Maddow showed a clip of John Roston interviewing Doug Hampton, the husband of the woman that John Ensign was having an affair with.
Doug Hampton: It's more about where they live and how these men operate in their life. They're, they're great men, they have a good heart, there's...
John Roston: Why did you contact them?
Hampton: 'Cause they're close friends. They - they're a part of the men that live at C Street.
Roston: What did you want them to do?
Hampton: Confront John.
Doug Hampton is, I think, terribly wrong when he says that these are great men and they have a good heart. His praise of these folks may be understandable considering that he and his family have apparently received a great deal of money from these folks in exchange for their silence (and in exchange for the sex?). But who are these people anyway, and why are they acting as a go-between for John Ensign and his mistress's family? Known alternately as The Fellowship or The Family (Wikipedia, NPR), this shadowy group has been near the center of domestic and international American power for a long time, and now thanks to Jeff Sharlet we're finally getting a peek inside.
The Family has a particular theology that makes them ideally positioned to be in a position of power. They call themselves followers of Christ but avoid the label Christian. Their C Street house is called a church, but their members rarely attend church, or at least what would be recognizable to most people as church. These folks are not mainstream Christians, and they worship a Jesus who bears little resemblance to the 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild' that most Christians would find familiar. These religious ideas are fine for the plebicites, but the Family worships a Jesus who speaks to their specifically. This is the Jesus who came with a sword, who demands that his disciples hate their mother and father, a Jesus for powerful men.
If you think of the mafia when you hear The Family, you're on the right track. In fact the leaders of The Family make reference to the mafia, and sometimes even call themselves the Christian Mafia. The Family also draws inspiration from Hitler, from Lenin, from Mao, and from other dictators and powerful men in history. This doesn't make them neo-Nazis or Communist revolutionaries. To the contrary the movement is quintessentially American. This is the theology of unrestrained capitalism, of trickle-down economics. Power is important: the theology of the Family says that power comes to those who God has chosen, so you can recognize a chosen man because of the power that he has.
Wealth is also important. Just as with power, you can identify a man who has been chosen by God by the wealth he has, because wealth accrues to those who have been chosen. Family members not only aspire to and achieve vast fortunes, they also maintain connections between members by large secret gifts to each other, called "man-to-man financing". These gifts not only allow members to circumvent campaign finance laws and ethics comittees and taxes, they also allow members to pull the strings of power invisibly.
At the same time that the Family encourages and enables its members to become powerful and weathy individuals, it also attacks individualism and personal identity. A man who is chosen by God becomes weathy and powerful, but at the same time he abdicates his personal will and identity: those belong to Jesus. Yes, this is a paradox, but only as far as the elites are concerned. Those outside the inner circle are expected to give up their personal identity as well as their wealth and power. The Family is uniquely American, as I said, but it is not democratic and it is not egalitarian.
I've been using 'men' and 'he' exclusively in my discussion in spite of my normal caution with gendered pronouns. This is no accident - The Family is an intensely patriarchial organization. The young women who work and serve the Family's Washington operation live in a separate dorm from the young men and more often than not are barred from political meetings.
Before hearing about The Family and starting to read Jeff Sharlett's book, I would have thought that the American fundamentalist movement didn't need a secret conspiracy - everyone already knows they're out to take over the country. The secret wing of the fundamentalist movement operates under the cover of the broader movement; it's secret because it's happening in plain sight. Of course, the activities and membership of the inner circle is not known to outsiders, even outsiders who also happen to be fundamentalists. Indeed, the theology of this elite C Street Gang, the Jesus they worship, would be hardly recognizable to a more typical fundamentalist Christian.
As a final note, it appears that Hillary Clinton is and has been since 1993 a member of Family Bible studies and prayer breakfasts. It puts her quote about the "vast right-wing conspiracy" in a whole new light when you think that she may be a member. I've never been one of those Hillary bashers, but I do think she should answer the questions raised by Sharlet and Ehrenrich and probably at minimum she should publicly denounce Doug Coe.
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