christian. In the 1940s, The Family
reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that
exemplary leader, Adolph Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole
bestiary of murderous thugs. As Sharlet reported in Harper's in 2003:

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 Suharto (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.

At the heart of the Family's American branch is a collection of powerful
rightwing politicos, who include, or have included, Sam Brownback, Ed Meese,
John Ashcroft, James Inhofe, and Rick Santorum. They get to use the Family's
spacious estate on the Potomac, the Cedars, which is maintained by young men in
Family group homes and where meals are served by the Family's young women's
group. And, at the Family's frequent prayer gatherings, they get powerful jolts
of spiritual refreshment, tailored to the already-powerful.

Clinton fell in with the Family in 1993, when she joined a Bible study group
composed of wives of conservative leaders like Jack Kemp and James Baker. When
she ascended to the senate, she was promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family's
"most elite cell," the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, which included, until his
downfall, Virginia's notoriously racist Senator George Allen. This has not been
a casual connection for Clinton. She has written of Doug Coe, the Family's
publicity-averse leader, that he is "a unique presence in Washington: a
genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or
faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."

Furthermore, the Family takes credit for some of Clinton's rightward
legislative tendencies, including her support for a law guaranteeing "religious
freedom" in the workplace, such as for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth
control prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-ehrenreich/hillarys-nasty-pastorate_b_92361.html