The Family

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George W. Bush: National Prayer Breakfast

The Family

international religious movement

Also known as: International Christian Leadership, National Committee for Christian Leadership, The Fellowship

Written by Jeff Sharlet

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Quick Facts

Originally:: National Committee for Christian Leadership

Later called:: International Christian Leadership

Also called:: The Fellowship

Date:: 1935 - present

Headquarters:: Arlington

The Family, international religious movement that ministers to political and economic elites. It is based on visions that members believe were granted by God to the movement’s founder, Abraham Vereide, and on subsequent refinements by Douglas Coe, Vereide’s successor, and other Family leaders. Centred at The Cedars, a mansion in Arlington, Virginia, it is active throughout the world.

Structure and activities

The Family is organized according to a model of the degrees of intimacy that Jesus maintained with different groups of his followers. An inner circle of “apostles,” also known as the Core Group, exercises spiritual authority and supervises the movement’s finances. An outer circle of “disciples” constitutes the regular membership of the movement. The public is conceived of as lying outside the outer circle. The Family’s activities, which are conducted through a loose network of nonprofit corporations and prayer meetings, emphasize what it calls “leadership development” among members and the recruitment of current and future leaders in politics and business as disciples.

History

Origins

In April 1935 Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant and Methodist minister living in Seattle, claimed to have had a vision in which he was instructed by God to redirect his Christian ministry away from the “down and out” and toward the “up and out.” He subsequently evangelized among wealthy and politically powerful individuals who shared his concerns about socialism and other “subversive” forces. Strongly opposed to the New Deal policies of Democratic U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vereide favoured an unregulated economy in which the less fortunate would depend on the religiously motivated charity of those in whom God had vested power and wealth. As Vereide’s movement grew, its “God-led” members, including local business leaders and members of the Republican Party and the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, were organized into “prayer cells” and “breakfast groups,” through which they could seek divine counsel in both personal and political matters.

One of the movement’s early successes was the election of one of its members, the Seattle lawyer Arthur Langlie, as mayor of the city in 1938 and as governor of Washington state in 1940. Langlie, who declared at a movement retreat that he had been called by God to political office, was described by Vereide as “the spearhead of a return to an American way of life.”

Move to Washington

Seeking greater impact for his ideas, Vereide moved to Washington, D.C., and in 1942 organized a prayer cell of congressmen. By this time he had already established groups of local leaders in most major U.S. cities, including Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Vereide incorporated his movement as the National Committee for Christian Leadership in 1943 and changed its name to International Christian Leadership the next year. By the mid-1940s it was firmly established in Washington, D.C., with a board composed largely of senators and representatives from both parties.

In 1948 Republican Rep. Paul B. Dague defined the movement’s guiding principle as the “conviction that more of God’s mandates and the teachings of [Jesus] must be written into current legislation.” Most members believed that this principle justified their support of antilabour initiatives and increased military spending, among other conservative policies. The movement extended its influence in the executive branch of the federal government by founding the annual Presidential Prayer Breakfast in 1953 with the help of the Baptist evangelist Billy Graham. Known since 1970 as the National Prayer Breakfast, it is regularly addressed by the president of the United States and is conceived of by the movement as a consecration of the governing class to the service of Jesus.

Vereide’s movement differed from most Christian political organizations in its emphasis on economics and foreign affairs. Influenced by Christian fundamentalism, evangelicalism, and laissez-faire economic theory, Vereide dedicated the movement in 1950 to a “worldwide spiritual offensive,” which would be waged through the cultivation of relationships with authoritarian political leaders whom Vereide believed had been chosen by God for this struggle. They included François (“Papa Doc”) Duvalier of Haiti, Suharto of Indonesia, Park Chung-Hee of South Korea, and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. Vereide’s congressional and business associates became de facto champions of these regimes.

Reorganization

Vereide died in 1969 and was succeeded by Douglas Coe (died 2017). Believing that publicity had undermined the movement’s effectiveness, Coe converted it into what he called an “invisible” organization. He instructed members to avoid publicly acknowledging the organization, to use their own letterhead when conducting its business, and to cultivate the appearance of government sponsorship of the National Prayer Breakfast, its only public event. Coe also moved The Family, as he and other leaders began referring to the movement in 1970, farther from mainstream evangelicalism, discarding the term Christian, cultivating Jewish and Muslim “followers of Christ,” and emphasizing a model of power taken from the New Testament and understood through the study of such 20th-century dictators as Vladimir I. Lenin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong. Coe admired those leaders’ emphasis on total commitment to a cause and their ability to effect change through the use of political cells.

The Family continues to work with numerous politicians in the United States and abroad, who claim that the organization’s private meetings enable them to hold each other accountable for their actions. From the first decade of the 21st century, however, the movement faced growing media scrutiny of its secretive mixture of politics and religion. In 2009 allegations that some politicians linked to the “C Street House,” a Family-subsidized dormitory for affiliated congressmen, had engaged in extramarital affairs led to calls from across the religious and political spectrum for greater transparency in the organization.

