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The secretive connection of Nevada’s Republican Senator John Ensign with the shadowy C Street Family continues to eke out bit by bit. The Family is a secretive association of Christian evangelicals.
Ensign is just one of a rather long list of powerful Senators and Congressmen somehow connected together in some kind of theological web carrying out missionary tasks throughout the world.
Other names keep cropping up. South Carolina’s Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and Virginia’s Republican Congressman Randy Forbes, Kansas Republican Congressman Todd Tiahrt, currently running for the Senate.
Jeff Sharlet is author of a book, The Family: Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power published by HarperCollins in 2008.
The Family is a secretive network founded in 1935 and since known by several names, including The Fellowship, The Fellowship Foundation, National Fellowship Council, Fellowship House, The International Foundation, National Committee for Christian Leadership, International Christian Leadership, and the National Leadership Council. It is an international movement that claims to be centered on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ as the common ground across all religious and political divisions. [Wikipedia]
The Family, is led by Doug Coe, It is best known for organizing the annual National Prayer Breakfast, at which every President since President Dwight D. Eisenhower, including President Barack Obama in 2009, has spoken.
According to Wikipedia
The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God’s plan. The Family represents “Jesus plus nothing,” as its leader, Doug Coe, puts it, the “totalitarianism of God,” in the words of an early Family leader, a vision that encompasses not just social issues but also the kind of free-market fundamentalism that is the real object of devotion for core members and insiders. At the heart of the Family’s spiritual advice for its proxies in Congress is the conviction that the market’s invisible hand represents the guidance of God, and that God wants his “new chosen” to look out for one another.
Apparently members of The Family consider themselves as chosen by God, thus elites. Sort of like the movie, The Blues Brothers, on a mission for God. But these people aren’t Dan Ackroyd or James John Belushi.
Nor is it some small obscure cult. It includes influential leaders, not only members of Congress, but includes former military officers such as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the heads of humanitarian aid organizations, as well as dictators of third world regimes. According to David Kuo, former Special Assistant to President George W. Bush and Deputy Director of the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives, “The Fellowship’s reach into governments around the world is almost impossible to overstate or even grasp.” Core members and associates deny that the Fellowship exists.
It is linked to many prominent American politicians, primarily conservative Republicans, A subject of controversy for its secrecy, involvement in sex scandals, ties to third-world dictators and oppressive regimes, and approving references to Adolf Hitler, terrorist and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, Cambodian despot Pol Pot, and the Mafia. The Fellowship is built on the “Hitler Concept” based on a covenant among a political avant garde. [Wikipedia]
“The Fellowship’s prayer group movement was founded in the United States in 1935 by Abraham Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant and traveling preacher….”
The movement grew and became centered in Washington D.C. In 1955, Pentagon officials secretly met at the group’s Fellowship House in Washington, D.C. to plan a worldwide anti-communism propaganda campaign endorsed by the CIA.
David Coe, son of Doug Coe, has suggested that members of the Family “are here to learn how to rule the world.”
Boarders at the C Street Center currently include Senators Tom Coburn, R-OK; John Ensign, R-Nev.; and Jim DeMint, R-SC; and Representatives Zach Wamp, R-TN; Bart Stupak, D-Mich.; Joseph Pitts, R-PA; Heath Shuler, D-N.C.; and Mike Doyle, D-Pa.
Other members, some of whom have lived at C Street Center or the Cedars, include Senators Sam Brownback, R-KS; Mark Pryor, D-AR; Charles Grassley, R-IA; James Inhofe, R-OK; Susan Collins, R-ME, and Bill Nelson, D-FL; Representatives Ben Nelson, D-NE; Frank Wolf, R-VA; Todd Tiahrt, R-KS; Mike McIntyre, D-NC; John R. Carter, R-TX and Ander Crenshaw, R-FL; as well as former Senators Pete Domenici, R-NM; Don Nickles, R-OK; George Allen, R-VA; Conrad Burns, R-MT; and Mark O. Hatfield, R-OR; and former Representatives Steve Largent, R-OK; Mark Sanford, R-SC; Chip Pickering, R-MS, Ed Bryant, R-TN, John E. Baldacci, R-ME, and J.C. Watts, R-OK.
Senators Ensign, Inhofe, Brownback (a former C Street resident), and Susan Collins, R-ME, and former Senators George Allen and current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have attended the Wednesday morning Senate Prayer Breakfast at the C Street Center. Former Attorney General Ed Meese under Ronald Reagan regularly presided over other prayer breakfasts. Two former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. David Jones and General Richard Myers, are members as are former Marine Corps Commandant and NATO commander General James L. Jones, Iran-contra figure Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, and Army Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, the military head of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s intelligence branch. In 2003, Boykin, in a speech to the First Baptist Church in Daytona Beach, Florida, referred to the United States as a “Christian nation” and, that in reference to a Somali warlord, he stated, “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.”
According to the Wikipedia Encyclopedia The Family is affiliated with a number of other groups, among them are:
Three Swallows Foundation. Between 1998 and 2007, the “International Foundation” located at 133 C Street, SE in Washington, D.C., received grants totaling $1,777,650 from billionaire Paul N. Temple‘s Three Swallows Foundation, including $203,500 in 2006 and $145,000 in 2007. Temple, a graduate of Harvard Law School, is a former executive of Esso (Exxon) and the founder of the Three Swallows Foundation and the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
Youth with a Mission. Loren Cunningham, President and founder of Youth with a Mission International Inc., an affiliate of which owns the C Street Center (and formerly owned the property known as Potomac Point in Arlington, Virginia) has described a vision of achieving world domination by taking over key sectors of society which include government. In a 2008 promotional video, “Reclaiming 7 Mountains of Culture”, YWAM Founder Loren Cunningham describes a vision he shared along with the late Campus Crusade For Christ founder Bill Bright and late Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer, in which Christian fundamentalists could achieve world domination by taking over key sectors of society such as government, along with business, media, and education.
As reported by Andrea Mitchell and Jim Popkin for NBC News, Fellowship leader Doug Coe repeatedly urges a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that he compares to the blind devotion that Adolf Hitler demanded from his followers. Coe has stated “Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler were three men. Think of the immense power these three men had, these nobodies from nowhere,” and later in the same sermon: “Jesus said, ‘You have to put me before other people. And you have to put me before yourself.’ Hitler, that was the demand to be in the Nazi party. You have to put the Nazi party and its objectives ahead of your own life and ahead of other people.”
Doug Coe refers to the Fellowship as the “Christian Mafia” and is on record saying that he tries to make the group act like the Mafia because the more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have.
If interested, you will find a lot more about The Family on Wikipedia and even running Google searches. I have taken a lot of the above from Wikipedia. Harper’s Magazine has a piece Peering Under the Rock at the C Street “Family” by Scott Horton about the group.
Other than Rachel Maddow’s coverage I haven’t seen or heard much about the C Street group in the main stream media. But I suspect we will all hear more in the coming weeks.
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Ahh, that’s John, as in John Belushi, late comic actor, co-starred in the Blues Brothers….John’s untimely demise by overdose paved the way for his brother, James, to find his own stardom.
Yes, you’re right, it is John Belushi, not James. Guess my senility and memory are failing me. Thanks for correcting me SmilinSam.