This Explains So Much
Rachel Maddow looks into The Family, a fundamentalist religious group that counts a number of important politicians among its members. She talks with reporter Jeff Sharlet, who spent time inside the organization, and wrote The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. (Video runs about 9 minutes.)
It’s the oldest Christian conservative organization in Washington. It goes back 70 years, when the founder believed that God gave him a new revelation, saying that Christianity had gotten it wrong for two thousand years, and that what most people think of as Christianity, as being about, you know, helping the weak and the poor and the meek, and the down and out, he believes God came to him one night in April 1935 and said what Christianity should really be about is building more power for the already powerful, and that these powerful men who were chosen by God, can then, if they want to, dispense blessings to the rest of us, through a kind of trickle-down fundamentalism.
Rachel asks whether this sense of being God’s chosen explains why members like Sen. John Ensign and Gov. Mark Sanford, caught in scandals, have refused to resign. Sharlet notes that Sanford cited King David to help explain that he wasn’t going to resign.
That just struck a bell with me, because the King David story is a core teaching of The Family … One of the leaders of The Family was explaining why King David was important, and he said, “It’s not because he was a good man; it’s because he was a bad man. You know, he seduced another man’s wife; he actually had the husband murdered.”
And he wanted to explain why this was a model, and he says to one of the men in the group, “Suppose I heard you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?”
And this guy, being a human being, says, “You would think I was a monster.”
Well, the leader of The Family says, “No, not at all, because you’re chosen. You’re chosen by God for leadership, and so the normal rules don’t apply.”
Sounds like the Manson family.
More from NPR, including an excerpt from Sharlet’s book.