Jeff Sharlet: One of the few advantages of maintaining a blog about media and religion is that when a media heavyweight gives you a bad review, you have a forum in which to respond. Politely, of course. In this case, it’s Jay Tolson of US News and World Report, writing on my new book, The Family. Here’s how Tolson opens:

It is an elite and secretive network of fundamentalist Christians that has been quietly pulling strings in America’s highest corridors of power for more than 70 years. Or so claims Jeff Sharlet, author of a new exposé, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. And in his telling, the group that calls itself the Fellowship operates at the very center of the vast, right-wing conspiracy that has promoted unfettered capitalism and dismantled liberal social policies at home, even while encouraging ruthless but America-friendly dictators abroad.Sharlet, an associate research scholar at New York University’s Center for Religion and Media, tells an intriguing story of an organization founded in 1935 by Norwegian immigrant pastor Abraham Vereide. Growing out of Vereide’s early struggles against the radical labor movement on the West Coast, the group came to consist of religiously minded businessmen and sympathetic politicians who shared Vereide’s mildly pro-fascist sentiments. Vereide is most widely known for launching in 1953 what is now a Washington institution, the National Prayer Breakfast, where movers and shakers come together to pray in an uplifting but blandly interfaith way.

But behind the scenes, Sharlet contends, Vereide and his key men worked with politicians and officials to advance unfettered, tooth-and-claw capitalism and engage in secret diplomacy with some of the world’s least savory leaders, including, in the past, Indonesia’s General Suharto and Haiti’s François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. If all that weren’t ominous enough, the group’s leader since 1969, Doug Coe, has gained something of a reputation for invoking not only Jesus but also Hitler, Lenin, and Mao as models of effective leadership.

Sound sinister? To be sure.

Only, Tolson doesn’t think so. Citing a conservative writer, The Economist’s Adrian Woolridge, a conservative think tanker, Michael Cromartie, and the wonderful work of Senator Sam Brownback, Tolson comes to the confusing conclusion that The Family is not “politically harmless,” as Cromartie contends, but not politically toxic, as I argue. Tolson seems lost between black and white poles — either The Family is a conspiracy, or it’s relatively benign. In fact, it’s neither. Here’s my response:

Jay Tolson, usually a nuanced and thoughtful writer, resorts to the most juvenile method of criticism in his attack on my book, The Family: He sets up a caricture, then dismantles it. Tolson is absolutely correct in mocking the idea that The Fellowship, aka The Family, is at the heart of the “vast, right-wing conspiracy,” or any other conspiracy. Unfortunately, those are Tolson’s words, not mine. I’m not sure how I could have made my view any clearer than this, on page 7 of my introduction: “This so- called underground is not a conspiracy.”If that’s too vague for Tolson, there’s always this, later in the book, referring to Fellowship founder Abram Vereide: “Abram’s upper-crust faith was not a conspiracy.” And if Tolson was still confused, he might have skipped ahead further, to this, in response to current Fellowship leader Doug Coe’s documented decision to “submerge” the profile of the organization: “The decision was not so much conspiratorial, as it seemed to those among Abram’s old-timers who responded with confusion, as ascetic, a humbling of powers.”

Is The Fellowship secretive? Yes, by its own declaration. Does that make it a conspiracy? Not in any court of law I know. Rather, as I argue in the book Tolson so knowingly skimmed, The Fellowship represents a strand of evangelical activism that has clearly been influential among some of America’s most powerful Christians and yet which to date has never been subject to any kind of in-depth study. That’s a more modest claim than Tolson’s tin-foil caricature, yes, but one that I think would withstand Tolson’s scrutiny if he bothered to review my book rather than his own assumptions about my political views.

Had he done so, he might have noticed the explanation I offer in the introduction, with reference to respected scholars such as George Marsden, Martin Marty, Scott Appleby, and Nancy Ammerman, for my decision to use the term “fundamentalism” as more accurately descriptive of the movement as a whole than “evangelicalism.” Tolson thinks to school me on the conventional historiography of the terms, according to which fundamentalism was a separatist movement under the umbrella evangelicalism. With respect for scholars who hold that position, I’ve explicitly argued for re-definition of terms based on the actual history of the movements in question rather than the formal declarations of leaders. Many evangelicals are not fundamentalists, but plenty of fundamentalists – Abraham Vereide, ostensibly a Methodist, among them—did not think of themselves as part of evangelicalism. Doug Coe, the current leader, denies the name “Christian” all together, and yet his oft-stated view that all governance should be according to Jesus rather than the will of the people marks him as a far more extreme believer than the vast majority of evangelicals who respect the First Amendment as much as every other American.

Most puzzling of all in Tolson’s article, though, is his insistence that we trust him because he has access to Washington insiders, not usually known for their candor. One such he cites is Michael Cromartie, head of the Evangelical Studies Projects at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Cromartie assures us that Coe’s publicity-shy ways are “politically harmless.” Tell that to the people of Somalia. As The Fellowship’s own documents demonstrate, Coe arranged meetings between that blighted country’s late dictator Siad Barre and high American officials, including then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey. A document prepared for The Fellowship by Barre’s government notes that it had already provided for the Pentagon a list of desired armaments. Barre received most of them, as the United States greatly amplified the firepower he then turned on his own people, providing Somalia with its only moment of unity in recent decades when everyone in the country turned on the vicious dictator. Did Coe pull the triggers? No. Did he speak truth to power? No. Did he flatter power and at the very least act as its secretary? Undeniably. “Politically harmless”? You decide.

Cromartie tells Tolson he thinks so. Ethics, in Cromartie’s apparent definition, must mean a very relativist understanding of truth. Several years ago, he told the LA Times that “a lot of people use the Fellowship as a way to network, as a way to gain entrée to all sorts of people. And entrée they do get.”

“Insiders” such as Cromartie and Tolson may think that’s hunky-dory, but to me, that sounds like bad religion – an insult not just to open and transparent democracy but to the vast majority of Christians in America for whom faith is a path toward God, not power.

Cromartie used to think so himself — several years ago, when I was an invited guest at a Key West junket organized by Cromartie’s group, he told me that my characterization of Coe and The Family in the original Harper’s article out of which this book grew was dead-on. But that was back when I could conceivably pass as a chummy insider myself, enjoying a luxury vacation on the tab of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. So was Tolson. Between friends, apparently, it’s ok to criticize power; but before the public, insiders close ranks.

My Revealer colleague Kathryn Joyce, herself the author of a forthcoming book on fundamentalism, Quiverfull, I’m just now enjoying in manuscript, comes to my aid. Not nonpartisan support, but all the better for its biases, I think:

I must be reading a different book than the one described in this sneering review. With each of Tolson’s critiques, he manages to bungle the story and the point. The Fellowship hasn’t clearly been linked to faith-based initiatives and conservative judges, Tolson declares, so claims about their power must be exaggerated. Or, conversely, since they host, counsel and house leading congressmen, presidents and international leaders, and undeniably must have some sizable degree of power, their influence on those leaders must be benign. They’re just working towards the same establishment religious right goals, protests Tolson, then disclaims that they’re really working on policy even liberals would like. (This is a particularly misguided claim, as the religious right’s work on slavery and trafficking issues, as Tolson refers to with Browback’s legislation, has only the trappings of liberal policy. In practice, it’s been much more about cracking down on prostitution, and sex workers, than on actual instances of slavery, unsexy labor and human rights issue that it is. But that’s just dizzyingly complicated to convey through journalism, isn’t it?)Forgive me if I find that Tolson’s protesting a little too much. These seeming contradictions don’t settle the matter of the Fellowship, as Tolson would like to do in 1,000 words; they’re just the starting point for an investigation of theological and political nuance about the way that a group with a decidedly undemocratic theology has set itself up as an underground power-broker in Washington conducting illegal diplomacy with a group of world-class creeps.

The saddest part of this reaction is that Tolson’s biggest complaint is that Sharlet undertook a investigation and followed it through with success. I suppose there’s a reason for establishment reporters on religion and politics to find that bothersome, but it reflects more poorly on them, and the state of investigative journalism today, than it does on Sharlet’s findings, which are thoroughly explained as to terminology, origin and method. Is the established press really so desk-bound, “expert”-indebted and unimaginative now that it can’t imagine a journalist or scholar accessing information without the approval of the subject they’re writing about?

Sorry – that question is as snide as the “right-wing conspiracy” set-up for Tolson’s review. Of course the established press is that fangless by now. They maintain their access by agreeing to abide by a certain conventional wisdom, rather than by digging.

But even bearing that in mind, it’s really hard to fathom why Tolson is so intent on dismissing Sharlet’s very well-documented research and findings out of hand. Tolson’s own admission, “Coe himself has often used his network of international friends to help resolve conflicts between and within nations in Africa, notably within Sudan,” seems reason enough to know more about this political “spiritual advisor” who’s had the ear of presidents for decades. Admitting further that the “pastorally helpful” Coe worked with a host of dictators involved in human rights abuses would seem further reason. But not “to Washington insiders,” and so not to Tolson.

Raise a glass to the late, great Fourth Estate.