Sarah Posner, author of the new God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, has been doing some of the best reporting around on Huckabee’s connections to the Christian Right. Like that’s news, right? Well, it is — the mainstream media that has consistently reported that Christian Right leaders have turned their back on Huck has ignored the significant support he’s been getting from the leader who don’t bother with secular Sunday chat shows. In particular, televangelist Kenneth Copeland, currently under investigation by conservative Republican senator Chuck Grassley. (MSM picked up onthe story after Posner broke it in (The American Prospect.)

Now, in her indispensable “FundamentaList” of the week in religious right news, Posner points us to another overlooked facet of the story. (See item # 5, “Wead Takes Aim at Grassley Investigation.”) Doug Wead, Bush the elder’s liaison to the Christian Right, takes aim at Grassley in his blog, with the awkwardly titled “People in Grassley Houses Shouldn’t Throw Stones.” Wead argues that Grassley, a Christian conservative himself, is using his office to pursue a theological dispute with Copeland and five other evangelists he’s targeted for financial investigation. Wead writes:

Senator Charles Grassley’s inquiry into the six televangelists is not without its irony. Grassley is apparently making sure that their “prosperity doctrine” is not just a tax dodge to allow them to accumulate personal wealth. Meanwhile, the Senator helps run the International Christian Leadership Council, a non profit organization that owns its own mansion, Cedars, overlooking the Potomac River on land that has to be worth a fortune. Grassley is part of the country club, Christian, elitists, who famously run the National Day of Prayer. I guess they need a little place to relax after the exhausting breakfast.

Wead is referring to a network of elite fundamentalists in government, military, and business known at “the Family,” in which I have more than a passing interest. I wrote about the Family in Harper’s and at much greater length in my forthcoming book, named for the group at its core, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Ok, so I’m working in a plug for my book. Forgive me — it’s not often that the public gets a glimpse into the faultlines of fundamentalism such as the one Wead has offered. Of course, Wead, an insider’s insider, is stretching things a bit by casting his guys as victims of elite disdain. After all, many of the televangelists targeted by Grassley do engage in some shady accounting. But more important, for those of us interested in seeing beyond the image of a monolithic Christian Right presented by mainstream media, Wead, Grassley, and most of all Posner are revealing the class-based factionalism that pervades the American fundamentalist movement.

–Jeff Sharlet