A New Divinely Ordained President: The Hand of God or the Silence of the Press?
Posted March 26, 2008 | 10:39 AM (EST)
Imagine a presidential candidate who believed that God wanted him to run for president because American needed him. Picture a secretive group of Washington insiders who meet quietly to mix religion, class and politics and who believe in an elite group of people divinely ordained to run the country and the world. Now envision this group meeting in sex-segregated cells to discuss how God has chosen them to fulfill their roles in public life. And, at the helm of this group, picture a figure described by an admirer as a "guy in the smoky back room" who "sits in the corner, and you see the cigar, and you see the flame, and you hear his voice -- but you never see his face" whose followers have made "a fetish of being invisible." Now imagine that a few of the members of this group outside of the U.S. have included "General Suharto of Indonesia; Honduran general and death squad organizer Gustavo Alvarez Martinez; a Deutsche Bank official disgraced by financial ties to Hitler; and dictator Siad Barre of Somalia, plus a list of other generals and dictators."
For those of you who think you're reading about George W. Bush and his administration, you'd be mistaken, though members of the Bush administration do belong to the sect described. The presidential candidate is Hillary Clinton, and the group is "The Foundation" also known as "The Family." Its leader is Doug Coe, a man described by Clinton as "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God." Yes, it's true, according to Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet who published an article in Mother Jones magazine in September 2007 about Hillary Clinton's deepening ties to the group.
According to Mother Jones, Clinton has been meeting regularly with The Foundation's women's bible study groups since 1993 and moving up through its ranks. Clinton herself has written in Living History about Coe and her first encounter with him at The Foundation's estate and how deeply he impressed her. According to one of Mother Jones' sources, a Coe supporter, Clinton "has become a regular visitor to Coe's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, a former convent where Coe provides members of Congress with sex-segregated housing and spiritual guidance." The article goes on to report that "These days, Clinton has graduated from the political wives' group into what may be Coe's most elite cell, the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast." But, despite the words she has written about Coe and the reports of her deepening involvement with the Fellowship, Clinton has refused requests by the press for interviews about Coe and her membership in The Fellowship. But clearly, she is not as scrupulous about her association with religious figures in her life as she claimed when attacking Barack Obama for remaining in Pastor Jeremiah Wright's congregation.
Others who have been involved with the group have broken the code of silence. Sharlet himself went to live with one of the cells of The Foundation and describes the inner workings and ideology of the organization in an article that appeared in Harper's magazine in March of 2003. He writes that The Family is "in its own words, an "invisible" association, though its membership has always consisted mostly of public men. Senators Don Nickles (R., Okla.), Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Pete Domenici (R., N. Mex.), John Ensign (R., Nev.), James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), and Conrad Burns (R., Mont.) are referred to as "members," as are Representatives Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), Frank Wolf (R., Va.), Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.), Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.), and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.). Regular prayer groups have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries. The Family maintains a closely guarded database of its associates, but it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities." Is this why Hillary Clinton has refused requests for interviews about her association with The Family?
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-gans/a-new-divinely-ordained-p_b_93425.htmlHARPERS: " Jesus Plus Nothing: Undercover among America's Secret Theocrats"
Jesus plus nothing:
Undercover among America's secret theocrats
Originally from Harpers Magazine, March 2003, by Jeffrey Sharlet, discusses 'the family' in Washington D.C.
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By the end of the war, nearly a third of U.S. senators attended one of his weekly prayer meetings.
In 1944, Vereide had foreseen what he called “the new world order.” “Upon the termination of the war there will be many men available to carry on,” Vereide wrote in a letter to his wife. “Now the ground-work must be laid and our leadership brought to face God in humility, prayer and obedience.” He began organizing prayer meetings for delegates to the United Nations, at which he would instruct them in God's plan for rebuilding from the wreckage of the war. Donald Stone, a high-ranking administrator of the Marshall Plan, joined the directorship of Vereide's organization. In an undated letter, he wrote Vereide that he would “soon begin a tour around the world for the , combining with this a spiritual mission.” In 1946, Vereide, too, toured the world, traveling with letters of introduction from a half dozen senators and representatives, and from Paul G. Hoffman, the director of the Marshall Plan. He traveled also with a mandate from General John Hildring, assistant secretary of state, to oversee the creation of a list of good Germans of “the predictable type” (many of whom, Vereide believed, were being held for having “the faintest connection” with the Nazi regime), who could be released from prison “to be used, according to their ability in the tremendous task of reconstruction.” Vereide met with Jewish survivors and listened to their stories, but he nevertheless considered ex-Nazis well suited for the demands of “strong” government, so long as they were willing to worship Christ as they had Hitler.
