Hoekstra admits to Family ties

Congressman Pete Hoekstra is friendly and affable as he makes his way around the Kent County Republican Headquarters room introducing himself. He is followed shortly by Sen. Jim DeMint, the South Carolina senator and hero of the Tea Party movement. DeMint is in town to stump for Hoekstra’s bid to become the Republican nominee for governor.

DeMint talks about Hoekstra’s courage, and his conservative values. The 30 or so people gathered nod knowingly. It is clear Hoekstra and DeMint are not just Republicans who have shared time in the U.S. House of Representatives. They are friends.

And they are also bonded by their relationship with a shadowy group of Christian fundamentalists called the Family or the Fellowship.

While Hoekstra has admitted his ties to the group once, in an interview last year with the Detroit News where he told the news paper he prayed with the group. In interviews with Michigan Messenger over the weekend, the Congressman from Holland revealed the depth of that relationship.

“I went to C-Street. We prayed, and we studied the Bible and we fellowshipped together. Very straight forward,” Hoekstra said Saturday afternoon at a campaign stop in Lansing. “We went and had a group of eight to 10 members that had dinner there every, pretty much every week. And it was a personal accountability between us as members.”

The group met every Tuesday night at the infamous C-Street house in Washington D.C., a mansion in Washington D.C. which has been a center of controversy for renting rooms to legislators for well under market value. Congressman Bart Stupak (D-Menominee) was, until recently, one such tenant. But the mansion also serves as a rest stop for the spirit-weary leaders of the nation’s capitol, where members pray, study the Bible and learn the Family’s peculiar view of the relationship between religion and politics.

So who is the Family? David Kuo, who headed up the Office of Faith Based Initiatives during the Bush administration, calls them “the most powerful group in Washington that nobody knows” and says that their “reach into governments around the world is almost impossible to overstate or even grasp.”

Jeff Sharlet, author of the 2008 book “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,” is the foremost — perhaps the only — expert on the secretive group. Sharlet lived for several months at Ivanwald, a boarding house outside of Washington D.C. for young men being groomed for positions of leadership in politics and business. He describes a group that is nearly obsessive about secrecy, swearing their members to an oath never to talk about the organization or what it does.

The group has members in the highest positions in government both in the United States and in nations around the world, but their political goals are not as predictable as their Christian fundamentalist theology might suggest. Sharlet, speaking to the Michigan Messenger’s Ed Brayton on his radio show Declaring Independence last year, said that the Family is not a typical religious right group that focuses primarily on issues like abortion and homosexuality.

“There’s a real difference between the kind of populist fundamentalism, the popular front of fundamentalism that we see in the public sphere, and this kind of avant garde, elite fundamentalism that represents the Family,” he said. “Their main issues are not abortion or homosexuality, their main issues are economics. They are free market fundamentalists and have been since the Great Depression, which they thought was a punishment from God for socialism. And so they have, for seven decades, been advocating for the deregulation of the American economy.”

The Family’s mission is far broader than that, encompassing a quasi-theocratic vision in which every single question is answered by applying Christian theology. Sharlet sat in on a “spiritual counseling” session of a U.S. Congressman in which Family leader Doug Coe told the legislator, Rep. Todd Tiahrt of Kansas, “We need to think about not just how does Christianity relate to these sort of hot button issues, but what does Jesus have to say about social security? What does Jesus have to say about building roads? What does Jesus have to say about every single facet of government from top to bottom and every single facet of our private lives from top to bottom?”

Just how involved Hoekstra is with the Family and how much knowledge he has of their history and their inner workings is an open question. In an interview with the Minnesota Independent, Sharlet said that the group is organized into concentric circles — the closer to the inner circle, or core group, the more privy they are to the backroom dealings and real purposes of Family activities.

“In terms of the US government, that core idea they have is very important. They think of religion and power as working in concentric rings. As they interpret the Bible,and it’s an unorthodox interpretation, Jesus had one set of teachings for James and Peter, another set for the rest of the twelve, and another set for so on and so on, out to the masses. There’s an inner circle, and that’s gathered around the first brother, Doug Coe, and around the person of Jesus. There are congressmen at that level. Rep. Joe Pitts is a core member. Sam Brownback is becoming a core member. Former attorney general Ed Meese, who’s still very much a mover and shaker in Washington — perhaps more so than when he was attorney general — is a core member.”

