Inside "The Family": Jeff Sharlet Speaks About His Unique Look at American Evangelicals

Mostly, the idea is that you're building a network. You're building a behind-the-scenes brotherhood that you can call upon if you move ahead in the world of business or government or whatever you end up doing. When I left, I discovered that they dumped 600 boxes of papers in the Billy Graham center archive in Wheaton, Illinois. So I moved there, got myself an apartment with no furniture and just spent every day going through this archive, Xeroxing as much as I could to get as much out of there because I knew they were eventually going to restrict the archive. I suspected they would and indeed they did.

I'm curious to hear how the whole experience changed your perception of who the Evangelical community is and what they are.
I think one of the main arguments of the book is that we have misunderstood what Evangelicalism and Christian conservatism are in American history. We're familiar with the pulpit pounders — the Jerry Falwells, the guys who are on TV — the guys who want a lot of attention. They're not insiders to power, they're outsiders. And then there's this whole other parallel movement that's been really understudied and I think people are starting to pay attention to them now. I call them the avant-garde of American fundamentalism. It's a term they use themselves — and they're using it in the sense that Lenin used it. They think that democracy has run its course. They don't need to call attention to themselves partly because they're not trying to gain access. They're not doing this from the outside, they're doing this from the inside. They're not breaking laws, they're making laws.

Did you hear any feedback from the Family? Are they angry with you?
Because I first published about this several years ago in Harper's, there was a response then and ever since then it's been this weird ongoing relationship. You know, one of the things about becoming a member of the Family, which I did, is that you are forever a member of the Family. It's sort of this Calvinist theology, this idea that you are one of God's elect, one of God's chosen. So I'm still a brother — I'm a bad brother, but I'm still a brother and after I first wrote about them they would do all these weird things and I immediately saw right through it.