They insist they are just a group of friends, yet they funnel millions of dollars through tax-free corporations. They claim to disdain politics, but congressmen of both parties describe them as the most influential religious organization in Washington. They say they are not Christians, but simply believers.
Behind the scenes at every National Prayer Breakfast since 1953 has been the Family, an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. Their goal is "Jesus plus nothing." Their method is backroom diplomacy. The Family is the startling story of how their faith—part free-market fundamentalism, part imperial ambition—has come to be interwoven with the affairs of nations around the world.
New York Times bestselling author Jeff Sharlet has been writing about the intersection of religion, politics, and culture for more than a decade. A contributing editor for Harper's and Rolling Stone, he has reported from the inner sanctums of American fundamentalist power and from every corner of the megachurch nation. Barbara Ehrenreich calls his most recent book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, "one of the most compelling and brilliantly researched exposés you'll ever read"; Ann Coulter declares Sharlet one of the stupidest journalists in America.
Sharlet is the cofounder of the online literary magazine, KillingTheBuddha.com, which won an Utne/Alternative Press Award. In 2004 Sharlet and cofounder Peter Manseau published Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible, a travelogue based on a year Sharlet and Manseau spent exploring the fringes of religion in America. Publishers Weekly named it one of the top 10 religion titles of 2004; NPR's Morning Edition described the book as "a mix of hymn and history, poem and prophecy, story and sermon." KillingTheBuddha.com, the online magazine, has been anthologized as Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, to be published in July 2009.
Sharlet is a Visiting Research Scholar at New York University's Center for Religion and Media, where he has taught graduate seminars in journalism and the history of American religion. He has also spoken on religion, politics, and media at Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and colleges and universities across the country. At NYU, Sharlet created TheRevealer.org, a review of religion and the media, with a grant from the Pew Charitable Trust.
Sharlet has also written for Mother Jones, New York, The Nation, The New Republic, New Statesman, The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, Nerve, Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Journalism Review, Oxford American, Lapham's Quarterly, In These Times, The Baffler, The Forward, and Pakn Treger, an award-winning magazine of Jewish history and literature which he created for the National Yiddish Book Center. He has commented on religion and politics for NBC, CNN, NPR, BBC, Air America, The New York Times, Newsweek, and other media venues.
Sharlet's work has twice been anthologized in Best Music Writing (2004, 2008), and his 2005 Harper's cover story on Pastor Ted Haggard was part of Harper's winning National Magazine Award entry. Sharlet is currently working on The Hammer Song, a history of postwar American protest music. He lives in a 200-year-old grist mill in upstate New York with his wife, daughter, and a fascist cat named Richard.
