In the little over two years since the release of The Family, Jeff Sharlet’s initial report from inside the walls of one of Washington’s most private and perhaps frightening fundamentalist lobbies, it is clear that the author acutely realizes that the stakes have grown dramatically in the days leading up to the publication of his latest work, the aptly titled, C-Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy.

And although his first work created major ripples documenting the indiscretions of former Family associates such as John Ensign and Mark Sanford -primary examples of an organization whose evangelical-influenced fallacies emphasized their perceptions of God’s will for those in power- it’s Sharlet’s latest that assembles the most damning portrait of the group yet, the Family’s involvement with Uganda’s recent “Kill the Gays” legislation.

Jeff Sharlet spoke with RootSpeak regarding his latest book, his time spent on the ground in Uganda and the Family’s recent statements elevating him from one of their enemies…to the enemy of the organization as a whole.

RS: In taking a solid read through things, you’ve remained pretty adamant that the Family isn’t an organization mired in conspiracy-laden intentions. Rather in your latest book, C Street, you’ve used the term ‘benevolent subversion’ to better explain the ways in which the Family is spreading this sort of relative Christian discipling. How do you envision folks like David Coe reacting to your latest report? Do they concern themselves with their dealings being made transparent, or in their eyes are they still untouchable under their perceived roles of God’s master plan?

JS: No, things have really changed since the last book. I think they were hoping to just ride out the storm, and in 2008 when it was published in hard cover they thought they had. Then in 2009 things changed and it just kept coming, and there was one scandal after another. There was the Stupak-Pitts anti-abortion amendment and then, most damningly for them, were their deep connections to the Uganda Kill the Gays bill. This is the most anti-gay piece of legislation in the world, even according to the author of the bill who told me, frankly, this is ‘a genocidal plan.’ They saw that they had a real publicity problem and they are pushing back this time in a big, big way.

I feel like I’ve been given a promotion of sorts because back in 2005 when I was writing about this former senator Dan Coates, a Republican from Indiana, he had described me as an enemy of Jesus. Now, in an email exchange related to their PR efforts, they are describing me as the enemy of Jesus. So I’ve gone to being “the enemy,” which is a promotion in their eyes. And although it doesn’t endanger me, what’s worse is that the push-back is scarier on every level and most frightening because of some of my sources in Uganda and Lebanon. Last week I heard some very unsettling news. I write about senator Tom Coburn who lives at C Street and his sort of stealth evangelism on behalf of the Family in Lebanon. One of my sources for that was a Lebanese-Canadian man who had gone to work for a Family organized school in that country and had believed in it until he discovered that it was a stealth evangelism project and that they were taking young Muslim children from their parents and trying to quietly indoctrinate them in a different faith. And moreover, they were being dishonest with the American people that were supplying the money and were trying to tap into U.S. Federal dollars. He was just an honorable guy and took his concerns to the head of the school who brushed him off, so he went public. Now he’s getting death threats – credible death threats – that have put him in the position of hiring a body guard. Moreover, some of the Americans involved in this thing are trying to discredit him by saying, and I’m quoting here, ‘that he is working for a Jew… Jeff Sharlet.’ That kind of rank antisemitism that you think is an artifact of the past would be stunning to me if I hadn’t encountered it already when I was in Uganda speaking to the author of the Kill the Gays bill. He told me that an American had come over to make sure that he knew he was still in good standing with the Family, who told him to ignore me, because quote, ‘my people’ are obsessed with money. And he said, what do they mean ‘your people?’. I said ‘well, they know I’m Jewish’ and he said ‘of course that’s what they mean.’ That is the true gutter of American politics and when I confronted the Family about this they said ‘oh no, we’re not anti-semitic – some of our best friends are Jewish – Jewish followers of Jesus.’ Well, we have a word for those people – it’s Christian, they’re not Jewish.

This time it’s quite ugly. They’re working with a man named A. Larry Ross who is the PR man for Pastor Rick Warren and I got hold of a chain of emails in which they talk very bluntly about their success in placing what they viewed as a favorable article about themselves in the New Yorker as a rebuttal to me, and a preemptive strike to what I was doing, with a reporter that did not bother to do his own research and depended on what the Family had told him. They told the reporter ‘we’re a great group’ and he wrote down ‘they’re a great group.’

