Stephen Crittenden: Welcome to the program.

Pastor Eli : We have a sinner with us here who wishes for salvation. Daniel, are you a sinner?

Daniel: Yes.

Pastor Eli : The Lord can't hear you, Daniel. Say it to him. Go ahead, and speak to him, it's all right.

Daniel: Yes.

Pastor Eli : Down on your knees, and say it.

Daniel: What do you want me to say?

Pastor Eli : Daniel, you've come here and you've brought good and wealth, but you have also brought your bad habits as a backslider. You've lusted after women and you have abandoned your child. Your child that you raised, you've abandoned all because he was sick and you have sinned. So say it now. 'I am a sinner'.

Daniel: I am a sinner.

Pastor Eli : Say it louder, 'I am a sinner'.

Daniel: I'm a sinner.

Pastor Eli : Louder, Daniel, 'I am a sinner'.

Daniel: I am a sinner.

Stephen Crittenden: A dramatic moment from the movie 'There will be Blood' based on a novel by Upton Sinclair, which won an Oscar last year for the glowering Daniel Day Lewis.

If you've seen the movie you'll know it's an allegory depicting the clash between two very different sides of American society, the religious and the capitalist. If they seem to mix all too comfortably together these days, 'There Will Be Blood' is a reminder that it wasn't always so.

Today's program is really the story of how those two sides came together. It's the story of a shadowy religious organisation known as The Fellowship, or The Family, founded in the 1930s by a Norwegian immigrant to the United States named Abraham Vereide. He believed that the best way to change the world was to minister to business and political leaders, powerful men like Henry Ford, who weren't much interested in the churches.

A bit like Protestant version of Opus Dei, the Fellowship is basically theocratic in impulse and deeply hostile to democracy, and over decades it has managed to penetrate to the very centre of American political power by preaching a gospel of American power. In the 1950s the Fellowship established the National Prayer Breakfast, and now every week in Washington, business leaders and politicians from all sides sit down to read the Bible and pray together.

The current leader of the Family is the reclusive Doug Coe. Described by Hillary Clinton as 'A genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God', as we'll hear, he's also an admirer of Hitler, Lenin and Mao.

Jeff Sharlet is a contributing editor for Harper's and Rolling Stone, an association research scholar in the Centre for Religion and Media at New York University, and he's the author of an new book about the Fellowship entitled 'The Family: Politics, Power and Fundamentalism's Shadow Elite'. It's based on research he did on documents kept at the Billy Graham Centre Archives, and it's one of the most absorbing books I've read all year.

Jeff Sharlet says that when we think of American Christian fundamentalism, we tend to think of the populist, Bible-thumping TV evangelists. But the Fellowship is about a different kind of fundamentalism, elite fundamentalism. More upper class, more sophisticated, it doesn't need the media, doing its work behind the scenes.

Jeff Sharlet: Elite fundamentalism and especially the elite fundamentals in The Family, is not so much interested in holding mass rallies, or saving everybody's souls, rather it grows out of this belief that took hold in the 1930s that God works through a few specially chosen individuals. They call them key men, the sort of anointed. And there's the real concerns, well, not social issues but economic, something that they came to call 'Biblical capitalism', a sort of laissez-fair capitalism, and especially foreign affairs, and I think that comes as a surprise to a lot of folks here in the United States, but also overseas, but they're the kind of Christian fundamentalism in America that has always taken as its main concern the role of American power in the world, and the expansion of that kind of power.

Stephen Crittenden: Now the book is basically about a shadowy organisation called The Family, or The Fellowship that was founded by a guy called Abraham Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant to the United States in the 1930s. Tell us about him and the foundation of this organisation.

Jeff Sharlet: Vereide is a fascinating character. This guy who comes to America from Norway, because he sees America's the land of the Bible unchained. Even from a boy he's given to what he thinks are prophetic visions. He believes that God comes to him and talks to him in very literal words. He comes to America and he makes quite a name for himself, becomes a preacher and starts preaching to guys like Henry Ford and titans of the steel industry and so on, and then has this Epiphany, this realisation in the middle of our Great Depression in the 1930s. He decides that the Great Depression is actually a punishment from God for disobeying God's law, and how are we disobeying God's law? Well it's because we are trying to regulate the economy, we are trying to take matters into our own hands. Well we just have to completely trust God, and those he chooses, men like Henry Ford and the CEO of US Steel and so on.

