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Showing reviews 1-5 of 157
 Truly unsettling March 7, 2010
John Baesler (Bloomington, IN)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Like many people, I first heard about Jeff Sharlet's work on "the Family" and its role in the recent affair of Senator John Enzine through Rachel Maddow's show on MSNBC. Then I remembered his article in Harper's Magazine about Hillary Clinton's involvement in a Washington prayer cell, which I had read and which had given me one more reason not to support her in the Democratic 2008 primary. But now I finally picked up the book while killing time at an airport, and boy was it worth it!
This is a longish book, with many winding narrative roads and more names I will be able to remember. But that's what it takes to dig up the deep roots of elite fundamentalism in American politics, beginning definitely in 1935 with Abram Vereide's biblical union-busting efforts in Seattle and ending in today's Washington, D.C., the capital of America's global military, economic, and religious empire. Judging from some of the reviews, a lot of readers found this story hard to swallow, maybe offensive, but don't kill the messenger here. Sharlet makes an honest attempt to understand the Family's bizarre "Jesus plus nothing" philosophy and their fascination with power. He writes with aplomb and insight, providing exhaustive documentation and analysis. I sometimes felt that this absurd cult of personality and power does not deserve such even-handed treatment.
Having finished the book, I feel a veil has been lifted from my eyes. I knew about the rise of fundamentalist religion in the U.S. during the Cold War, and I was well aware of U.S. foreign policy sins of the time, but only Sharlet's book gave me a true insight in how to connect the two. Contemplating the long roster of Family associates, I feel like I have been handed the master key to understanding why we keep going to war, keep protecting the elites even in a time of financial collapse, and keep postponing any reform that will truly heal the social rifts in this country and around the world.
To be sure, the Family is not to blame for all of our problems. Rather, in its ability to find centers of power, it illustrates the larger forces that drove America's elites toward global power and the ways such exercise of power could be justified by seemingly Christian morals. But make no mistake, the Family is about power and nothing else. Somebody had to write this story. Now more people need to read it and spread the message.
Fascinating March 7, 2010
Ryan M. Mccluskey
A great explanation of the past century political-religious movement that helps make sense of today's political landscape. And... well written.
 Jeff believes if you don't agree in aborting infants you are an idiot March 5, 2010
Kenneth Carlson
2 out of 15 found this review helpful
Jeff believes that if you don't agree with him in that we have the right to abort infants you are an idiot.
Why didn't Jeff agree with abortion when he was in his mother's womb? Just a question?
ken Carlson
Necessary Scary Information March 4, 2010
David Jackson
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a well researched book that provides some pretty scary information. Several pertinent insights for me. When the Cold War was over and the right wing religious people didn't have Communism to be their enemy, they took on sex and sexuality. The influence of the Family on the Prayer Breakfast in Washington, and the uses that event lets happen, are terrible. The connection between the Family and Uganda is a disgrace. Thank heavens that Rachel Madow has brought this dangerous phenomenon to a wider public. Several Key figures in promoting again the "divine destiny" of the U.S. are made public. Whether this book will have sufficient influence to put a stop to some of these abuses isn't clear to me. I hope that more people read this book. I have encouraged a number of people to do so.
 couldn't finish it February 25, 2010
C. P. Anderson (Charlotte, NC)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I think there might be a decent book in here (based on the reviews, if nothing else). The writing is so terrible, though, it's really hard to tell.
It starts out well enough, with the author talking about his short time in the Family. He then jumps to Jonathan Edwards, then Charles Grandison Finney, then to the founder of the Family, then Frank Buchman, Bruce Barton, and on and on. It's an attempt, I guess, to put the family in historical context, but the transitions are so abrupt, the connections so tenuous, and the writing so florid that it just all seems rather manic.
Here's an example of the tortured, breathless, and purple prose Sharlett dishes out here (this about Jonathan Edwards):
"Among the Mahican Indians, he pondered the vicissitudes of the mood he had stoked, its brightness and its darkness, its hymnody and its screeching, the new birth it offered and the death's-head that grinned alike on the saved and the damned. He was a man given to the study of oneness. Perhaps he recognized that the heart full of feeling and the calculating mind full of knowing, like the thunder and lightnings he so adored, were simply two expressions of the same phenomenon, an American religion, one so well suited to the brutal demands of the building of a new Jerusalem - conquest; unrestrained capital; the rights of men and women to speak for themselves; and the rights of stronger men to command their submission for the greater cause - that it would still insist, two and half centuries later, that all the world is a frontier, in dire need of a new revival, and a new chosen people."
This book could easily have been cut in half. An editor would have helped immensely too. An interesting topic, but a very poor writer.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 157
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