RS: In regard to Uganda, that obviously being the item that the U.S. press has really picked up on from your reporting, what sort of responsibility do David Coe and the other residents at C Street take in regard to these fragile powder kegs that are sparked when they share their structure to initiate similar types of organizations in other countries?

JS: Exactly. And the question is, do you then take responsibility? Do you then hold accountable your so-called brothers in Christ and say that’s not what we do? The answer is zero. And I want to emphasize that: zero. Because part of the publicity they thought they pulled off with the New Yorker piece was when they got the writer to say ‘and then The Family took a firm stand against this bill.’ Well, if they can show me evidence of that – I have corrected myself before and I will go out there and correct myself again. But the reality is, as I was going to press with this book, one of the men involved with this – a guy that’s personally opposed to the Kill the Gays bill, and that’s important to note, called to tell me that both he and David Coe had the power to call the president of Uganda and neither had, and moreover I should understand that he was sort of trying to distance himself from David Bahati, the author of the bill. And he’s not even our key guy there. He is by Bahati’s own description his mentor. He doesn’t need to tell Bahati what to do –that’s inappropriate– you know you don’t go in and interfere with another country like that, but he needs to say – ‘hey this isn’t the faith we share.’ Now I know he doesn’t see it as faith but they won’t risk their access to power to stand up against it. Meanwhile that Ugandan has proposed to them, by someone who is trying to take a middle road on this, that they should stop focusing all their fire power on rebutting me and they should maybe put some energy into fighting this bill. They said, ‘Sharlet is not the problem… David Bahati, this guy who’s putting them in the news, is the problem.’ And the answer was, again I quote ‘Bahati is not the problem – Sharlet is the enemy.’

So you have a situation here where they do have an opportunity to use their tremendous access to do something good. If they’re doing it, they’re keeping it quiet. So quiet in fact, that David Bahati doesn’t know about it. He’s told me again and again that’s why he speaks to me, because he wants it clear that he has never received any push back from the Family. He brought the bill to them before he introduced it, and as far as he’s concerned they gave him a green light. They say they told him to go slow. That’s a possible mis-communication, but it’s time to clear up that mis-communication. Time to clear it up 9 months ago, before so many gay people in Uganda, and even straight people that have been tagged as gay, were forced out of their jobs and their families were beaten and raped. You may hear a more urgent tone in my voice now than the last time we spoke when I was talking about historical examples in Somalia where the dead were dead. Now we have an opportunity to do something, and this group instead of stepping up and taking responsibility and even reading their Bibles, their concern -and I’ll just quote from their own email messages- is ‘managing PR.’ That’s just terrifying. They are willing to let people die while they make sure that their American political members aren’t tainted by affiliation with something that they spawned.

RS: Did you feel that while you were on the ground taking these accounts in Uganda – you said the stakes had been raised a bit and not to turn this into a Hollywood-esque situation – but did you feel like you were in any sort of danger or or did you fear any sort of reprisal in documenting what was going on?

JS: It’s a little bit funny – yes and no – and I don’t want to turn it into a Hollywood situation and I don’t want to distract from the really important parts of it. I’m an American journalist, you know? I’m a citizen of the empire, and frankly, you’ve got to be pretty ballsy to bring that kind of diplomatic nightmare down on your head. At far greater danger are the people who traveled with me and who had the courage to talk to me, such as one young man called Blessed that was a gay man who had come out and was giving his testimony at real danger to his life. Uganda is interesting. It’s a soft police state -almost an incompetent police state- and it’s ranked around 130th to 138th, depending on the year on the International Transparency Index for Corruption. In Uganda, if you want to get arrested you have to pay the police – they’re not going to lift a finger to do anything. When I was speaking to folks at the law school and establishment figures they said ‘of course you’re under surveillance, you need to understand that.’ And they made that pretty evident. People I hadn’t contacted knew I was there. I would get to meet with one official who knew I had been speaking to another official whom he didn’t like. At one point I’m talking to my wife back home and a guy breaks in on the phone and apologizes very politely and says ‘go on with your conversation… I’ll be quiet.’ So it was a little Keystone Cops.

