The House on C Street

So Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev) and Gov. Mark Sanford both hang out at “C Street,” a house in Washington apparently owned by The Family, a super-secretive Christian fellowship. This raises an interesting question: What are they doing in there? Shortly after the publication of his book on the Family, journalist Jeff Sharlet told us a […]

So Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev) and Gov. Mark Sanford both hang out at “C Street,” a house in Washington apparently owned by The Family, a super-secretive Christian fellowship. This raises an interesting question: What are they doing in there?

Shortly after the publication of his book on the Family, journalist Jeff Sharlet told us a little about them.

Q: What makes the group worth a book?


A: This is a group that denies its own existence and yet the tax records tell a different story, and a group that has been involved for several decades now in playing matchmaker between American power and foreign dictators.

Q: Your book chronicles the Family’s history but also the history of revivalists like Jonathan Edwards. What connections do you see between them?

A: The Family (are) not literalists. They don’t read the Bible very much. They believe (two Republican senators) can get in a room together and they just pray together and God will reveal a truth to their hearts. That idea of a heart religion goes back to Edwards. The heart is the progenitor of the idea that the Family has of “Jesus plus nothing.”

Q: What was the most striking to you about the Family and its leader, Doug Coe?

A: Whenever I hear a congressman and spiritual adviser talking about the leadership lessons of Hitler, my ears perk up. And I didn’t know what to make of it at the time.

Through literally five years of research and looking at probably hundreds of thousands of documents, the one thing that really disturbed me was I found that Hitler, Stalin, Mao (were) the trinity he most often uses. That was not the exception to the rule, that’s his boilerplate. He said they’re evil but they understand the total strength that Jesus was modeling.

And here’s a 2003 AP story about the house on C Street.

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