Many of us have our reasons for walking away from the two-party duopoly and not supporting the Democratic Party's anointed successor. These reasons often include her belligerent foreign policy, her neoliberal economic beliefs, her support for offshoring American jobs, her past and present support for militarized police and a draconian criminal justice system, the pay-to-play corruption that has always surrounded both her and her husband, the underhanded tactics she and her establishment backers used to derail an actual social democratic reformer, as well as her untrustworthiness in general. But there's one thing that (much to her relief, I'm sure) has barely been mentioned this cycle--many of the pieces I've linked to below are from the 2007-2008 primaries, and the Harper's article I quote isn't online anymore, but has been archived elsewhere. Yet I still find it surprising that this has passed largely unnoted this year.

I'm talking about the fact that Hillary Clinton used to belong to a secretive Washington religious cult that literally worships power.

And no, I'm not making that up.

The "cult" I'm talking about is called The Family (also known as The Fellowship.) The Family/Fellowship is essentially a group of extremely powerful people who believe they attained their power because they were chosen by God. It consists mostly of men, many Senators and Representatives, some Defense bigwigs, lots of Republicans, some conservative and neoconservative Democrats, and other extremely powerful people:

Regular prayer groups have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries. The Family maintains a closely guarded database of its associates, but it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities.

Or as Mother Jones put it in 2007:

The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God's plan. Clinton declined our requests for an interview about her faith, but in Living History, she describes her first encounter with Fellowship leader Doug Coe at a 1993 lunch with her prayer cell at the Cedars, the Fellowship's majestic estate on the Potomac. Coe, she writes, "is a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God." The Fellowship's ideas are essentially a blend of Calvinism and Norman Vincent Peale, the 1960s preacher of positive thinking. It's a cheery faith in the "elect" chosen by a single voter—God—and a devotion to Romans 13:1: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers....The powers that be are ordained of God." Or, as Coe has put it, "we work with power where we can, build new power where we can't."

At this point, you're probably either wondering how a shadowy religious cult that caters exclusively to the powerful came to be, or else you're wondering why Washington doesn't have more of them. I can only nod my head in agreement at the second question, but thanks in part to the fact that the Family wasn't always as secretive as it is now, we know quite a bit about its origins.

The group was founded in Seattle in 1935, by a Norwegian immigrant named Abraham Vereide. God came to Vereide in a vision and told him where Christianity had gone wrong: it was too preoccupied with feeding the hungry and clothing the poor, when what it really needed to be doing was evangelizing to the already powerful. Because after all, they're in a much better position to remake the world in God's image than some beggar, n'est-ce pas?

From AlterNet in 2008:

Besides, in Seattle in the 1930s, union agitators were making a play for the down-and-out. Christianity promised rewards in the hereafter, but workers in the Pacific Northwest were starting to wonder why they had to wait so long. Instead of competing for market share with the Industrial Workers of the World, Vereide sought a different niche. His new plan was to target men who were already powerful and turn them to God -- and wouldn't you know it, God hated unions, too.

What's the old saw about how if God hates all the same people you hate, that's a sure sign you've created Him in your image and not the other way around? Yeah, I don't think Abraham Vereide had heard that one, either. Because he took his union-busting road show first to Chicago and then to the other Washington--Washington, DC--where the connections he made and his attempts to influence policy soon bore fruit:

Through personal relationships and small group encounters, Vereide united captains of industry and politicians as a Biblical bulwark against the increasing power of organized labor. In the late 1940s, the Family helped roll back key pro-labor provisions of the New Deal. Later, the Family did its part for the Cold War by cultivating anti-communist strongmen around the world, including repressive leaders like Suharto of Indonesia and Jonas Savimbi of Angola.

Here's a bit more on their Good Works:

During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa’s postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand “Communists” killed marks him as one of the century’s most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise.

I swear there was some book that said "Ye shall know them by their fruits." And that in Washington people had a saying that goes something like "Personnel is policy." But I guess I must just hate Jesus or something.

So far I've been referring to 'The Family' as if it were one group, but in truth, it is many small, loosely-connected groups that refer to themselves as "cells." (A term whose baggage they seem to embrace.) These cells are entirely sex-segregated. One such cell--which has included various elected officials such as Senator John Ensign--lives in a well-maintained red-brick townhouse on C Street. And I guess because it's cheaper than hiring a gardener, there are also cells for people who aren't powerful yet but aspire to be someday. The young men--"brothers," as they call themselves--live in a house in Arlington dubbed Ivanwald and maintain the C Street house as well as The Cedars, the Family's mansion overlooking the Potomac, cleaning the toilets and mowing the lawn. The young women live nearby in a home called Potomac Point. They do the cooking and serving for the various VIPs for whom a stop at The Cedars is a crucial part of any trip to Washington. In 2002, the writer Jeff Sharlet was allowed to stay at Ivanwald for a time, and he described what life was like for these women:

They wore red lipstick and long skirts (makeup and “feminine” attire were required) and had, after several months of cleaning and serving in The Cedars while the brothers worked outside, become quite unimpressed by the high-powered clientele. “Girls don’t sit in on the breakfasts,” one of them told me, though she said that none of them minded because it was “just politics.”

So how did Hillary Clinton become involved with such a dictator-loving, communist-hating, union-busting, gender-role-enforcing power clique such as the Family?

Entirely of her own accord, naturally:

When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group. For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian "cell" whose members included Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker; Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp; Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke, a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat.

And:

Throughout her time at the White House, Clinton writes in Living History, she took solace from "daily scriptures" sent to her by her Fellowship prayer cell, along with Coe's assurances that she was right where God wanted her.

And finally:

These days, Clinton has graduated from the political wives' group into what may be Coe's most elite cell, the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast. Though weighted Republican, the breakfast—regularly attended by about 40 members—is a bipartisan opportunity for politicians to burnish their reputations, giving Clinton the chance to profess her faith with men such as Brownback as well as the twin terrors of Oklahoma, James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, and, until recently, former Senator George Allen (R-Va.). Democrats in the group include Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor, who told us that the separation of church and state has gone too far; Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) is also a regular.

The presence of Joe Lieberman is why I say that this group worships power, not Christ. The Jesus thing is fungible. But it is the love of power--the quest for it, the often deadly use of it, and the belief that it was divinely granted to them and them alone--that brings these individuals together in their secret meetings. Seriously, they wax rhapsodically about the brutal ways power was wielded by the likes of Genghis Khan and even Adolf Hitler.

Not that the belief that God has made you His own personal John Galt doesn't have some very tangible real world benefits. Did you ever notice how Washington politicians in general--and the Clintons in particular--seem to believe that there is one set of rules for them and another for everyone else? That they get rewarded for things most of us would be arrested for? Well at least when it comes to the Family, there might be something to that. During his time at Ivanwald, Jeff Sharlet observed an exchange between David Coe (the Family's heir apparent and the son of the man whom Hillary called "a genuinely loving spiritual mentor") and a few of the brothers: