Sharlet: Harper’s editor Bill Wasik and I talk about The Family and how the article we collaborated on as author and editor five years became a book. Here’s an excerpt:

WASIK: I remember that when you were writing >“Jesus Plus Nothing,” the themes of secrecy and betrayal loomed very large in your mind. The Family was a self-avowedly secret group, engaged in essentially subversive acts of behind-the-scenes power-brokering. And you, meanwhile, were learning all this undercover, fully prepared to betray these young men with whom you lived. How do you look back on that betrayal?SHARLET: I used my real name, I took notes openly, I told them I was a journalist and that I was working on a book (my first), about unusual religious communities around the country. I told them the title, too, Killing the Buddha. Maybe they thought I meant it literally. Regardless, they had a pretty full dossier on me. I even talked about writing and betrayal with them—I tend to agree with Joan Didion’s assessment that “writers are always selling somebody out.” It’s inherent in the process. “Undercover” is a funny word, in that many people think it means the journalist has some kind of secret identity, maybe a fake mustache. I didn’t—it wasn’t necessary. The Family couldn’t imagine that someone might learn to speak their language without sharing their beliefs.

That sentiment is reflected in a letter I found in The Family’s archive, from an inner circle leader to a South African operative. “The Movement,” he writes, “is simply inexplicable to people who are not intimately acquainted with it.” The Family’s political initiatives, he goes on, “have always been misunderstood by ‘outsiders.’” Then he talks about how whole projects have been hurt when Family members leak information to the public. “Thus,” he writes, in conclusion, “I would urge you not to put on paper anything relating to any of the work that you are doing… [unless] you know the recipient well enough to put at the top of the page, ‘PLEASE DESTROY AFTER READING.’”

This is one of my favorite documents out of the hundreds of thousands I reviewed because A, it’s funny—the recipient immediately wrote back to say that he understood and he’d made multiple copies of the letter for all of his associates, one of which I now have; B, it reveals the sense of persecution and victimhood which undergirds so much of that culture of secrecy on the right.

This secrecy is pragmatic—“The more you can make your organization invisible,” preaches Doug Coe, “the more influence it will have”—but it’s also a way for these very influential people to conceive of themselves as akin to the Christians of the first century, struggling nobly against a dominant culture of secularism. Family members imagine themselves as revolutionaries, even as they function as defenders of status quo power.

That kind of self-deception allows a writer only two real responses—deference, or betrayal.

I should add that the question of “undercover” has been one Wasik and I have been arguing about for years. I don’t think I was undercover, he thinks I was. “Betrayal” is another one of those complicated terms — he doesn’t think telling stories people don’t want you to tell is necessarily a betrayal, I do. He makes his case in a forthcoming anthology he’s edited, Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person, in which “Jesus Plus Nothing” is included along with work by Charles Bowden, Barbara Ehrenreich, William Vollman, and Wasik’s own undercover adventure, deemed a betrayal by some and a brilliant, deeply moral exercise in irony by me. Pre-order Wasik’s book so you can decide for yourself.

And in the meantime, read the interview, buy the book.