May 18, 2008

Broadcast Date: 
May 18 2008

An interview with journalist Jeff Sharlet on his new book about the Family, a Christian right ministry to some of the world's most powerful men--the most influential Christian right organization you've never heard of.

Episode segments
  • Jeff Sharlet Part 1
    Foreign Policy, National Politics, Christian Right

    Jeff Sharlet is the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.  He is a contributing editor at Harper's and Rolling Stone and an associate research scholar at New York University's Center for Religion and Media.  He is the co-author with Peter Manseau of Killing the Buddha and is the editor of TheRevealer.org.

     
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    Jeff Sharlet introduces us to the Family, Christian fundamentalism's most elite organization, and takes us from its origins in the 1934 West Coast dock workers' strike through its flirtations with fascism to its presence today on Capitol Hill. He reads a passage from his new book about the time he spent at Ivanwald, the Family's training house for young men on the outskirts of Washington, DC.

  • Jeff Sharlet Part 2
    Foreign Policy, National Politics, Christian Right

    Jeff Sharlet is the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.  He is a contributing editor at Harper's and Rolling Stone and an associate research scholar at New York University's Center for Religion and Media.  He is the co-author with Peter Manseau of Killing the Buddha and is the editor of TheRevealer.org.

     
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    Jeff Sharlet lays out key elements of the Family's theology--Jesus plus Nothing and the Idea--through which they reject the social gospel and the institutional church and seek to minister instead to those in power: not the down and out, but the "up and out."

  • Jeff Sharlet Part 3
    Foreign Policy, National Politics, Christian Right
    Jeff Sharlet is the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.  He is a contributing editor at Harper's and Rolling Stone and an associate research scholar at New York University's Center for Religion and Media.  He is the co-author with Peter Manseau of Killing the Buddha and is the editor of TheRevealer.org.
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    In part three of our conversation with Jeff Sharlet we talk about the Family's support for brutal dictationships from Southeast Asia to Central America to Africa and the organization's subversive influence on U.S. foreign policy.