Stephen Crittenden: Yes, it's a muscular Christianity. You'd almost say he had a ministry to bring that industrial class back into religion.

Jeff Sharlet: Absolutely. This must be a Christianity on steroids. They were building on this tradition of this kind of macho Christ, and taking it to these businessmen who didn't really care about church or the Bible or anything like that. What they cared about was organised labour, and in fact particularly in Australia, men and Harry Bridges was a major, major labour leader here in the United States. And they just saw him the Devil Incarnate, and began to organise against him. And that's what this group has become - and are to this day. They still see God's interests as those of the absolutely unregulated free markets - a very sort of macho, muscular Christianity that tends to serve the interests of those involved.

Stephen Crittenden: As I was reading the book, I was constantly reminded of the Catholic elite fundamentalist organisation, Opus Dei, which was founded just a couple of years before The Family, and clearly had a political program. There seem to be very interesting similarities between them.

Jeff Sharlet: There are really striking similarities between Opus Dei and The Family, they were actually both founded at this moment, when conservative Catholics in the case of Opus Dei, and conservative Protestants in the case of The Family, conclude that democracy is done, that it's spent, that it can't compete with these incredibly vigorous forces of communism and fascism. And there's a mistaken idea that the Opus Dei, and also The Family, wanted to be just fascist. No, they didn't want to be fascist, they saw a lot to admire in fascism, but they wanted to create their own religious way, where fascism sort of idolised the character like Hitler and Mussolini, they said No, we want that same kind of cult of personality, that same kind of muscular politics and religion, but we want it to be centred around Jesus. Well of course who's Jesus? And that's when you run into the real religious horror story of this book, which is that they read the same Bible that most of the rest of us do, but they take a very different message, one that's not about mercy or justice or love or forgiveness, but rather is about power. And very literally, when I look through The Family's papers, 600 boxes of documents, that's what they saw in the New Testament as the bottom line, was this message of power, and it's striking I think, and unsettling to even most conservative Christians.

Stephen Crittenden: So much to talk about in what you've just said to unpack. Let's talk about the theological question about Jesus first. You speak about a theology which you say is totally malleable, and you talk about a theology of Jesus plus nothing. It's almost like a home-grown American religion that purports to be about Jesus, purports to be Christian, but it's had all the content drained out of it.

Jeff Sharlet: Yes, that's really exactly it. I begin the book, and I begin the story with a month I spent living in one of The Family's houses where they sort of groom younger men for leadership by signing you up for mentoring with a Congressman and so on. And I remember being struck at the time when a US Senate Aide was telling us about former Vice-President, Dan Quayle, who had volunteered to lead a Bible Study for political men, for The Family, but he needed some help, he needed someone to come over and give him just a quick crash course, 'Because', he said, 'well, he hadn't actually ever read the Bible.' So he was quite certain he knew what the Bible said, he was quite certain it supported his political program. He felt confident in scolding others for not living up to the Bible, but he had never actually read the Bible. And that's what you really see when you look at this elite fundamentalism. It's a religion of the status quo, it's a religion of things as they are. It's not the sort of science fiction vision of what the world will look like when the fundamentalists have taken over. These guys are very content with the world as it is, and they top up the Bible as something that is supporting themselves and power. Doug Coe, the leader of the group says 'We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't.' And that's a very status quo religion.

Stephen Crittenden: The next big question is to unpack where the religious program ends and the political program begins.

