C Street Read online

  C Street

  The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy

  Jeff Sharlet

  LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY

  NEW YORK BOSTON LONDON

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  Reading Group Guide

  Copyright Page

  For Robert Sharlet and

  Roxana Ruth

  1

  THE CONFESSIONS

  “As much as I did talk about going to the Appalachian Trail… that isn’t where I ended up.”

  —South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, at the

  June 24, 2009, press conference at which

  he confessed to cheating on his wife.

  IN 2008 I published a book called The Family, which took as its main subject a religious movement known to some as the Fellowship and to others as the Family and to most only through one of the many nonprofit entities created to express the movement’s peculiar approach to religion, politics, and power. One of these entities is the C Street Center Inc., in Washington, DC, or, simply, C Street, made infamous in the summer of 2009 by the actions of three Family associates: a senator, a governor, and a congressman, each with his own special C Street connection.

  The senator lived there; the governor sought answers there; and the congressman’s wife says he rendezvoused with his mistress in his bedroom at the three-story redbrick town house on Capitol Hill, maintained by the Family for a singular goal, in the words of one Family leader: to “assist [congressmen] in better understandings of the teachings of Christ, and applying it to their jobs.”

  Among the men thus assisted by the Family have been Sen. Tom Coburn and Sen. Jim Inhofe, Oklahoma Republicans racing each other to the far right of the political spectrum (Coburn has proposed the death penalty for abortion providers; Inhofe, who was a defender of the Abu Ghraib torturers, hosts regular foreign policy meetings at C Street); Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who insists that the Bible teaches we cannot serve both God and government; and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), who says that through meetings of his Family “cell” of like-minded politicians he receives divine instruction on subjects as varied as sex, oil, and Islam. There’s also Sen. John Thune (R-SD), Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY); Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Rep. Zach Wamp (R-TN), and Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA). And Democrats, too: among them are Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida; North Carolina’s Ten Commandments crusader, Rep. Mike McIntyre; its newest Blue Dog, Rep. Heath Shuler; and Michigan’s Rep. Bart Stupak. In 2009 Stupak joined with Rep. Pitts to hold health care reform hostage to what Family leaders, pledging their support for Pitts early in his career, called “God’s leadership” in the long war against abortion.

  Buried in the 592 boxes of documents dumped by the Family at the Billy Graham Center Archives in Wheaton, Illinois, are five decades’ worth of correspondence between members equally illustrious in their day: segregationist Dixiecrats and Southern Republican converts Sen. Absalom Willis Robertson (Pat Robertson’s father) and Sen. Strom Thurmond; a Yankee Klansman named Ralph Brewster and a blue-blooded fascist sympathizer named Merwin Hart; a parade of generals, oilmen, bankers, missile manufacturers; little big men of the provinces with fast food fortunes or chains of Piggly Wiggly supermarkets or gravel quarry empires. There was even the occasional liberal—Sen. Mark Hatfield, Republican of Oregon, and Sen. Harold Hughes, Democrat of Iowa—men of good faith and bad judgment who lent their names to the causes of the Family’s “brothers” overseas, the Indonesian genocidaire Suharto (Hatfield), the Filipino strongman Ferdinand Marcos (Hughes).

  “Christ ministered to a few and did not set out to minister to large throngs of people,” says a supporter. The Family differs from more conventional fundamentalist groups in its preference for those whom it calls “key men” over the multitude. “We simply call ourselves the fellowship or a family of friends,” declares a document titled “Eight Core Aspects of the vision and methods,” distributed to members at the 2010 National Prayer Breakfast, the movement’s only public event. One of the Eight Core Aspects is the movement’s interpretation of Acts 9:15—“This man is my chosen instrument to take my name… before the Gentiles and their kings” (emphasis theirs). The Family’s unorthodox reading of this verse is that it is an injunction to work not through public revivals but through private relationships with “ ‘the king’—or other leaders of our world—who hold enormous influence—for better or worse—over vast numbers of people.” The Family sees itself as a ministry for the benefit of the poor, by way of the powerful. The best way to help the weak, it teaches, is to help the strong.

