(UPDATE: the Huffington Post has now picked up this story as well)
A new Politico story showcases disturbing aspects from a 2001 audio recording from an appearance that Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education, and her husband Dick DeVos made at the annual conference of multimillionaire and billionaire conservative Christians known simply as The Gathering, an event characterized in a 2014 report from the LGBT rights nonprofit Truth Wins Out as “the religious right’s cash cow”.
As Politico summed the disturbing DeVos audio from The Gathering,
“The billionaire philanthropist whom Donald Trump has tapped to lead the Education Department once compared her work in education reform to a biblical battleground where she wants to "advance God's Kingdom."
Trump’s pick, Betsy DeVos, a national leader of the school choice movement, has pursued that work in large part by spending millions to promote the use of taxpayer dollars on private and religious schools.”
Relatively few news outlets have focused on the DeVos’s rather strong religious views. But the audio obtained by Politico makes clear that Betsy and Dick DeVos (who operate very much as a team, it’s quite clear from the audio recording) view school privatization as a means for advancing their version of the faith. As Politico’s Benjamin Wermund characterizes it,
“School choice, they say, leads to “greater Kingdom gain.” The two also lament that public schools have “displaced” the Church as the center of communities, and they cite school choice as a way to reverse that troubling trend.”
In short, for the DeVos’s, school “reform” is meant to roll back secularization and erode church-state separation.
Wermund’s story especially highlights the biblical imagery invoked by Betsy and Dick DeVos at their The Gathering appearance:
‘During the DeVos interview, the couple talks about a trip to Israel where they learned about a geographical region, called the Shephelah, where battles were fought between the Israelites and Philistines. Betsy DeVos then links this topic to education.
"It goes back to what I mentioned, the concept of really being active in the Shephelah of our culture — to impact our culture in ways that are not the traditional funding-the-Christian-organization route, but that really may have greater Kingdom gain in the long run by changing the way we approach things — in this case, the system of education in the country," she says.
Using an anecdote about pig remains found on archaeological digs in the Shephelah, the couple compares their work in education reform to the long-ago battles waged in that region. Pigs are not kosher, Dick DeVos says, so you could tell where the Jewish people influenced what the couple call "pagan" communities, because “the pig bones were gone.”
"We could run away and just go back up in the hills and live very safely and very comfortably — or are we going to exist in the Shephelah and try to impact the view of the community around us with the ideas we believe are more powerful ideas of a better way to live one’s life and a more meaningful and a more rewarding way to live one’s life as a Christian?" Dick DeVos says. "Our job is to figure out in the contemporary context — how do we get the pig bones out of our culture?" ‘
As noted in the linked 2014 report on The Gathering from Truth Wins Out, the event known as The Gathering was launched following a 1985 meeting at the Arlington, VA mansion known as “The Cedars” that’s owned by the Fellowship, which organizes the annual National Prayer Breakfast.
Longtime head of The Fellowship Doug Coe has praised (as showcased in video aired in a 2007 NBC News report) the dedication of the followers of Hitler, Lenin, and Mao.
Another prominent Fellowship member, Saddleback Church head and Purpose Driven Life author Rick Warren, has also encouraged Christians to be as dedicated as the followers of totalitarian leaders such as Adolf Hitler. Over the years, Warren has been one of the more frequent featured speakers at The Gathering.
The Fellowship was the subject of two books (published in 2008 and 2010 — see this NPR interview) by journalist Jeff Sharlet, who characterized the secretive, Washington, DC-based neo-fundamentalist network as a “fundamentalist threat to American democracy”.