Jeff Sharlet: You know, I like to think of it as sort of a mobia Strip, you know, that popular optical illusion of a ribbon that's sort of twisting, and you can never figure out which side you're on. There is no clear line where the religion ends and the politics begin. They don't draw the distinction. I'll give you an example of the project they did recently, something called The Silk Road Act. These is a piece of American legislation passed in 1999 by our Senator Sam Brownback in a Congressman Joe Pitts, both members of The Family. The Silk Road Act directed US funds to the dictatorships of the Central Asian region, and as Senator Brownback explained to me, his role was to essentially buy these countries off, to open them up to free markets by giving them a lot of money, a sort of an odd concept of free markets. And the reason he wanted to do that is Well we have free markets where capitalism goes the gospel follows. And so there you have economics, you have politics, and you have religion, and they're all caught in this loop.

Stephen Crittenden: Jeff, let's go back to the early history of The Family and look in more detail at its political program during the 1930s and '40s which seems to focus primarily on destroying trade unionism in the United States, and in that, they completely succeeded.

Jeff Sharlet: Yes, they really did. I mean I think that again takes me back to this question, people always ask what the fundamentalists want to do? I think the more relevant question is what have fundamentalists done. And you look in the United States and say Why do we alone in the developed world, not have a serious organised labour movement? Our organised labour movement is nowhere near as powerful and influential as yours in Australia. I think we really have to look to groups like The Family and elite fundamentalism. They came into being to opposed organised labour, worked steadily at that, and counted as one of their first big victories a law that was passed here in 1947 which essentially rolled back many of the rights to organise and to form unions, that had been won under Franklin Roosevelt. They counted that as their first victory, and then they just sort of went forward from there and played this role of driving the centre to the right, they were very involved in the Cold War, very involved in the economics of globalisation. These are their projects, but they see them as religious ends.

Stephen Crittenden: You mention that in these years The Family was attracted by Fascist and even Nazi ideas, and you say that in the immediate aftermath of World War II, they were involved in rehabilitating key Nazi industrialists and bankers, helping them out or even bringing them to the United States.

Jeff Sharlet: That was their first big step overseas. That's when they became international during World War II. Abraham Vereide, the founder, actually travelled to the allied prisons in Germany where we were holding the prisoners of war, with a mandate from the United States State Department to go among these Nazis and sort of interview them and decide which ones could be used for rebuilding Germany. And brought in quite a few scary characters, perhaps the most notable of whom was Hermann Josef Abs who after Vereide and The Family had vouched for him, rose to become the chief financial wizard behind West Germany's rise, enjoyed a very successful career into the 1970s until the Simon Wiesenthal Centre discovered that before he had been known as Germany's banker, he'd been known as Hitler's banker, that he had helped spirit uncounted sums of money off to the Nazis who escaped to Latin America. He was a bad guy, he was driven out of politics. But that was the role that The Family was playing, was whitewashing these guys and getting these guys back into power because they wanted them for the Cold War.

Stephen Crittenden: Jeff, I guess the most public face of The Family, or The Fellowship, in the last 30, 40, 50 years, has been the fact that it created the National Prayer Breakfast, and you tell the story of how President Eisenhower really officiates at the first National Prayer Breakfast a bit reluctantly. He's a bit like a John McCain figure, not very comfortable with overt displays of religion.

Jeff Sharlet: Yes, exactly. 1953 they inaugurated the National Prayer Breakfast which has been held in Washington ever since. The United States President always attends, Congress attends, and they set these up around the world. You even have one there in Australia. And they've been sort of very deliberately banal events, very bland, but they refer to within the group and in their documents as recruiting devices to identify and bring people into closer involvement. And The Family had wanted to do this for many years but the previous US Presidents wouldn't do it. Eisenhower didn't want to do it, he said it's 'a violation of separation of Church and State which is a fundamental part of our constitution here'. But Billy Graham and a Senator who was involved in The Family, Frank Carlson, had organised an evangelical Christian vote for him, and they wanted payback, so Eisenhower went, concerned that this was going to become a tradition, and indeed it did, and now it doesn't matter who's elected, here in November, whether it's McCain or Obama come February they're going to the National Prayer Breakfast, and what that does is it gives The Family that kind of power and that draw. It doesn't mean that every President signs off on their beliefs, but they're able to go around and say 'Look at this, we're able to bring the President of the United States to one of our events, don't you want to be associated with that?'