  In 2008 and 2009, the Family did so by helping Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC), and former representative Chip Pickering (R-MS) cover up extramarital affairs, and in Ensign’s case secret payments. Not to avoid embarrassment for the Family, an organization that until 2009 denied its own existence, but because the Family believes that its members are placed in power by God; that they are his “new chosen”; that the senator, the governor, and the congressman were “tools” with which to advance his kingdom, an ambition so worthy that beside it all personal failings pale.

  On June 16, 2009, Sen. Ensign flew home to Las Vegas to confess his affair. Ensign, fourth-ranking Republican and a man with Iowa and Pennsylvania Avenue on his mind, had made a career of going against the grain of his hometown. He was a moral scold who’d promoted himself as a Promise Keeper—a member of the conservative men’s ministry—and a family values man. He’d been a hound once, according to friends, but he’d come to Christ before he came to politics; for Ensign, the two passions were intertwined. He didn’t just go to church, he lived in one, the Family’s house at 133 C Street, SE, registered as a church for tax purposes.

  I’d met Ensign there once, when I was writing an earlier book on unusual religious communities around the country. I’d seen some strange things: a Pentecostal exorcism in North Carolina; a massive outdoor Pagan dance party in honor of “the Horned One” in rural Kansas; a “cowboy church” in Texas featuring a cross made of horseshoes and, in lieu of a picture of Jesus, a lovely portrait of a seriously horned Texas Longhorn steer.

  But C Street was in its own category, simultaneously banal—a prayer meeting of congressmen in which they insisted on calling God “Coach”—and more unsettling than anything I’d witnessed. Doug Coe, the “first brother” of the Family since 1969, used to say that Jesus was not a sissy. That disdain for weakness infuses the movement’s theology so completely, so naturally, that it comes across as almost amiable. “I’ve seen pictures of the young men in the Red Guard,” he says in a videotaped sermon, a tall man in a rumpled suit, spreading out his hands like he’s setting up a joke. “They would bring in this young man’s mother… he would take an axe and cut her head off.” Coe makes a chopping motion. That, he says, is dedication to a cause. But there’s nothing grim about his presentation; he sounds like he’s inviting you to join a team or a fund-raiser. And he is. “A covenant! A pledge!” he exclaims, setting up the punch line. “That’s what Jesus said.” Such is the C Street style, the most violent metaphors imaginable deployed as maxims for everyday living, from the prayer calendar on the wall that called on the house’s congressional tenants to devote a portion of each morning to spiritual war (combat by prayer) against “demonic strongholds” such as Buddhism and Hinduism, to Coe’s routine invocation of history’s worst villains as models for the muscle he’d rather see applied on Christ’s behalf. The first time I met Coe, he was in the midst of a spiritual mentoring session in which he cited “Hitler, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh [and] bin Laden” as models with which to understand the “total Jesus” worshipped by the Family. He sipped hot cocoa while he lectured.

  Ensign seemed to fall on the banal end of that spectrum. He miss
ed the prayer meeting, bouncing into the foyer in red jogging shorts and a white T-shirt that made his tan—the most impressive tan in the Technicolor portrait gallery of golf-happy, twenty-first-century political America—glow beneath his equally striking silver hair. Ensign’s hair, prematurely gray, is his most senatorial feature; it possesses a gravitas all its own. The man beneath it, though, square-jawed and thick-browed, is something of a giggler. Jogging in place, grinning, bobbing his head back and forth, he boasted to a young female aide who’d been sent to fetch him about the time he’d clocked on his run. “That’s great!” she said, then asked him what kind of time he could make showering and getting ready for work. Up popped Ensign’s arched black brows: a challenge! “I’m all about setting records today!” he said.

  And away he went. When I wrote The Family, I devoted only a sentence to him, describing him as a “conservative casino heir elected to the Senate from Nevada, a brightly tanned, hapless figure who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling-fortune name.” After his press conference, a magazine editor, noting Ensign’s Washington address and recalling my book, asked me if I wanted to write something about Ensign’s apparent hypocrisy. I didn’t. The senator’s sins were his own.

