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| The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power | 
 enlarge | Author: Jeff Sharlet
Publisher: Harper
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95 (61.09 RON)
Buy New: $18.43 (43.39 RON)
You Save: $7.52 (17.70 RON) (29%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 57392
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9 x 5.9 x 1.5
ISBN: 0060559799
Dewey Decimal Number: 277.3082
EAN: 9780060559793
ASIN: 0060559799
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
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Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 EXPOSING THE SECRETS OF THE PRESENT ADMINISTRATION IN THIS COUNTRY July 25, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
THIS BOOK IS RESEARCHED IN A WAY THAT ONE CAN BELIEVE WHAT ONE IS READING. IT ISN'T SLANTED, IT'S FACTUAL. YOU, THE READER CAN BASE YOUR OWN OPINION BASED ON THESE FACTS. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT BE READ BY ANYONE WHO IS INTERESTED IN THE POLITICAL SCENE IN THE U.S. I HAVE BOUGHT ADDITIONAL COPIES TO GIVE TO FRIENDS. I GIVE IT A 5 STAR RATING. DR. JEAN TANT
A fascinating investigative report July 11, 2008
14 out of 14 found this review helpful
I have been following Jeff Sharlet's "The Revealer:a daily review of religion and the press" (www.therevealer.org)for some time and have come to respect his thorough and even-handed approach to religious reporting. It was through that site that I became aware of "The Family," and, being interested in the history of American religion and issues of church and state, I ordered it.
It was not long before I began to wonder if I had stumbled into some kind of paranoid fantasy rivaling the Illuminati, but was reassured by Sharlet's careful documentation and the fact that one of his sources is a friend of mine. When I checked with the friend (whose judgment I respect highly) he confirmed what Sharlet had written.
Sharlet is a marvelous writer. At times I found myself simply marveling at the beauty of the language and the tightly-woven structure. He can pack more information into a single sentence than many authors can in a whole page. He is able to explain the intricacies of the Christian right- its history, attitudes, and interactions with the culture at large- in clear, understandable language.
The one critique I would have of the book as a whole is that Sharlet tends to lump conservative Christian groups under the single rubric of "fundamentalist." While that might work as shorthand for what he is trying to discuss here, it blurs the very real differences between Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and many other sympathetic subgroups.
Still, I recommend this book highly to anyone who wants to understand the dynamic relationship of conservative Christianity and the political scene in America today.
A Brilliant, Scary, Witty Eye-Opener July 11, 2008
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
The Family is much more than an expose into some shadowy religious group with political aspirations. Jeff Sharlet's book is a brilliant dissection and contextualization of the makings and workings of a political powerhouse that gained its following by tapping into mythic American ideals, has tasked itself with making Jesus America's main export, and has fine-tuned how to operate in the political sphere to ensure "a leadership led by God" across the globe. There are many things that make this book so good, but especially notable is how expertly Sharlet charts the evolutionary course of American fundamentalism and The Family's ascendency to power through the lens of politics and culture wars from the 1930s through today.
In a whirlwind through recent history, Sharlet shows us everywhere the fingerprint of the organization that eventually became The Family. The Family found its calling in the tumultuous post-WW America that was forced to deal with Labor on the home front and to grapple with new ideas about modern nations and internationalism. It found its focus during the Cold War when it backed small nation allies as the new Christian frontier. And in the culture wars of 60s and 70s and in the 80s moratorium on those previous two decades, the Family figured out that its best bet was to take a trickle-down approach to faith from the elite to the masses and to practice the "quiet diplomacy" that George H. Bush praised it for. Today, The Family has become the oil to the political machinery of connections and mutual back-scratching.
I met Jeff Sharlet when we spent a few weeks at the same artists' colony where he struck many as someone who's as intellectually gifted as he's curious, and it's no surprise that his book is equally rigorous in its examination as it is humanizing of the people he writes about. Forget the shady figures of smoke-filled backrooms. The people of The Family are neither naively misled nor simply reactionary; their leaders are keen tacticians whose actions are grounded deeply in religious thought, in nationalism, and in a sense of providential duty.
This is a book of big ideas, but to Sharlet's credit, it's one that was compelling and entirely comprehensible even to this reader with little knowledge about Washington or fundamentalism. It's also filled with some hilarious anecdotes (there's an attempted seduction to sway the author from writing his tell-all) and a host of characters not likely to be grouped together(Billy Graham, General Suharto, the Black Buffers, and Hillary Clinton, really?). It's the story of one scary marriage of American empire and gospel that Sharlet manages to tell with a gentle wittiness. The Family is the hand that will feed you what's good for you (American democracy, free enterprise, military aid, education) even if you don't know yet that it's good for you.
Sharlet doesn't just unmask the wizard behind the curtain; he outlines the unobservable architecture of how political deals get made. The Family is frightening for its invisibility, its insidiousness, and the staying power it will have, in part because it operates in the language and beliefs of what America is about. Sharlet's book is an eye-opener and truly important in a time when the US's relationship with the rest of the world is challenged with a different urgency, and when political responses are played out again in the context of religious and cultural wars.
