Jesse Moss’s docu-series, The Family, was executive produced by Alex Gibney, who likewise produced the Netflix series Dirty Money, which included an episode helmed by Moss (The Overnighters). Watching it is either heaven or hell, which is part of its brilliance. Whether you believe in the religious freedom the Founding Fathers espoused – or in the white Christian supremacy they actually practiced – will determine if the series is a five-part horror film or a much-ado-about-nothing profile (of an organization that, after all, has been “hiding in plain sight” since Eisenhower).
Based on the research of author Jeff Sharlet, who joined this opaque organization dubbed “The Fellowship,” a Christian fundamentalist entity based right in the heart of D.C. (and more importantly, in the minds of many a political leader, Democrats and Republicans alike), the series explores not simply the transformation of a small prayer group into a globe-spanning power, though it indeed does that. “The Family” – and its “friends” – it turns out are firm believers in both Jesus Christ and in the (white male) elite as His chosen ones. (Regardless of their sins. That the Holy Father often chooses “imperfect vessels” is a common mantra – and excuse.)
Even weirder, this strangely familiar old boys’ club enables the most egregious instincts of its power brokers (by accepting or at least minimizing their bad behavior) by taking advantage of the most vulnerable (i.e. these insecure politicians). As former member Doug Hampton – who fell out with The Family after his Republican congressman boss John Ensign, also a member, had an affair with his wife – succinctly laments, “Jesus and Capitol Hill don’t mix.”
The group itself was founded in Seattle in 1935 by like-minded Christians; industrialists trying to figure a way to fight against organized labor. “This is either the most naive theology ever created – or the most cynical one,” opines journo Sharlet at one point. “The transcendence of The Family is that it manages to be both at the same time.”
(Of course, using religion to justify power is as old as Christianity itself. See James Carroll’s book Constantine’s Sword, and Oren Jacoby’s excellent 2007 doc based upon it.)
Yet the entity’s emphasis on “forgiving and forgetting” – but not holding accountable – is perhaps its most disturbing feature. That and their engagement in “nonconsensual diplomacy” by sending “friends” overseas to do “Jesus’s work” – “friends” who also happen to be United States congressmen. (One rattled minister even accuses The Family of using “Jesus as a mascot.”) Yet for The Family, what one is using Jesus for is fairly irrelevant – that you’re spreading his name is all.
However, unlike your run-of-the-mill left-wing propaganda, Moss’s take on all this uncovers something far more insidious than any religious conspiracy. If you subscribe to the notion that America was conceived as a white Christian nation – a Christian theocracy in business attire – then no “reveal” in The Family will trouble you. Indeed, we mustn’t forget that Trump himself – who Sharlet calls the “wolf-king” – was brought up in the church of Norman Vincent Peale, raised on the prosperity gospel.
Why don’t Ten Commandments on government lawns spark the same level of outrage as Confederate statues here in the US of A? (Though The Satanic Temple’s attempt to place their Baphomet statue next to a proposed Ten Commandments monument on the Arkansas Capitol grounds did cause a stir. For more on that see Penny Lane’s terrific doc Hail Satan?.)
Because for most of our history we’ve simply ignored one basic fact that’s been “hiding in plain sight.” That Christian supremacy, like racism, is baked into our American government’s very DNA.