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The Secret Political Reach Of 'The Family'
...The Family is also connected to proposed anti-gay legislation in Uganda that could sentence, quote, repeat offenders to the death penalty. That family connection is revealed in new reporting by my guest, Jeff Sharlet. Sharlet is the author of the bestseller "The Family" and is a contributing editor for Harper's. He's been investigating The Family for years.

Jeff Sharlet, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Let's start with a recap of what The Family is and what it stands for. You've described it as elite fundamentalism, as opposed to the kind of televangelist, populist fundamentalism. What do you mean by elite?

Mr. JEFF SHARLET (Author, "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power"; Associate Research Scholar, Center for Religion and Media, New York University): Well, the founder of the group, Abraham Vereide, said that God came to him one night in April 1935 and said Christianity has been focusing on the wrong people, the poor, the suffering, the down and out. I want you to be a missionary to and for the powerful, those who he calls the up and out. They can dispense blessings to everybody else through a sort of kind of trickle-down religion.

GROSS: So The Family is into the cultivation of powerful people. They call them key men. What is key men?

Mr. SHARLET: A key man is someone that they identify as chosen for his position of power or affluence by God. And they like to emphasize that the leaders that they work with are not so much elected to their positions or work their way up the corporate ladder, as they are selected by God, used as tools.

The kind of the comparison that they like to use is King David, who they note is a sort of guy who, as a leader, actually does all sorts of terrible things -seduces another man's wife, has the man killed and so on - and yet he's still in power. It's because God has chosen to use this imperfect tool. And so they see the politicians that they work with as tools of God. ...