{"id":71,"date":"2010-09-16T06:37:20","date_gmt":"2010-09-16T06:37:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/the-familys-baaaack.html"},"modified":"2010-09-16T06:37:20","modified_gmt":"2010-09-16T06:37:20","slug":"the-familys-baaaack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/the-familys-baaaack.html","title":{"rendered":"The Family’s Baaaack"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Family–the secretive Jesus-centric cult that runs the National
\nPrayer Breakfast and solicits the engagement of Washington and world’s
\nhigh and mighty–is creeping back into the news. The New Yorker<\/i>‘s Peter J. Boyer has delivered himself of an extended report<\/a>, while another book on the subject from the redoubtable Jeff Sharlet waits in the wings. I’m not an uncritical<\/a> admirer of Sharlet’s 2008 The Family<\/i>, which makes this eccentric enterprise into the hidden key to American conservative religion. The new book, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democrac<\/i><\/strong><\/strong><\/a>y<\/i>, promises more of the same.<\/p>\n

Boyer, characteristically<\/a>,
\nlets you know where the warts are while suggesting that they aren’t
\nanything very serious to worry about. Sure, the Family welcomes
\nevildoers–who else is religion for? The Sharlet view is acknowledged,
\nbut waved away. But as usual with Boyer, there’s just enough new
\nreporting to give you something to chew on.<\/p>\n

I’m chewing on Jim
\nDeMint, the Tea Party’s most important paladin in the U.S. Senate, who
\nlives in the C Street house when he’s in Washington. He vigorously
\nsupported Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, and in the wake of her
\nvictory Tuesday, has earned himself more obloquy than ever from the GOP
\nestablishment. “It
\nspeaks volumes that in Jim DeMint’s world, the ‘principles of freedom’
\nare more important than a candidate who pays their taxes, is honest with
\nvoters and who isn’t a complete fraud,” a “senior GOP aide” sputtered<\/a> in Politico yesterday. What would Jesus say to that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Family–the secretive Jesus-centric cult that runs the National Prayer Breakfast and solicits the engagement of Washington and world’s high and mighty–is creeping back into the news. The New Yorker‘s Peter J. Boyer has delivered himself of an extended report, while another book on the subject from the redoubtable Jeff Sharlet waits in the wings.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Family's Baaaack - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/the-familys-baaaack.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Family's Baaaack - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Family–the secretive Jesus-centric cult that runs the National Prayer Breakfast and solicits the engagement of Washington and world’s high and mighty–is creeping back into the news. The New Yorker‘s Peter J. Boyer has delivered himself of an extended report, while another book on the subject from the redoubtable Jeff Sharlet waits in the wings.…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/the-familys-baaaack.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-09-16T06:37:20+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The Family's Baaaack - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/the-familys-baaaack.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"The Family's Baaaack - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"The Family–the secretive Jesus-centric cult that runs the National Prayer Breakfast and solicits the engagement of Washington and world’s high and mighty–is creeping back into the news. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}