[News] Hillary's Nasty Pastorate

[Anti-Imperialist News]

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/ehrenreich



Hillary's Nasty Pastorate

by BARBARA EHRENREICH

[posted online on March 19, 2008]

There's a reason Hillary Clinton has remained 
relatively silent during the flap over 
intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former 
pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to 
unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.

You can find all about it in a widely under-read 
article in the September 2007 issue of Mother 
Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet 
<http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/hillarys-prayer.html>reported 
that "through all of her years in Washington, 
Clinton has been an active participant in 
conservative Bible study and prayer circles that 
are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known 
as "The "Fellowship," also known as The Family. 
But it won't be a secret much longer. Jeff 
Sharlet's shocking exposé 
<http://jeffsharlet.blogspot.com/2008/02/blog-post.html>The 
Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of 
American Power will be published in May.

Sean Hannity has called Obama's church a "cult," 
but that term applies far more aptly to Clinton's 
"Family," which is organized into "cells"--their 
term--and operates sex-segregated group homes for 
young people in northern Virginia. In 2002, 
Sharlet joined The Family's home for young men, 
forswearing sex, drugs and alcohol, and 
participating in endless discussions of Jesus and 
power. He wasn't undercover; he used his own name 
and admitted to being a writer. But he wasn't 
completely out of danger either. When he went 
outdoors one night to make a cell phone call, he 
was followed. He still gets calls from Family 
associates asking him to meet them in diners--alone.

The Family's most visible activity is its blandly 
innocuous National Prayer Breakfast, held every 
February in Washington. But almost all its real 
work goes on behind the scenes--knitting together 
international networks of right-wing leaders, 
most of them ostensibly Christian. In the 1940s, 
The Family reached out to former and 
not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with 
that exemplary leader, Adolf Hitler, has 
continued, along with ties to a whole bestiary of 
murderous thugs. As Sharlet reported in Harper's in 2003:

During the 1960s the Family forged relationships 
between the U.S. government and some of the most 
anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within 
Africa's postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian 
dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family 
support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups 
for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, 
General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred 
thousand "Communists" killed marks him as one of 
the century's most murderous dictators) was 
presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian 
legislators. During the Reagan Administration the 
Family helped build friendships between the U.S. 
government and men such as Salvadoran general 
Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a 
Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and 
Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, 
himself an evangelical minister, who was linked 
to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise.

At the heart of The Family's American branch is a 
collection of powerful right-wing politicos, who 
include, or have included, Sam Brownback, Ed 
Meese, John Ashcroft, James Inhofe and Rick 
Santorum. They get to use The Family's spacious 
estate on the Potomac, The Cedars, which is 
maintained by young men in Family group homes and 
where meals are served by The Family's young 
women's group. And, at The Family's frequent 
prayer gatherings, they get powerful jolts of 
spiritual refreshment, tailored to the already powerful.

Clinton fell in with The Family in 1993, when she 
joined a Bible study group composed of wives of 
conservative leaders like Jack Kemp and James 
Baker. When she ascended to the Senate, she was 
promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family's "most 
elite cell," the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, 
which included, until his downfall, Virginia's 
notoriously racist Senator George Allen. This has 
not been a casual connection for Clinton. She has 
written of 
<http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101050207/photoessay/4.html>Doug 
Coe, The Family's publicity-averse leader, that 
he is "a unique presence in Washington: a 
genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to 
anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants 
to deepen his or her relationship with God."

Furthermore, The Family takes credit for some of 
Clinton's rightward legislative tendencies, 
including her support for a law guaranteeing 
"religious freedom" in the workplace, such as for 
pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control 
prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics.

What drew Clinton into the sinister heart of the 
international right? Maybe it was just a phase in 
her tormented search for identity, marked by 
ever-changing hairstyles and names: Hillary 
Rodham, Mrs. Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton 
and now Hillary Clinton. She reached out to many 
potential spiritual mentors during her White 
House days, including New Age guru Marianne 
Williamson and the liberal rabbi Michael Lerner. 
But it was the Family association that stuck.

Sharlet generously attributes Clinton's 
involvement to the under-appreciated depth of her 
religiosity, but he himself struggles to define 
The Family's theological underpinnings. The 
Family avoids the word Christian but worships 
Jesus, though not the Jesus who promised the 
earth to the "meek." They believe that, in mass 
societies, it's only the elites who matter, the 
political leaders who can build God's "dominion" 
on earth. Insofar as The Family has a consistent 
philosophy, it's all about power--cultivating it, 
building it and networking it together into 
ever-stronger units, or "cells." "We work with 
power where we can," Doug Coe has said, and "build new power where we can't."

Obama has given a beautiful speech on race and 
his affiliation with the Trinity United Church of 
Christ. Now it's up to Clinton to explain--or, 
better yet, renounce--her long-standing 
connection with the fascist-leaning Family.




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