Scott Horton - September 29, 2:41 PM, 2010

Harper’s contributing editor Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to report on the Family’s C Street power base on Capitol Hill from the inside. Now he has updated his reporting with a new comprehensive look at the Family’s quiet and carefully obscured influence on American government, foreign policy, and the military, and a survey of the scandals that have finally put C Street on the nation’s political map. I put six questions to Sharlet about his new book, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy.

1. Let’s start with a bit of Scripture. Acts 9:15 says, “This man is my chosen instrument to take my name… before the Gentiles and their kings.” How is this understood by the men who gather in C Street?

The clue is in the emphasis the Family puts on those last two words. “Their kings” is italicized in the document from which I quote it in the book, “Eight Core Aspects of the vision and methods.” It was distributed to potential new members of the Family, the organization behind C Street, at the 2010 National Prayer Breakfast, the Family’s only public event. Every year, the Family uses American political leaders—they refer to them as “bait”—to attract foreign leaders they want to evangelize. The focus is on leaders, or “kings.” The Family twists Acts 9:15 into a justification for a complete inversion of Christianity, a faith that, whatever else one thinks of it, was born of a radically egalitarian premise. To the C Streeters, Christianity is all about elites. They pay lip service to helping the poor, but they believe the best way to help the weak is to help the strong.

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Peter J. Boyer - Sep 13 2010

One midwinter night in 2008, Senator John Ensign, of Nevada, the chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, was roused from bed when six men entered his room and ordered him to get up. Ensign knew the men intimately; a few hours earlier, he had eaten dinner with them, as he had nearly every Tuesday evening since he’d come to Washington. Now they were rebuking him for his recklessness. They told him he was endangering his career, ruining lives, and offending God.

The men leading this intervention considered themselves Ensign’s closest friends in Washington. Four of those who confronted Ensign—Senator Tom Coburn and Representatives Bart Stupak, Mike Doyle, and Zach Wamp—lived with him in an eighteenth-century brick row house on C Street, in southeast Washington, a short walk from the Capitol. The men regarded themselves in part as an accountability group. Despite their political differences—Coburn and Wamp are Republicans, Stupak and Doyle are Democrats—they had pledged to hold one another to a life lived by the principles of Jesus, and they considered the Tuesday supper gatherings at C Street an inviolable ritual.

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See also, “The Family of Sharlet.” His new book ships next week: C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy

Sanford, Ensign, and other regulars receive guidance from the invisible fundamentalist group known as the Family

By Jeff Sharlet

Jul. 21, 2009 |

I can’t say I was impressed when I met Sen. John Ensign at the C Street House, the secretive religious enclave on Capitol Hill thrust into the news by its links to three political sex scandals, those of Gov. Mark Sanford; former Rep. Chip Pickering, R-Miss., who allegedly rendezvoused at the C Street House with his mistress, an executive in the industry for which he then became a lobbyist; and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev. Although Sanford declared today that his scandal will actually turn out to be good for the people of South Carolina because he’s now more firmly in God’s control, the once-favored GOP presidential prospect will finish out his term and fade away. And Ensign’s residence at the C Street House during his own extramarital affair now threatens to end a career that he and other Republicans hoped would lead him to the White House.

When I met Ensign, he was just back from a run, sweaty and bouncing in place, boasting about the time he’d clocked and teasing a young woman from his office. She seemed annoyed that the senator wouldn’t get himself into a shower and back on the job. When I wrote about Sen. Ensign in my book about the evangelical political organization that runs the C Street House, “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,” I described him as a “conservative casino heir elected to the Senate from Nevada, a brightly tanned, hapless figure who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling-fortune name.”

Now, of course, I know I was wrong: John Ensign is a brightly tanned, hapless figure who used his Family connections to cover up the fruits of his flirtations, to make moral decisions for him, and to do his dirty work when his secret romance sputtered. Doug Hampton, the friend and former aide whom Ensign cuckolded, tells us that it was Family leader David Coe, along with Coe’s brother Tim and Family “brother” Sen. Tom Coburn, who delivered the pink slip when it was time to put Cynthia Hampton out of Ensign’s reach.

Full story

Parts 1 to 4

via The Alex Jones Channel

Also see:

• “Secrets of C Street” by Jeff Sharlet (Jul 26, 2009)
• “D.C.’s ‘invisible army’ for Christ” (Jul 24, 2009)
• “The Family At C Street” by JRed (Jul 23, 2009)
• “Showing Faith in Discretion” by The Los Angeles Times (Sep 27, 2002) [mentioned by Sharlet, in his interview, as being particularly thorough]

Part 1

Part 2

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Theocratic Rule In America! “The Family”, Making It Happen

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All in ‘The Family’ – Is this politics or a cult?

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The Christian Mafia, Ensign, and Coburn

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“The Family” and its use of cells, explained

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Jeff Sharlet - Is there a secret society of Christian crazies and is Mark Sanford a member?