Search Results for: Jeff Sharlet

The Tea Party Finds Newt’s God

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This week Digby wondered if Former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, is making a move to appear more Godly in order to get the Tea Party nomination for president in 2012.  It’s a worthy question, now that a multitude of observers (read Jonathan Kay, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Sarah Posner, David Dayen, Laurie Lebo, Ari Melber, Jeff Sharlet) have concluded that the religious right has successfully got its firm grip on the Tea Party.  Gingrich will appear at Liberty University’s convocation today —  the title of his talk is “Rediscovering God in America” — and then meet with Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. and others after the talk.  Which all would induce a giggle — Gingrich, motivated by God?! — if we didn’t remember how skilled Gingrich is at mongering fear for power.  And money.

But a more important question is this:  How was it so easy for tax-loathing, live-free-or-die discontents to cede their “leaderless” movement to the long-standing insiders who have worked for self and corporate interests in the name of a “family values,” “pro-life” God?  Perhaps they are not discontent with what they think they are discontent. Continue Reading →

Tea Party Theology

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From “Is the Tea Party becoming a religious movement?” by Jeff Sharlet at CNN.

Liberals and centrists wring their hands over Miller and giggle about O’Donnell, hoping that her political hopelessness somehow proves that the movement isn’t going. They compile lists of what they take to be her craziest statements, such as her confession that as a young woman she dabbled in witchcraft.

That’s a strategic mistake, because they’re mocking what is, in fact, a mainstream evangelical view — that witchcraft and “spiritual war” are real — and a narrative with powerful resonance in American life. Consider not O’Donnell’s words, but her theme: Once I was lost (making bad choices), but now I’m found. Who didn’t do something stupid in their youth?

But it’s the “found” part that reveals the religiosity of the Tea Party movement, spirituality not at odds with the Tea Party’s economics but intertwined with it.

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Junkets for Jesus

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By Jeff Sharlet

This article is cross-posted from Mother Jones and is adapted from C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy.

THE OLDEST AND MOST politically influential Christian conservative organization in Washington is known to the public, if at all, for one thing: adultery. In particular, that of three Republican politicians, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), Gov. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), and ex-Rep. Chip Pickering (R-Miss.)—all caught last year in various states of moral undress, all linked to a Capitol Hill townhouse at 133 C Street SE, which the blogosphere promptly tagged “the Prayboy Mansion.” The organization behind the townhouse, which is used to provide subsidized housing for “brothers” in Congress, is known to outsiders as the Fellowship. But its leader, a quietly charismatic octogenarian named Doug Coe, calls it the Family.

Coe is only the second leader of the movement, which began as a fundamentalist anti-labor coalition of political and business elites in 1935. Coe’s mentor, Abraham Vereide, shared with him a revelation from God: For nearly 2,000 years, Christianity, with its emphasis on the down and out, had been getting it all wrong. Their focus would instead be on the “up and out,” the “key men” in positions of power who would be able to usher in the kingdom of God—which, to the Family, has always looked a lot like the country clubs where it conducts much of its soft-sell evangelism. The best way to help the weak, it teaches, is to help the strong. Continue Reading →

God-Led Government

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Catch The Revealer founder, Jeff Sharlet, talking about his new book, C Street, on NPR’s “Fresh Air” today.  Among the topics: the anti-gay bill in Uganda, the definition of homosexuality, and The Family, genocide.  The discussion follows up on Jeff’s recent article, “Straight man’s burden,” at Harper’s magazine and “Dangerous Liaisons” at The Advocate. Continue Reading →

Compromising On Death

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From “Straight Man’s Burden,” an article by Revealer founder and contributing editor Jeff Sharlet in the September issue of Harper’s magazine:

I do not understand you Americans,” he said, sighing.  “Look at a woman like Hillary Clinton, supporting the killing of babies, and then you say no, you should not threaten to punish somebody with death.”  He was coming to terms with the possibility that the threat of losing foreign aid — Sweden said they’d cut theirs; Germany would offer Museveni $148 million to muzzle Bahati — would force him to make a deal:  no death penalty.  He’d have to settle for prison and purges.  He’d have to settle for prison and purges.  “Leviticus is very clear.  If a man sleeps with a man — punishable by death.  If a woman sleeps with a man — punishable.

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The Strange Moves of The Economist

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By Jeff Sharlet

The reverence with which so many upper-middle class Americans read The Economist has always puzzled me. There’s much to admire about the magazine, but it generally performs the same function as Newsweek, boiling down events into centrist conventional wisdom, facts be damned. A report in the July 3, 2010 issue, “The religious right in east Africa: Slain by the spirit,” is a case in point. I’ve been reporting on the religious right anti-gay movement in Uganda from here in the U.S. and from Kampala for nine months now, so I’m in a good position to see The Economist’s strange moves; I wonder what I’d make of the article that follows it, on Somaliland’s elections, if I were as informed on that story. But one needn’t have expertise to debunk The Economist’s report; a Google search would do it, especially if you landed, as you likely would, on the well-documented blogs of gay activist Jim Burroway or evangelical scholar Warren Throckmorton.

The biggest error is The Economist’s declaration that the bill no longer calls for the death penalty. That’s propaganda put out by the bill’s defenders. In fact, as I learned by asking the bill’s author, Ugandan Member of Parliament David Bahati, it does. (I’ll be publishing those interviews in my forthcoming book, C Street.) Bahati acknowledges that the death penalty may drop out of the final version; but it hasn’t yet, and it’s dangerous for The Economist to say as much. Continue Reading →

The Meaning of Relics

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If the Pope says it’s real… Pope Benedict XVI has declared the Shroud of Turin authentic. Writes Chris Armstrong at Grateful to the Dead:

This also seems a bold move by a pope–to declare something authentic that it is well within the realm of science to later declare a fraud (though so far no conclusive proof has been given).

I pulled out my copy of Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead by Peter Manseau, co-founder with Jeff Sharlet of our sister site, Killing the Buddha, to find this quote:

Even if an object is not genuinely what believers profess it to be — such as Chaucer’s feather of the angel Gabriel — it becomes the locus of belief for centuries. And it is in this belief that faith is made. For the faithful, to pray to a relic displayed in its reliquary — even to a blackened and shriveled tongue — is like shining sunlight through a magnifying glass. A relic concentrates the beliefs surrounding it until they can be seen: it is faith so intense it has, at times, set the world on fire.

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