[image, right: Ben Carson speaks at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast, hosted by The Fellowship; along with Billy Graham, Carson may be the only other person twice tapped to keynote the event.]
"[It] functions invisibly like the mafia... They keep their organization invisible. Everything visible is transitory. Everything invisible is permanent and lasts forever. The more you can make your organization invisible, the more influence it will have." - Longtime Fellowship head Doug Coe, speaking in 1989
While Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson panders to the base with factually dubious dog whistle
claims that reference conspiracy theories held by the hard evangelical right (and also promotes those conspiracy theories
quite directly), he's also got close ties to the superstructure of American elite conservative evangelicalism - as represented by the shadowy Washington D.C.-based network known as
"The Fellowship" which boasts global influence, whose members are prone to refer to themselves as a "Christian Mafia", and whose leadership advocates that Christians should emulate the fanatic dedication shown by the followers of Hitler, Lenin, and Mao.
Evangelical sociologist (and Fellowship member) D. Michael Lindsay, in a 2006 academic paper based on hundreds of interviews with leaders associated with The Fellowship, explained,
"Dozens of informants referred to the Fellowship as that 'Christian mafia that puts on the National Prayer Breakfast.' The term originates from Fellowship insiders themselves."
While longtime Fellowship leader Douglas Coe has claimed that young Chinese communists who decapitated their own parents for the cause learned such dedication to communism from the Bible, and the words of Jesus, Fellowship leader Rick Warren has
repeatedly called upon evangelical Christians to be as dedicated as the Hitler Youth.
Ben Carson referenced his relationship with The Fellowship in his 2014 book "One Nation: What We Can All Do To Save America's Future", in which the pious neurosurgeon recounted being asked in 2012 to give a repeat performance (a reprise of Carson's 1997 keynote) at The Fellowship's signature event, the National Prayer Breakfast:
"Stunned by the request, I asked if anyone had ever done it twice and I was informed that only one person fit into that category and that was Billy Graham. I prayed about it and felt that there was a reason why I was being asked for a repeat performance. I talked by telephone and in person with members of the National Prayer Breakfast staff and they informed me that many senators thought that I was the right person not only to encourage people but also to help bring a sense of unity back to our nation's capital. I was honored to accept the challenge and immediately begin praying for the necessary wisdom and words to gently address the spiritual, financial, and moral decline of America, a difficult task in the highly partisan atmosphere that exists in Washington, DC, today."
A Sense of Unity
How did Carson promote "unity" from that very prominent pulpit ? In early 2013, Carson's speech in February at the National Prayer Breakfast, delivered from a podium only a few feet from a scowling President Obama, set hard right media abuzz by attacking Barack Obama's health care reform effort :
First inveighing against "moral decay" that, he claimed, had brought down entire nations, Carson then proposed a flat tax system based on the biblical tithe and proceeded to float his own scheme for a privatized alternative to Obamacare - by paying for medical care with private, non-taxable health savings accounts for all citizens, a system which, claimed the renowned neurosurgeon, would prevent talk of "death panels".
It's likely Obama was expecting such a rude swipe from The Fellowship - at the 2012 National Prayer Breakfast, Fellowship member Eric Metaxas, who spoke immediately before President Obama and seemed to have an uncanny sense of what Obama would say during his address at the event - including the President's use of bible verses in Obama's address that followed Metaxas' speech, launched a blistering attack on "phony religiosity" and noted, of Jesus,
"When he was tempted in the desert, who was the one throwing Bible verses at him? Satan. That is a perfect picture of dead religion. Using the words of God to do the opposite of what God does. It’s grotesque when you think about it. It’s demonic.
After dropping the foreshadowing suggestion that President Obama might be in the same league as Satan, Metaxas went on to accuse those Christians (including Obama) who accept legalized abortion of being as morally corrupt as supporters of the institution of slavery or Germans who backed Hitler.
Only a few months later, in July 2012, Metaxas – a global warming denialist [along with Fellowship operative Senator James Inhofe] and heir-apparent to the global Prison Fellowship ministry empire of the late Watergate felon-turned prison evangelist Charles Colson – suggested, in a speech before a hard-right Catholic audience in Washington, D.C., that the Obama Administration’s health care reform effort might represent a totalitarian threat akin to that faced by German Christians such as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer during the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. Warned Metaxas,
"If we don’t really use all our bullets now, we will have no fight five years from now. It’ll be over. This it. We’ve got to die on this hill."
