The Fellowship Foundation or "The Family" and "C Street" Exposed.

Above: Bush Sr. (left) with the current leader of, "The Family" Doug Coe (middle).

"What is C-Street? The C-Street house in Washington DC is actually a former convent and now it’s registered as a church. It is run by what is called the Family and is used to provide housing for six to eight congressmen at any time, and provide spiritual direction for these congressmen or politicians. The powerful and secretive group known as the Fellowship Foundation or the “Family” is quickly gaining notoriety, due to its links to two scandal-plagued Republicans, Senator John Ensign of Nevada and Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina."

"Jeff Sharlet is the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. According to Sharlets research, the Family is the oldest Christian Conservative organization in Washington and actually began 70 years ago. The founder believed that god gave him a new revelation saying that Christianity had gotten it wrong for two thousand years and that what most people think of as Christianity, as being about, helping the weak and the poor and the meek and the down and out, he believes god came to him one night in April in 1935 and said what Christianity should really be about is building more power for the already powerful. And that these powerful men who were chosen by god can then if they want to dispense blessings to the rest of us, through a kind of trickle-down fundamentalism.""Sharlet [Author of "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power] follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the far right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. In public, they host Prayer Breakfasts; in private, they preach a gospel of "biblical capitalism," military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao as leadership models, the Family's current leader, Doug Coe, declares, "We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't." Coe once stated, "Mao even had the kids killing their own mother and father. But it wasn’t murder. It was for building the new nation. The new kingdom."

TPJ: The author, Jeff Sharlet answers some questions about his book:

"1. Your exposé on The Fellowship, aka “The Family,” appeared five years ago. Has your understanding of the group changed?

When I was working on that story, I remember debating how much Hitler we should put in the piece. That is, we wondered how fair it was to dwell on The Family’s invocations of Hitler as a model of “total commitment.” As it turns out, it was quite fair. After I left Ivanwald, a team of researchers and I spent years combing through hundreds of thousands of documents in archives around the country. We discovered that as far back as the 1940s, when The Family began organizing congressmen, the group’s founder, Abraham Vereide, was praising Hitler’s “youth work” as a model to be adopted by Americans. He denounced Hitler himself, but he admired fascism’s cultivation of elites, crucial to what he saw as a God-ordained coming “age of minority control.”"

TPJ: The Hitler Youth Work praise is especially chilling when you consider the revelation of the YWAM movement within, "The Family."

"According to the Washington Post, however, the Fellowship Foundation is itself linked to an even more secretive religious organization — Youth With a Mission (YWAM), whose Washington, DC branch owns the “C Street House.” A diarist at Daily Kos points out that “YWAM founder leader Loren Cunningham has publicly outlined a vision for Christian world-control,” which involves establishing domination over government, education, business, the media, and other areas. YWAM has also been accused of having cult-like tendencies, which were detailed at length in an article published in 1990 that described both the brainwashing-like techniques employed in its Discipleship Training Schools and its financial exploitation of its recruits."

TPJ: Even the Republican Saint Ronald Reagan seemed to have a suspicious tie to the organization saying about it once, "Speaking at the 1985 Prayer Breakfast, Ronald Reagan said, “I wish I could say more about it, but it’s working precisely because it’s private.” (TPJ: This reminds me of Bush II mentioning the equally as secretive and elitist group "Skull and Bones" in his book but saying he was indeed a member but could not reveal any information).

Special thanks to my friend Shaw over at the excellent blog, "Progressive Eruptions" for tipping me off to much of this information. It certainly raises some serious questions about the motives of many of the elite within the halls of American government--especially it appears within the Republican/Conservative wings. It should cause alarm and concern over a growing theocratic movement in America, which has been seen in several organizations over the past 3 decades or so. It seems over more and more we hear of people willing to sacrifice Democracy for some perceived Christian theocratic utopia. I have ordered Sharlet's book and can't wait to read it.

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