Tag: c street

In Lieu of Hobbits

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An interview with Jeff Sharlet about his new book of essays, Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithless, and the Country In Between. Sharlet is the bestselling author of  The Family and C Street and a contributing editor to Harper’s and Rolling Stone. Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College, he taught literary nonfiction through New York University’s Center for Religion and Media from 2006-8 and created The Revealer for the Center in 2003.

by Ashley Baxstrom

The only reason I write this stuff is because I’m a nerd whose heart was broken when he discovered there are no hobbits.  ~ Jeff Sharlet, author of Sweet Heaven When I Die

Jeff Sharlet is best known for The Family and C Street, a pair of books about what he calls “the avant-garde of American fundamentalism,” a religious and political movement that fuses conservative evangelicalism with a laissez-faire, expansionist vision of American power. But really, Sharlet he has been writing about the people in whom belief lives, and the meaning that comes during – and out of – their experience of faith. Over several years, while writing those two books, Sharlet wrote the stories of those he met and their experiences with belief, with causes, with struggle and survival. In his latest book, Sweet Heaven When I Die, Sharlet gathers these stories together to explore an American landscape that is at once a whole country and yet a world apart. He writes about friends and about strangers who become less strange. Continue Reading →

Ugandan Genocide, On Schedule

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The Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, also known as the “kill the gays” bill, never went away.  We were just supposed to think it did.  A debate of the bill is set to begin before Uganda’s parliament in the next few months, writes Warren Throckmorton, who last week interviewed the author of the bill, David Bahati. Continue Reading →

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 →

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 →