In 1955, Senator Frank Carlson, a close adviser to Eisenhower and an even closer associate of Vereide's, convened a meeting at which he declared the Family's mission to be a “worldwide spiritual offensive,” in which common cause would be made with anyone opposed to the Soviet Union. That same year, the Family financed an anti-Communist propaganda film, Militant Liberty, for use by the Defense Department in influencing opinion abroad. By the Kennedy era, the spiritual offensive had fronts on every continent but Antarctica (which Family missionaries would not visit until the 1980s). In 1961, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia deeded the Family a prime parcel in downtown Addis Ababa to serve as an African headquarters, and by then the Family also had powerful friends in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya. Back home, Senator Strom Thurmond prepared several reports for Vereide concerning the Senate's deliberations. Former president Eisenhower, Doug Coe would later claim at a private meeting of politicians, once pledged secret operatives to aid the Family's operations. Even in Franco's Spain, Vereide once boasted at a prayer breakfast in 1965, “there are secret cells such as the American Embassy the Standard Oil office to move practically anywhere.”
By the late sixties, Vereide's speeches to local prayer breakfast groups had become minor news events, and Family members' travels on behalf of Christ had attracted growing press attention. Vereide began to worry that the movement he had spent his life building might become just another political party. In 1966, a few years before he was “promoted” to heaven at age eighty-four, Vereide wrote a letter declaring it time to “submerge the institutional image of .” No longer would the Family recruit its powerful members in public, nor recruit so many. “There has always been one man,” wrote Vereide, “or a small core who have caught the vision for their country and become aware of what a 'leadership led by God' could mean spiritually to the nation and to the world. . . . It is these men, banded together, who can accomplish the vision God gave me years ago.”
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http://harpers.org/archive/2003/03/0079525 Hillary's Prayer: Hillary Clinton's Religion and Politics
NEWS: For 15 years, Hillary Clinton has been part of a secretive religious group that seeks to bring Jesus back to Capitol Hill. Is she triangulating—or living her faith?
By Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet
Illustration by: Andy Friedman
September 1, 2007
It was an elegant example of the Clinton style, a rhetorical maneuver subtle, bold, and banal all at once. During a Democratic candidate forum in June, hosted by the liberal evangelical group Sojourners, Hillary Clinton fielded a softball query about Bill's infidelity: How had her faith gotten her through the Lewinsky scandal?
After a glancing shot at Republican "pharisees," Clinton explained that, of course, her "very serious" grounding in faith had helped her weather the affair. But she had also relied on the "extended faith family" that came to her aid, "people whom I knew who were literally praying for me in prayer chains, who were prayer warriors for me."
Such references to spiritual warfare—prayer as battle against Satan, evil, and sin—might seem like heavy evangelical rhetoric for the senator from New York, but they went over well with the Sojourners audience, as did her call to "inject faith into policy." It was language that recalled Clinton's Jesus moment a year earlier, when she'd summoned the Bible to decry a Republican anti-immigrant initiative that she said would "criminalize the good Samaritan...and even Jesus himself." Liberal Christians crowed ("Hillary Clinton Shows the Way Democrats Can Use the Bible," declared a blogger at TPMCafe) while conservative pundits cried foul, accusing Clinton of scoring points with a faith not really her own.
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Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. "A lot of evangelicals would see that as just cynical exploitation," says the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue who now ministers to decision makers in Washington. "I don't....there is a real good that is infected in people when they are around Jesus talk, and open Bibles, and prayer.
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http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/hillarys-prayer.html
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