I started having a number of meetings with David Bahati – the author of the bill. He had invited me to Uganda and that’s why I had gone. We would meet in a luxury hotel which was where he wanted to meet to show off his wealth. He was buying lunches that would be expensive in America and finally he said ‘you’ve got to come out to my house.’ The Ugandan reporter I was working with there – people can figure out who it is, but I don’t want to over emphasize it because again he’s at risk – we’ll just call him Robert. He had said all along I had nothing to worry about; the worst that ever happens here to journalists is you get thrown in jail for a couple of days. Sounds bad to me but he said ‘you’re going to be okay.’ And I said ‘hey we’re going to go out to David Bahati’s house’ and he said ‘oh no I wouldn’t do that, I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ The risk there in Uganda is a well-timed car accident. And we went out there and it was fine, and that was maybe even more frightening.

Bahati is a sophisticated guy – he comes to America, and refers to Senator Mitch McConnell as ‘Mitch’ and knows other American politicians on a first name basis. He was candid with me and you know we’re in this moment of civility. It kind of gives the word civility a bad taste. He says, ‘you know if you come back in the bill’s path I’ll have you arrested, but for now we’re friends.’  So no, I don’t think I was in danger.

I know some of these people I spoke with were very literally on the run. It’s not what they had in mind but they’re not going to risk one ounce of their influence to help these people. I would be glad to be proved wrong, so if they want to say that I’m a big liar, terrific. I’d like to see them step up.

RS: In talking about folks renouncing or at least addressing it, have any members of the Family in any way disassociated or renounced ties to the organization in recent years because of any of the scrutiny now taking place in regard to Uganda or Lebanon or what’s happened here in the US with some of the more public sex scandals?

JS: Yeah, they’ve taken a real hit which is why they started working with A. Larry Ross and Cal Thomas the conservative syndicated columnist. Bart Stupak, the conservative Democrat who nearly scuttled health-care in pursuit of his own anti-abortion agenda, he moved out of the C Street house. He called it a ‘political stink-bomb,’ not because he had realized there was something wrong there you know – hey I’m getting subsidized rent – it was a stink-bomb because it was hurting his reputation. Again, the focus was not on the problems of the group but the problems with the press for paying attention to it.

Senator John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota who’s got presidential ambitions – he had to move out. Senator John Ensign obviously had to move out. Representative Joe Pitts who was the other half of that Stupak-Pitts amendment, he’s up there in Lancaster County, PA, a very conservative area. He did this thing where he said, ‘oh I’ve got nothing to do with this organization,’ by which he meant he didn’t live at C Street, but he has been a core member for decades and there is a paper trail to show it. Local reporters there have been digging in, finding money moving around between representative Pitts and the organization. What I find interesting there is that’s a very conservative area of the country and they’re not going to throw Pitts out of office because he’s using back channels to promote America as the Christian nation overseas to pursue his anti-abortion agenda. That’s what they sent him to Congress to do – fair enough – but what they don’t like is dishonesty and when you can say that this guy is not being straight up then you’ve got a problem. Senator Mark Pryor was one of my favorites down there in Arkansas. He had told me about how he had learned from the Family that ‘Jesus didn’t come to take sides, he came to take over.‘ He’s a very conservative democrat. He’s anti-gay, pro-life, anti-labor, anti-healthcare and pro Bush tax-cuts. Why he calls himself a Democrat I don’t know, but there it is.

So I had noted this and he had his press people put out to the Arkansas paper that I was lying and had never even spoken to him. I had interviewed him for a Rolling Stone article; I’ve got the notes. I’ve got the transcript and everything else. I called him up and I said ‘look, I’m going on TV tonight and I’m happy to play the transcript.’ So they backpedaled very quickly and said, ‘well, could you please just stop associating us with David Coe?’ So there’s people backing away but the group isn’t backing down. I think the reality is they feel like they scored a huge publicity coup with that New Yorker piece which I can’t say enough disappointed things about. The fact checker contacted me, and I asked what kind of archival documents reporter Peter Boyer used and she said ‘oh he did his own archival research’ and I said, ‘really, that’s interesting because the archives have been restricted,’ and she said ‘oh yes, he did his own archival research.’ And I said ‘that’s interesting – they gave him special access…that’s a story in itself.’