  Next up was Mark Sanford, the weather-beaten governor of South Carolina, his tan the result of days spent in the woods, hunting, or on his tractor, planting. He was famous for his frugality. As a congressman, he slept on a futon rolled out across his office rather than coughing up rent, and as governor he turned down $700 million in federal stimulus money because he feared it would lead to “a thing called slavery.” In 1995, when Ensign and Sanford were at the vanguard of the right-wing revolution, Ensign quietly continued business as usual, collecting $450,000 from political action committees, more than any other freshman. Mark Sanford refused to take a dime. By 2009, even more than Ensign Sanford was being spoken of as presidential material for the GOP, fabric to be cut, folded, and sewn.

  So, when on June 18, 2009, Sanford disappeared, some assumed it was for a good or maybe even a noble reason. For days, there were whispers about where the governor had gone—gone being the operative word, because nobody knew where the governor was. Not in the governor’s mansion in Columbia, not in the airy beach house on Sullivan’s Island he shared with his wife, Jenny Sanford, and their four boys, not at Coosaw, the semi-feral, falling-down plantation along the Combahee River that had originally brought the Sanford clan, Floridians, to South Carolina. Calls to his wife, the state’s elegantly beautiful First Lady, a gentlewoman, in the antique parlance of the state’s finest matrons, led reporters to believe the governor was thinking, working on a book about the meaning of conservatism. Calls to his staff led seekers to the woods: to the Appalachian Trail, to which the governor was said to have taken in contemplation.

  Contemplation of what? Hopes rose, résumés rustled, ambitions flared, as Sanford’s circle imagined the governor emerging from the wilderness as a new kind of contender. They didn’t see the truth coming. “Mark Sanford literally likes to go his own way,” gushed GOP consultant Mark McKinnon, whose clients have included George W. Bush and John McCain. “For this act alone, we’re going to move Sanford up at least a notch on our Top 10 GOP contenders for 2012.” In the days ahead he’d become a laughingstock: a symbol of all that is pathetic about politics, men, middle age, even romance itself at the tired end of a decade celebrated by no one. But before that, while he was still gone, so long as nobody knew where he was, when the governor for a moment occupied a space in the realm between the possibility of tragedy (was he silent because his broken body lay at the bottom of a gully?) and the transcendent (would he walk out of the woods with the wisdom of one who knows how to quiet the world’s noise?), he was almost a folk hero. His supporters—the true believers who loved his Roman nose and his leathery skin and his wry smile, and the Washington slicks who would sell these features as the face of a modern-day Cincinnatus, a reluctant philosopher-king for the common man—asked themselves if this strange departure would herald his arrival. Would the governor return from the wilderness to announce a higher aspiration?

  Yes, in a sense: love. On June 24, after a reporter for the Columbia State tracked him down in a Georgia airport and discovered he’d returned from Argentina, Sanford called a press conference at which he mused on his genuine affection for the Appalachian Trail, then pledged to “lay out that larger story”—the story of where he’d been the previous week. “Given the immediacy of y’all’s wanting to visit,” he said, he was forced to intrude private concerns into a public meeting. He began with apologies to Jenny and his four boys, “jewels and blessings,” his staff, and an old friend—the memory of whose early support brought the governor close to tears. “I let them down by creating a fiction with regard to where I was going,” he said. He had been on an “adventure trip,” indeed, but not on the Appalachian Trail. He rubbed his forehead, his eyes glanced off into nowhere, his voice wobbled. “I’m here,” he continued, still deferring any concrete explanation of why he actually was there, “because if you were to look at God’s laws, they’re in every instance designed to protect people from themselves.” He warmed to the subject of religion, firmer ground, he knew, for the narrative of public confession. “The biggest self of self is indeed self.”

  The answer to that riddle was a woman. The “biggest self of self” for Sanford was love; he’d fallen into it, and he wanted us to forgive him.

  To that point, I’d been interested only in the convoluted candor with which he was testifying. It was some good church, tension building, a parade of emotions not often on display in political life. I admired him for it. Then came the kicker. In answer to a question about how long his family had known (five months), Sanford paused, as if lost in recollection. Then: “I’ve been to a lot of—as part of what we called C Street when I was in Washington. It was a, believe it or not, a Christian Bible study—some folks who asked members of Congress hard questions that I think were very, very important. And I’ve been working with them.”

