Jeffrey Sharlet has had an article in this month's March's Harper's about the organization, known to the initiated as The Family, which holds the annual National Prayer Breakfast. A long list of politicians and other powerful men are members of The Family; some have been inmates of the organization's house in Arlington, Virginia, called Ivanwald. The place is run like a cult:
"We prayed to be 'nothing.' We were there to 'soften our hearts to authority.' We instituted a rule that every man must wipe the toilet bowl after he pisses, not for cleanliness but to crush his 'inner rebel.' Jeff C. did so by abstaining from 'shady' R-rated movies, lest they provoke dreams of women. He was built like a leprechaun, with curly, dark blond hair and freckles and a brilliant smile. The Potomac Point girls brought him cookies; the wives of the Family's older men asked him to visit. One night, when the guys went on a swing-dancing date with the Potomac Pointers, more worldly women flocked to Jeff C., begging to be dipped and twirled. The feeling was not mutual. 'I just don't like girls as much as guys,' he told me one day while we painted a new coat of 'Gettysburg Gray' onto Ivanwald. He was speaking not of sex or of romance but of brotherhood. 'I like'—he paused, his brush suspended midstroke—'competence.'"
It's all there. The religious fanaticism, the misogyny, the self destruction. This is what it means to be a Christian conservative.
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