Back in late 2009, a number of Fellowship members (including former U.S. Senators Sam Brownback and Jim DeMint - who went on to head the Heritage Foundation) had joined with leaders of the radical New Apostolic Reformation movement in a Family Research Council hosted
"Prayercast" rally against Obamacare.
Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Uganda
The Fellowship came under increased media scrutiny in 2007 with the publication of journalist Jeff Sharlet's book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism At The Heart of American Power. That same year, an NBC special report covered disturbing doctrines promoted by longtime Fellowship head Doug Coe.
"There's a little-known organization in Washington with a worldwide reach and enormous and sometimes surprising political connections," announced NBC news anchor Brian Williams, introducing Andrea Mitchell's 2007 NBC report on the secretive conservative evangelical network know as The Fellowship (or "The Family".)
The NBC report showcased footage from a 1989 talk Doug Coe gave near Colorado Springs, in which Coe explained,
"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."
While Jeff Sharlet was writing his book on The Fellowship, I provided him with material concerning the group's relationship to the 1990s-era "Third Way" Democratic Leadership Council and The Fellowship's involvement in the 1996 'welfare reform' bill that began the process of gutting America's welfare system.
Looking into The Fellowship, I found a startling audio cache of sermons Doug Coe had given at the hulking Colorado Glen Eyrie castle headquarters of an evangelical group called The Navigators - which targets the U.S. military but also has played a central role in the religious right's evolving master plan (unveiled at The Gathering in 1997) for defeating the LGBT rights movement: a plan that has in the United States has failed but which overseas is being implemented, in countries from Russia to Uganda to Honduras, to deadly effect.
Repeatedly in the sermons, over and over and over again, Coe stressed the power of small bands of individuals, bound together by blood oaths, to change the world. In one sermon, Coe crisply sums up,
"Jesus said, 'If any man comes to me and does not hate his father, mother, brother, sister, and his own life' - The Communists demand that. The Mafia demands that. The Vietcong demanded that. I’ve seen pictures of the Red Guard, young men, cutting the heads of their own mothers and fathers off, for the cause. They can do that. They got it right out of the New Testament, from Jesus."
In his 2006 academic paper, published in
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, D. Michael Lindsay explains,
"According to several associates, Coe is a student of various social movements, including the Nazis and the Mafia. On several occasions, Coe would discuss how their tight, cohesive bonds that were formed in non-public settings produced significant social movements. In particular, Coe appreciates the Mafia’s high regard for the effect two or three families who work together can have. One former Fellowship insider noticed another similarity:
"if you do join the mafia and become part of their protected area, then you have access to power . . . you have ways to connect with people. If you don’t join . . . you’re left out and you’re unprotected. Many people within Washington sort of feel that way. Doug [Coe] kind of wields that much power."
Lindsay's research into The Fellowship culminated in the publication of his 2007 book
Faith In The Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite - a book both supported by The Fellowship and which had its unofficial but true launch in 2007 at the annual meeting of The Fellowship's De facto funding arm,
The Gathering, the religious right's "cash cow" for the culture wars.
D. Michael Lindsay's book cast a soothing light on The Fellowship and evaded the darker nature of the group's international activities; from stirring up fierce anti-LGBT hatred in Russia and Uganda, to advocating for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, to close support for regimes implicated in mass killing and mass rape in sub-Saharan Africa, to backing for Indonesia's genocidal invasion and occupation of East Timor in 1975, The Fellowship has supported some of the worst human rights atrocities of the later 20th Century and into the new millennium.
Here and there across the globe The Fellowship also runs orphanages - such as in Uganda, where children who represent the smartest and most talented from among the myriad orphans whose parents have died in Fellowship-backed violence are cared for but also trained to be future national leaders in business, politics, and all the professions: an elite cadre raised up and indoctrinated towards the task of taking the "Seven Mountains" and reconstructing their nation along "biblical" lines (as defined by The Fellowship.)
Audio from the trove of Doug Coe sermons I had found was not aired in NBC's 2007 report because more gripping material surfaced; a video copy of one of the sermons from the set. But in retrospect, even more disturbing material from the sermons escaped public notice.
In one of the sermons, Doug Coe describes being in Moscow in 1989 and mentions a conversation with a Soviet general in which Coe had admired the ability of a tiny band of Lenin's Bolshevik revolutionaries to take over the enormous country of Russia. Enthused Coe,
"Lenin got the idea. And he built his core - and here’s a picture, with all of his friends. And he started a little Ecclesia over in this factory, and over in this town, and over in Leningrad, and over in Stalingrad, and over in Estonia... all these little groups, these little friends that were against the Tzar. Had an underground. And they called each other brother, comrade. Took it right out of the Bible.
