The Family was founded as an anti-labor movement. More about power than religion.

[madfloridian]

Last edited Mon Jun 16, 2014, 09:17 PM - Edit history (1)

These quotes are from a couple of pages of Jeff Sharlet's book, The Family. I transcribed them from my copy of the book. I did that after reading some words in a Democracy Now interview with Sharlet, which indicated that Abraham Vereides founded the group in the 30s to fight against the labor movement.

This part showed a sharp contrast between the wealthy and the workers. They seemed to take the efforts of the unions to gain power very personally...or as Sharlet once said Vereides considered it a challenge to God's sovereignty. From page 104 about the 1934 union strikes:

Seven hundred policemen in dark blue patrolled the waterfront on foot and in black cars and on high chestnut horses. Twice that number and more picketed and searched for strikebreakers. The middle class began contemplating last minute vacations. The wives of the wealthy bunkered up at the Union Club, where Abram led prayer meetings for businessmen. As the blue tear gas sent tendrils up the hill, they must have felt frustrated by his optimistic lessons in biblical capitalism. Scripture has much to say about honest dealing and even more about handling the heathen, but not once does it mention organized labor.

From page 108:

The strike went on, but the shippers were defeated by the time the coffins went into the ground. Their old beliefs could not compete. Management-capital-would require a new faith if it was to survive.

The strike of 1934 scared Abram into launching the movement that would become the vanguard of elite fundamentalism, and elite fundamentalism took as its first challenge the destruction of militant labor. Destruction was not the word Christians used however. They called it cooperation.

There is more about Vereide in The New Yorker for September 2013. This is one of the best articles I have read about the Family, the Fellowship. It is very long and detailed. If you are really interested it is worth the time to read it.

Frat House for Jesus. The entity behind C Steet

When the big preachers came through Oregon in the early nineteen-fifties, Billy Graham among them, they all stopped by to visit Hatfield, and Coe began to develop a network of important connections. One who made a lasting impression was a Norwegian immigrant named Abraham Vereide, a Methodist preacher who had created a unique ministry that existed outside the organized churches and aimed to change the world by changing the hearts of leaders.

Vereide had arrived in America, which he called the “land of the unchained Bible,” in 1905, at the age of eighteen, with a burning zeal and uncommon drive. He soon made his way from preaching a horseback circuit to a prominent pulpit in downtown Seattle. On his recommendation, the city’s civic leaders created the program that came to be known as Goodwill Industries, putting people to work at reclaiming and reselling surplus goods. In 1934, in a meeting with nineteen of the city’s civic leaders, Vereide proposed that they try to order their lives according to the principles of Jesus. They met again the next week, and the next, with the understanding that the gatherings were utterly secret. “This was an intimate circle,” Vereide wrote, according to “Modern Viking,” a privately published authorized biography by Norman Grubb. “We didn’t dare tell anybody what was going on, or even include anyone else,” Vereide continued. “It was a sharing fellowship.” Vereide began to hear from men across the country (Fiorello LaGuardia sought him out on a trip West), and what had evolved into the prayer-breakfast idea became a national movement. At Vereide’s instigation, a prayer group was started in the House, and then in the Senate, and they continue today. In 1953, Vereide’s friend Senator Frank Carlson, of Kansas, invited the new President, Dwight Eisenhower, to attend a prayer breakfast. It was the first instance of what has become the National Prayer Breakfast, attended annually by every President since.

The real work of the movement, though, was in the small groups of top men (as Vereide described his mission field) which proliferated across the country. Sam Shoemaker, the New York Episcopal priest who helped to devise the Twelve Step program for Alcoholics Anonymous, in the nineteen-thirties, was Vereide’s close friend and adviser, and made key connections for him in New York and in Washington. Thomas Watson, of I.B.M., summoned Vereide to discuss his groups, as did Marvin Coyle, the president of Chevrolet, and J. C. Penney. Prayer groups were spreading overseas, and, by the end of the nineteen-fifties, with Vereide in his seventies, the core group of men around him decided to bring younger blood into the leadership circle. Doug Coe was recruited into the organization, which was then called International Christian Leadership, as field director, in 1959, and when Vereide died, a decade later, Coe effectively became his successor.

Here is a video about Doug Coe and his influence. In this one he speaks of the kind of power wielded by Chairman Mao and Hitler. He actually compares it to what Jesus expects of us. It is a segment by Brian Williams and Andrea Mitchell at NBC in I believe 2008.

Take time to read the notes under it, click the More section. That is basically the NBC transcript of the Coe section.

There was an amazingly thorough post at Daily Kos in 2008 by Frederick Clarkson. He pulls a lot of stuff together. I remember the enormous amount of recommends this post had because people there recognized that ultimately this group is about power more than religion, that it is making contacts around the world with important people.

NBC News on Sen. Clinton & "The Family"

Access, and networking connections among the powerful is an important part of the modus operandi of The Family.

Sharlet and Joyce reported:

When Time put together a list of the nation's 25 most powerful evangelicals in 2005, the heading for Coe's entry was "The Stealth Persuader." "You know what I think of when I think of Doug Coe?" the Reverend Schenck (a Coe admirer) asked us. "I think literally of the guy in the smoky back room that you can't even see his face. He sits in the corner, and you see the cigar, and you see the flame, and you hear his voice—but you never see his face. He's that shadowy figure."

Coe has been an intimate of every president since Ford, but he rarely imposes on chief executives, who see him as a slightly mystical but apolitical figure. Rather, Coe uses his access to the Oval Office as currency with lesser leaders. "If Doug Coe can get you some face time with the President of the United States," one official told the author of a Princeton study of the National Prayer Breakfast last year, "then you will take his call and seek his friendship. That's power."

There's more from Clarkson, but from another source so I am not breaking copyright.

When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group. For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian "cell" whose members included Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker; Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp; Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke, a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat.

Clinton's prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family&quot , a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship's only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has "made a fetish of being invisible," former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God's plan.

The Fellowship isn't out to turn liberals into conservatives; rather, it convinces politicians they can transcend left and right with an ecumenical faith that rises above politics. Only the faith is always evangelical, and the politics always move rightward.

This is in line with the Christian right's long-term strategy. Francis Schaeffer, late guru of the movement, coined the term "cobelligerency" to describe the alliances evangelicals must forge with conservative Catholics. Colson, his most influential disciple, has refined the concept of cobelligerency to deal with less-than-pure politicians. In this application, conservatives sit pretty and wait for liberals looking for common ground to come to them. Clinton, Colson told us, "has a lot of history" to overcome, but he sees her making the right moves.

It also is a long post, but well worth the read.

The Family, the Fellowship, is on the surface about religion. But it is underneath about power and political contacts.