Stephen Crittenden: And is the National Prayer Breakfast then the key instrument of The Family's power?

Jeff Sharlet: I think the key instrument is this really incredible network of politicians that they built up over the years. I mean you look back across American history and you find guys like Chief Justice William Renquist who's one of the most influential conservative Chief Justices of our Supreme Court. The old legendary Dixie-crat named Strom Thurman, was a long-time right-winger. Even now I can give you a long list of American politicians and there have been Australian politicians involved as well, and folks around the world, they're able to build this network so that if you want to get something done, it's helpful to work through The Family.

Stephen Crittenden: You've got to tell us who the Australians are.

Jeff Sharlet: Well the Australians are going back in history. The first guy to get involved was man named Norman Makin who was actually not considered a right-winger, he was a long-time Ambassador to the United States, but was an early Cold warrior and saw The Family as a useful vehicle for working with the Conservative side of American politics during the Cold War. More recently, I would just bump into - in the documents -minor Australian politicians, Bruce Baird, a fellow named Ross Cameron, and I suppose Peter Costello has been involved, and I don't know how involved and I just, that's not something I followed up on.

Woman: Who is Doug Coe? Here he is on videotapes obtained exclusively by NBC News, with his account of atrocities under Chairman Mao.

Doug Coe: I've seen pictures of the young men in the Red Guard, they would bring in this young man's mother, he would take an axe and cut her head off. They have to put the purposes of the Red Guard ahead of their father, mother, brother, sister, and their own life. That was a covenant, a pledge. That's what Jesus said.

Woman: In his preaching he repeatedly urges a personal commitment to Jesus Christ, a commitment Coe compares to the blind devotion Hitler demanded.

Stephen Crittenden: NBC News reporting on the reclusive leader of The Family, Pastor Doug Coe. Jeff, you say that The Family has penetrated American politics so thoroughly that even someone like Hillary Clinton has to be part of these prayer breakfasts. It doesn't really matter what side of politics you're on, The Family isn't interested in that.

Jeff Sharlet: Yes, I write in the book about Hillary Clinton's involvement which is actually fairly long-standing. She's upfront about it in her autobiography, 'Living History'. She writes in 1993 of coming to Washington and having a segregated women's prayer group organised for her of the wives of very conservative political brokers, and this was not just prayer business. Clearly politics. NBC one of our network news stations here did a little segment on that aspect of the book and they noted that both John McCain and Barak Obama had also attended the weekly Senate prayer breakfasts, there's the Annual National Breakfast and then there's a weekly breakfast also run by The Family. And what that really shows is not that John McCain or Barak Obama are part of it. It shows that it's become this almost necessary piety pit stop, that to run for national office in the United States, you have to show your religiosity, which is forbidden by our Constitution. We say there's no religious test, anyone's allowed to run. But it's become this de facto test, and what that does is it also opens the door for a kind of conservative politics that people don't notice. Here we have something called faith-based initiatives, introduced by President Bush, and what this amounted to was a massive privatisation of government resources, turning over social welfare to religious organizations; changing the law so those religious organisations are free to discriminate against who they want, and one of the most dismaying things I think about our campaign right now is that both John McCain and Barak Obama have pledged to not just continue this program, but to expand it. And the reason is, they have to do that because The Family, populist fundamentalism, and elite fundamentalism working together have so set the terms of religiosity in American life, that we don't have a whole lot of room for genuine religious discussions, genuine discussion of religious ideas, which are always welcome. We have only room for these kinds of public proclamations of piety.

Stephen Crittenden: You mentioned the Reverend Billy Graham earlier. He's a very interesting character in this story, he only appears once or twice, but he's obviously pivotal at the beginning of setting up the National Prayer Breakfast, as you mentioned. He shoehorns President Eisenhower into sort of turning up and playing along. What is Billy Graham's role in all of this? He always strikes me as a much more complex and ambiguous character than he sometimes seems on the surface.

