The Family
The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
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4.2 • 19 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The most powerful and most enduring Christian Right movement in America isn’t James Dobson’s Focus on the Family or Pat Robertson’s electoral armies. It is “The Family” – soldiers in the army of God, quietly waging spiritual war in the halls of American power. Their base is a quiet, leafy estate along the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside its walls.
A New York Times bestseller, The Family dramatically revises conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism. Sharlet reveals its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the creation of the Cold War, the no-holds-barred economics of globalization, and the slow but steady destruction of the wall of separation between church and state.
Jeff Sharlet is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and Harper’s and associate research scholar at New York University’s Center for Religion and Media. He regularly comments on religion and politics for major media outlets. He is the co-author, with Peter Manseau, of Killing The Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible (Free Press), and the co-founder of KillingTheBuddha.com. Sharlet is the editor of TheRevealer.org, a review of religion and media for working journalists. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Julia Rabig, a historian.
“Un-American theocrats can only fool patriotic American democrats when there aren’t critics like Jeff Sharlet around – careful scholars and soulful writers who understand both the majesty of faith and the evil of its abuses. A remarkable accomplishment in the annals of writing about religion.” – Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