  Another spiritual adviser, Warren “Cubby” Culbertson, was at the press conference. Every month, Cubby and two seminary professors invited fifteen well-connected men for a meeting at a downtown office where Cubby, a wealthy entrepreneur, would train them in the use of “spiritual weaponry,” with distinctly political implications. “Never underestimate the influence the ungodly have upon the godly,” he warned. “The ungodly want to unlord the Lord, but they must first unlord the law.” It was a ministry for men who had already achieved financial success and yet wanted more—meaning greater influence. The “up and out,” as the Family calls such people. “The ostrich has wings,” Cubby taught, “but cannot fly.” By which he meant: “The almost saved are totally damned.” No half measures. The men Cubby brought to God were instructed to become the “most holy,” to “enter God’s playing field,” to take God’s “litmus tests.” Ask yourself: Do I keep my eye on “the enemies known as the world”? “The children of the devil are obvious,” Cubby advised, citing 1 John 3:9; avoid them or become an “eternal inhabitant of Sodom.”

  At the press conference, you could almost see Sanford weighing his options, trying to hold on to his ambition, lamenting the loss of the woman he’d already described to Jenny as his “heart connection.” Then he made his choice: C Street. “A spiritual giant,” Sanford said of Cubby, who was looking on from the back of the room, and finally tears began to fall.

  * * *

  I was stunned. One of the first rules of C Street is that you don’t talk about C Street. “We sort of don’t talk to the press about the house,” C Streeter Bart Stupak, a conservative Democrat, had told a reporter back in 2002. Another C Streeter, Zach Wamp, spoke out against transparency in the wake of the Ensign scandal. “The C Street residents have all agreed they won’t talk about their private living arrangements, Wamp said, and he [Wamp] intends to honor that pact,” reported the Knoxville News-Sentinel, after scandal forced the press to pay attention.
/>
  “I hate it that John Ensign lives in the house and this happened because it opens up all of these kinds of questions,” Wamp told the paper. “I’m not going to be the guy who goes out and talks.”

  From the Family’s point of view, C Street’s code of secrecy is not a conspiracy but a matter of simple efficiency. “The more invisible you can make your organization,” Doug Coe observes, “the more influence it will have.” True enough; that’s why we have lobbying and disclosure laws. It’s also part of why we have the Fourth Estate, the press, to hold the powerful accountable. If the press can’t comfort the afflicted, as the old saying goes—and even as a onetime employee of a freebie paper used primarily by homeless men for warmth in the winter, I doubt that it can—it may, on occasion, afflict the comfortable.

  But most reporters have never shown much interest in C Street or the organization behind it. The exceptions are remarkable for the scrutiny that didn’t follow. Not in 1952, when the Washington Post noticed that the Secretary of Defense had granted four senators the use of a military plane for international Family meetings; questions were raised, then dropped. No questions at all followed the New Republic’s 1965 report on the Family’s only public event, the National Prayer Breakfast (then the Presidential Prayer Breakfast), an evangelical ritual of national devotion that politicians skipped at their peril. In 1975 Playboy published an exhaustively researched report on how the Family functioned as an off-the-books bank for its congressional members. Then, nothing.

  Not even Watergate could goad the press into real action. The New York Times noted that President Ford had convened his old all-Republican congressional prayer group—organized by the Family—to consider Nixon’s pardon, but asked no questions about what criteria it would use. Time did a little better, identifying Doug Coe as the top man of what it described as “almost an underground network,” an “intricate web” of Christian activists in the capital, but left it at that. In December 1973, Dan Rather challenged his deputy press secretary to explain why Watergate conspirator Chuck Colson continued to make frequent visits to the White House he’d left in criminal disgrace. “Prayer,” came the answer. “Now we all know the way Washington works,” Rather replied. “People ingratiate themselves with people in positions of power, and at such things as, yes, a prayer breakfast, they do their business. Isn’t someone around here worried at least about the symbolism of this?” Apparently not; the questions that followed were bemused. Nobody seriously wondered why the soon-to-be-convicted Watergate conspirator, a man who had allegedly proposed firebombing the Brookings Institution, needed to worship in the White House. Not even a few years later, when Colson, never good at keeping his mouth shut, told the story of Doug Coe’s collaboration with the CEO of Raytheon, manufacturer of missiles, to bring Colson into the Family fold. “A veritable underground of Christ’s men all through government,” as Colson called the network that would vouch for his parole after only six months in prison.