Jeff Sharlet

Later in 2009 a Ugandan politician with ties to The Family and to other U.S.-based religious organizations introduced in the Ugandan parliament a bill that greatly strengthened criminal penalties for homosexual acts and required Ugandans to report homosexuals to authorities.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

new religious movement

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new religious movement summary

new religious movement

Written by Murray Rubinstein

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Key People:: Jim Jones; Katherine Augusta Westcott Tingley; Li Hongzhi; Helena Blavatsky; Asahara Shoko

Related Topics:: Scientology; New Age movement; apocalyptic movement; UFO group; millenarian church

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new religious movement (NRM), the generally accepted term for what is sometimes called, often with pejorative connotations, a “cult.” The term new religious movement has been applied to all new faiths that have arisen worldwide over the past several centuries.

NRMs are characterized by a number of shared traits. These religions are, by definition, “new”; they offer innovative religious responses to the conditions of the modern world, despite the fact that most NRMs represent themselves as rooted in ancient traditions. NRMs are also usually regarded as “countercultural”; that is, they are perceived (by others and by themselves) to be alternatives to the mainstream religions of Western society, especially Christianity in its normative forms. These movements are often highly eclectic, pluralistic, and syncretistic; they freely combine doctrines and practices from diverse sources within their belief systems. The new movement is usually founded by a charismatic and sometimes highly authoritarian leader who is thought to have extraordinary powers or insights. Many NRMs are tightly organized. In light of their often self-proclaimed “alternative” or “outsider” status, these groups often make great demands on the loyalty and commitment of their followers and sometimes establish themselves as substitutes for the family and other conventional social groupings. NRMs have arisen to address specific needs that many people cannot satisfy through more traditional religious organizations or through modern secularism. They are also products of and responses to modernity, pluralism, and the scientific worldview.

The West

The historical roots, doctrines, and practices of the NRMs in the West are extremely diverse. The following overview organizes this diversity into certain categories, but many NRMs could be classified under more than one of these rubrics.

Apocalyptic and millenarian movements

Some NRMs are characterized by an apocalyptic or millenarian dimension—the belief that the end of the world is imminent and that a new heaven or new earth will replace the old one. There are apocalyptic strains in many world religions, but it is Christian millenarianism—the belief that Jesus Christ will establish a 1,000-year reign of peace on earth before the Last Judgment—that has formed the backdrop for the development of many of the NRMs in the West.

Among the first new religions in the United States were the Seventh-day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, both the products of millenarian fervour set off in the mid-19th century by William Miller (1782–1849). Miller predicted that Christ would return to earth sometime in 1843 or 1844. The failure of Miller’s prophecy, the so-called “Great Disappointment,” did not deter many of his followers, who still believed in the prediction but felt that only Miller’s calculations were faulty. The Seventh-day Adventists, formed under the leadership of one of Miller’s followers, the prophet and visionary Ellen G. White (1827–1915), and the Jehovah’s Witnesses (a successor of the International Bible Students Association), led from 1917 by Joseph Franklin Rutherford (1869–1942), continue to believe in the imminent return of Christ and the end of time.

Millenarianism also underlies the New Age movement that arose in the 1970s and ’80s. The New Age movement is an extremely eclectic conglomeration of beliefs and practices that includes channeling, crystal healing, new versions of shamanism, and a variety of therapies and techniques designed to “transform” the individual into a “higher consciousness.” The movement as a whole optimistically presumes that the world has entered, or is on the verge of entering, a “New Age” (sometimes referred to as the “Age of Aquarius”) of unprecedented spiritual possibilities.

A darker side of apocalyptic expectations has resulted in mass suicides and tragic conflict with governmental agencies. In the 1970s an ordained Methodist minister named Jim Jones (1931–78) moved his congregation (called the Peoples Temple) from the United States to the jungles of Guyana, where he attempted to create a utopian, interracial community based on his idea of “apostolic socialism,” a version of Christianity that was influenced by contemporary Marxist liberation theology. Jones, an increasingly authoritative and paranoid personality, warned his followers that a devastating thermonuclear war was impending. In 1978, after a group of concerned family members (led by a U.S. congressman) visited the group’s commune, Jones and his followers (913 persons in all) committed what Jones called “revolutionary suicide” rather than submit to what they thought would be an attempt to compromise their community. “Death is a million times preferable to 10 more days of this life,” Jones told his group, and, “If you knew what was ahead of you, you’d be glad to be stepping over tonight.”

A similar tragedy befell the Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993. The group, an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist church, first settled near Waco in 1935. After a succession of leaders and internal power struggles, Vernon Howell, who later assumed the name David Koresh, took control of the group in 1987. Koresh taught a highly apocalyptic Christianity and identified himself with the Lamb of Revelation 5, which is traditionally associated with Christ. Allegations of child abuse and the launching of a retail gun business attracted the attention of the authorities, which led to a long standoff with the FBI and a tragic fire that killed Koresh and some 80 members of the group.