Know Your Secret Political Organizations: Part 1, The Family
July 2nd, 2009There’s a house in Washington DC. A large-ish place, but not terribly remarkable. It’s officially a church, and thus tax-exempt. At any time, around a half-dozen US Senators and/or Representatives live in the house, paying well below market rent. The people who own the house, an organization called The Family, run Bible studies there, teaching Washington’s elite about Jesus.
What they teach is that Democracy is “rebelliousness”, and that the people should be taught to “soften our hearts to authority”. They enumerate and revere the more noble aspects of men like Genghis Khan, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, and bin Laden, primarily for their being able to form a strong ‘covenant’ with a ‘brotherhood’. The proper sort of brotherhood to have, the current leader of The Family claims, is like that of the Mafia.
Their beliefs include some attention to what many Christians consider to be important morality–lying, stealing, killing, etc.–but also the belief that the Free Market Economy is of incredible importance to Christianity. It’s pride, they teach, for people to think that they can control the economy through regulation. Thus, regulation is wrong. Oversight is wrong. In fact, Democracy is wrong.
Their goal is to bring the world together under Jesus…by training the power elite, and having that small minority rule over the rest of us. Because if those few people have Jesus in their hearts, they will do right by the rest of us. We don’t need a voice in our governing, as long as we have good people in power. Trickle-down social justice. Like the Taliban.
And The Family likes to be quiet. They don’t like publicity or attention. They have no website that I could find. So what you have is a secret society whose mission is to teach the leaders in our government all about how they have been chosen by God, and therefore should be leading us like sheep…like Jesus leads his people as a shepherd. A very small minority of very secretive men who believe it is their duty to tell the rest of us about real Christianity, and then to rule over us.
Some names associated with The Family: Don Nickles (R-OK), James Inhofe (R-OK), Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), Pete Domenici (R-NM), John Ensign (R-Nevada), Bill Nelson (R-FL), Conrad Burns (R-MT), Frank Wolf (R-VA), Joseph Pitts (R-PA), Sam Brownback (R-KS), Hillary Clinton (Sec of State), Mark Sanford (Gov-SC), Zach Wamp (R-TN), Bart Stupak (D-MI), Jim DeMint (R-SC), Mike Doyle (D-PA).
I’d love to give you a bunch of clickable links, but they are a secret society, afterall. However, given the publicity of Ensign and Sanford right now, Google should turn up some results if you’re interested. Here’s a link to the Googlebooks preview of some pages from Jeff Sharlet’s book about them.
-Tom













