C Street, by Jeff Sharlet

In his best-selling 2008 book, The Family, Jeff Sharlet probed the sprawling but mostly secretive work of a longstanding Christian outreach to political leaders in the United States and, increasingly, around the world. The Family, better known as the Fellowship, surfaces each year as sponsor of the National Prayer Breakfast. Sharlet sees the group not merely as a promoter of vapid civil religion, but as "a threat to American democracy."  Now he is doubling down on his thesis.

Sharlet's new evidence begins with C Street House, a Capitol Hill townhouse as­sociated with the Family, where congressmen (the residents are all men) enjoy Christian fellowship along with low rent. C Street made headlines in 2009 when it was revealed that two residents, Nevada senator John Ensign and Mis­sissippi representative Chip Pick­ering, had had extramarital affairs. Meanwhile, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford noted his C Street ties after returning from a visit to his "dear friend from Argentina." The other C Streeters did not approve of these transgressions, but neither did they call for impeachment hearings.

At the ethically ambiguous place where prayer groups and political interests intersect, Sharlet sees the logic of the Family at work. Its outreach to the powers that be depends on the redemption of political authority. Here King David is a role model in all respects, right down to his affair with Bathsheba. The emperor might occasionally lose his clothes, but he must never lose his throne. Sharlet assails "the alchemy by which men elected by citizens persuade themselves that they were, in fact, selected by God." That is the driving dynamic behind what Sharlet identifies as Family-style fundamentalism, with its paternalistic "conflation of democracy with authori­tarianism."