I asked him the other day, I said, 'Boy, I was moved when I saw how a few people took over this country [Russia]. Unbelievable.' "
That is the model underlying The Fellowship; the power of revolutionary cell groups bound together by fanatic loyalty and loosely connected through such networks as The Fellowship, and events like the National Prayer Breakfast and The Gathering, to impose The Fellowship's agenda on entire nations.
The model ? It fuses radical economic privatization with coercive fundamentalist morality imposed by the state upon subject populations; Biblical capitalism.
The scope and influence of the operation ? David Kuo, Former Special Assistant to President George W. Bush, stated in a 2006 book that "The Fellowship's reach into governments around the world is almost impossible to overstate or even grasp."
That's a big claim. But consider just one data point; World Vision.
A Vision For the World
Founded by close associates of Billy Graham (the most public figure in The Fellowship), World Vision US, World Vision International, and its various offspring World Vision affiliates in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and elsewhere boast annual budgets that, combined, are about 3/5 the size of the regular budget of the United Nations (excepting UN peacekeeping operations.)
World Vision is listed on the 2001 IRS 990 tax form of the Fellowship Foundation (which also goes by the name the International Foundation) as a sister organization to The Fellowship, and both organizations are heavily funded from the biggest nonprofit (the National Christian Foundation) of The Fellowship's private funding wing (The Gathering.)
In 2014 the National Christian Foundation dispensed an estimated $875 million in grants, often to big religious right nonprofits helping drive the culture wars (such as the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom.) NCF's anti-LGBT rights funding is so extensive I've written a book length encyclopedia of anti-gay groups that NCF funds, to support my contention that the National Christian Foundation is the biggest anti-gay rights funder in America.
Such streams of private philanthropic funding might seem huge, but The Fellowship has for decades been hard at work siphoning from a far bigger source: government. Here are just a few recent examples:
Following the 2003 US invasion of Iraq - which longtime World Vision president Robert Seiple backed, on the grounds, according to Seiple (in an interview published by Christianity Today) that the U.S. was already at war with Islam - World Vision was given an official three year $30 million dollar contract to manage humanitarian assistance in Northern Iraq, an enterprise that ended it its second year when terrorist attacks began to target Western humanitarian aid workers.
The reason for the contract is clear; former World Vision president Andrew Natsios had been appointed by George W. Bush as head of USAID and was among multiple Fellowship operatives from USAID who flooded into the agency after Bush took office and began funneling USAID towards a range of secretive evangelical missionary operations, from Kurdistan to North Korea - where the work of an evangelical aid and relief organization served as cover for a top-secret Pentagon spying operation.
While the Fellowship-associated evangelical USAID operatives who funded such efforts often moved in elite Washington cocktail party circuits and sported impressive secular credentials, the evangelical efforts they financed and supported were headed by leaders from the most radical and aggressive tendencies in American conservative evangelicalism, notably the Christian Reconstructionism movement and the rapidly growing, globally influential New Apostolic Reformation movement (whose work, such as in Uganda, often parallels or even merges into The Fellowship's efforts.)
The North Korea spy program was headed by New Apostolic Reformation operative Kay Hiramine, whose NAR movement is in the vanguard of anti-LGBT organizing from Uganda to Honduras. But the NAR also holds maximal hatred for Islam; key NAR organizer and theorist C. Peter Wagner has stated that "Allah is a high-ranking demonic spirit who has come to steal, to kill, and to destroy".
George W. Bush did not initiate the close symbiosis between World Vision and USAID - the process by which elite neo-fundamentalist evangelical aid and relief organizations have been integrated into U.S. foreign policy had already been underway for decades.
Indeed, as chronicled in the monumental work Thy Will Be Done - The Conquest of The Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil by Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett (HarperCollins, 1995, and here's a LA Times review of the book), the Central Intelligence Agency has long used evangelical missions groups for covert operations purposes - generally to manage burdensome refugee populations dislocated by American wars but also for intelligence gathering towards targeted assassination programs and to mobilize indigenous populations in bloody counterinsurgency efforts.
Back To Carson
But what does it mean ? Is Carson the secret favorite of The Fellowship ? Probably not, because The Fellowship encompasses a range of political and ideological views, and individual members who hold common objectives will nonetheless disagree on strategy and tactics.