About an hour later she writes back an email that says –this is a correction from a fact-checker of her own facts– Peter Boyer did not visit the archives; he got his documents from the organization. You know, that’s not journalism. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not journalism and it’s dangerous and it’s especially dangerous when it gets into this thing where he kind of does a whitewash on their involvement in Somalia because he didn’t look at any documents. The documents are there, but as I said, the dead are dead in Somalia. But in Uganda it’s not over and in Sri Lanka things are still very lively.

RS: In reading the book, along with the factual details, you paint these affecting narratives of individuals like Blessed in Uganda and the rest. One of the others that is a lot closer to home which I found very interesting is this cadet down at the Air Force Academy here in Colorado. Slightly off topic, I have a question about the military. You look at the plight of the modern evangelical who in the words of one of your subjects looked at the military as ‘a mission field.’ Just how concerned should the everyday American be with regard to not just a god-fearing – but maybe a god-serving US military?

JS: Well I think they should be as concerned as the US military leadership that considers it one of their biggest problems. I spoke to a 3 star general, a guy who understands his oath to protect and defend the constitution. I spoke to him before and after the Obama election and he said we need executive action. We need a president to come in here and address both houses of Congress and say we need to put this military back in order. We are out of control. He said I think Obama is going to get elected and that’s going to happen. For whatever reason, Obama had different priorities and it didn’t happen. I spoke to him more recently and I said ‘what’s the situation like… Where do you see it now’ and how bad off is the military? And he said, ‘It’s a fucking clown show.’  He says it’s as if we are trying to give material to Al Qaeda to prove this is a crusade. He’s got top colleagues in every branch of the military who see what they’re doing in Iraq and Afghanistan as fighting a spiritual war. Every day more accounts of this come out – little things. You probably know that suicide has become a huge problem in the armed forces – epidemic, pandemic, a bigger problem than it’s really been since Vietnam. Fundamentalists in the military have kind of grabbed hold of all the suicide prevention programs. I write about one in the book and they just keep coming out. I read about one today – a chaplain at an air base in Wisconsin responsible for overseeing suicide prevention programs and he’s saying there’s only one way to prevent suicide and that’s Jesus. And if you don’t do that you’re going to hell. Is that wise?

I think we should be worried for the rights of the 1.5 million people currently in uniform. But also you have the armed forces and whether you’re pro-war or anti-war. One thing that historians notice is that armed forces tend to be ahead of the rest of society in adopting social change so they integrate before the rest of society does. And with some very notable exceptions -they actually start trying to reach equality for women before the rest of society does – they take these steps. And now we see them embracing a really radically fundamentalist paradigm of what America is and should be. And the concern is – we’re not talking about a few bad apples, we’re talking about the 15,000 strong officers Christian fellowship. We’re talking about as you said that cadet and you know – the number of military people who – and I think this is important – are responding to fundamentalism. In the same way that in an earlier age where a lot of troops in Vietnam era responded by real disaffection and real alienation from the purpose of the military. That’s happening again, except now instead of going leftward, they are going rightward. They can see that the rationale they’ve been given – when I talk to military people there are some that are really die hard for the mission in Afghanistan – most of them I speak to have been there, and they’re under no illusions about spreading democracy. That’s not what they’re doing there. They know they’re protecting a corrupt government – they don’t really know why but fundamentalism can provide them a purpose that democracy at this point is failing to do.

Jeff Sharlet’s C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy is available now from Little, Brown and Company.

Nicholas M.H. | RootSpeak Staff

Nicholas M.H. is one of the founders of both RootSpeak and the site's parent publisher, Truth&Rights Collective. Between giving his fellow editors a hard time, he fills the remaining hours of each day with his own writing and excursions into the worlds of media cooperatives and creative consulting for various inspired upstarts.

Read more by Nicholas M.H. on RootSpeak