Jeff Sharlet > Quotes

“By ignoring the apparent contradictions of scripture, fundamentalism ignores its questions, reducing its complexity to implicit equations. Hate equals love; obedience is freedom.”
― Jeff Sharlet, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy

“What did “good government” really mean? Langlie and his brotherhood promised an end to political corruption. (There’s no evidence that Langlie ever even took a drink, much less a bribe.) The days of “honest graft” were over, at least for a while. But seen from another perspective—that of ordinary citizens without access to Langlie and Abram’s elite network—Langlie didn’t so much end corruption as legalize it. Langlie wasn’t opposed to a government organized around the interests of the greedy; he just didn’t want to have to break the law to serve them.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

“To him, homosexuality is only a symbol for what he learned from the Family is a greater plague: government by people, not by God.”
― Jeff Sharlet, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy

“I read as easily as I breathe.”
― Jeff Sharlet, Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between

“It's a familiar moment to students of history: the late stage of empire, hairline fractures shooting through the foundations of society. They're like cracks in the sidewalk; by the time you see them, the damage has already been done.”
― Jeff Sharlet, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy

“American politics tends to produce a limited emotional range, mostly positive, peppered with indignation. But Trump scrawled across the spectrum: not just anger but rage; love and, yes, hate; fear, a political commonplace, and also vengeance. It didn’t feel political. Politicians have long borrowed from religion the passion and the righteousness, but no other major modern figure had channeled the tension that makes Scripture endure, the desire, the wanting that gives rise to the closest analogue to Trumpism: the prosperity gospel, the American religion of winning.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“Talking with her was like listening to a ballad on a radio station that fades in and out as you drive, sometimes clear and sentimental and tuned perfectly to the passing land, sometimes filled with static, lost, a song played too many times.”
― Jeff Sharlet, Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between

“Like Jerry Falwell and [Tim] LaHaye, [Pat] Robertson is a minister who advocates a Bible-based, pro-family agenda. Robertson, a faith healer, also claims to have controlled the course of a hurricane by directing it away from his headquarters.”
― Jeff Sharlet, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy

“If Trump said it was a joke, reporters reported that claim. They wanted to believe that some norms still held. Some feared that if they acknowledged just how far beyond norms he’d gone, they’d be normalizing the new American spectrum, one in which dictatorship had become not just a hyperbolic charge thrown around by each party’s most heated partisans but an actual idea.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“That's religion in America, under constant revision.”
― Jeff Sharlet, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy

“What Tim [Kreutter] is doing is owning people, training them and owning them. Even if he wants them to do good things, the principle is corrupting. It is the seduction principle.”
― Jeff Sharlet, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy

“American fundamentalism’s original sentiments were as radically democratic in theory as they have become repressive in practice, its dream not that of Christian theocracy but of a return to the first century of Christ worship, before there was a thing called Christianity. The “age of miracles,” when church was no more than a word for the great fellowship—the profound friendship—of believers, when Christ’s testament really was new, revelation was unburdened by history, and believers were martyrs or martyrs-to-be, pure and beautiful.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

“. . . private group prayers were the modern equivalent of a backroom cigar.”
― Jeff Sharlet, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy

“Where your anger comes from,' {Belafonte} says, ' is less important than what you do with it.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“The Solace of the surreal, the comfort of chaos, the great relief of all the "issues" falling away, like a body letting go, falling backward, into the Foreversville of conflict itself as the cause for which one fights. The topic—the border, guns, election "integrity," pedophiles—does not matter. Only the fight.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“It's satisfying when an expert flattens a false claim. That's how so many of us believe we'll resist the undertow of civil war, fact-checking our way back to solid ground...You can't fact check a myth.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“Coe has always claimed he’s not a nationalist, and it’s true—unlike immigrant Abram, who cared most for America, Coe, Oregon-born, cares most for the American Christ, His power spread throughout the world even as the homeland is denied Him in the secular folly of church/state separation. One day, Coe believes—not yet—America (and Old Europe, too, the Germans and French and Italians who drifted from Christ once their prosperity was assured) will wake up and find itself surrounded by a hundred tiny God-led governments: Fiji, a “model for the nations” under a theocratic regime after 2001, a Family organizer boasted to me; and Uganda, made over as an experiment in faith-based initiatives by the Family’s favorite African brother, the dictator Yoweri Museveni; and Mongolia, where Coe traveled in the late 1980s to plant the seeds for that country’s post-communist laissez-faire regime.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

“The bartender did not try. He sighed and slapped another round of sickly sweet fireballs, shots of cinnamon whiskey, on the bar, glancing at a party including both Black and White people he hoped was out of earshot. He, like me, was White. We both rolled our eyes at Shawn’s racism rather than confronting it, which is to say we cowered in what is sometimes called White privilege.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“Walt Disney admired Mussolini and in 1938 quietly hosted Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, a month after Kristallnacht.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“Pepper spray blinds, but it has a way of clarifying the issues.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“In 1936, when men such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh openly admired Hitler, it was still safe to name the style of government to which these words pointed. Human problems, Buchman told his little group that night in Lenox, require “a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy.” Just as good, said Buchman, would be a “God-controlled Fascist dictatorship.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

“If Trump said it was a joke, reporters reported that claim. They wanted to believe that some norms still held. Some feared that if they acknowledged just how far beyond norms he'd gone, they'd be normalizing the new American spectrum, one in which dictatorship had become not just hyperbolic charge thrown around by each party's most heated partisans but an actual idea. A joke or maybe a possibility, sooner rather than later.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“Do I need to say none of this is true? Would it matter?”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“Movements are born from the problems of everyday lives, but they are not limited by them.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“The Family’s only publicized gathering is the National Prayer Breakfast, which it established in 1953 and which, with congressional sponsorship, it continues to organize every February at the Washington, D.C., Hilton. Some 3,000 dignitaries, representing scores of nations and corporate interests, pay $425 each to attend. For most, the breakfast is just that, muffins and prayer, but some stay on for days of seminars organized around Christ’s messages for particular industries. In years past, the Family organized such events for executives in oil, defense, insurance, and banking. The 2007 event drew, among others, a contingent of aid-hungry defense ministers from Eastern Europe, Pakistan’s famously corrupt Benazir Bhutto, and a Sudanese general linked to genocide in Darfur.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

“Scandal does not destroy American fundamentalism. Rather, like a natural fire that purges the forest of overgrowth, it makes the movement stronger. And fiercer.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

“The difference between the two parties”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

“Joe,” in Fountain Hills, was Sheriff Joe Arpaio, nationally known for the boiling-hot tent-city jails he joked about as concentration camps, his theory of sexual humiliation as a form of rehabilitation and his “saturation patrols” in Latinx neighborhoods in search of “illegals,” a practice that led to a 2013 federal court ruling against him for racial profiling and unlawful detention. Trump was particularly proud of his endorsement.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“legislators organized by Coe and subsequently won the good graces of a far more powerful group of American congressmen, who helped pour a billion dollars in aid into Brazil’s long dictatorship of the generals.30 “I never invite them,” Coe said in 2007 of his dictator friends. “They come to me. And I do what Jesus did: I don’t turn my back to any one. You know, the Bible is full of mass murderers.”31”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

“The real achievement of faith-based initiatives was not to launch flashy programs or even to buy votes for Republicans; it was to open the door for religious groups to the whole treasure house of federal social-services funding, tens of billions of dollars.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power