Carson likely enjoys access to Fellowship members on the sharper part of The Fellowship's political and ideological spectrum, but the smartest Fellowship money and opinion is elsewhere:
In a question and answer period during one of his repeat appearances at The Gathering, Michael Gerson - the former head speechwriter for George W. Bush, spoke scornfully of wilder potential Republican presidential candidates (of whom Carson would clearly be one) and pushed his own favorite: former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who has closely followed a strategy successfully used by his brother George W. to gain the White House:
As did George W. in Texas, governor Jeb Bush substantially ramped up funding for public education, especially for K-6 schools (and, he also sopped the evangelical base by quietly opening the sluice gate for state funds to flow to private religious schools); the tactic helped George W. Bush lay claim to being a moderate and to run as a "compassionate conservative", and it will also help propel Jeb in 2016 if the Jeb Bush for President effort can drag itself from its current slough of despair.
The very term "compassionate conservative" was minted by Fellowship strategists such as Marvin Olasky - perhaps the most central intellectual architect of George W. Bush's Faith Based Initiative (FBI) - as part of a (wildly successful) plot to divert vast sums of federal money towards evangelical organizations and churches.
Under Bush, billions of FBI money poured into domestic evangelical causes; meanwhile, Bush's PEPFAR program billions, that helped mitigate the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa, also immeasurably strengthened African evangelical churches favored to administer PEPFAR programs.
My point is that this was very, very smart politics - The Fellowship's specialty.
Because conservative evangelicals are a minority within the U.S., The Fellowship cannot directly, openly advance its agenda via electoral politics. To achieve its goals, it needs candidates such as George W. and Jeb Bush branded as "centrist" and "compassionate", who seem to stand out in sharp contrast to candidates who pander to the hard conservative evangelical base - such as Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, and so on.
Those sorts of candidates do have a certain measure of backing from elite financier associates with The Fellowship and The Gathering; in 2012, Rick Santorum's presidential bid was heavily financed by venture capitalist Foster Friess.
But the smartest strategists, represented by Michael Gerson, known that candidates such as Santorum, who can win individual state primaries with the help of highly mobilized hard-right evangelicals, cannot prevail nationally because those very positions, such as on immigration, that appeal to a dwindling base of hard right white evangelical primary voters are also driving immigrant and minority voters, including evangelicals who might hold conservative positions on abortion or gay marriage, from the Republican fold.
That very point Michael Gerson aired to The Gathering as far back as 2007, when the wunderkind speechwriter informed The Gathering's assorted multimillionaires and billionaires that top GOP strategists such as Ken Melman and Karl Rove had told him, in no uncertain terms, that because of shifting demographics Nixon's racism-based Southern Strategy could no longer prevail in a national election though it might still be very useful at the state level.
The real threat, Gerson told The Gathering, was Barack Obama, who according to Gerson seemed to be a genuinely nice guy who spoke naturally the language of faith and values and might have, even, Clintonesque appeal. Ben Carson, of course, is no Barack Obama.
Yes, Carson - along with his fellows in the pack, disparaged in the 2012 elections and now again in 2015 as the "clown car" - is the GOP favorite of the month but probably not for long, because he's playing a losing game.
But perhaps we can discern, in Ben Carson's run, the subtle hand of The Fellowship; as with Herman Cain in the 2012 election primaries, part of Carson's true, underlying, function may lie in the ongoing effort to sell rightwing tropes to minority groups - not to mention the importance of African-American token candidates for the GOP image; it dispels the stench of white supremacy that's long troubled the party.
Thus, Carson for VP ? You never know. It bears remembering that in September 2008,
an Alaska New Apostolic Reformation "prophet" close to Sarah Palin's personal friend and former prayer group leader Mary Glazier released a prophecy that envisioned the McCain/Palin ticket prevailing in the election - and then a tragic, unexpected death sent the nation into mourning and allowed Palin to ascend to an even higher office.
Sarah Palin was born from the very womb of the NAR movement in Alaska (the Wasilla Assembly of God, and the ministry of NAR prophet and Apostle Mary Glazier) but also had ties, through the Alaska Prayer Breakfast, to The Fellowship.
As with Palin, Carson's evangelical credentials are strong (and if a Mormon was palatable in 2012, a Seventh Day Adventist in 2016 scarcely merits a shrug), and his status within Fellowship circles is high indeed. So don't count Ben Carson, or his clever, God-guided hands and soft demeanor, out. Yet.