Jeff Sharlet: He really is. He really is a complicated character, which is interesting, because he was not a complicated man, but I'm sorry, 'was not', put it in the past tense. Still alive, still with us, but mostly his public career is over. He was a simple man who found himself at the nexus of a lot of power, and was a little bit proud of that. You know, I mean I was able to put together the account of his role in the National Prayer Breakfast, not just through these documents which are in the archives, but through his own biography in which he really comes right out and boasts about bullying President Eisenhower into this role. He was a guy who came from a very right-wing fundamentalist place, a very anti-Semitic place which he never really quite overcome, and moved into the mainstream of American life and was instrumental for instance, in giving religious cover to President Nixon. And also played this very important role for The Family.

Stephen Crittenden: And how knowingly did he do that? I mean in your view, was he aware, clearly aware of the agenda of The Family and was he in fact supporting, part of, that agenda?

Jeff Sharlet: Oh, certainly, yes. I mean The Family and the Billy Graham Crusade worked together very closely, and one of the things that Billy Graham Crusade could do for The Family and The Family could do for them, was that they could help them win access to foreign governments. Here's two groups that are very interested in going around the world and talking to elite and powerful people around the world, and they each have their networks. And throughout the documents, (the documents are stored at the Billy Graham Centre Archives, I mean that gives you sort of a sense of the intimacy of these two movements) you find examples of Billy Graham helping The Family out with introductions to this leader, and the Family helping the Billy Graham Crusade out with introductions to leaders, say, in South East Asia where they were very strong. So they're working together not as one, but on parallel tracks. No-one ever looks at Billy Graham's economics. One of the things I found in the archives is an early film that he made called 'Oil Town USA', in which Billy Graham comes right out and says, 'Look, the interest of the oil companies are the exact same as the interests of America, and those are God's interests.' He couldn't put it any plainer than that.

Stephen Crittenden: That's a fairly succinct statement of The Family's actual theology isn't it?

Jeff Sharlet: It really is. You know, you see for instance the relationship to Indonesia which is something I write a lot about in the book, and Soeharto who they very early on identified as a great man of God. They were sending delegations of Congressmen over to meet him early on in his dictatorship, they were instrumental, those politicians were instrumental on arranging for massive American military aid which they kept right up to the invasion of East Timor and all the killing in Indonesia. And they were also sending delegations of oil executives. I found one letter from a prominent American oil executive who came back and wrote up a memo for the Senators who had sent him, saying how he had met Soeharto and he had talked to him about Jesus, and it was the most spiritual hour he'd ever had.

Stephen Crittenden: Now this is interesting. You mention a number of dictators stretching back over the past 50 years, Papa Doc Duvalier, General Park of Korea, a number of Brazilian dictators, The Family latches on to these characters and signs them up for Bible Study groups. One of the most recent is President Museveni of Uganda, who's their man in Africa.

Jeff Sharlet: Yes, exactly, and in fact they latched on to Museveni after Siad Barre the former dictator of Somalia died, and that was a relationship they'd forged through Senator Chuck Grassley, the conservative Republican from Iowa and still in office in the United States, and he went to see Siad Barre who was Muslim, and he said, 'Look, I want to talk to you', Barre had been a Soviet client and now he was looking to switch sides. He said, 'I want to talk to you, I can arrange meetings for you with the Pentagon, but first we need to talk about Jesus, we need to pray.' And these dictators were no dummies, they understood that the price was being exacted, which was an ideological one, a theological one, and guys like Soeharto, of course Muslim as well, were more than happy to pray to Jesus in exchange for this massive military aid. Museveni is really only the latest of these characters, who, it's pretty transparent the relationship. I write in the book about Museveni makes friends with a major family businessman, a guy named Dennis Bakke, who was at the time the CEO of AES, one of the largest energy corporations in the world, at a mid-'90s National Prayer Breakfast, and then gives Bakke a new big contract for a $500-million hydroelectric dam, which Uganda doesn't need. Well everybody's making money, they all think they're doing God's work, and they're being supported effectively by the American government, which is sort of subsidizing this kind of thing.

