Reddit Reddit reviews The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

We found 27 Reddit comments about The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
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27 Reddit comments about The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power:

u/dudedoesnotabide · 352 pointsr/worldnews

As someone who dated the daughter of one of Exxon's top advisers from the 50s-60s* who was also probably very high up in the most powerful fundamentalist christian political cult in the US, yes, they are the definition of evil. I also started my environmental engineering career fighting against Exxon in litigation. They are some of the nastiest motherfuckers in the O&G industry, I have poured through thousands of pages of discovery of internal emails as support for the cases I worked on.

EDIT: Since people are asking, here is the beginning of your rabbit hole adventure into the most powerful fundamentalist Christian political cult in the United States:

Yeah, his name was Paul Temple, he died a couple years ago. I guess he was with Exxon from 1954 to 1961. Here's his wikipedia:

>From 1954 to 1961 he was an international petroleum concessions negotiator for Exxon.

>He helps fund The Fellowship Foundation, a U.S.-based religious and political organization founded in 1935 by Methodist minister Abraham Vereide.[5][6] Paul N. Temple was an insider "core member" of the Fellowship Foundation and/or Institute for Christian Leadership since the 1940s.

And here's the link to the book that was written about the "Fellowship Foundation."

https://www.amazon.com/Family-Secret-Fundamentalism-Heart-American/dp/0060560053

Here's a fun NPR story on it: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120746516

If you want to go down a rabbit hole, they organize the National Prayer Breakfast every year, which all the most powerful politicians and business leaders attend...

Here's the Wiki for the "Foundation":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fellowship_(Christian_organization)

>D. Michael Lindsay, a former Rice University sociologist who studies the evangelical movement, said "there is no other organization like the Fellowship, especially among religious groups, in terms of its access or clout among the country's leadership."[13] He also reported that lawmakers mentioned the Fellowship more than any other organization when asked to name a ministry with the most influence on their faith.[2] Lindsay interviewed 360 evangelical elites, among whom "One in three mentioned [Doug] Coe or the Fellowship as an important influence."[13] Lindsay reported that it "has relationships with pretty much every world leader—good and bad—and there are not many organizations in the world that can claim that."

>Rob Schenck, founder of the Washington, D.C. ministry Faith and Action in the Nation's Capital, described the Family's influence as "off the charts" in comparison with other fundamentalist groups, specifically compared to Focus on the Family, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, Traditional Values Coalition, and Prison Fellowship.[16] (These last two are associated with the Family: Traditional Values Coalition uses their C Street House[16] and Prison Fellowship was founded by Charles Colson.) Schenck also says that "the mystique of the Fellowship" has helped it "gain entree into almost impossible places in the capital."

>Former Senate Prayer Group member and current Kansas Governor Sam Brownback has described Fellowship members' method of operation: "Typically, one person grows desirous of pursuing an action"—a piece of legislation, a diplomatic strategy—"and the others pull in behind."[25] Brownback has often joined with fellow Family members in pursuing legislation. For example, in 1999 he joined together with fellow Family members, Senators Strom Thurmond and Don Nickles to demand a criminal investigation of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and in 2005 Brownback joined with Fellowship member Sen. Tom Coburn to promote the Houses of Worship Act.

You want to learn about where Christian fundamentalist conservatism in the US comes from? Start with the Fellowship.

And yes, I dated his daughter for over 2 years and we almost ended up engaged. I am glad that did not happen.

EDIT2: Fun fact: Hillary Clinton is an esteemed member:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/09/hillarys-prayer-hillary-clintons-religion-and-politics/

>Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. “A lot of evangelicals would see that as just cynical exploitation,” says the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue who now ministers to decision makers in Washington. “I don’t….there is a real good that is infected in people when they are around Jesus talk, and open Bibles, and prayer.”

>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”), 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.

u/chodeboi · 33 pointsr/politics
u/301ss · 12 pointsr/politics

This isn't unique to Bannon btw. Of course it extends to the aids he's elevated from Stephen Miller to Sara Hahn.

But it's much bigger than Bannon. Pence, Sessions, Conway, Betsy Devos, and others have all evinced key elements of this ethnonationalist, Christian Dominionist, Clash of Civs ideology.

One center of this group in politics is organized by the CNP, which has included Conway and Bannon in the past. However, it's extremely secretive.

>The CNP is not controversial so much for the conservatives who dominate it — activists of the religious right and the so-called “culture wars,” along with a smattering of wealthy financiers, Congressional operatives, right-wing consultants and Tea Party operatives — as for the many real extremists who are included.

>They include people like Michael Peroutka, a neo-Confederate who for years was on the board of the white supremacist League of the South; Jerome Corsi, a strident Obama “birther” and the propagandist hit man responsible for the “Swift boating” of John Kerry; Joseph Farah, who runs the wildly conspiracist “news” operation known as WorldNetDaily; Mat Staver, the Liberty Counsel leader who has worked to re-criminalize gay sex; Philip Zodhaites, another anti-gay activist who is charged with helping a self-described former lesbian who kidnapped her daughter from her former partner and fled the country; and a large number of other similar characters.

>As the SPLC noted when it published the 2014 directory in May of this year, the CNP has every right to keep its membership secret. But, as the SPLC wrote then, “it also provides an important venue in which relatively mainstream conservatives meet and very possibly are influenced by real extremists, people who regularly defame LGBT people with utter falsehoods, describe Latino immigrants as a dangerous group of rapists and disease-carriers, engage in the kind of wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing for which the John Birch Society is famous, and even suggest that certain people should be stoned to death in line with Old Testament law.”

