The Family / C Street (Fellowship Foundation)

The Fellowship Foundation — known publicly as 'The Family' and to insiders simply as 'The Fellowship' — is the oldest and most secretive Christian political organization in the United States. It was founded in 1935 by Abraham Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant Methodist minister in Seattle, who began organizing prayer breakfasts for business leaders with the explicit goal of countering labor organizing by building Christian relationships among employers. Vereide moved the organization to Washington, D.C. in 1942 and began building relationships with members of Congress. The National Prayer Breakfast — a Washington institution held annually since 1953, attended by every president since Eisenhower — is The Fellowship's creation and primary public event, though The Fellowship itself is deliberately invisible at it. Doug Coe led The Fellowship from 1969 until his death in 2017, building it into a global network of 'key men' — politicians, military leaders, and business executives — whom Coe believed God had selected to govern nations. Coe's theology was deliberately simple: Jesus chose his disciples not for their virtue but for their power potential. The implication was that powerful men selected by Jesus were accountable primarily to God, not to democratic processes, ethical norms, or public accountability. Coe was documented making favorable comparisons between the devotion of Hitler's inner circle, the Mafia, and the bond he sought among Fellowship members. These comparisons are documented on tape and described by journalist Jeff Sharlet, who lived in a Fellowship house and wrote the defining investigation. The Fellowship's operations: - C Street House: A Capitol Hill rowhouse at 133 C Street SE, designated by the IRS as a church, that has served as a subsidized residence for members of Congress including Sen. John Ensign, Sen. Tom Coburn, Rep. Zach Wamp, Rep. Mike Doyle, Rep. Bart Stupak, Rep. Jim DeMint, and others. The below-market rent was investigated as a potential ethics violation. - International prayer breakfast network: The Fellowship has organized prayer breakfasts in Uganda, Somalia, Rwanda, and dozens of other countries, providing cover for American political influence operations. - Uganda anti-homosexuality connection: Fellowship member Scott Lively and Fellowship-connected Ugandan politicians were directly involved in the drafting of Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill (2009), which initially included the death penalty for homosexuality. This connection was documented by investigative reporters and in Sharlet's reporting. The Fellowship's ideology in the context of this network: its 'Jesus plus nothing' framework — in which conventional religious accountability structures, democratic processes, and public ethics are subordinated to the private relationship between powerful men and a God who has selected them — is the theological operating system for a significant portion of the political relationships documented in this graph. Members of Congress who move through C Street, attend National Prayer Breakfasts, and participate in Fellowship small groups are being formed in a theology that makes them accountable to a private, unaccountable spiritual authority network rather than their constituents.

Documented themes

• Christian Nationalism
• Anti-Democratic
• Anti-LGBTQ
• Political Strategy

Connections from The Family / C Street (Fellowship Foundation)

• influenced → Council for National Policy (1990) — The Fellowship Foundation (C Street/The Family) and the Council for National Policy operated as parallel but complementary coordination mechanisms for the Religious Right political network: the CNP coordinating organizational strategy among institutional leaders and donors; The Fellowship building intimate, unaccountable spiritual relationships among politicians at the individual level. Individual figures — including CNP members who were also Fellowship participants — connected the two networks.

Sources

• The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power — Jeff Sharlet (2008), pp. 1–380
• C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy — Jeff Sharlet (2010), pp. 1–280
• The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism — Katherine Stewart (2020), pp. 180–200