Issues 101
Religion Part 1

"Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler were three men.
Think of the immense power these three men had,
these nobodies from nowhere."
Douglas Coe, leader of the National Prayer Breakfast

"We were being taught the leadership lessons of Hitler, Lenin and Mao.
And I'd say, `Aren't--isn't there a problem with that?'
And they would even seem perplexed by the question.
Hitler's genocide wasn't really an issue for them.
It was the strength that he emulated."
Jeff Sharlet, who lived among Coe's followers six years ago

The "Religion Issue" has never been as high as it is today since the 1960 election when Catholic John F. Kennedy was both forced to defend his religion and reassure American voters that he would not be taking his orders from the Vatican.

In 2008, it became an issue for Mitt Romney, a Mormon, and then for Barack Obama, whose pastor had made several inflammatory comments - pieced together into one brief but unsettling YouTube video, now duplicated hundreds of times over. It appears, from public statements by Hillary campaign official Harold Icke, that the Clinton camp intends to keep pushing the religion issue as "proof" that Obama is unpatriotic and supportive of the "hate America crowd".

That fairly opens up Hillary's own "religious connections" to a group known as "The Family" that, according to critics and former insiders, preaches a fascist message praising Adolf Hitler, as well as the totalitarian platforms of Lenin and Mao Tse-Tung. This group sponsor the Prayer Breakfast for members of Congress, sponsored by Doug Coe and his "The Fellowship Foundation", and is coming under recent scrutiny for its use of money as well as its reportedly fascist message.

Both McCain and Obama have attended at least one Prayer Breakfast, but don't seem to be as deeply involved as Hillary Clinton. Some say Coe's espousal of "power" and his reportedly fascist leanings "fits right in" with Clinton's own philosophies of power and total control, while others call this "religion-baiting" at its worst.

For more than 50 years, the National Prayer Breakfast has been a Washington institution. Every president has attended the breakfast since Eisenhower, elbow-to-elbow with Democrats and Republicans alike. “I am really proud to carry on that tradition,” President Bush said at this year’s breakfast. “The people in this room come from many different walks of faith. Yet we share one clear conviction: We believe that the Almighty hears our prayers -- and answers those who seek Him.”

But Doug Coe is well known to scores of senators in both parties--and many faiths--including Sam Brownback, Mike Enzi, Mark Pryor and Bill Nelson. They go to small weekly Senate prayer groups that Coe attends. Participants tell NBC News that so have senators John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, which those campaigns confirm.

Senator Clinton’s participation is surprising to observers who have investigated Coe’s group, called The Fellowship Foundation, which critics have described as a secretive organization populated mostly by conservative Republicans. “I think in part through her involvement with the Fellowship’s prayer group she was able to meet with some of these Republican senators and get to know them on a one-on-one basis,” said Joshua Green, a Senior Editor at The Atlantic magazine.

In her autobiography, “Living History,” Senator Clinton describes Coe as "a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God.” She writes that “Doug became a source of strength and friendship" during her often-troubled White House years.

Their relationship began in February 1993 with a prayer lunch at The Cedars, the Fellowship’s Virginia estate on the Potomac River. NBC News reviewed the First Lady’s official daily calendar, recently made public by the National Archives, and found other gatherings including a “Private Meeting” with Coe in her West Wing office on December 19, 1997, and a “Meet & Greet with Business Leaders” on Feb. 4, 1998. “Doug Coe introduces business leaders to the First Lady,” the calendar states.

"NBC News Exclusive: Political ties to a secretive religious group"
by Andrea Mitchell and Jim Popkin, NBC News, April 6, 2008

The question concerning Hillary, though, isn't whether she is a staunch advocate (she's said to be a Level I insider), but whether she's cynically formed partnerships (whereby she has been introduced to "11 wealthy businessmen") as a means to personally enrich herself and her husband.

Although he’s not an ordained minister (contrary to his claims), the 79-year-old Coe is the most important religious leader you've never seen or heard, according to a recent MSNBC report (see video above).

John McCain, who claims to be both an Episcopalian (Senate biographies) and a Baptist (in a recent speech), has for the most part been much more private - and quiet - about the religion issue, including his own, than either Obama, Clinton or Mike Huckabee.

Jeff Sharlet and Kathryn Joyce reported in [liberal] Mother Jones that Hillary Clinton has been involved in the group since the early 1990s; and NBC showed that Coe introduced 11 "businessmen" to her, according to her White House logs.  Access, and networking connections among the powerful is an important part of the modus operandi of The Family.

Sharlet and Joyce reported:

When Time put together a list of the nation's 25 most powerful evangelicals in 2005, the heading for Coe's entry was "The Stealth Persuader." "You know what I think of when I think of Doug Coe?" the Reverend Schenck (a Coe admirer) asked us. "I think literally of the guy in the smoky back room that you can't even see his face. He 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. He's that shadowy figure."

Coe has been an intimate of every president since Ford, but he rarely imposes on chief executives, who see him as a slightly mystical but apolitical figure. Rather, Coe uses his access to the Oval Office as currency with lesser leaders. "If Doug Coe can get you some face time with the President of the United States," one official told the author of a Princeton study of the National Prayer Breakfast last year, "then you will take his call and seek his friendship. That's power."

In their Mother Jones article, Sharlet and Joyce reported specifically on the involvement of Senator Clinton in the group, showing a more profound level of participation than unnamed people "close to" Sen. Clinton's claim to NBC (see transcript below) that she is not a "member" of the Family:

Clinton's God talk is more complicated--and more deeply rooted--than either fans or foes would have it, a revelation not just of her determination to out-Jesus the gop, but of the powerful religious strand in her own politics...

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.

When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group. For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian "cell" whose members included Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker; Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp; Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke, a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat.

Clinton's prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family"), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship's only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has "made a fetish of being invisible," former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) 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 Fellowship isn't out to turn liberals into conservatives; rather, it convinces politicians they can transcend left and right with an ecumenical faith that rises above politics. Only the faith is always evangelical, and the politics always move rightward.

This is in line with the Christian right's long-term strategy. Francis Schaeffer, late guru of the movement, coined the term "cobelligerency" to describe the alliances evangelicals must forge with conservative Catholics. Colson, his most influential disciple, has refined the concept of cobelligerency to deal with less-than-pure politicians. In this application, conservatives sit pretty and wait for liberals looking for common ground to come to them. Clinton, Colson told us, "has a lot of history" to overcome, but he sees her making the right moves.

Was the MSNBC piece a "hit job" on the "Christian right" or was it fair to point out how The Fellowship uses Hitler, Mao and Lenin as examples of "how to gain power"? Is Hillary involved because of her true supportive spiritual beliefs or as a cynical ploy to find "money connections" and to learn how to achieve total power for an agenda some have called fascist and others have called communist?

The Question Hillary Clinton Won't Answer

During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa's postcolonial leadership.

The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand "Communists" killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators.

During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise.

"We work with power where we can," the Family's leader, Doug Coe, says, "build new power where we can't."

The last question, at least, would seem to be a legitimate inquiry.

Religion has cropped up in other controversies, such as a Florida church that was instructing its members to write out checks to Florida Governor (and Republican) Charlie Crist, while at the same time dipping into the collection plates for their own personal use, including millions of dollars in real estates, a $170,000 luxury automobile, and more - while getting the church some $29 million in debt.

Whether we choose to overlook it, ignore it or take a closer look, the role of religion - for good or bad, depending on how it's used - most certainly is a major factor behind the scenes and in public in the shaping of a national agenda and the personal agendas of political candidates - be it for religion or for money and power.