If you're interested in reading more about this strain of politics in the US gov, you can also check out The Family by Jeff Sharlet.


u/redpocketknife · 9 pointsr/netflix

Read the book. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060560053/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

It's much easier to believe. The author stumbled on this connection as a reporter in the late 80s and the experience changed his entire worldview.

Here's another book he wrote at the time. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316091065/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2

You can probably find these in your local library. They are absolutely worth reading.

u/saqwarrior · 8 pointsr/politics

Is this the book you're talking about? The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

At first I thought you were referring to Dominion Theology, and then I thought you might be talking about the Council for National Policy. How many of these fucking Christian shadow organizations are there influencing our country?

Our society is fucked.

EDIT: a brief description of the book:

> Checking in on a friend's brother at Ivenwald, a Washington-based fundamentalist group living communally in Arlington, Va., religion and journalism scholar Sharlet finds a sect whose members refer to Manhattan's Ground Zero as "the ruins of secularism"; intrigued, Sharlet accepts on a whim an invitation to stay at Ivenwald. He's shocked to find himself in the stronghold of a widespread "invisible" network, organized into cells much like Ivenwald, and populated by elite, politically ambitious fundamentalists; Sharlet is present when a leader tells a dozen men living there, "You guys are here to learn how to rule the world." As it turns out, the Family was established in 1935 to oppose FDR's New Deal and the spread of trade unions; since then, it has organized well-attended weekly prayer meetings for members of Congress and annual National Prayer Breakfasts attended by every president since Eisenhower. Further, the Family's international reach ("almost impossible to overstate") has "forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most oppressive regimes in the world." In the years since his first encounter, Sharlet has done extensive research, and his thorough account of the Family's life and times is a chilling expose.

NPR's Terry Gross did an interview with Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Political Reach of 'The Family'

This article from Truthout goes into The Family's (aka "The Fellowship") activities, including their influence in Uganda:

> Most vivid is Sharlet's focus on the Fellowship's activities in Uganda, where, in 2009, a bill was introduced into the Ugandan Parliament that would condemn to death individuals convicted of "aggravated homosexuality," which includes "simply sex, more than once," and three years in prison "for failure to report a homosexual within twenty-four hours of learning of his or her crime."
Sharlet draws links between the Family and evangelical church leaders and politicians championing the bill in Uganda (including David Bahati, who introduced the legislation into Parliament); the Family has donated millions of dollars to Uganda for "leadership development" - more, writes Sharlet, than it has invested in any other foreign country.

u/godmakesmesad · 6 pointsr/Christianity

Which makes it even more scary we got those Seven Mountain Dominionist types in with Trump who love the idea of a theocratic kingdom. For information read this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Family-Secret-Fundamentalism-Heart-American/dp/0060560053

u/Tinkeringhalo10 · 4 pointsr/conspiracy
u/[deleted] · 2 pointsr/books

The Family by Jeff Sharlet

u/LincolnHighwater · 2 pointsr/politics

...the family..."

As in... The Family?

u/williamsates · 2 pointsr/conspiracy

>They are calling them the family even though I have been deep in this shit for years and never heard that stupid name

Thats funny, because it has been known about for years. Jeff Sharlet even wrote a couple of books about them C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy was published in 2010, and The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power was published in 2009. He wrote a famous piece in Salon about this issue in 2009 as well.

https://www.salon.com/2009/07/21/c_street/

The nexus of right wing Christianity and fascism in American politics has been a running theme for decades.

u/conspirobot · 1 pointr/conspiro

PingTiao: ^^original ^^reddit ^^link

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

"Behind the scenes at every National Prayer Breakfast since 1953 has been the Family, an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. Their goal is "Jesus plus nothing." Their method is backroom diplomacy. The Family is the startling story of how their faith—part free-market fundamentalism, part imperial ambition—has come to be interwoven with the affairs of nations around the world."

u/PingTiao · 1 pointr/conspiracy

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

"Behind the scenes at every National Prayer Breakfast since 1953 has been the Family, an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. Their goal is "Jesus plus nothing." Their method is backroom diplomacy. The Family is the startling story of how their faith—part free-market fundamentalism, part imperial ambition—has come to be interwoven with the affairs of nations around the world."

u/Inanzi · 1 pointr/atheism

I've been meaning to read this book since Rachel Maddow first started talking about it. The whole thing just seems so weird to me. It just sounds like it must be a conspiracy theory, but the whole thing is just so ridiculously well documented, it's obviously the truth.

I'm really can't wrap my head around how something like this can exist.

Has anyone read this book and would you recommend it?

u/pastordan · 1 pointr/AskHistorians
u/fuzzo · 1 pointr/politics

Thanks so much. I've been racking my brain for that term of weeks now. I read about the trend in I think Harpers when I was on vacation awhile back and promptly forgot the term but held on to the concept. Whew.

Reference

Also

u/carkedit · 1 pointr/AskReddit

This noir anthology kept me entertained while I was bedbound with a broken leg.

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace. Very fun to read, funny, insightful. He was pretty great.

This book is creeeepy but fascinating.

Also, try r/books. It's what they're about over there, after all.

u/Atheris · 1 pointr/atheism

I called it that because I didn't elaborate on the effect of the Great Awakenings. Their push back against the enlightenment I think started the ball rolling.

More recently the organized infiltration of religious fundamentalists into government positions has normalized violations of church and state. See C Street and The Family

u/Designthing · 0 pointsr/feminisms