Big Think Interview with Jeff Sharlet | Big Think

Big Think Interview with Jeff Sharlet

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Jeff Sharlet:

Jeff Sharlet is a writer, journalist, and contributing editor for Harper's and Rolling Stone magazines. His 2008 book "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," a New York Times bestseller, dissects the phenomenon known as "elite fundamentalism" and its gospel of "Biblical capitalism." In 2000 he founded a religion-themed online literary magazine, Killing the Buddha, which has spawned a book of the same title (Free Press, 2004, co-author Peter Manseau) and an anthology called "Believer, Beware" (Beacon Press, 2009).

Sharlet's work has appeared in publications as various as The Washington Post, The Nation, Salon, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His next book, an essay collection called "What They Wanted," is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Big Think Interview with Jeff Sharlet

Question: What is “The Family”?

Jeff Sharlet: Yeah, The Family is the oldest and arguably most influential religious political organization in Washington. It dates back to the Great Depression in 1935 when the founder of this group thought what he had was a new revelation that Christianity had been looking for the wrong direction for 2,000 years, focusing on the poor, and the weak, and the down and out. That God, instead, wanted him to work—God wanted to work through elites, through those whom he called the "up and out," and that he should be a missionary to and for the powerful. And that's what The Family has been ever since, concentrating not on mass revivals, but on organizing Congressmen, businessmen and foreign officials. Today in Washington, the membership is comprised primarily of Senators, Representatives, and government officials who are bound together in this idea that what they see as "spiritual warfare," as they call it sometimes, or religious change, can best be affected through elites, not through mass movements.

Question: Will elite fundamentalism and the GOP always be intertwined?

Jeff Sharlet: Elite fundamentalism has always going to be involved with a certain set of conservative interests, but certainly not exclusively Republican. What's interesting about The Family is a lot of The Family is a particularly useful group for going back and reviewing the history of conservatism. That while it’s always been majority Republican it's never been exclusively Republican.

Back in the early days, there was a lot of the so-called "Dixie-crats;" the conservative pro-segregation, southern Democrats, Strom Thurman was involved, Herman Tallmadge, Absalom Willis Robertson, Senator from Virginia, Pat Robertson's father. And today I think what's interesting is the populace movement of fundamentalism is starting to mirror that approach that elite fundamentalism has long had of trying to have influence across the political spectrum. And understanding when you do that, you can drag the whole political spectrum right-ward. So, The Family has always been doing this, always cultivating certain democrats.

I think now we are starting to see populace conservatives recognize that they were too tied to the Republican Party. So, there’s the Republican partisan activist, but then there's the real conservative visionaries, for lack of a better word. They don't care who does the changes they want to see happen. They don't care if it's Senator Chuck Grassley standing in the door and walking Obama's legislative changes, or if it's Senator Mark Prior, Democrat from Arkansas who was arguably one of the key men in scuttling a big part of Obama's labor agenda. In fact, I think they take great satisfaction from the idea that there are Democrats and Republicans involved because to them, this is testifying to the sort of the universal truth of their cause. They say, in fact, that, "What we're saying isn't conservative or liberal, it's not right-wing or left-wing, it's simply true." And all of these Republicans know it and a bunch of Democrats know that too.

Question: As the populist movement in the GOP strengthens, will it ally with elite fundamentalism?

Jeff Sharlet: Elite fundamentalism has always been on the corporate side of things. But what this does is tell us that this divide is not nearly as sharp as maybe David Brooks would have us believe that there's some rattle out there and then there's some high-minded proper Republicans. The Family begins as a Christian fundamentalist anti-labor organization.

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