Stephen Crittenden: Just going back to Uganda, one public policy outcome of this connection with President Museveni is that through him, they were able to export a Christian fundamentalist abstinence program into Uganda's policy about how to deal with AIDS. In the 1990s Uganda was being held up for its ABC policy, Abstinence, Be faithful, use a Condom. Ten years later, the results are very poor.

Jeff Sharlet: It's one of the most dismaying tragedies in the fight against AIDS. Uganda was a country that had really turned around. It had a high AIDS rate, and through using this program had turned it around, had actually successfully rolled back the AIDS rate. But because it became so enmeshed with the American Christian Right, and the American Christian Right is part of President Bush's AIDS program, was able to put pressure on these countries to drop the 'C' from the ABC. So they still want Abstinence, they believe in abstinence, but they don't want Condoms. And indeed Uganda backed very sharply away from condoms, and as predictably as any scientist could have told you, the AIDS rate skyrocketed, and people are dying again. And the most horrifying part about that, for some of these people, that's not a problem. I spoke to Senator Sam Brownback about this, who has worked actually with Senator Clinton to change the laws governing US foreign aid to make it so that we can't give money to any organisation that works with prostitutes. The example Brownback's Chief Legislative Director gave me, he said he would rather a Thai prostitute die of AIDS than have her soul imperilled by using a condom. And it's just an absolutely horrifying vision of what the Gospel says.

Stephen Crittenden: To what extent is The Family a structured, self-conscious organisation with a leadership, membership and rules? And to what extent has it just become this sort of amorphous, sticky cloud that just saturates everything, and almost no longer has a structure?

Jeff Sharlet: Yes. I mean it's one of these sort of interesting things where The Family is somewhat amorphous but never quite as amorphous as they would like you to believe. Doug Coe, the leader of the group, says in one of his sermons, 'The Family functions invisibly like the Mafia' (I'm quoting him here; this is a sermon you can actually hear online). 'They keep their organisation invisible. Everything visible is transitory, everything invisible is permanent and last forever. The more you can make your organisation invisible, the more influence it will have.' And that explains a lot of The Family's view of secrecy, and why it doesn't seem to have an organisation in one. The Los Angeles Times here in the United States, or NBC News went to them and said, 'You know, is there an organisation here?' And they said in both cases, 'No, it's just a group of friends, just a group of friends hanging out.' But the tax documents tell another tale; not too many groups of friends have corporate structures through which millions of dollars are moving every year, and not too many groups of friends have dumped 600 boxes of documents in the Billy Graham Centre Archives, which I think they assume nobody would ever look at, and when you did, discovered they'd been keeping very close membership rolls for decades, there's a very structured hierarchical organisation, again they're not going to come out and thump their Bibles and pound the pulpits, they're not even going to identify themselves as an organisation, but it's there, it's there in the documents, it's there in their tax records.

You know, I always say that actually I had no problem with the populist fundamentalists in the United States who go out in the public and they get involved in campaigns and they make their case in public. Then you can agree with it or disagree with it. That's democracy at work. What these guys do is the opposite of democracy and deliberately so. From the very beginning they've opposed democracy, they call it 'the din of the vox populii', 'the racket of the voice of the people', and they say they want to get away from it, they want to transcend democracy.

Stephen Crittenden: Jeff, an amazing conversation. Thank you very much for being on the program.

Jeff Sharlet: Thank you, Stephen, thanks for having me.

Stephen Crittenden: Jeff Sharlet, and his book 'The Family', is published in Australia by University of Queensland Press.

Well that's all this week. Before we go a brief follow-up to last week's story on the conflict at St Mary's Catholic parish, South Brisbane. Late last week the parish priest wrote to Archbishop Battersby, indicating that priests celebrating mass on Sunday would vest for mass and recite the Eucharistic prayers alone. The Archbishop thanked him for that, and that appears to be what happened. So some improvement there in relations with the Archdiocese.

Goodbye now from Stephen Crittenden on ABC Radio National.