God likes the poor, but loves the rich July 4, 2008
20 out of 21 found this review helpful
The Family is the most powerful political organization you have never heard of. Its members have included a host of congressmen and senators, including some who chair important committees, CEOs of major corporations, senior officers in the military, leaders of foreign nations, members of the Supreme Court, and at least one president of the United States. It is a vast network of "prayer cells" of two or three individuals who see themselves as God's agents on earth.
The Family, as it is most commonly known, is like some immense, deep-sea leviathan that is only rarely glimpsed on the surface. Yet it is seen, like the Punxsutawney groundhog, at least once a year. This event is called the National Prayer Breakfast where the Family makes an effort to appear ecumenical and harmless. It is rather as if once a year Hannibal Lechter made a public appearance disguised as Mr. Rogers.
What is known as the Family began with a clergyman named Abraham Vereide in Depression-era Seattle. Vereide, or Abram, as he is referred to by the Family, looked upon workers who went on strike to secure enough pay to feed their families as agents of Satan. He was convinced that the Kingdom of God would be secured if the best among us, the rich that is, guided by Jesus Christ, made decisions for the rest of us unfettered by such messy things as democracy and the rule of law. If the poor could be made to see that God intended them to be poor and humbly accept their lot all would be well.
Abram, as one might have guessed, regarded the New Deal as an abomination in the eyes of the Lord.
Abram was a very effective salesmen for this idea among wealthy businessmen in Seattle. The Family grew through members recruiting new members who were either wealthy or in positions of authority. Over time, the Family's theology has been stripped down to "Jesus plus nothing." Members are expected to have surrendered themselves to Jesus Christ, but are certainly not asked to perform such unseemly acts as giving what they have to the poor or turning the other cheek. A prospective member gets reassurance that he (there are women involved, but with a few notable exceptions they have about as much power as the members of a ladies' auxiliary at a Moose lodge) has got Jesus watching over him, has his sins forgiven, and is now serving Jesus in everything he does. He gets to keep his power, his wealth, his vices. He is even able to tell himself that he is humble, or at least as humble as a man can be who reminds himself every day that he is one of God's elect.
And he gets one hell of a network or powerful connections.
What makes this different from other books on the Religious Right I've read, some of them quite good on facets of this phenomenon, is that those other books are about the more public, plebeian kind of fundamentalism one finds operating out in the open. Few participants in that kind of fundamentalism even know that the ethics-free kind of fundamentalism practiced by the Family exists. Sharlet does discuss how those fundamentalists fit into the plans of their elite brethren, as well as provide a rich and detailed history of fundamentalism and evangelical Protestantism from Jonathan Edwards (who encouraged an obviously disturbed woman to starve herself to death in a fit of religious fervor) onwards. If you are going to read only one book about the Religious Right, this is the one to select.
to read this book... June 29, 2008
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
The comments below, "Who cares about all the dictators in the past who true historians have exposed already?... Can these people through personal relationships, friendships really change the minds of power players in today's world?" should stand as the "you must be this tall" carnival measure for readers approaching this book. Yes, you will have to care about genocidal dictators who have functioned not just with the approval and support of the U.S. government, but who were shepherded into that cozy relationship with U.S. leadership by a band of fundamentalist ideologues operating below the radar. You will have to have, or at least be able to recognize, the moral standard the book revolves around: a fierce anger over the undermining of democracy that the Family has enacted for more than seventy years. And you will have to look beyond the conventional wisdom that glosses over how power games are actually played, to recognize a different set of players, ones who don't flaunt their influence on cable news, but who function strictly behind the scenes.
Sharlet has gone far beyond the conventional wisdom on religion in politics through doggedly persistent investigation and research. That he has found something beyond most people's imaginings is as much a credit to him as it is an indictment of the level of journalism we've grown used to, shoehorning complex and deep-rooted networks and belief systems into bite-sized truisms. Sharlet doesn't dismiss; he digs in. And he certainly doesn't rest on any comfortable resolutions to the "problem" of America's fundamentalist history and reign: that they are unChristian, that they are getting Jesus "wrong," or that the strangeness of their elite gospel means it doesn't have influence. Instead the author approaches the power theology of the Family as a system of ideas with a definite lineage and even more definite results: from the U.S. government smiling at the slaughter of millions around the globe, to the gentle, unseen hand in the Senate dining room, pushing American politics rightward. It is the best book on the Christian right I've read, with personal experience that grounds the members of the Family network not as phantoms, but devotees to a strange and deeply flawed religion, and an historical scope that recalls a period of American history that conventional wisdom has forgotten existed, when America could have gone a different way. That it didn't is largely due to the right-wing network that became the Family, who have been quietly shaping history since. That we don't recognize their hand is exactly what they planned.
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