![]() ![]() Bush spoke directly to Coe during the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast speech to praise him for his “quiet diplomacy-I wouldn’t say secret diplomacy.” The show’s fourth episode, “Dictators, Murderers, and Thieves,” explains how Coe and his congressmen emissaries travelled around the world to pray privately with leaders, including men like Muammar Gaddafi, to build diplomatic back-channels. “The more invisible you can make your organization,” Coe once said, “the more influence it will have.” The Family is modeled on Coe’s own profile: he was deeply pious, extremely secretive, and influential beyond belief.įor example, President Jimmy Carter himself appears in The Family to recall how helpful Coe was in during the 1978 Camp David Accords, helping negotiate the peace deal between Egypt and Israel behind closed doors. Many congresspeople believe the event is thrown by Congress itself, Sharlet discovered, but in truth it has always been a Family affair. event attended by hundreds of politicians-including, since 1953, each sitting president of the United States. Vereide’s little meeting grew into the National Prayer Breakfast, the annual D.C. When Vereide died in 1969, leadership of the secretive club passed to the legendary evangelical figurehead Douglas Coe (who died in 2017-the group now has no official leader, but many cells). In the 1930s, a Norwegian named Abraham Vereide visited America, where he organized a “breakfast prayer meeting” between 19 unnamed business leaders who wanted to keep Western money in private pockets as the world’s markets heaved. senators to the leaders of foreign nations-visiting their compound? From its narrow initial focus, the show’s narrative opens up to incorporate a huge story that has its origins in the Great Depression.Ībraham Vereide with John F. So why was Sharlet noticing so many politicians-from U.S. The organization running the community claimed to have no name and no real mission, aside from spiritual matters. Also: The young men were told they were being trained to rule to world. There, Sharlet found a group of young men all living together, fraternity-style, spending their days playing sports or reading from a slim volume simply titled Jesus. The two men met, and the son invited Sharlet to take a look at the community he had joined near Washington, D.C. As a young writer in New York City in the early 2000s, Sharlet recalls, he was asked by family friends to check on their son, who they worried had joined a cult. It’s the kind of story we’re hungry for now, because The Family, like any good conspiracy theory, makes sense of what would otherwise be absurd, nonsensical. Its goal is to undermine the project of American democracy itself. It doesn’t merely run a system of private prayer meetings to funnel tax-exempt cash to favored individuals, or promote a warped interpretation of Christian scripture. But if Sharlet and Moss are to be believed, The Family is one of the preeminent powers behind the throne. It has no hierarchy, no staff, and its members prefer not to acknowledge the group’s existence. Across five episodes, director Jesse Moss lays out a series of shocking claims regarding a secretive Christian organization variously called The Family, The Fellowship, or nothing at all. The Family is a Netflix miniseries based on two books by the investigative journalist Jeff Sharlet. A new documentary faces both issues-the private money behind the government, and Trump’s alliance with the religious right-head on. The scrutiny has extended to evangelical Christians, who have confusingly been a pillar of support for the president, despite the fact that he behaves in decidedly un-Christian ways and frequently takes the Lord’s name in vain. Things have gotten so perilous for plutocrats that Joaquin Castro, a congressman whose brother, Julián, is one of those Democratic candidates for president, was accused of harassment when he publicly named a few of Trump’s campaign contributors-which of course was already a matter of public record. President Trump’s atrocious behavior in office has begun to sully the public image of many of his major donors, with billionaires like Equinox-owner Stephen Ross suffering boycotts waged by his high-income, left-leaning customers. īut that public-private boundary is fraying. I don’t think I could pick Robert Mercer out of a line-up, for example, and he bankrolled Brexit and Trump’s candidacy. But televised debates are electoral theatrics, not governance: Most of the people who run the world have little to no face recognition. On the debate stage, candidates for the Democratic nomination tussle for our attention, straining to exploit their allotted seconds of screen time. ![]() We are in a high season of political showboating. ![]()
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