Shorter video focusing on the Engle/Brownback thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8nn5qrVclohttp://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/video-engle-explains-his-ties-sen-brownbackGod's Senator
Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback
JEFF SHARLET .Posted Jan 25, 2006
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/9178374/gods_senatorBrownback got involved in the Fellowship in 1979, as a summer intern for Bob Dole, when he lived in a residence the group had organized in a sorority house at the University of Maryland. Four years later, fresh out of law school and looking for a political role model, Brownback sought out Frank Carlson, a former Republican senator from Kansas. It was Carlson who, at a 1955 meeting of the Fellowship, had declared the group's mission to be "Worldwide Spiritual Offensive," a vision of manly Christianity dedicated to the expansion of American power as a means of spreading the gospel.
Over the years, Brownback became increasingly active in the Fellowship. But he wasn't invited to join a cell until 1994, when he went to Washington. "I had been working with them for a number of years, so when I went into Congress I knew I wanted to get back into that," he says. "Washington -- power -- is very difficult to handle. I knew I needed people to keep me accountable in that system."
Brownback was placed in a weekly prayer cell by "the shadow Billy Graham" -- Doug Coe, Vereide's successor as head of the Fellowship. The group was all male and all Republican. It was a "safe relationship," Brownback says. Conversation tended toward the personal. Brownback and the other men revealed the most intimate details of their desires, failings, ambitions. They talked about lust, anger and infidelities, the more shameful the better -- since the goal was to break one's own will. The abolition of self; to become nothing but a vessel so that one could be used by God.
They were striving, ultimately, for what Coe calls "Jesus plus nothing" -- a government led by Christ's will alone. In the future envisioned by Coe, everything -- sex and taxes, war and the price of oil -- will be decided upon not according to democracy or the church or even Scripture. The Bible itself is for the masses; in the Fellowship, Christ reveals a higher set of commands to the anointed few. It's a good old boy's club blessed by God. Brownback even lived with other cell members in a million-dollar, red-brick former convent at 133 C Street that was subsidized and operated by the Fellowship. Monthly rent was $600 per man -- enough of a deal by Hill standards that some said it bordered on an ethical violation, but no charges were ever brought.
snip
Although Brownback converted to Catholicism in 2002 through Opus Dei, an ultraorthodox order that, like the Fellowship, specializes in cultivating the rich and powerful, the source of much of his religious and political thinking is Charles Colson, the former Nixon aide who served seven months in prison for his attempt to cover up Watergate. A "key figure," says Brownback, in the power structure of Christian Washington, Colson is widely acknowledged as the Christian right's leading intellectual. He is the architect behind faith-based initiatives, the negotiator who forged the Catholic-evangelical unity known as co-belligerency, and the man who drove sexual morality to the top of the movement's agenda.
snip
"I am a seeker," he says. Brownback believes that every spiritual path has its own unique scent, and he wants to inhale them all. When he ran for the House he was a Methodist. By the time he ran for the Senate he was an evangelical. Now he has become a Catholic. He was baptized not in a church but in a chapel tucked between lobbyists' offices on K Street that is run by Opus Dei, the secretive lay order founded by a Catholic priest who advocated "holy coercion" and considered Spanish dictator Francisco Franco an ideal of worldly power. Brownback also studies Torah with an orthodox rabbi from Brooklyn. "Deep," says the rabbi, Nosson Scherman. Lately, Brownback has been reading the Koran, but he doesn't like what he's finding. "There's some difficult material in it with regard to the Christian and the Jew," he tells a Christian radio program, voice husky with regret.
Elite Fundamentism - The Fellowship's gospel of Capitalist Power|
The Family (or the Fellowship as it is also known), is a shadowy organisation founded in the United States in the 1930s to promote a gospel of theocratic capitalist power and American empire. Like a Protestant version of Opus Dei, the Family is best known for founding the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC in the 1950s, and its invisible network has not only penetrated the highest levels of political power in the United States but wherever in the world America has political or economic interests.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2008/2353921.htm#transcrStephen Crittenden: The next big question is to unpack where the religious program ends and the political program begins.
