It's referred to alternately as The Fellowship or The Family. They have this building on C Street in Washington where they house members of Congress and indoctrinate them into a very outside the mainstream religious ethos where these members of Congress are led to believe they are more special than all of us and that they, basically, are free to do whatever they need to do in the acquisition of power and wealth.
Whatever. They. Need.
Rachel Maddow had Harper's Magazine's Jeff Sharlet on two days in a row (very rare) to discuss this group and their relationship to both the Ensign and Marc Sanford political sex scandals. Sharlet infiltrated the group to research this secretive group for his 2008 book The Family, which is now available in paperback. (If you buy it from Amazon by clicking the icon below I get a li'l somethin' somethin' from them, so thanks.)
This text is from the book's jacket:
Sharlet’s discoveries dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the Cold War, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not “What do fundamentalists want?” but “What have they already done?”
You wanna know more now, don't you? I thought so.
After the jump, two clips from Thursday's and Friday's Maddow show with Jeff Sharlet. I'm gonna pick up this book this week and you should too, especially if your member of Congress or any of your elected officials are affiliated. When you hear about what these people and their leader Douglas Coe espouse, you're gonna be freaked out.
Read this backgrounder written by NBC's Andrea Mitchell and Jim Popkin from April 2008 for more information. Pay particular attention to the Doug Coe sermon footage from the second clip after the jump. There's a clip on the page too, an NBC Nightly News story on the group from the same time.
Particularly, there's this:
In his preaching, Coe repeatedly urges a personal commitment to Jesus Christ. It’s a commitment Coe compares to the blind devotion that Adolph Hitler demanded from his followers -- a rhetorical technique that now is drawing sharp criticism.
"Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler were three men. Think of the immense power these three men had, these nobodies from nowhere,” Coe said.
Later in the sermon, Coe said: "Jesus said, ‘You have to put me before other people. And you have to put me before yourself.' Hitler, that was the demand to be in the Nazi party. You have to put the Nazi party and its objectives ahead of your own life and ahead of other people."
Coe also quoted Jesus and said: “One of the things [Jesus] said is 'If any man comes to me and does not hate his father, mother, brother, sister, his own life, he can't be a disciple.’ So I don't care what other qualifications you have, if you don't do that you can't be a disciple of Christ."
These are the people who have access to our elected officials. They have very twisted ideas about how the world should be run, they care little about you short of your potential to be utilized by them in whatever way they want, and it scares the livin' shit outta me.