Sharlet says the next circle includes legislators like Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Then in a third circle, he lists Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, saying he probably is not aware of some of the group’s more extreme views but it still likely influenced by them.

It is not at all clear where Hoekstra might be in those rings, but probably not as close as any of the legislators Sharlet listed in his interview. But the Family, he says, makes a strong distinction between “members” and “friends” — people with loose associations that may help them on policy issues from time to time but who are not intimately involved — so the statement by Hoekstra that he was one of 8 to 10 members who attended the dinners every week is probably significant.

Hoekstra paints himself as involved in a Christian fellowship — an innocuous, even comforting idea for many. But he is far more deeply involved than just fellowshipping with the group. In late 2003, Hoekstra took a nearly $8,000 trip to Israel, Jordan and the Palestinean Territories. The trip was funded by a one of the main Family organizations called The International Foundation. Sharlet calls the group “the deathstar of Family nonprofits.”

“[The trip] was about building dialog between Muslims, Jews and Christians,” Hoekstra said.

Sharlet says there is a much more provocative reality to such trips.

“The work these guys do on these trips is foreign policy. It’s dangerous stuff, and it pisses off the State Department,” he said. “But they seem to really believe their own nonsense, that it’s just friendship.”

But the question becomes, was Hoekstra there as window dressing to promote the Family’s backroom deal making, or was he one of the brokers? Hoekstra, as ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, would be an attractive piece of window dressing, drawing key leaders in the region.

“Family leaders speak of the American politicians they dispatch overseas as ‘tools’ and ‘bait’ with which to draw powerful local actors into the room for the sake of what the Family calls ‘reconciliation.’ What this usually means in practice is back room dealing between political and business elites,” Sharlet explains. “Hoekstra may have played a role in some of these conversations, or he may have been there as window dressing. As one Family man, who works in Africa, put it, ‘I purposely try to give an illusion of — I was like the Wizard of Oz, because I kept coming with guys.’ In the Middle East, the Family keeps coming with guys — Hoekstra, [Sen. John] Ensign, [Sen. Tom] Coburn, and many more.”

Unfortunately, there is a long history of such Family delegations to foreign countries ending with American support for brutal dictators who then used American aid brokered by Family members to commit genocide.

“In 1959 they sent a delegation to interview a promising young leader in Haiti, a guy named Papa Doc Duvalier,” Sharlet says. “They decide he’s a man of God and come back and arrange for foreign aid to Haiti and start the long policy of American aid to that incredibly brutal regime. This gets repeated over and over again, in Brazil with Gen. Costa e Silva, the dictator, and in South Korea with Gen. Park, the dictator. They supported Gen. Suharto in Indonesia, for whom they organized the military aid with which he committed the genocide in East Timor, and Gen. Siad Barre in Somalia, for whom they organized all of the military aid with which he pretty much destroyed his country in a manner from which it has not recovered to this day.”

David Holtz, executive director of Progress Michigan, says Hoekstra’s ties to C-Street and the Family are concerning to him for a number of reasons.

“I don’t think being active with an elite power club that promotes a political religion that is way outside the mainstream of American life is going to sell as Michigan values. The C Street family has enabled seedy sex scandals by powerful right-wing politicians like John Ensign and Mark Sanford and promoted a brand of free trade zealotry, intolerance and ethical blindness that is the last thing Michigan needs from its next governor,” Holtz said.

Sharlet says it is the group’s passionate belief in their own ideology that is most bothersome.

“You gotta understand this about these guys, this is not done out of a sort of cynical, let’s get rich thing, they really believe they’re doing God’s work,” he said on Declaring Independence. “That’s part of what makes them fascinating to me and, I think, much more dangerous than the typical, cynical politician who’s just using a little religion in the public sphere to make himself look nice.”

Ed Brayton contributed to this report