Jeff Sharlet: You know, I like to think of it as sort of a mobia Strip, you know, that popular optical illusion of a ribbon that's sort of twisting, and you can never figure out which side you're on. There is no clear line where the religion ends and the politics begin. They don't draw the distinction. I'll give you an example of the project they did recently, something called The Silk Road Act. These is a piece of American legislation passed in 1999 by our Senator Sam Brownback in a Congressman Joe Pitts, both members of The Family. The Silk Road Act directed US funds to the dictatorships of the Central Asian region, and as Senator Brownback explained to me, his role was to essentially buy these countries off, to open them up to free markets by giving them a lot of money, a sort of an odd concept of free markets. And the reason he wanted to do that is Well we have free markets where capitalism goes the gospel follows. And so there you have economics, you have politics, and you have religion, and they're all caught in this loop.
Stephen Crittenden: Jeff, let's go back to the early history of The Family and look in more detail at its political program during the 1930s and '40s which seems to focus primarily on destroying trade unionism in the United States, and in that, they completely succeeded.
Jeff Sharlet: Yes, they really did. I mean I think that again takes me back to this question, people always ask what the fundamentalists want to do? I think the more relevant question is what have fundamentalists done. And you look in the United States and say Why do we alone in the developed world, not have a serious organised labour movement? Our organised labour movement is nowhere near as powerful and influential as yours in Australia. I think we really have to look to groups like The Family and elite fundamentalism. They came into being to opposed organised labour, worked steadily at that, and counted as one of their first big victories a law that was passed here in 1947 which essentially rolled back many of the rights to organise and to form unions, that had been won under Franklin Roosevelt. They counted that as their first victory, and then they just sort of went forward from there and played this role of driving the centre to the right, they were very involved in the Cold War, very involved in the economics of globalisation. These are their projects, but they see them as religious ends.
Stephen Crittenden: You mention that in these years The Family was attracted by Fascist and even Nazi ideas, and you say that in the immediate aftermath of World War II, they were involved in rehabilitating key Nazi industrialists and bankers, helping them out or even bringing them to the United States.
Jeff Sharlet: That was their first big step overseas. That's when they became international during World War II. Abraham Vereide, the founder, actually travelled to the allied prisons in Germany where we were holding the prisoners of war, with a mandate from the United States State Department to go among these Nazis and sort of interview them and decide which ones could be used for rebuilding Germany. And brought in quite a few scary characters, perhaps the most notable of whom was Hermann Josef Abs who after Vereide and The Family had vouched for him, rose to become the chief financial wizard behind West Germany's rise, enjoyed a very successful career into the 1970s until the Simon Wiesenthal Centre discovered that before he had been known as Germany's banker, he'd been known as Hitler's banker, that he had helped spirit uncounted sums of money off to the Nazis who escaped to Latin America. He was a bad guy, he was driven out of politics. But that was the role that The Family was playing, was whitewashing these guys and getting these guys back into power because they wanted them for the Cold War.
snip
Jeff Sharlet: It's one of the most dismaying tragedies in the fight against AIDS. Uganda was a country that had really turned around. It had a high AIDS rate, and through using this program had turned it around, had actually successfully rolled back the AIDS rate. But because it became so enmeshed with the American Christian Right, and the American Christian Right is part of President Bush's AIDS program, was able to put pressure on these countries to drop the 'C' from the ABC.
So they still want Abstinence, they believe in abstinence, but they don't want Condoms. And indeed Uganda backed very sharply away from condoms, and as predictably as any scientist could have told you, the AIDS rate skyrocketed, and people are dying again.And the most horrifying part about that, for some of these people, that's not a problem. I spoke to Senator Sam Brownback about this, who has worked actually with Senator Clinton to change the laws governing US foreign aid to make it so that we can't give money to any organisation that works with prostitutes. The example Brownback's Chief Legislative Director gave me, he said he would rather a Thai prostitute die of AIDS than have her soul imperilled by using a condom. And it's just an absolutely horrifying vision of what the Gospel says.
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